A faint scrape of metal, then: ‘Dr Wilde?’
The voice was male, whispered. Everyone turned in alarm to its source – the ventilation slot. ‘Shit,’ Nina whispered. If the spy had heard them plotting and reported them to Kroll . . .
‘Dr Wilde, are you there?’ The voice was still low, and strained, as if the speaker were afraid of being overheard.
Bewildered, Nina replied: ‘Yeah?’
‘Please, quiet! I do not want the guards to know I am here.’
She stepped up on to the bed to look through the little opening. The metal cover at its other end had been lifted. A pair of blue eyes peered nervously back at her. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded.
‘You are Nina Wilde?’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘Please, I must be sure!’ The eyes glanced away as if checking for sentries, then back at her.
‘Yeah, I’m Nina Wilde,’ she said, curiosity taking hold. ‘And you are?’
Relief was clear even on the small visible part of the man’s face. He was young, Nina could tell; no older than twenty, if that. ‘I thought it was you when I saw you outside the Führer’s house. I recognised you from your photographs on the Internet. My name is—’
‘Koenig,’ she cut in, remembering the youth she had seen while being marched to Kroll’s residence – the twin of Jaekel’s victim in Los Angeles. ‘You’re Volker Koenig’s brother!’
‘Yes, I am Roland.’ His surprise turned to hopefulness. ‘You have seen Volker?’
‘Yeah, I saw him.’
‘Where is he? He told me he would find you, but . . . I did not think that you would come here.’
‘Right, we came here. That’s why we’re sitting in a prison cell,’ said Nina, her voice overflowing with sarcasm. ‘Your brother found me in Los Angeles. He wanted me to stop your people from raiding the tomb of Alexander the Great.’
Roland’s expression told her that while he knew something about his brother’s intentions, he had not been aware of the whole story. ‘Where is he?’
As much as she hated the Nazis, she couldn’t help but feel some sympathy for the youth, knowing what she was about to tell him. ‘Your brother, Volker . . . he’s dead.’
Roland flinched in shock. ‘Nein – no, no. That cannot be.’
‘He was gunned down in the street by one of your leaders! A guy called Jaekel – big scar on his face.’
‘Herr Jaekel, yes, of course. But – no, he would not have killed Volker.’
‘It happened right in front of me. And then Jaekel tried to kill me too.’
‘Then . . . where is Herr Jaekel?’
‘On a slab. Dead,’ she clarified; Roland’s English was good, but he apparently didn’t understand slang. ‘The police shot him.’
He drew back. ‘I . . . I do not believe you.’
‘Why? Your brother came looking for me; he never came back, but I’m here as a prisoner instead. What does that tell you?’
There was no answer. The vent cover clanked into place. ‘No!’ Macy gasped, jumping up beside Nina. ‘Don’t go, please!’
A pause . . . then the plate rose again. Roland looked back at the cell’s occupants. ‘Who else is there?’
‘I’m Macy, Macy Sharif. This is Ubayy Banna.’ The Egyptian stood and moved into Roland’s view. ‘We’re all archaeologists; we were kidnapped.’
Again the young man was shocked. ‘Kidnapped?’
‘You’ve got to get us out of here, please!’
‘I – I cannot. The front door is guarded. They will not let me in.’
‘Then get word to someone outside!’ said Nina. ‘Call my husband – or the United Nations in New York. There’s a man called Oswald Seretse; tell him where we are.’
Roland retreated again, agitated. ‘Only the Oberkommando may use the telephone, it is not permitted—’
‘Screw what’s permitted! Just do it!’
‘I am sorry, but – but I cannot help you . . .’ He jumped down from whatever he was standing on, and the cover clanged shut.
‘So, I guess he’s not going to bust us out of here,’ said Macy, breaking the glum silence that followed.
