'He will convince himself nothing is going to happen to Sarah. He is very good at lying to himself. I think we all are, actually.'

  'If Himmler wants this he will find it! You aren't saving me with this, Otto! You are getting me into the middle of something horrible!'

  'We are all in the middle of something horrible, Elise. Besides, he isn't going to know to look at you. He is going to be following me.'

  Her eyes fixed on him with an expression of utter tragedy. He had never before seen her face like this. 'You aren't coming back, are you?'

  'I want to see Sarah before I go.'

  Kufstein, Austria

  March 15, 1939.

  It took two days for Himmler to learn that Otto Rahn had stolen a car from the motor pool, three to discover he had taken the Lance of Antioch from Wewelsburg. The moment he realised what Rahn had done to him, he called off the Gestapo and put Colonel Bachman in charge. 'No matter the cost, no matter the time involved,' he said, 'You will find out where he has hidden it!'

  'Of course, Reichsführer!'

  'As for Dr Rahn, once you have recovered what he has taken, I want him brought back to Berlin so that I may have a word with him before he is shot.'

  Operating directly under Himmler's authority, Bachman directed a nationwide manhunt. Additionally, he sent men to the south of France and to Geneva, Switzerland, where he knew Rahn had a number of old friends. Bachman set up his headquarters for the search in Berlin, coordinating a number of teams. He kept a plane on standby night and day. He gave orders to call him the moment Rahn had been detained. On the fifth night after Rahn had run, Bachman was spending another sleepless night when he suddenly sat up in bed, wide awake. They had not found Rahn in France or Switzerland or at any of the border crossings, he realised, because Rahn was not running. He was still in Germany.

  ' We are plotting to kill Hitler!' That was what he had said as a joke one evening when Bachman had caught him whispering to Elise, but there had been something in his eyes when he had said it. . .

  The following morning Bachman ordered everything in Otto's office and apartment reviewed a second time. It took three days and ten agents before they found he had taken a look at the plans of the Eagle's Nest. Hitler was going there for his birthday in just over a month, and Rahn - the doomed romantic with his deluded notions of right and wrong - intended to be there!

  Bachman flew to Berchtesgaden on Monday, 13 March, and began directing a discreet search of the villages and towns. They were looking for a soldier on leave who was passing his time quietly. Late on Wednesday, one of his agents reported a tall, fairly young captain in the SS who was renting a room from a widow in the village of Kufstein - not more than forty kilometres from Berchtesgaden.

  Bachman moved in just after dark.

  Rahn travelled by car to central Germany, then by train as far as Munich. He got ahead of the first investigators and hitchhiked southeast to the village of Kufstein on the Austrian side of the border. His papers were checked at the border, but his forged papers had stirred no interest. He got a room with a widow by telling the woman he was on medical leave from the army and wanted to do some hiking in the area for a few weeks before he reported to Berchtesgaden for active duty. She did not ask for proof, but to assuage her curiosity he left his orders to transfer to Berchtesgaden on 19 April out on the bureau for her to find. His uniform, he kept hanging in his closet.

  He sometimes spoke with the woman about his parents and a fiancée who had broken off the engagement with him without explaining herself. He told a good story, and won the old woman's sympathy with it. She told him he ought to make up with his parents before it was too late. There would be a time when he would be sorry for the quarrel. As for the young woman, it was her loss. He just needed a little time getting past a broken heart! He told her she was probably right, but for the time being he just needed some time to himself. She seemed to understand, and certainly showed no concern when he stayed locked in his room or went alone into the woods as the weeks passed.

  On the night they came for him, Rahn heard her answer the door and then her cry of surprise as they pushed into the house. Rahn got his military uniform and his papers together before they hit the bedroom door. In the mad scramble to get away, he had nothing else. He went out through a window, threw his boots and uniform to the ground and risked descending by the drainpipe. Neither man giving chase was willing to risk a fall. They watched as he ran. They might have shot him easily enough. When they didn't, Rahn knew Elise had done as he had asked her. If Himmler had any hope of retrieving his Lance he needed Rahn alive.

