Checkmate in Amber (6 page)

That was a question which nobody even bothered to answer. Läufer went on to bring us all up to date with what he had discovered - still shouting, of course. He had only had a couple of hours to search the web for any bits of information about a German artist of the mid-twentieth century called Erich Koch. The little he had been able to lay his hands on had left him frankly stunned. The hits that kept coming up on screen had nothing to do with an unknown painter called Erich Koch. Every single one of them dealt with
Gauleiter
Erich Koch, a top Nazi official in the East Prussian capital, Königsberg, who had died in a Polish prison in 1986.

‘What? Not a single mention of any other Eric Koch?’ asked Cavalo. ‘We’re clearly dealing with two completely different people.’

‘Not necessarily,’ I pointed out, rapidly putting two and two together.

‘THEY ARE ONE AND THE SAME PERSON. NO OTHER ERICH KOCH APPEARS IN ANY GERMAN CENSUS AFTER 1875.’

‘How strange that he’s the third Nazi to crop up in this story,’ I wondered out loud. ‘Fritz Sauckel, Helmut Hübner and now Erich Koch. All closely connected to the art world and to the Krylov painting.’

‘That is precisely the point,’ remarked Roi. ‘I am convinced that we have become inadvertently involved in some rather tricky business that, so far, we do not fully understand, but which could affect us directly if it turns out that Helmut Hübner is actually part of some conspiracy.’

‘And what about our Russian client? We need to find out a good deal more about him, I think,’ said Cavalo.

‘Vladimir Melentyev? Yes, you are absolutely right, we should investigate him as well. Clearly it is his interest in the Krylov piece which has set off the whole process that we are now caught up in. Perhaps we should have looked into him more thoroughly before accepting his order.’

‘IT’S POSSIBLE THAT HE KNEW NOTHING AT ALL ABOUT THE KOCH CANVAS.’

‘Oh come on, Läufer!’ protested Cavalo. ‘Remember that he was willing to pay whatever price we asked him for, however high we pitched it. That hardly sounds innocent, does it?’

‘ONLY IF THE KOCH CANVAS HAS SOME KIND OF INTRINSIC VALUE FOR HIM. WHICH I DOUBT BECAUSE ARTISTICALLY IT’S A MESS.’

‘By the way, Roi,’ I butted in. ‘You haven’t told us yet what your friend Uri found out.’

‘Fair enough. Apparently the painting depicts the moment when the prophet Jeremiah was rescued from captivity. For those who have a Bible to hand, this is described in Jeremiah 38: 1-14. They imprisoned the prophet in the cistern of Malchiah, son of King Zedekiah, for prophesying a succession of disasters for the people of Israel. This cistern was empty of water but still silted up with mud, and Jeremiah would have died of hunger there. An Ethiopian court eunuch interceded with the king and convinced him to free the prophet. And it is this moment which is portrayed in the painting.’

‘But what does the inscription in Hebrew say?’ I asked.

‘That, I’m afraid, Uri was unable to tell me. The script is indeed Hebrew, but the text is utterly incomprehensible.’

‘AMAZING!’

‘Läufer, I want you to turn every single database on the planet upside down, if need be, as long as you find out absolutely everything you possibly can about Erich Koch, Fritz Sauckel, Vladimir Melentyev and Helmut Hübner. I am going to immerse myself in Ilya Krylov’s life story until I can read his mind, and I ask the rest of you to study and study the Koch painting until we are sure that we have not missed a single detail. It is more than possible that the Chess Group has become involved in some seriously ugly business with highly unpredictable consequences. So - get to work! I expect you all next Sunday, October 11th, same time, same place, and with the password “Gobi”. And remember: maximum security is our best possible insurance. If one of us goes down, we all go down.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

I spent the whole day in the store, taking care of the usual minor details. But at eight o’clock in the evening, as soon as I had set the alarm, lowered the security shutters and closed up the store, Koch’s painting dominated my every thought. Ezequiela was watching TV in the sitting room, and cross-stitching linen to produce embroidered squares to frame and hang on her bedroom walls. The house was pleasantly warm and there was fresh-made coffee in the kitchen.

