Maria looked aghast. “You don’t mean the blood eagle?”
O’Connor nodded. “Harald’s ship was the Eagle. The guardian of the felag was the great eagle giant Hr?svdg. The blood eagle was to be performed on his behalf, like a sacrificial rite.”
“It was the Norse equivalent of hanging, drawing and quartering,” Jeremy said. “Only without the hanging and quartering.”
“The outline of an eagle was carved on the back of the victim, while he was still alive,” Maria said quietly. “Then they cut away the ribs and ripped out the lungs.”
“God almighty.” Even Costas was at a loss for words.
“They haven’t used it yet on one of their own,” O’Connor said. “But at the Einsatzgruppen trial one of the Jewish survivors spoke of a rumour that an SS officer had carried out something like this on a group of prisoners, using his ceremonial dagger.” O’Connor looked at the object on his desk with disgust. “Even among the horrors of the Holocaust it was too much to believe, and there was nobody left alive to confirm it. But it would have been in Andrius Reksnys’ area of operations.”
“I’m really beginning to love this guy,” Costas murmured.
“And there was one other feature, something that marked the felag out wherever they went.” O’Connor paused. “They slashed their hands across the palm, a sign of blood fealty. They believed they were the Knights of the Blooded Hand, born again.”
“The SS, the Ahnenerbe, the search for lost Aryan civilizations, for Atlantis,” Jack murmured. “It was all a perfect vehicle for the felag, a cover to reach their goal.”
O’Connor nodded. “Andrius Reksnys, the son, was a fanatical Nazi. The picture the old Inuit presented of him is typical. A real sadist and bully. But he was an even more fanatical member of the felag, steeped in the obsession since childhood.”
“Why?” said Jack.
“Because it wasn’t just mystical. There was a goal, a quest. They worked out that Harald Hardrada must have headed for Greenland. They studied the Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik the Red’s Saga, which show that the nordrseta, the northern parts beginning around Disko Bay, would have been the staging post for voyages farther west. When they heard that the explorer Knud Rasmussen was planning an expedition to the Greenland ice cap at Ilulissat, they leapt on the chance. By then Himmler had become obsessed with World Ice Theory and a lost polar civilization, and there was no problem authorising an SS Ahnenerbe team to attach themselves to Rasmussen’s expedition.”
“And Rolf Kunzl? How does he fit in?”
“Totally innocent of the goals of the felag. He was the one who mapped out the voyage described in the sagas. He was the world expert on the Vikings in the West, the perfect companion for Reksnys. They used him. And when they knew he had found some clue in the ice, something he then concealed, he was doomed.”
“The runestone in the longship,” Costas said.
O’Connor nodded again. “Kunzl was quick-witted enough to know he had found something of momentous significance, and the fact that Reksnys was so desperate to get his hands on it was enough for him. Kunzl loathed Reksnys and the Nazis with equal fervour. So he decided to pass the runestone to the old Inuit for safekeeping. Kunzl had known nothing about the felag, but had begun to guess that he was dealing with more than just Nazi lunacy. He and Reksnys had fought in that crevasse, and from then on he must have known it was a blood feud, a duel to the death. That was always the weakness of the old felag. The murders of Thomas Becket and Richard of Holdingham meant that their secrets went with them to the grave. In the thirst for vengeance the killers lost sight of their goal. After the war began, Kunzl was safe as long as he was fighting with the Afrika Korps, but when he was arrested with the von Stauffenberg conspirators, Andrius Reksnys finally had his chance. He used his considerable expertise to try to extract what he could from Kunzl in the Gestapo torture chambers. He failed, and in his rage he let Kunzl be executed along with the others. He must have assumed that Kunzl, the great scholar, would have left some written record, but he discovered that Kunzl had destroyed all of his personal papers and that all records of the expedition had disappeared from the Ahnenerbe headquarters early on in the war.”
“One question,” Maria said quietly. “The menorah would have meant everything to the Nazis. The ultimate symbol of domination over a race they were determined to destroy. They would have wielded it as the Romans had done in their triumph over the Jews two thousand years ago. What would Reksnys have done if he had found the menorah?”
O’Connor got up again and gazed pensively at the map. “The search for the menorah was kept secret, even from Himmler. If Himmler had found out anything about the menorah and the felag, that the search was being concealed from him, then Reksnys would probably have suffered the same fate as Kunzl. To answer your question we need to move to the present day. We’re not dealing with neo-Nazis here. Nothing that banal. The felag is still with us, as strong as it ever was. And the menorah has even more potency today than it did in the dark days of the 1940s. They could hold the world to ransom for it. The Catholic Church, the Jewish state, the Arab states. Extremist groups of all persuasions.”
“Auction it to the highest bidder,” Costas murmured.
“So it’s really about greed, not ideology,” Maria said.
“That was what drove the schism in the felag almost a thousand years ago,” O’Connor replied grimly. “Greed and power.”
“So how do you know all this?” Costas blurted out. “I mean, if it’s all so secret, how does a Jesuit historian in the Vatican get access to this kind of information?”
“That was to be my last revelation.” O’Connor took a deep breath, pulled up the right sleeve of his cassock and held his hand towards them, palm outwards. There was a collective gasp of astonishment. Diagonally across the middle ran a jagged white scar.
“The blooded hand,” Maria whispered. “I thought that was just an old injury.”
“You can relax.” O’Connor let his sleeve down and slumped into his chair. “I am no longer one of them. My grandfather was an American inventor who was part of the World Ice Theory circle, no less eccentric than its founder but probably slightly less mad.”
“My God,” Maria exclaimed. “You never told me about this. I thought your family were all academics.”
“It was a strange period,” O’Connor said quietly, gazing at the floor. “The world started to go insane a few decades before the First World War, and we’re still not out of it.” He looked up and smiled thinly at Maria. “My grandfather was a scientist but dabbled in a lot of fringe stuff like many academics at the time, and eventually let this particular obsession consume him. Like my father before me I was sworn into the felag in my youth, went through the whole initation rite. I loathed it, hated the false rituals, and as soon as I found out about the Nazi connection I wanted out. I discovered my vocation as a Jesuit, and I could not reconcile it with membership of the felag. The felag has always professed to be pagan, to despise Christianity even while they worked within it. I believe they expected me to return to the fold, saw me as a useful future asset within the Church. They agreed to let me go with a vow of secrecy. It is a vow I have now broken.”
“But you are not bound by their absurd rituals,” Jack said.
“Indeed.” O’Connor looked down, and then gazed directly at Jack. “But I have stoked the fire of vengeance. Over the years I gathered all I could on Andrius Reksnys. I was merely contemptuous of the felag, but with Reksnys it was different. The more I found out about his murderous activities with the Einsatzgruppen, the more determined I was to bring him to justice, even if it meant breaking my vow of silence. The memory of Rolf Kunzl drove me on. I took my creed from the old Varangian Guard, from the earliest felag, that our fate is predetermined, that Ragnarok is inevitable, so what matters is our conduct in this world. It was my sole inheritance from the old ways. Somewhat at odds with my Jesuit calling, but it linked me to the nobility of the earliest felag and gave me strength.”