“How did this monster escape prosecution?” Jack asked.
“Usual story.” There was an edge of anger to O’Connor’s voice. “Shockingly few of the Einsatzkommandos were ever brought to justice. In the final Russian onslaught in 1945, Reksnys disguised himself as a Wehrmacht private and fled west, to surrender to the British. There were suspicions during his interrogation but nothing concrete. On his release in 1947, now named Schmidt, he recovered his son from an orphanage and went to Australia. Together they made a fortune mining opals near Darwin. Then in the mid-60s he sold his operation without warning and disappeared.”
“And the son?” Jack said. “Surely he was too young to have been in the war.”
“Pieter Reksnys was six years old in 1941,” O’Connor replied. “But there’s an eyewitness account from a Jewish survivor at the Einsatzgruppen trial, at Nuremberg in 1947, that spoke of a boy in Hitler Youth uniform accompanying Sturmbannfuhrer Reksnys in his work. It’s a chilling account, one of the worst of the trial. Apparently the boy loaded his father’s Luger between each batch of executions, even carried out some himself. It was this account that eventually made the connection when Interpol became involved in the 1990s, and led to Andrius and Pieter Reksnys being tracked down to Mexico, where the son ran a drugs and antiquities cartel. He’s now in his early seventies, and is still there.”
“Why so long?” Costas said incredulously. “Why did it take so long to identify them?”
“Contrary to the Hollywood version, chasing down Nazi war criminals was never a priority in the West after the late 1940s,” O’Connor replied. “The main intelligence agencies-the CIA, the British SIS-were completely wrapped up in Cold War espionage. They knew all about Eichmann and Mengele and the other Nazis who had escaped to South and Central America, but few thought they posed a threat. Only the Israelis put serious efforts to bringing any of them to justice.”
“And now we reap the rewards,” Costas muttered.
“Not entirely.” O’Connor opened a drawer and placed a plastic sleeve with a photograph on the table. “You probably won’t remember this. A footnote in the newspapers about eight years ago, but actually the highest-profile Nazi death since Eichmann.”
The picture was a shocking image of a dead man lying on his back in a pool of blood, his eyes and mouth wide open and his face contorted with pain. He was an old man, wearing a dark suit, with his right arm flung over his front; visible through the smear of blood was a red armband with a black swastika.
“He wore that armband in the privacy of his own home,” O’Connor said. “An unreconstructed Nazi to the end. In case you haven’t guessed, that’s Andrius Reksnys. He was shot in the stomach to ensure a slow death, to give him time to be really frightened of where he was going next.”
“Mossad?” Costas asked.
“There is liaison with the Israelis,” O’Connor replied quietly. “But this was an independent operation.”
“What are you saying?”
O’Connor’s face was blank. He spoke coldly. “Andrius Reksnys was a henchman of the devil. All the efforts of international law had failed to bring him to account. He deserved to face the judgement of humanity, as well as God.”
“Are you saying the Vatican runs a hit squad?” Costas said incredulously.
“The Holy See is not just a spiritual beacon,” O’Connor said. “For centuries our survival has depended on strength in the world of men, on the power to persuade the unwilling to submit to God. Look at my own order, the Jesuits. Or the Crusades. Or the Inquisition. For centuries the Vatican has overseen the most successful covert intelligence network in the world, and has never shrunk from using it.”
“The Crusades were hardly a glorious episode, even if the intention was righteous to begin with,” Costas muttered. “I can’t imagine the sack of Constantinople was quite what the Pope had in mind.”
“You’d be surprised,” O’Connor said. “The papacy has always had to resist being drawn too far into the secular world, losing sight of the spiritual plane that bonds together all Christians. By the time of the Fourth Crusade the Vatican had developed a real problem with the Eastern Church, schismatics whom they regarded as heretics. It became a feud, and like all feuds led the antagonists to lose reason. Some apologists for the sack of Constantinople even twisted it into God’s actual purpose for the Crusade, punishment for deviating from the true path.”
“The feeling was reciprocated,” Jeremy added. “The Byzantine eyewitness Niketas Choniates called the Crusaders the forerunners of Antichrist, chief agents of his anticipated ungodly deeds.”
“The Holy See has always faced temptation from the dark side,” O’Connor continued. “Those who struggle against the devil can so easily end up doing the devil’s work. The Crusades were the ultimate challenge of the Middle Ages, and we did not always overcome. Monstrous tendencies have exploded into history in our moments of weakness. There are those among us who feel we owe a debt for failing to stem the greatest evil of all, the Nazi Holocaust.”
“So Reksys’ death has nothing to do with the menorah,” Jack said.
O’Connor paused, then stood. “I fear I may have misled you. His death has everything to do with the menorah. Please bear with me.”
There was another knock at the door, and O’Connor ushered Maria back in. She sat down, fingering her cellphone. “I’ve got news from Hereford,” she said, looking serious. “Fantastic news. My team from the Oxford Institute has finished excavating the manuscripts from the sealed-up stairway. It’s amazing, the greatest trove of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts ever discovered. It’s like finding the Roman library in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, and it’s going to be just as much work putting the pieces all together again.” She glanced at Jeremy, who was leaning forward in rapt attention. “Unless you’re in a hurry to return to the States, there’s going to be a full-time job looking after all this.”
“Yes, please,” Jeremy said.
“So why the glum face?” Costas said.
“It’s what else they found.” Maria suddenly sounded tense. “Right at the bottom of the stairwell, buried under all the paper and vellum. A skeleton of a man, a tall man, dressed in a monk’s cassock. Hundreds of years old, medieval. His limbs were askew as if he’d been thrown there. And the back of his skull was shattered.”
There was a stunned silence, and O’Connor paced towards the reproduction of the Mappa Mundi on his wall before turning to face them. “It is as I suspected. In the spring of 1299, Richard of Holdingham, mapmaker, came to this very place, to the isle of Iona. He was accompanying his ailing master, Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, on his final journey. Afterwards Richard went south to Hereford, to oversee the completion of the map he had started fifteen years before. There were errors in the inscriptions he wanted to correct. He had left an exemplar, a sketch for the Hereford monks to work from, and the illuminator had not been very literate. And now we know from his own personal exemplar, the one Jeremy and Maria found, that he wanted to add more, that he had a secret addition he wanted to make in the left-hand corner of the map, where the monks later added the inscription naming him as mapmaker.” O’Connor stopped in front of the fireplace, deep in thought. “We know he spent his final night at Bishop Swinfield’s palace at Bromyard and that he walked the final road to Hereford in the guise of a pilgrim. After that he vanished from history. The corrections were never made. He was never heard of again.”
“You think he was murdered?” Maria said shakily.
“I have no doubt of it.”
“I felt so close to him,” Maria whispered, her voice shaking with emotion and her hands gripping her chair. “I’ve studied him all my life, and I’ve never felt as close to him as I did that evening in the cathedral. It was almost like he was there.”
“A murder?” Costas looked dumbfounded. “And what was this guy doing on Iona? Can someone tell me what’s going on here?”