‘Annie’s from the nextdoor barge. She’s a . . . good friend.’
Narov spoke from where she was bent over her documents. ‘Aren’t they all? Women and Will Jaeger – they seem drawn like the moth to the candle flame. Isn’t that how you say it in English?’
‘Anyone who can make carrot cake like Annie – they’ll win my heart, for sure,’ Jaeger answered, doing his best to rescue an awkward situation.
Realising that he and his friends were busy, and sensing the tension in the air, Annie handed Jaeger the cake she’d brought and backed out quickly. ‘Don’t work too hard, fellas,’ she called with a wave.
Narov hunched closer over her documents. Jaeger eyed her, irritated by what she’d just done. What right did she have to be rude to his friends?
‘Thanks for helping the neighbourly relations,’ he remarked, sarcastically.
Narov didn’t even raise her head from her task. ‘It is simple. No one outside of these four walls should be trusted with what these documents will reveal – that’s if we can crack them. No one, no matter how good a friend.’
‘So, Klaus Barbie,’ Jenkinson volunteered.
‘Yeah, tell me about the Butcher of Lyons.’
‘At war’s end Klaus Barbie was protected by British and American intelligence. He was posted to Argentina as a CIA agent, code-named Adler.’
Jaeger raised one eyebrow. ‘Adler: eagle?’
‘Eagle,’ Jenkinson confirmed. ‘Believe it or not, the Butcher of Lyon became a life-long CIA agent code-named The Eagle.’ He moved his finger down the list. ‘And this one. Heinrich Müller, former head of the Gestapo – the most senior Nazi whose fate remains an utter mystery. Believed by most to have fled to… well, you guessed it: Argentina.
‘Below him, Walter Rauff, a top SS commander. The inventor of the mobile vehicles in which the Nazis gassed people. Fled to South America. Lived to a grand old age, and his funeral was reportedly a major celebration of all things Nazi.
‘And finally,’ Jenkinson announced, ‘the Angel of Death himself, Joseph Mengele. Carried out unspeakable experiments on thousands in Auschwitz. At war’s end he fled to – need I say it? – Argentina, where he is reported to have continued his experiments. A true monster of a human – that’s if you can even call him human.
‘Oh, and lest we forget, Bormann’s also on the list. Martin Bormann – Hitler’s right-hand man—’
‘Hitler’s banker,’ Jaeger interjected.
‘Indeed.’ Jenkinson eyed him. ‘In short, it’s a Nazi rogues’ gallery if ever there was one. Though the foremost rogue of all is missing: Uncle Adolf. They say he died in his Berlin bunker. I’ve never really believed it myself.’
Jenkinson shrugged. ‘I’ve spent most of my adult life in the archives researching the Second World War. You’d be amazed what an industry has grown up around it. But I’ve never come across anything that even remotely rivals all this.’ He waved a hand at the pile of documents on the table. ‘And I must say, I’m rather enjoying myself. Mind if I have a crack at another?’
‘Go right ahead,’ Jaeger confirmed. ‘There’s too much for Ms Narov to deal with in the one night. But I’m curious, what happened to that Hans Kammler file that you found in the National Archives? The one you emailed me a couple of pages from?’
Jenkinson seemed to jump slightly, a hint of worry creeping into his eyes. ‘Gone. Vanished. Kaput. Even when I checked the online cloud storage systems – not a page remains anywhere. It’s the file that never was.’
‘Someone went to great lengths to make it disappear,’ Jaeger probed.
‘They did,’ Jenkinson confirmed uneasily.
‘One more thing,’ Jaeger added. ‘Why use something so basic as a book code? I mean, the Nazis had their state-of-the-art Enigma cipher machines, didn’t they?’
Jenkinson nodded. ‘They did. But thanks to Bletchley Park, we broke Enigma, and by the end of the war, the Nazi leadership knew that.’ He smiled. ‘A book code may be simple, but it’s also utterly unbreakable, unless you have the exact same book – or, in this case, books plural – that the code is based upon.’
With that he joined Narov, turning his fine mind to cracking another of the documents.
91
Number crunching wasn’t really Raff and Jaeger’s strength. They busied themselves making brews, and keeping vigil on the deck outside. Jaeger wasn’t exactly expecting any trouble here at the marina, but both he and Raff were still alive and in the game because they’d been trained to expect the unexpected – training they still lived by.
After an hour or so Dale came and joined them. He took a long pull on his coffee. ‘Only so much reading documents a sane man can film.’
‘Talking of film, how’s it going?’ Jaeger asked. ‘Carson happy, or are you about to be shot at dawn?’
Dale shrugged. ‘Oddly enough, he seems pretty sanguine about it all. We got to the aircraft and lifted it out of the jungle, just as we’d promised. Fact that we lost it along the way – it just means there won’t be any sequel. But once I’m done here, I’m supposed to head to an edit suite, so I can start cutting the series.’
‘How’re you going to make me look?’ Jaeger queried. ‘You editing out my ums and ahs?’
‘I’m going to make you look like an idiot,’ Dale replied, deadpan.
‘Do that and you will get shot at dawn.’
‘Do that and there’s no film.’
They laughed.
There was a certain camaraderie between them now – one that Jaeger would have never imagined possible upon their first meeting.
It was pushing midnight by the time Narov had her first document cracked. Sure enough, the Voynich manuscript was proving the key to unlocking its meaning, but even so it was slow and painstaking work. She came and joined Raff, Dale and Jaeger on the barge’s open rear.
‘I am maybe fifty per cent done,’ she announced. ‘And already it is incredible.’ She glanced at Jaeger. ‘We now know exactly where the first three Ju 390s – Adlerflug I, II and III – were headed, as would our warplane, Adlerflug IV, have been, had she not run out of gas. Which means we know exactly where the Nazis had their safe havens.
‘Aktion Feuerland,’ she continued. ‘You know why they called it that? They named it after Tierra del Fuego – the land of fire. Where is that? It is the sliver of land where the extreme southern tip of Argentina slips into the Atlantic… For me, Argentina is no massive surprise. It always was the key suspect for sheltering the foremost Nazis.
‘But there are several other locations that the document reveals. Other safe havens. And they do come as a real shock.’ Narov paused, struggling to control her elation. ‘You know, we have never had the wherewithal – the intelligence or expertise – to finish this. To end it. But with breaking these codes, maybe we do now.’
Before Narov could continue, there was a triumphant yell from inside. The voice was that of Jenkinson, and they figured it had to be something utterly extraordinary, for it wasn’t in the archivist’s nature to get needlessly overexcited.
They hurried inside.
Jenkinson held up a sheet of paper. ‘This – is – it,’ he stammered, breathlessly. ‘This changes everything. It would have been so easy to overlook – one seemingly unremarkable sheet of numbers… But finally it all starts to make sense. Horrible, chilling sense.’
He gazed at the four of them, his lower lip trembling with… what? Excitement; trepidation; or was it dread?
‘There is little point in shipping your loot, your top people and your Wunderwaffe – your wonder weapons – to the four corners of the earth, unless you have a reason. A schedule. A master plan.’