He put the question to the back of his mind as he panned across a group of houses. Unlike the utilitarian barracks, these were far more luxurious and homely, with a distinctly Bavarian style. Kroll and his cronies obviously lived there, the war criminals who had founded the hidden community treating themselves to all the comforts of their stolen wealth while their followers were crammed into concrete boxes.
A bright light came on outside his field of vision, starkly illuminating the houses. He looked over the top of the binoculars to locate the source, then examined it through the lenses. Near the barracks was an open square that he guessed was a parade ground, a raised stage at one end. A set of powerful floodlights had just come on to illuminate it. Men carrying chairs and lengths of wood filed across the open space towards the platform. They were going to build something — but what?
‘Eddie,’ Julieta whispered. The urgency in her voice instantly put him on alert, and he lowered the glasses. ‘Over there.’
A vehicle had left the central compound and was crossing the farmland. Eddie tensed, but soon saw that it wasn’t coming towards them, instead heading for some low mounds about half a mile north-west. Through the binoculars, it was revealed as an old US army-surplus Jeep, two men in the front seats.
‘Are they looking for us?’ asked the nervous Argentinian.
‘I don’t think so, but let’s not move while they’re out there.’ He watched the Jeep cross the barren fields and scrabble up a slope. Once at the top, it continued along the rise for a short way, then stopped.
Julieta squinted at the distant vehicle. ‘What are they doing?’
‘Not sure, but the two guys in it are getting out. They’re going to the back, and—’
‘And what?’
He didn’t answer, suddenly filled with fear. The men had just hauled something out of the 4x4, a shape shrouded in plastic sheeting.
A corpse.
He couldn’t make out any details through the wrapped layers, but he could tell from the overall shape that it was a woman. The pair carried the limp body away from the Jeep, then tossed it without ceremony into a ditch. Their grim job done, they went to their vehicle and returned the way they had come, not once looking back.
Eddie jumped from the roof. ‘Come on.’ Julieta climbed after him and went to one side of the ruin. ‘No, this way.’
‘But the buildings are over here.’
He fixed her with a stone-cold stare. ‘They just dumped a woman’s body. If it was Nina… I’m going to go into that place and kill every last one of them.’
The Englishman started for the mounds. Julieta hesitated, then hurried to catch up.
Nina curled in a tight ball in the corner of the cell, forehead pressed against her knees and eyes tightly shut. It was the nearest she could get to shrinking and shrinking until she fell through a crack in the floor and was swallowed by the earth, never to be seen again. Macy’s last moments kept replaying in her mind, an endless loop of pain and horror that she would see until she died.
And right now, she wanted nothing more than for that moment to come. She had failed, utterly and completely. Her stupid, selfish desire to make one last big find had handed the Nazis the very thing they had sought… and in the process, she had killed her friend.
A sob escaped her mouth. She squeezed her legs harder, trying to crush herself out of existence…
‘There was nothing you could have done.’
Zane’s words stirred Nina out of her numbness. ‘What?’
‘What happened in the bunker.’ The Israeli was lying on the bed; he painfully sat up. ‘You couldn’t have saved her. Kroll was going to kill all of us except Banna, no matter what; he’s the only one they need to find the spring.’
‘I could have saved her,’ Nina whispered. ‘If I’d told Kroll about Alexander’s tomb being moved, I—’
‘Then he would have killed Banna and Macy and kept you alive. They only need one archaeologist now that they know where to look — and the second they find what they’re after, they won’t need any. I’m sorry about your friend, and about Eddie too. But once these bastards catch you…’ He hung his head.
‘What — what happened to Eddie?’
‘There’s a town near here, and the local cops and the mayor are in Kroll’s pocket. It seems they usually just scare off tourists, but after Eddie marched into a bar and asked if anybody had seen any Nazis, it didn’t take long for them to figure out that we were a threat.’
‘He’s… not subtle, no.’ For a moment, her mental picture of the dying Macy was replaced by one of Eddie striding into a room and asking the blunt question in his broad Yorkshire accent…
She almost smiled. Almost.
But the image vanished as Zane continued: ‘The cops called Kroll and told him we’d been arrested. The man we went after in Italy, the Nazis’ middleman — he must have told Kroll about us. They knew I was a Mossad agent, but since Eddie wasn’t Israeli they didn’t know who he was. Kroll told the cops to kill him.’
‘But… you didn’t see them do it?’ The tiniest glimmer of hope rose within her. Eddie had been believed dead before…
The spark was snuffed out. ‘No, but they told Kroll that it was done. He gloated about it while Gausmann was torturing me.’ Zane clenched a fist in anger.
The only emotion Nina now felt was despair. She drew her legs up to her body once more, sinking back into anguished misery…
A rattle from above.
Even in his weakened state, Zane still jumped off the bed and whirled to find the source of the noise. ‘What was that?’
‘Quiet, quiet,’ came a whisper from outside the air vent. ‘Dr Wilde? Are you there?’
Nina looked up. ‘Roland?’
‘Yes. Is it safe?’
She stood. ‘Check the door, make sure no one’s there,’ she told Zane in a low voice, before adding: ‘He’s not a threat. I think.’
The Mossad agent was not convinced, but nevertheless went to the cell door. He listened for several seconds, then nodded. Nina climbed on to the bed and looked through the opening.
It was now dark outside, but the single bulb cast enough light to reveal the young man’s blue eyes looking back at her nervously. ‘What do you want?’ she demanded.
‘I need to know what happened to my brother,’ said Roland.
‘I already told you. He tried to give me the plans for the raid on Alexander’s tomb, but Jaekel shot him.’
He hesitated before speaking again, agitated. ‘Herr Jaekel has not been seen for days. They say he is away on important business for the Reich, but…’ Another pause, then: ‘Volker… he became opposed to the Reich after reading about the outside world on the Internet. He did not believe it at first, and nor did I. But the more he saw, the more he thought the Oberkommando had lied to us.’
‘And what did you think?’
The question caught him off guard. ‘I… do not know. I still do not. Jul— A friend, from outside the Enklave, has told me things that contradict what I have been told all my life, but… Why would our leaders lie to us?’ The question was almost plaintive.
‘To get you to do what they want,’ Nina growled. ‘There you go, your first lesson in politics. I suppose they told you they had to hide out here because they were unjustly persecuted when the rest of the world conspired against Hitler’s Germany?’
His reaction told her that was not far from the truth. ‘That is not what other people say, though.’
‘No, it isn’t. The Nazis were genocidal thugs, the most evil regime in history. Their leaders were psychopathic murderers — and they still are. They killed your brother, and they killed my—’ Her words caught in her throat. ‘And they killed my friend!’