69

Monte Carlo Harbor, Principality of Monaco

October 20, 2009

10:45 a.m. (Central European Time)

Walking alongside the harbor in Monte Carlo, Sarron was immersed in the extreme wealth of the Riviera. To his right, the street was lined with Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maybachs, and Rolls-Royces like a luxury car show. Yet they were mere accessories when compared to the line of multimillion-euro yachts moored to his left. If he wanted money, then he had certainly come to the right place. It had taken a month to arrange a meeting with Stefan Vollmer. In the end it had been the Vishnevskys’ access to a Russian oligarch that moored near to Vollmer who arranged an introduction through a terse, late-night telephone call that was going nowhere until Sarron told Vollmer he had the ice axe from the Weisshaus Club.

Vollmer’s yacht wasn’t hard to find. At over seventy meters long, the Hyperborea was significantly larger than the majority of the other boats docked in the crowded harbor. As Sarron approached, it rose up out of the water before him, blindingly white against the perfect blue of the sky. It was moored from the stern, revealing three visible decks, each broad in the beam to house the extensive living space within before narrowing to end in an aggressively sharp, angled prow that pointed out to sea like a grooved bayonet. The roof was a cluster of satellite dishes and communication domes—high-tech bumps and blisters that suggested greater purpose than the simple desire to follow the money markets or the latest game of the owner’s Bundesliga soccer team in HDTV.

Sarron stepped onto the gangway that led to the lower rear deck of the yacht. It was narrow and unstable. Deliberately so, he thought, as, holding the rope barriers, he began to walk across, the gantry flexing beneath his feet similar to a long ladder over a crevasse in the Khumbu icefall. When the Frenchman was exactly halfway across, two men in immaculate white suits and dark glasses appeared from the rear of the boat, motioning him to stop exactly where he was, the bulges in their jackets indicating they were both armed. The little bridge to the boat bowed some more as Sarron stood there.

One of the men stepped forward to where the gangway met the boat. “Name?” he demanded as the other stood to the side, clearly covering his colleague should anything happen.

“Jean-Philippe Sarron.”

“Shoe size?”

Sarron was momentarily confused by the question.

The security guard repeated the demand.

“Forty-one,” he replied, slow to understand the purpose of the query.

“Okay. When you step onto the boat you will immediately hand me the bag you are carrying. Do you understand?”

Sarron nodded and deliberately held it forward to show he intended to take nothing out.

The guard motioned him forward onto the deck. There he exchanged the kit bag for a pair of slippers, saying, “Take off your shoes, put these on and then follow me.” They then quickly ushered Sarron across the deck and through two sliding black glass doors into a security room. One side was lined with a myriad of camera screens that monitored every approach to the boat, even green-tinted underwater views of the ship’s hull.

Once inside, both men motioned Sarron to stop again. One told him to remove his watch and belt, hand over his wallet, and then step through a metal detector followed by a pat down. Meanwhile, the other guard opened the kit bag to remove the only thing it contained, the old ice axe: its presence a condition of Sarron being allowed onto the boat to see Vollmer. The whole process was putting the Frenchman on edge. His mind automatically began to run moves and scenarios to evade them, to take them down, to kill them with the axe until he reminded himself that he was there at his own request. He needed to calm down if this was going to work.

Eventually satisfied that Sarron was unarmed and the ice axe was exactly as described, one of the two guards picked up an intercom and, after a few words, motioned Sarron to follow the other up a chrome spiral staircase. When he asked for the ice axe back, the guard curtly said no and told him to get moving. Growing angry now, Sarron emerged up into an elegant reception room to be told to take a seat and asked if he would like a drink. He requested a brandy. While the drink was being prepared, he remained standing, looking at the room around him.

It was not what he had anticipated. He had expected something harder, edgier, but the room transported him away from the modern lines of the boat and the bright crystalline sea, to a softer, cooler country house seemingly somewhere in the Alps. There were sofas and chairs of the smoothest leather, polished wood sideboards and tables decorated with exquisite marquetry, antique Asian rugs, gleaming silver ornaments. Hanging on the walls were mountain scenes of the Argentinean Andes, interspersed with those of the Bavarian Alps. Handing Sarron the drink, the guard gestured once again for him to sit, waiting until he did so before leaving.

Still no one appeared. Sitting there alone, Sarron recalled what he had learned about the man that Kassner said many in Germany believed was going to lead the Nazis back to power one day.

Vollmer’s extreme wealth was rooted in a steel business in the Ruhr Valley, built by his family over many generations. During the credit squeeze of the Great Depression, the family threw their hat in with the fledgling Nazi party, quickly becoming one of Adolf Hitler’s most fervent benefactors. When the demand for steel rocketed during the rearmament, their loyalty was rewarded. At the end of the war, Vollmer’s grandfather fled with his family to Argentina where, within the network of Nazi escapees and investments masterminded by Martin Bormann, they continued to be active in international business until the family could return to Germany in the midsixties. Once home, Stefan Vollmer’s father, Rudi, was seemingly able to pick up exactly where his own father had left off some twenty years before, quickly reestablishing the family’s steel interests.