Without even taking off my jacket or hanging up my handbag on its usual hook, I hurried into the study, turned on all the lights and switched on my desktop and printer. As my system booted up, I poured myself a cup of coffee and changed my clothes. Back in the study, I checked my email to see if there was anything important (there wasn’t) and uploaded my digital photo of Koch’s
Jeremiah
. I fed the photo paper into my printer, adjusted my brightness, contrast and saturation settings and printed off a first copy of the highest quality available. After quite a while, a whole pack of paper and a change of ink cartridges, my study walls were completely covered in a series of blow-ups of the canvas, section by section and all taped to the shelves, furniture and walls. I’d got my hands on the old family Bible, bound in black leather and seriously beat-up, and was soon striding up and down the study with the weighty heirloom in my hands, declaiming out loud the first fourteen verses of Jeremiah, Chapter 38:

‘Then Shephatiah the son of Mattan, and Gedaliah the son of Pashur, and Jucal the son of Shelemiah, and Pashur the son of Malchiah, heard the words that Jeremiah had spoken unto all the people, saying,

“Thus saith the Lord, ‘He that remaineth in this city shall die by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence: but he that goeth forth to the Chaldeans shall live; for he shall have his life for a prey, and shall live.’ Thus saith the Lord, ‘This city shall surely be given into the hand of the king of Babylon’s army, which shall take it.’”

Therefore the princes said unto the king, “We beseech thee, let this man be put to death: for thus he weakeneth the hands of the men of war that remain in this city, and the hands of all the people, in speaking such words unto them: for this man seeketh not the welfare of this people, but the hurt.”

Then Zedekiah the king said, “Behold, he is in your hand: for the king is not he that can do any thing against you.”

Then took they Jeremiah, and cast him into the dungeon of Malchiah the son of Hammelech, that was in the court of the prison: and they let down Jeremiah with cords. And in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire.’

The door of the study suddenly opened, I pulled up sharp and froze into position like in a frame of an old movie, with the book in my left hand and my right fist raised up against the princes.

‘Is something wrong? What are you yelling and screaming about?’

‘I’m reading the Bible.’

Ezequiela raised her eyebrows, looked at me with wide open eyes, turned on her heels and left the room, heaving a deep sigh.

‘You’re clearly unwell.’

‘…
sunk in the mire
,’ I resumed.
‘Now when Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, one of the eunuchs which was in the king’s house, heard that they had put Jeremiah in the dungeon - the king then sitting in the gate of Benjamin - Ebed-melech went forth out of the king’s house, and spoke to the king saying, “My lord the king, these men have done evil in all that they have done to Jeremiah the prophet, whom they have cast into the dungeon; and he is like to die for hunger in the place where he is: for there is no more bread in the city.”

Then the king commanded Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, saying, “Take from hence thirty men with thee, and take up Jeremiah the prophet out of the dungeon, before he die.”

So Ebed-melech took the men with him, and went into the house of the king under the treasury, and took thence old cast clouts and old rotten rags, and let them down by cords into the dungeon to Jeremiah. And Ebed-melech the Ethiopian said unto Jeremiah, “Put now these old cast clouts and rotten rags under thine armholes under the cords.” And Jeremiah did so. So they drew up Jeremiah with cords, and took him up out of the dungeon: and Jeremiah remained in the court of the prison.’

Koch’s painting depicted the precise moment in which the prophet began to be pulled out of the dungeon with the cords. But however much I blew up the images, however much I adjusted the colors and made all the different checks and adjustments I could think of, I found not a single hidden message, nothing cunningly disguised or even suggested by the paintwork, aside from what I could see in plain view. And the only thing I could see in plain view was the enraged expression on the prophet’s angry face.

