Jake stared at the four pages. “This is it then. This is how the Secret Service knew, all those decades ago. This is how the paths converge – Rome, Nazism, MI6. Churchill and the ‘ancient Etruscan matter’. God only knows what Winnie made of it all.”
Jenny produced her smart phone and Googled: ‘Hitler + lightning’.
At once the search engine summoned up thousands of pages. Her eyes flitted from left to right as she read. Occasionally it seemed she would say something, but words never formed themselves. Her complexion had turned the colour of bad mackerel.
Finally she voiced a single word. “Blitzkrieg.”
“Lightning war,” Jake translated. “It was the name they gave to their battle tactics. Rapid motorized advances, encircling entire armies at a time.”
“And there’s this,” said Jenny, swivelling the tablet.
On the screen was the symbol of Himmler’s SS; the crooked letters formed two bolts of lightning.
“The badge was designed in 1933,” said Jenny. “About six months after Hess claimed they found Tages’s tomb.”
“My God,” said Jake, who was also on Google. “Look at this entry from the war diary kept by Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda guru. It’s dated 26th September 1938, at the height of appeasement – when Hitler bluffed Chamberlain into throwing Czechoslovakia to the wolves.”
Things have turned out just as the Fuhrer predicted. He is a divinatory genius. But first, our mobilization. This will proceed so lightning-fast that the world will experience a miracle.
“So the Nazis did buy into it too,” she said, her breathing shallow.
“And here’s a speech Hitler gave threatening the Jews in June 1941,” said Jake. “Jesus, just read this one.”
They can laugh about it, just as they used to laugh at my prophecies. The coming months will prove that here too I’ve seen things correctly.
Jake recalled the dream he’d had in Rome: how the beat of the drum had transmogrified into the sound of jackboots.
“There’s more,” said Jenny. “Much more, in fact. Lightning and storm imagery is shot through almost every pronouncement Hitler makes in the build-up to war. Early in 1938 he says the attack on the Czechs must be carried out ‘blitzartig-schnell’ – ‘lightning fast’. And this quote’s from the same year – when Hitler is threatening to invade Austria.”
I have a historic mission and I will fulfil this because providence has destined me to do so. I’ll appear in Vienna like a spring storm. Then you’ll see something.
“Feat after coup after bluff.” Jake’s voice was husky. “And lightning was never far from Hitler’s mind.”
“How did Hess’s flight go down with him?”
“Hold on.” Jake pulled up a page from the historian Ian Kershaw’s biography of the dictator.
The first Hitler knew of Hess’s disappearance was in the morning of 11 May. One of the Deputy Fuhrer’s adjutants turned up at the Berghof. He was carrying a letter which Hess had given him before taking off, entrusting him to give it personally to the Fuhrer. When Hitler read Hess’s letter the colour drained from his face. Albert Speer heard an ‘almost animal-like scream’. ‘Goring, get here immediately!’ he barked into the telephone. ‘Something dreadful has happened’.
‘The Fuhrer is completely crushed,’ the Propaganda Minister noted in his diary. The letters, he claimed, were full of ‘half baked occultism’.
According to one account, Hitler was ‘in tears and looked ten years older’. He told General Udent, ‘I hope Hess falls into the sea’.
‘I have never seen the Fuhrer so deeply shocked,’ Hans Frank told subordinates a few days later.
“Then the job of discrediting Hess began,” said Jake, pointing to another paragraph. “Straight away the Nazi propaganda machine began trying to paint him as a lunatic.”
The German communiqué of 13 May acknowledged Hess’s flight to Scotland and capture. It emphasized his physical illness stretching back years, which had put him in the hands of mesmerists, astrologists, and the like, bringing about a ‘mental confusion’ that had led to the action. It also held open the possibility that he had been entrapped by the British Secret Service.
“And read this,” said Jenny. “It’s an excerpt from a Nazi Party newspaper dated 13th May, 1941.”
As is well known in party circles, Hess had undergone severe physical suffering for some years. Recently he had sought relief in methods practised by astrologers. An attempt is being made to determine to what extent these persons are responsible for bringing about the condition of mental distraction which led him to take this step.