Rudi Vollmer would die in 1993—a single-vehicle accident in the Simplon Tunnel that had “Mossad” written all over everything except the official police report. A week later, the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper in Tel Aviv ran a story that reported an unnamed source in the Israeli government as “confident that Saddam Hussein’s attempts at obtaining the materials of reconstruction and rearmament were being thwarted wherever he turned.” Stefan, still a young man of thirty, had immediately picked up the reins of the family’s interests, and did so with aplomb, taking them to even greater heights, expanding into all areas of modern commerce: real estate, energy, telecommunications, information technology, media, even sports club ownership.

In doing so, he was as discreet in his political affiliations as he was with everything else about his private life. However, in 2007, a young policeman in Munich had revealed that, through a series of dummy companies, Vollmer had been making significant financial donations to the German far-right NPD party and possibly sponsoring other underground neo-Nazi groups. The revelations had sent Vollmer running to Monaco, where he now lived full-time, the Hyperborea both his home and, by the look of it to Sarron, his fortress. There he abandoned his former discretion, vowing publicly to rebuild the far right across Europe and prepared to use his vast fortune in any way necessary to do so.

The entrance of his host interrupted the Frenchman’s contemplation. Blond, tanned, wearing a red polo shirt and white slacks, Vollmer moved effortlessly into the room, more tennis professional than businessman, holding the old ice axe in his right hand as effortlessly as if it was a carbon-fiber framed racquet.

“Bonjour, Monsieur Sarron, welcome to the Hyperborea.”

Sarron rose from his chair to meet the German. They shook hands with a firm grip, both making deliberate eye contact until Vollmer stood back and deliberately turned the axe upside down to hold it like a golf club. Taking a step back, he gave a practiced swing at an imaginary ball and said, “This old axe has already cost me much more than it is worth, so I hope that you are here to offer me something better?”

“I am,” Sarron coldly replied.

Both sitting, Sarron proceeded to explain what he had learned from Graf about the axe in his hands.

Vollmer listened carefully saying only, “Interesting,” as he pulled his face close to the steel axe head to study its tiny swastika.

“Then you might be even more interested to hear that, despite what happened in Munich, it seems that the Englishman who found that axe on Everest is still alive,” Sarron continued. “It leads me to believe that others will soon want to find out what else is up there and, if it is as I suspect, will do everything to stop people like you getting their hands on it.”

“People like me? What does that mean?”

“You know well what that means, Vollmer. I am not a policeman and you are not a communist. You are someone that could use such a story to promote their own stated interests and intentions.”

“That is indeed true but do you think there is really more waiting up there? It seems a long jump from this ice axe to a frozen camera full of summit photos …”

“Perhaps … but is that a risk you can afford to take?”

“Sarron, I can afford anything, which I am sure is the principal reason why you are here.”

“No, I am here because I am the one person, beyond the Englishman, who can retrieve whatever else is up there and, if it does prove to be a photograph of an elite Nazi climber on top of Everest in 1939, I am also sure that you are the one person that would like to own it.”

“Okay, Sarron. I’m listening. What’s your proposal?”

Sarron outlined his plan and its financial terms while Vollmer looked out on the Monaco harbor through the dark-tinted windows. When the Frenchman had finished, Vollmer said nothing for a few minutes before turning back toward Sarron and raising the axe up in the air as if imagining it flying a swastika on a distant mountaintop.

“That’s a very expensive offer given that I have little interest in the contents of the pockets of some frozen Wehrmacht soldier; I could easily find similar myself if I were to dig around in the permafrost of Norway or Finland.

“No, the only thing that interests me is the rare chance, as you have explained, that you could find the climber’s camera with actual summit photos still preserved. Such photographs would indeed have a high value to me and on that basis alone I am prepared to make a counteroffer. However it will have to be an ‘all or nothing deal,’ one that places the risk, as you call it, back onto your shoulders.”

Sarron stared at Vollmer as he silently listened.

“I propose to fund you to go back to Everest,” Vollmer continued, “and will pay you an additional 2.5 million euros for a bona fide summit photograph if it exists. If it doesn’t, I will pay you nothing more than the initial expenses.”

Sarron opened his mouth to negotiate but Vollmer quickly stopped him. “Take it or leave it, Sarron, you won’t get a higher offer. And one more thing, I want this axe now as a sign of good faith.”

“Okay, Vollmer, I’ll take the deal but you can’t have the axe. Well not yet anyway.”

“Why?”

“I need to kill someone with it first.”