‘I guess not.’ Both women stepped down from the bed, the younger sitting heavily upon it. Nina, however, stalked across the cell in frustration. ‘Dammit! Nobody will even be looking for us here, but one frickin’ phone call would fix that. If Seretse knew we’d been taken from Egypt to Argentina, he could start searching in the right place—’
She broke off as her mind suddenly found the missing piece of the puzzle. ‘My God,’ she gasped. ‘How the hell did we miss it?’
‘Miss what?’ Macy asked.
‘I just realised why we can’t find the spring. We’ve been starting our search from the wrong place!’ Her companions looked mystified; she continued: ‘The text on the relic said to take a sun reading outside Alexander’s tomb – but it didn’t say which tomb. We all assumed it meant the one in Alexandria, because that’s where we found the statue of Bucephalus. But that wasn’t where Alexander was originally buried!’
‘Memphis!’ Banna exclaimed. ‘Of course – Ptolemy the Second moved the tomb from Memphis to Alexandria.’
‘Yeah – but Andreas didn’t know that when he made the fish! He went back to search for the spring after Alexander’s death, and evidently found it again, but the tomb was relocated while he was away. So all the clues, all the calculations you have to make using the relic to find the spring’s location . . . they use the original tomb as their starting point.’
‘Wow,’ said Macy. ‘Andreas must have been pissed when he got to Memphis to put the statue inside the tomb and found it wasn’t there any more.’
‘Maybe not. It actually worked to his advantage – it makes locating the spring even more of a challenge.’
Banna’s expression became thoughtful. ‘But we know. So now we can find it.’
‘Yeah. How far apart are Alexandria and Memphis?’
‘I do not know exactly,’ he said. ‘Memphis is south of Cairo, so . . . two hundred and fifty kilometres?’
‘We’ll need to work out the difference in degrees of latitude, though. And we can’t do that without a map.’ Nina paced across the cell, frustrated. ‘But now we know what we’ve got to do tomorrow. We string the Nazis along for as long as we can with the wrong starting point . . . while we work out where the spring really is using the right starting point. Then when,’ she placed deliberate emphasis on the word, to give hope to herself as much as her companions, ‘we get out of here? We’re going to find it ourselves.’
21
‘This is it,’ said Zane as the Jeep crested a low hill.
Eddie surveyed the landscape. ‘Christ, looks like we’re driving into a Clint Eastwood film. I should’ve brought a poncho.’ The scrubby plain rolled away to the distant Andean foothills. Winter had arrived, but for now the snow-capped peaks on the far horizon were keeping a jealous grip on their frozen moisture, everything a bleak, parched brown.
Zane checked a map. ‘The town’s on the west side of the lake.’
‘What lake?’ The Englishman searched for it. ‘That’s not a lake, it’s a puddle.’
‘Huh. It’s much bigger on the map.’
Surrounding the thin patch of water was an expanse of pale, flat ground. It was swathed in what Eddie at first thought was fog before closer observation revealed it as wind-blown dust. The lake had largely dried up, leaving behind a barren wasteland of silt. He guessed that the settlement had originally been built on the shore, but it was now at least half a mile from the water’s edge. Village and lake shared the same name: Lago Amargo – Bitter Lake. ‘So Kroll and his arsewipes are hiding out here?’
‘This is where the IP address originated, yes.’
‘Ass
uming they didn’t route it through somewhere else first.’
‘It’s possible,’ Zane admitted, ‘but this part of the world was a popular hideout for Nazis after the war. We’re only about sixty kilometres from Bariloche, where there was a whole community of escapees – and there was a compound over the border in Chile, Villa Baviera, that was basically a cult founded by a Nazi. When the Chilean police raided it, they found huge caches of weapons, and even a tank.’
Eddie gave him a disbelieving look. ‘A tank? How the fuck did they get hold of a tank?’
‘These people can get hold of anything. They have the money they stole from Jews and others in the war, and middlemen like Leitz to supply it to them.’
‘Speaking of Leitz, he’s bound to have told that fat bastard about us by now.’
Zane nodded. ‘I spoke to the Mossad after we landed. He’s already left Italy and gone off the grid. We tried to access his computer remotely, but he’s stopped using it. He probably guessed it had been compromised.’