  He changed into the uniform when he got to the base of the Wilder Kaiser. He hid close to a fine ledge, where in ancient times prisoners of war had been tossed. It was a good place for a soldier to die.

  The Wilder Kaiser, Austria

  March 15-16, 1939.

  Bachman brought several squads in from the roads to converge on the mountain. Once the search was started, he did what he could to reinforce the area quietly. He did not intend for Rahn to slip free, but neither did he want the villagers to notice any sort of military action.

  They found his civilian clothes an hour past midnight. Twenty minutes later they found Rahn. He was wearing a captain's uniform but hiding like a runaway slave inside a hollow log. By the time Bachman arrived, the soldiers had been standing around with their captive for nearly an hour. As per instructions Rahn had not been hurt, but they had stripped him of his officer's hat and of course his Totenkopf ring. A sergeant presented Bachman with the forged transfer papers.

  Bachman considered the transfer with his torch and then walked toward his old friend with a smile that evinced no affection. 'It never would have worked, Otto. They would have arrested you the moment you showed these papers. I was on to you! I know how you think!' He let this fact settle, before adding, 'You understand I am going to have to kill you?'

  Rahn smiled. 'You, or someone you order to do it, Dieter?'

  'I don't suppose it is going to matter much to you who does it, but you may want to consider how much pain you want to endure. Reichsführer Himmler has given me complete autonomy in that respect. I can still be your friend, Otto. I can make it very quick. You will feel nothing. But for that, my friend, I am going to need what you took from the Reichsführer.'

  Rahn looked at the men holding him and then at Bachman. 'Swear it - on the eyes of your daughter! Swear to me you will make it as painless as possible!'

  'I swear it on the eyes of my daughter!'

  Rahn nodded. 'Then I will tell you the truth - but only you, Dieter.'

  Bachman considered his old friend quietly for a moment. 'If you are lying. . .'

  'I am not lying. I owe you the truth, Dieter.'

  'Leave us alone!' The soldiers backed off some fifteen metres, establishing a circle around the two men. On three sides the ground was reasonably level and covered with trees. On the fourth side the cliff waited. There were twelve men in all, each aiming his torch at Bachman and Rahn. The two men stood close to one another, their faces illuminated by the artificial light.

  Rahn rubbed his wrists and stamped his feet, trying to restore his circulation. 'Where have you hidden the Lance?' Bachman asked him.

  'You must understand something, Dieter. Once I tell you the truth you will end up lying to Himmler about it. It is really better for you not to know.'

  'It is touching that you are so concerned for my well-being, Otto, but I will take my chances with the truth. Where have you hidden it?'

  'Are you talking about the Lance of Antioch?'

  'What else do you think?'

  'I haven't hid it anywhere. How could I? I've never seen the thing!'

  'You and I both know better!'

  'Oh, that! You are talking about what we brought out of France! That isn't the Lance of Antioch, Dieter. What you thought was a reliquary I paid a Swiss metal worker to gild and then paste with jewels that I had bought in a shop. Why do you think I asked you for money? Credible forgeries cost a good deal! As for the piece of iron inside, what you are calling the Lance of Antioch, I had more luck. I dug it up by chance from your garden.'

  Bachman stared at him without comprehending. 'What are you saying?'

  'I am saying you killed those men - we killed them - for nothing! I planted Himmler's precious relic in that cave, Dieter. It's why I insisted I go ahead of the expedition, why I directed the search the way I did. All of it was a show so that we could deliver a piece of nonsense to a mad man and keep our precious status as his darlings!'

  'I don't believe you!'

  'You don't want to believe me, but I swear it is the truth. On the eyes of my child, I swear it.'

  'No.' Bachman shook his head. He tried to smile. 'This is a tactic - a ruse! You will say anything to avoid being tortured! You know where it is!'

  'I know the Lance of Antioch disappeared in Constantinople over eight hundred years ago, Dieter. No one knows where it is. As for the Blood Lance of the Cathars - that rests in the heart of every true knight!'