“It’s as if the German leadership were trying to get in a pre-emptive publicity strike,” she said. “In case he started singing like a canary.”
“And yet the British didn’t try to turn Hess’s flight into a propaganda coup,” mused Jake. “It’s always been seen as one of the odd things about the affair. You’d expect them to make hay having captured the Deputy Führer. But they were strangely quiet.”
Suddenly a bit of Churchill came to Jake. His Finest Hour speech, 1940; the penultimate line.
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
That word again: science. ‘The lights of perverted science.’
The journalist’s frown deepened.
But that’s what it is, Jake. Don’t you see?
“After the news broke the Nazis arrested dozens of people connected to Hess,” said Jenny. “Hitler ordered Hess shot on sight if he ever returned.”
“Yet as it happened Hess was the most high-ranking Nazi to escape the death penalty at the Nuremberg Trials,” he muttered. “He lived out the rest of his days in solitary isolation and died of old age in 1987. Why?”
Jenny had turned even whiter. “The Cold War was on,” she whispered. “He was kept alive.”
She pushed the report across the table, as if it was unclean. And then came something totally unexpected.
“I believe him,” she said. “I believe every word of it.”
*
“Believe who?” said Jake.
“Rudolf Hess.” Jenny faltered – she looked reduced somehow. “I … I think he was telling the truth.”
“Telling the truth?” De Clerk scoffed. “About what?”
“The Disciplina Etrusca,” Jenny said, shrinking further into herself. “When he said that it … that it helped them.”
“You can’t be serious. You’re not saying …”
Jenny’s shoulders juddered, and Jake saw how he must have looked at his own awakening in the Monastery of Debre Damo.
“I don’t understand how,” she said. “But it works.”
“You’re mad,” said de Clerk. He stalked out of the room.
“You’re not mad,” said Jake. “I believe it too.”
He told Jenny about his own epiphany. How he had seen a bolt of lightning guide Florence to the monastery; how she’d sensed danger, foretold by thunder every time; how lightning from the north-west always augured ill, just as Tages said it would. Most of all, how Roman history ebbed and flowed with the appearance of lightning.
“Then we met Dr Nesta and I saw how this phenomenon could have a scientific basis after all,” Jake continued. “And now this. Half the Nazi state was modelled on Rome. The salutes, the architecture. The eagles and banners.”
“And that run of victories,” said Jenny. “From 1933 to 1941 it was triumph after triumph – Hitler conquered Europe in eighteen months flat.”
“But immediately after Hess’s flight the victories end,” Jake replied. “The miscalculations set in. A month later Germany invades Russia – the Fuhrer’s most catastrophic mistake. By the end of the year they’re at war with the USA too. Hitler bit off more than he could chew. Germany lost the war.”
“Every major decision the Nazis took after Hess’s flight they got wrong,” said Jenny. “All of them. And Roger Britton’s death – it wasn’t coincidence, was it? Dr Dicks tells us here that Hess boasted he could conjure up a lightning bolt. He offered to prove it. I think after Dicks finished his interviews Hess taught what he knew to MI6. Why else would Churchill be called to study the ravings of a madman?” She drew a long breath. “MI6 put Hess to the test and Hess delivered.”
“Which means …”
“Which means Roger Britton was killed by Charlie Waits with a bolt of lightning.”
“And ever since then MI6 has been hunting for the rest of the text,” Jake finished.
“But it still makes no sense,” said Jenny. “Surely conjuring up a lightning bolt takes more power than reading the future? How could Charlie do one and not the other?”
“Quite the opposite,” said Jake. “What would use up more energy – making electricity jump a few hundred feet through the air, or calculating the movement of quadrillions of atoms? Without the Disciplina Etrusca to hand that was beyond Hess. It remained beyond Charlie – and his predecessors too.” He shook his head, half-laughed, breathing out through his nose. “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties …”
Jenny frowned. “But if you’ve known it was real since Ethiopia, why on earth didn’t you tell me?”
“You’d have thought I was mad,” said Jake. “And I …”
“And you what?”
“Jenny, I …”
A drawer banged in the kitchen and the words “like you” died on his lips.