He picked up another handful of papers, and kept flicking through them. Some were marked TOP SECRET, and were to do with the Haus Germanien. Others were papers of some sort or another outlining policy as regarded different races. This was madness, Lockhart kept repeating to himself, pure lunacy.

“One more minute!”

Surely not—he hadn’t even scratched the surface. He decided, for no good reason, to transfer his attention to the stack on the left. He moved the dusty book and picked up some papers from underneath it. Again, the same mixture of flaky science, evil science, bureaucratic requests and denials, and academic papers on Nordic prehistory. Perhaps Parsch wasn’t the typical shambolic academic, and had actually filed away the really sensitive material.

“That’s five minutes!”

“All right,” Lockhart mumbled.

One more handful. Just one more. He picked up a few more sheets.

“Come on, sir!”

Lockhart ignored Stafford’s urgent request. Damn, damn. More of the same nonsense. He hadn’t seen one thing about weaponry. What was in this lot? The Nordic inheritance…Moslem members of the Waffen-SS…Transfer of A4 project…Conference agenda for 18 July 1944…Notes on the subhuman tendencies of the Russian Jew…

“Sir!”

Lockhart looked up.

“Let’s go!”

Just as Lockhart was about to put the papers back down, his mind went back to one of them. He rifled through them once more, and extracted it: Transfer of A4 project. It was so bland, but look where it was from! He skimmed over the contents of what was nothing more than a short memorandum.

From:

The Office of the Reichsführer-SS

MOST SECRET—Transfer of A4 project

To:

Senior officers of the German Ancestral Heritage

Society for the Study of German Prehistory

With immediate effect, the responsibility for the implementation of the A4 project passes to the Ahnenerbe. This marks a new direction for the organization, but the transfer will ensure that the project is brought fully under the efficient command of the SS.

Signed

SS-Brigadeführer Hans Kammler

29 March 1944

Was this it? What else could “a new direction” refer to? He quickly read it once more and then put it back, deciding that stealing it would be pushing his luck.

“Sir!”

“All right, I’m coming,” said Lockhart, and switched off the torch.

Although he had not seen much of it back in December, the Berlin Lockhart saw now in May was a noticeably different city. What he had then taken for devastation had merely been, in comparison, some light damage, for now much of the capital of the German Empire was a blasted heap of rubble. Even when there wasn’t an air raid, just being in the city was perilous enough. At any moment, a building could collapse, obliterating scores of Berliners shuffling through the masonry of their past lives, attempting to salvage some shards of hope from the ruins. And it smelled, thought Lockhart, smelled of decay, human decay.