The Devil's Gold by Steve Berry Read Free Book Online Page B

well.”
    “It is of no matter to me any longer. I have done my duty.”
    A lie. He was supposed to raise the child himself. But he wanted no more reminders of Adolf Hitler.
    The man rose from his chair and said, “Live long, old friend.”
    “I plan to.”
    And Bormann watched as his visitor headed for a car parked under the shade of a sprawling elm, the infant in his arms.

    Schüb finished his story.
    Voices broke the silence.
    From behind where they stood.
    Schüb ignored the sound and stepped forward, grasping a rope handle for the door.
    They entered what appeared to be a funerary chamber, the spacious room lit by sconces. A far wall was lined with bookcases, illuminated by ceiling-mounted floodlights. The shelves teemed with odd-shaped volumes packed tight in rows. But what dominated the room were two sarcophagi, each flooded in a pool of blue-white light. The exteriors were of marble, one gray, the other pink, the pair similar in size.
    “The pinkish tomb contains the mortal remains of my mother,” Schüb said. “Eva Braun. The other is Bormann’s.”
    “Your brother was Bormann’s son, born in Africa,” Wyatt said. “You, though, were the baby born in Spain. You are the son of Adolf Hitler.”
    Schüb’s face had a sad remorseful mien.
    Then Wyatt saw the gold bars, stacked five feet high, at least six piles on pallets. “There must be several hundred million dollars’ worth of bullion there.”
    “A fraction over a billion actually.”
    “This is Hitler’s Bounty?”
    “What is left of it.”
    He’d never seen so much raw gold.
    He stepped over and lifted one of the bars. Maybe thirty or so pounds. He studied the top, half expecting to see a swastika etched into the surface. But there was nothing.
    “No links to Nazis remain,” Schüb said. “Those traces were removed long ago.”
    “This is from the Reichsbank robbery? What was stashed in the Alps at the end of the war?”
    “Some. Some more from the bounty. Other parts from unspeakable sources. Bormann took control of all those caches.”
    He recalled what Isabel had called Bormann.
    A quetrupillán. Mute devil.
    “This is the devil’s gold?”
    Schüb nodded. “A good way to describe it.”
    “How did Bormann get it all here?”
    “Simple, actually. Much of what was buried in the mountains were bags of iron bars and plain paper. The actual gold and currency was moved farther south into Austria, where it stayed for many years. The man who raised me from birth personally supervised its eventual transportation here in the early 1950s. It took several years to accomplish, but it was accomplished.”
    “How was all that kept secret?”
    “There were men who still believed in the Reich. They did their job and took what they knew with them to their graves. They understood their duty. But of course each one realized that he, or his family, would be shot by the others if he revealed anything.” Schüb paused a moment, grabbing a breath. “They were but a few of those men, and eventually they all died. Bormann, though, survived. He possessed a great hatred for the follies of man, and all who knew him, like the real Gerhard Schüb, were aware of that fact. No tolerance for frailty or passion, no pity for those who’d done him harm. He wished his enemies to hell, and put them there in his heart. He was, quite simply, a man of wrath.” Schüb paused. “Or a devil, as you put it.”
    “Yet men served him.”
    Schüb took a disconsolate stroll around the stacks of gold bars, eyeing the gleaming metal in the cool glow of the light fixtures. “That is true.” He motioned to bookshelves. “Toward the end of his life Bormann and my adoptive father communicated more frequently. Bormann started writing down his thoughts. He did this while serving Hitler also. He was obsessive about note taking. ‘The savior of the administrator,’ he would say. He created meticulous journals. Textbooks, he called them. Before he died he gave the journals to my