At 11:30 Ezequiela came back to wish me goodnight. The whole house fell completely silent, apart from the low hums and clicks of the printer which hadn’t finished churning out the thousand-and-one copies I’d tasked it with, with all the tweaks and variations imaginable. By two in the morning, my constant staring at the screen had given me such a bad headache that I had to take painkillers to keep myself going. At three, I decided to abandon my adventures in graphic design and take up Bible Studies. Who was Jeremiah? Why did they throw him into the dungeon? What was it about this Jewish prophet that had so fascinated an anti-Semitic Nazi
Gauleiter?

Jeremiah was born in around 650BC and died some time after Babylon’s conquest of Jerusalem in about 586BC. From the start he broke with the traditional model of prophesying future glories, favoring instead lyrical but ominous predictions of conquest, captivity and exile. In the early days of his ministry, he enjoyed the protection of Josiah, king of Judah, but fell from grace soon after the king’s death in 609BC. His prediction of the Babylonians’ victory over Jerusalem and Judah led to his being considered a traitor, and he was forbidden from preaching in public. Naturally, he disobeyed the ban time and time again, was frequently arrested and ended up being thrown into the mire-filled dungeon.

I found a wealth of information about the Book of Jeremiah in the various en-cyclopedias I had around the house, but it was all too scholarly and theological, and very hard to understand for a newcomer to the subject like me. Nothing I read really grabbed my attention, and I was finding it increasingly hard to stay awake at that time of the night, as I ground my way through academic texts. I was on the point of giving up and going to bed, when I suddenly remembered an old book I’d seen on my shelves. It was one of those books that you only ever come across when you’re looking for something else, that you don’t remember ever having bought and that you’ve never once opened, not even just out of curiosity. It’s not as if it had much to do with what I was looking for, but it was about the Bible and by this time I wasn’t exactly thinking straight.

The book was called
The Messages of the Old Testament
, and its unknown author had set out to prove that all the allegories, parables, metaphors and proverbs contained a coded announcement of the end of the world and the arrival of a new civilization. As I browsed mechanically through the index of contents, my bleary eyes hit upon an entry which woke me up like a shot: the fourth chapter was entitled
Atbash: The Secret Code of Jeremiah
. Quickly I flipped through the pages until I found the start of
Chapter Four
and began to read with rapt attention. The oldest secret code in the history of humanity, the book argued, was the so-called Atbash Cipher, first used by the prophet Jeremiah to disguise the true meaning of his writings. Relentlessly persecuted by powerful members of the king’s court and by the king himself for predicting that Judah would be conquered by Babylon, he began to encrypt the name of the enemy whenever it appeared in his writings. He used a simple substitution cipher with the Hebrew alphabet, so that the first letter,
aleph
, was replaced by the last,
taw
, the second,
beth
, by the second from last,
shin
, and so on.
Atbash
, the name of this original cipher from over two and a half thousand years ago, is derived from these first two substitutions,
aleph
to
taw
,
beth
to
shin
, using the first sound of each letter - which produces
atbsh
. So in Chapter 25, Verse 26 and Chapter 51, Verse 41 of the Book of Jeremiah, for instance, the prophet wrote
Sheshakh
in place of Babylon.

I grabbed the family Bible again to check out whether or not what this thin volume said was true, and sure enough it was, as clear as daylight. Despite the time and my lack of sleep, I felt as fit and dandy as at midday. I immediately wrote out the Hebrew alphabet on a sheet of paper so that each half folded against the other, making it easy to substitute the letters. I copied down the inscription from the Koch painting, applied the Atbash cipher and wrote the result at the end of a brief explanatory email which I sent to Roi. Then I destroyed all the paperwork which I had printed out and written on (as required by Group regulations) and went off to bed.

The two hours’ sleep I got that night was the best night’s sleep I’ve ever had. I didn’t have the slightest idea whether the deciphered inscription would make any sense at all once Uri Zev got his hands on it. But even if it didn’t, I had worked so hard and with such passion that I slept the sleep of the righteous.