They drove on. Scrub gave way to fields, but from the derelict state of most of the farm buildings, it seemed that the former inhabitants had given up on their profession. ‘So what do we know about this place?’ Eddie asked.
‘Not much. It used to be a mining town, but the mines closed decades ago, so they turned to agriculture.’ Zane looked out across the desolate farmland. ‘Without much success, I’d guess. The population’s more than halved over the past twenty years. Beyond that, though, we couldn’t find much more information.’
‘How are we going to find these Nazis, then? I doubt we’ll get lucky and catch Kroll while he’s buying the morning groceries.’
‘That would save us a lot of time,’ Zane said. ‘But we should see if we can get access to the town records.’ He glanced at a boxy equipment case on the rear seat. ‘I’ve used the cover story of being a photographer before; it’s surprising how much people will open up to you if you tell them they have a pretty home.’
‘You’ll have to be bloody convincing for that to work here.’ They entered the settlement proper, passing a faded sign bearing the village’s name. More empty, crumbling buildings greeted them. They had gone a good hundred yards along the street before seeing their first sign of life: an old woman watching them warily from a doorway before retreating inside. Eddie whistled an ululating five-note tune, following it with ‘Waah waah waaaahh . . .’
‘What was that?’ Zane asked.
‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.’ The Israeli regarded him blankly. ‘Come on, don’t tell me you haven’t seen it?’
‘It must have been long before my time.’
‘Tchah! Fucking kids.’ Ignoring Zane’s smirk, Eddie guided the Jeep through the village. The buildings became grander, faded relics of a more prosperous era. Before long, they reached the centre, a flaking white church on one side of a small square facing a hotel with a sign optimistically proclaiming it to be the Paradiso. None of the buildings looked anything less than a century old.
‘There’s the satellite link,’ said Zane. A large white dish was mounted on a mast on the hotel’s roof, a couple of smaller ones flanking it. ‘The town’s Internet hub must be in there. We might be able to track down the IP’s physical location if we can access it.’
The new arrivals were now drawing more attention. A couple of old men on a bench stared as the 4x4 passed, and a young woman peered with interest from one of the Paradiso’s upper windows before hurrying from sight. Eddie pulled up outside the hotel. ‘Let me do the talking,’ said Zane as they got out.
‘Why you?’ Eddie demanded.
‘For one thing, you’re English, and England and Argentina have some issues.’ They headed for the entrance.
‘What? The Falklands War was over thirty fucking years ago.’
‘The Second World War was seventy years ago, but we’re still hunting down people who fought in it. And for another, you’re not exactly subtle.’
‘Bollocks!’ Eddie protested loudly as they entered a large and dimly lit bar. He couldn’t help but imagine that he’d stepped through a time portal to the Wild West, so dated were the surroundings. Even the lights were wheel-like wooden chandeliers, one of the few concessions to modernity being electric bulbs. There were half a dozen unenthused patrons, and a single mournful member of staff behind the long counter. ‘I know what I’m doing.’ He marched to the middle of the room. ‘Oi! Anyone seen any Nazis?’
Zane shook his head. ‘Yes, that was really subtle.’
‘Might as well get straight to the point and not piss around.’ He went to the bar and addressed the elderly man behind it. ‘Hi. We’re looking for some people who live around here. Germans, probably turned up around 1946?’
The barman gave him a look of bewilderment. ‘Lo sentimos, pero no sé lo que estás diciendo.’
‘No habló inglés?’ Eddie asked, to equal confusion.
‘You told him that you did not speak English,’ said an amused female voice. A young Hispanic woman came down the stairs. She was around eighteen, and had the flustered air of someone who had just given themselves a last-minute check in the mirror before hurrying to meet a guest.
‘Well, some people don’t understand me even when I am talking English,’ said Eddie. ‘You seem pretty good at it, though.’
‘I learned it from satellite TV,’ she said with pride. ‘And from the Internet.’
‘Hopefully only the nice parts.’
