The Isis Covenant by James Douglas Read Free Book Online Page A

come the moment when the broken, soiled creature in the chair must be dispatched. At first, he had not been strong enough to kill with his hands , although he had been taught the mechanics of it. Sometimes it would be with a knife. Sometimes with a pistol. Poison, administered in various ways. Even once with gas, though this was never repeated because of the time it took to clear the room. But his father’s favoured method was the wire. He remembered the quiet, almost seductive voice in his ear as he took hold of the wooden toggles with the link of steel piano wire between them.
    ‘
Wenn Sie die Schleife platzieren, müssen Sie die Hände kreuzen, rechts über links. Sehen Sie, wie es Ihnen die beste Position ermglicht, um den größten Druck ausüben? Nun, ganz langsam, in die entgegengesetzten Richtungen ziehen
.’ When you place the loop, you must cross the hands, right over left. See how it gives you the best position to apply the greatest pressure? Now, slowly, pull in opposite directions. Let him know he is dying.
    It was only after he mastered the wire that his father had proudly shown him the pictures of the men in grey with the lightning-flash runes on their collars and the people in the striped uniforms with the hopeless dead eyes. And when he had given him the belt buckle with the eagle and made him recite the oath.
    He felt a twinge of guilt at the thought of the oath. He knew he had taken pleasure in mutilating the woman in New York and inflicting the kind of pain on the children he had suffered as a boy. It was not part of his mission to take pleasure from it. It meant he would have to cleanse himself later at the special establishment he was a member of.
    Still, the deaths had served their purpose. One more avenue to the man he sought closed off to the opposition.
    And the computer he had removed from the apartment of the English Hartmans had provided him with a new trail to follow.

VII
    GEISTJAEGER 88?
JAMIE studied the sparse file on the computer in his Kensington High Street flat. According to Detective Danny Fisher, the two murdered families had one thing in common, apart from the similarity of their names. If you went back a couple of generations their genes converged with those of a Hamburg resident named Berndt Hartmann, and this Hartmann’s name had been linked to
Geistjaeger 88
. Most people thought Herman Göring was the Second World War’s greatest art thief, but he’d had a few rivals. Hans Frank for one, the
gauleiter
who had ruled over what had been called the General Government – the Nazis’ Polish slave state – and had pinched Raphael’s
Portrait of a Young Man
from under Göring’s nose. Frank, however, was just a bit player. Göring was a man who didn’t know the meaning of the word enough. When he stole, he stole on an industrial scale. In 1939 he had created an organization specifically to create the greatest art collection the world had ever seen. The man appointed to run it was an Austrian art historian called Kajetan Mülhmann, an SS officer and the Nazi Special Delegate for the Securing of Art in the Occupied Territories. Mülhmann and his staff travelled the length and breadth of the ever-expanding Third Reich plundering artworks belonging to Jews, ‘enemies of the state’ and the Roman Catholic Church, prudently siphoning off the occasional piece to go to Adolf Hitler’s planned
Führermuseum
in Linz. But what Göring and Hitler had, Heinrich Himmler must have too. Himmler loathed ‘
der dicke
’, as he called Göring. He also had his own, rather more specialized, reasons for hunting down artefacts and artworks. In 1942, he ordered the creation of a special SS unit specifically for that purpose. It had started off with a grandiose name to match the grandiose aspirations of its founder, but the men who served in it called themselves Ghosthunters and their unit became Ghosthunter 88; eight being the number that corresponded with the letter H in the alphabet, and not,