  'But you said Raymond sent it back to the Languedoc with his infant son!'

  'If he had possession of it and chose torture instead of surrendering it, then he was a greater fool than Peter Bartholomew, and this much I know: Raymond was no fool.' Rahn laughed suddenly at Bachman's utter consternation. 'I keep trying to imagine how Himmler is going to take it when you tell him this. You know he is going to blame you for it, don't you? No one likes being tricked - mad men least of all. My advice? Tell him I took the secret to my grave. Tell him you won't stop looking, but that I got away and there was nothing you could do. But on your life, my friend, do not tell him the truth or he will have you murdered!'

  'True or not, what you stole is what I will take back to him!'

  'I can't let you do that, Dieter.'

  'You have no choice!'

  'A man always has a choice.. . even if it isn't pretty.' In the next moment Rahn was running toward the ledge. Three of the men guarding it were close enough to move in to intercept him, but he had the size and the will to get through them. He drove hard toward the strongest of the three and stumbled when they collided. The other two tried to grab his coat as he kicked out two more steps.

  In the next he was gone.

  The Wilder Kaiser, Austria

  March 16, 1939.

  He heard the wind as he plunged. He saw the black face of the mountain blurring. He thought of Elise. She was sitting beside him on Montségur. Kissing his cheek lightly, she told him that she wanted to think of him always just as he was that day, the two of them high over the world and resting for a moment amongst the beautiful ghosts.

  Berlin

  April 11, 2008.

  A couple of weeks after their return to Zürich, Ethan received a letter from Frau Sarah von Wittsberg, one of the paladins of the Order of the Knights of the Holy Lance. She invited him to visit her at her Berlin apartment on the afternoon of 11 April. She had, she said, a favour to ask.

  Frau von Wittsberg lived in a nineteenth century flat that had been renovated without quite losing all of its original charm. Set in the former East Berlin, the neighbourhood had a friendly, Bohemian flavour to it, and Ethan was surprised to find that the former dame of Berlin society fit so easily into such unpretentious surroundings.

  She was in her mid-seventies and still quite the beauty. She had silver hair, and round, intense black eyes. She possessed the posture and confidence of aristocracy, the manner of one who had hosted diplomats, the unflinching character of one who had survived the camps.

  In her front hall and living room there were no photographs on her walls to commemorate her three-decade-long struggle to keep West Berlin free. Instead she had filled her walls with several canvases by different German artists who had been driven out of Berlin in the 1930s. Their art had been deemed by the Nazi authorities to be decadent. Ethan recognised the artists, but not these particular pieces, so he took a moment to study them whilst the lady prepared a pot of tea.

  'Giancarlo tells me you used to steal paintings like these and got rich doing it,' she said as she set a silver service on a small table in front of a settee.

  Ethan smiled affably. 'If you're worried I might come back and get these, don't be. I'm retired from that life.'

  'He told me. He said you had got religion or something.' She studied the paintings as if looking at them for the first time in years. 'You know, I don't particularly like any of these. I don't understand them really, but I absolutely love what they stand for. These artists stayed true to their own vision even though it ruined them. These days artists sell out for money they don't even need.' After a moment of thoughtfulness, she added, 'I was in the camps, you know.'

  'Yes, ma'am. I read about that in one of the early articles the Knights published about you.'

  'My mother and I spent most of our first year at Buchenwald.'

  'And today is the anniversary of its liberation?'

  'Very good. Very good, Mr Brand.' She reflected for a moment. 'Giancarlo told me I would be impressed with you. I'm beginning to see why. My mother was still quite lovely at the start so they used her as a prostitute for the guards. After a year, when they had ruined her beauty, we got shuffled off to one of the sub-camps where they tried to kill us by hard work and starvation. They would have done so too if they had had a little more time. But Buchenwald was where it started. Buchenwald is where I go when I dream of Hell.

  'Do you want to know a very cruel irony?' she asked after a moment of contemplative silence. When Ethan said nothing to this, she continued, 'Several years after the war my mother confessed to me that my father had served as a camp guard at Buchenwald. We were there at the end of 1943 and through most of 1944. My father had served only a few months in the fall of 1938.