She giggled. ‘I heard you say you were looking for someone? I know everyone in town, I can help you find them.’
Zane cut in before Eddie could speak. ‘We’re photographers; we’re taking pictures of the whole country. But we also want to interview people about what it’s like to live here.’
The young woman gave them a look that revealed considerable perception for her age. ‘That would be easier if you spoke Spanish, yes?’
‘I speak Spanish,’ said Zane. ‘My assistant is only here to carry the cameras.’
‘Oi!’ Eddie objected. ‘Assistant, my arse.’
She ignored him, instead addressing Zane in rapid-fire Spanish. ‘I . . . yes?’ he eventually replied.
Another giggle. ‘Your Spanish is not as good as you think,’ she said. ‘Unless you really paint your toenails pink?’
‘Oh, he does,’ said Eddie. ‘You should see what he wears for a night out on the town an’ all. Lots of frills.’
‘Will you shut up?’ Zane snapped. Behind him, Eddie noticed one of the patrons heading for the exit – watching the visitors out of the corner of his eye. Suddenly wary, he surveyed the room. The remaining barflies hurriedly looked down at their drinks.
Zane picked up on Eddie’s concern – as did the woman. She lowered her voice. ‘You are not here to take photos – did Roland’s brother send you?’
‘Who’s Roland?’ Zane asked.
‘My boyfriend. His brother left here a week ago, but nobody has heard from him – and I have not seen Roland either. I am worried, I do not know what has happened to them.’
A thought came to Eddie. ‘This brother . . . what’s his name?’
‘Julieta, qué estás haciendo?’ said someone before she could answer.
The group turned to see a man emerge from a back room. He was in his late forties, with slicked-back black hair and a rakish moustache. The barman’s look of deference told Eddie that the new arrival was his boss.
The girl, Julieta, replied in Spanish, drawing a good-natured shrug and a sigh. ‘I hope my daughter is not bothering you,’ he said. ‘Not many people visit Lago Amargo, and she likes to get fresh news from the outside world.’
‘It’s no trouble,’ Zane assured him.
‘Good, good. Then can I do anything for you? I am Pablo Silva, the owner of this hotel – and also the mayor.’ He gave them a beaming smile. ??
?Are you going to be our guests?’
‘Yes, we’ll probably be here for a day or two.’
‘Good! If you need anything, I am at your service. This may only be a small town, but we pride ourselves on our hospitality.’
‘It looks a lot smaller than it used to be,’ said Eddie.
Silva shook his head sadly. ‘Yes, a lot of the people have moved away. Since the lake dried up, many of the farms failed. It is hard to grow crops when there is not enough water.’
Julieta frowned and said something that clearly needled her father. ‘No ahora,’ he said, waving a dismissive hand.
Or was the gesture concern? ‘What happened to the water?’ Eddie asked.
‘There was enough for everyone,’ said Julieta, before Silva could respond, ‘until the people in the Enklave blocked the river to keep it for themselves!’
Eddie and Zane exchanged glances. Kroll had mentioned the name in his videoconference with Leitz. ‘Where’s this Enklave?’ asked the Yorkshireman.
‘It is a private estate,’ said Silva. ‘They own the land, so what they do there is their business.’
‘They have taken our water!’ Julieta protested. ‘You know they have. You are the mayor, and the Enklave is part of Lago Amargo – why have you not done anything about it?’
Her father’s tone became patronising. ‘It is more complicated than that. Hablaremos de esto más tarde. En privado,’ he added, glancing at the two travellers. ‘Now, I need to find rooms for these two gentlemen.’
With an angry huff, Julieta flounced up the stairs. Silva sighed again. ‘I apologise for my daughter.’
‘No problem,’ said Eddie. ‘So, this Enklave place – is it far?’
The mayor seemed unsettled by his return to the subject. ‘As I said, it is private property. The owners keep to themselves, but they pay their land taxes, so that is okay with me!’ A small laugh, with little humour.
‘But it must be upriver, right?’ Eddie pressed on. ‘Otherwise they couldn’t block off your water.’