  'He was one of the people Himmler personally recruited - one of his historians, actually - sent to the camps to work as a guard for unspecified disciplinary reasons. For years after I found out, I imagined that my father must have been different from the guards my mother and I had encountered. I knew him as a decent, sweet tempered man. My mother told me he was the most honourable man she had ever known.

  'As I have got older, Mr Brand, I have to admit to myself he probably behaved exactly as the rest of them did. It breaks my heart to believe it, but you see there were a great many decent, honourable men working in the camps. . . and every last one made God weep.

  'But I will tell you one thing about my father that was different from the rest of them. Fact, Mr Brand, not a daughter's wistful speculation. When he had finished his three month tour at Buchenwald he resigned from the Order of the Skull. Himmler wouldn't have it, of course. They made it sound like it was a climbing accident - but it was murder. They gave out a press release about his death and covered him in praise even whilst they were disposing of his corpse somewhere without so much as a marker to commemorate his existence. Exactly as Himmler treated the victims of the camps.'

  Frau von Wittsberg smiled, but there was no happiness in her expression. 'Are you familiar with the story of Percival?'

  Ethan looked at her, wondering what could have inspired such a change in topic. 'Percival was the knight who encountered the Blood Lance and Chalice in the hall of the Fisher King,' he said when it was clear she wanted him to speak.

  Frau von Wittsberg nodded and said, 'It is a lovely pagan legend the Christians appropriated, but good for all, I think. When he saw the Lance and Chalice carried by a procession of knights and ladies, Percival was obliged to ask, "Whom does one serve who follows this?" Had he asked that question, the Fisher King would have been healed of his lameness and the dying land would have bloomed into life again. Because he failed to say anything at all, Percival fell into a deep slumber and when he awakened he found himself alone in a wasteland.

  'My father knew that legend better than any man of his generation. He was a scholar of the Grail, and yet he committed Percival's error. He saw the great show the Nazi's put on, the brilliant uniforms, the colourful banners, the great triumphal processions and he forgot to ask, "Whom does one serve who follows this?" Like a lot of Germans of that generation, I suppose. . .'

  She walked over to the tea service and poured two cups, then signalled for Ethan to join her on the settee. 'I do not mean to speak to you in riddles, Mr Brand, but I find to my utter embarrassment I have committed my father's and Percival's error. The sin of omission, if you will. What is worse, I haven't even the comfort of blaming my youth and inexperience as they might have done if they had been the sort of men to make excuses. I was old enough to know better and had even the memory of my father's failing to remind me. More than that, I am a child of the camps. I know human nature's ugliest face. . . and still I failed to ask the essential question!'

  'You're talking about the Council of the Paladins?'

  'I fought for West Berlin's safety from the moment it stood in peril until the Wall came down. In all it was a twenty-eight-year-long siege that absolutely no one expected to end with victory. I spent lavishly on the cause. I spent the better part of my fortune, actually. Courting politicians and diplomats is not a game for the poor. I fought a war, Mr Brand, as surely as if I had carried a weapon, and I did not blanch at the alliances we made along the way. There is no other way to put it. We were

  not choosey about our friends - not so long as they served our cause.

  'When it was finished, when the Wall came down, I expected the Order of the Knights of the Holy Lance would quietly dissolve. We had no further reason to exist. I spoke my mind about so many things over the years, but not about that. Of course we had money and networks in place, and the Communists were on the verge of collapsing in the Soviet Union. So we could not stop with Germany reunified. We had to keep at it!

  'And when the Soviets fell and war broke out in the Balkans it did not seem right to turn our backs on the genocide.

  She shook her head slowly. 'It never occurred to me that my war had ended and I ought to resign my seat. I was proud of what we had accomplished, because I knew that we had resisted a great tyranny and we had won. My seat among the paladins meant I had made a difference. It was the brightness in my adult life that brought balance to the darkness of my childhood. It was proof I had done more with my life than just survive.