CHAPTER NINE

The information put together by Läufer over a few days’ research turned out to be even more astonishing than anything any of us could ever have expected. From far-flung places such as England, the Ukraine, Berlin and Israel, from wide-ranging sources such as the University of Toronto, the
El Universal
newspaper in Mexico, Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the War Museum in Athens and the Institut Français in Santiago de Chile, and from classified documents of the Israeli police, the FBI, the Stasi secret police service of the defunct German Democratic Republic and the reconstituted KGB, the documentation came flooding into our computers and painted an ever more detailed and horrifying portrait of figures who up until now had been no more than dimly-lit bogeymen in a messed-up horror story.

Fritz Sauckel was one of the most brutal of the Nazi old guard, a member of the Reichstag, an honorary
Obergruppenführer
of the dreaded SA stormtroopers and served during the war as Governor-General and
Gauleiter
of Thuringia. As General Plenipotentiary for the Deployment of Labor, he forcibly recruited over five million slave laborers, labeled as
Ostarbeiter
, in Nazi-occupied territories, most of whom were then overworked to death. According to Jacques-Bernard Herzog, an assistant prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, ‘This former merchant mariner, the father of ten children and brought to high office by the Hitlerian revolution, ordered that the laborers be fed in strict proportion to their performance at work. A primitive mentality like his could find justification for any indignity: he and he alone faithfully executed the commands of the Führer. He claimed to have known nothing of the atrocities committed in the concentration camps. I then showed him a photograph of a visit he undertook in the company of Himmler to the concentration camp at Buchenwald in Weimar, for which he himself was responsible as
Gauleiter
for the entire region. With unbelievable stupidity, he claimed that his visit had been limited to the camp’s outbuildings, and that he had never set foot in the camp itself.’

The ‘primitive mentality’ to which Herzog referred in a 1949 speech to distinguished members of the University of Chile was accompanied, however, by a much higher-than-average intelligence, as confirmed by Gustave Gilbert, the American Military Chief Psychologist at the Nuremberg Trials. Despite his high intelligence, Sauckel as
Gauleiter
of Thuringia, without a second thought, ordered the digging-up of the remains of the two great authors Goethe and Schiller for their removal to the nearby city of Jena to be destroyed on the entry of American forces into Thuringia. Fortunately, this barbarity was never carried out.

On July 1st 1949, Lord Justice Lawrence, President of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, formally announced that Fritz Sauckel had been sentenced to death by hanging for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The once-feared
Gauleiter
of Thuringia was executed three months later, at dawn on October 16th.

His friend Erich Koch just managed to avoid that fate. It seems that their friendship dated back to their meeting in Weimar in 1937, when Koch - the
Oberpräsident
of East Prussia - arrived in the city with the first group of three hundred prisoners sent to begin the construction of the huts and barracks of KZ (
Konzentrationslager
) Buchenwald.

Koch was born in East Prussia on June 19th 1896 and was appointed
Gauleiter
of his home region in 1938. Three years later, following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he was appointed
Reichskommissar
of the Ukraine. According to
The Ukrainian Weekly
of November 10th 1996, Koch was directly responsible for the deaths of over four million people, including practically the entire Jewish population of the Ukraine. Under his government, and with the enthusiastic collaboration of Fritz Sauckel, a further two and a half million people were deported to Germany to work as slave laborers. Following the forced Nazi withdrawal from the Ukraine in late 1943, Koch returned to his job as
Gauleiter
of East Prussia until the German surrender to the Allies in May 1945, when he disappeared until being discovered and arrested four years later in the British Zone of Occupation.

He was deported to Poland for trial and, although the trials of war criminals in the rest of the Soviet-dominated areas were rapidly organized and their sentences (usually fatal) carried out within only a few hours, Koch had to wait ten years to be tried, and his inevitable death sentence was never actually carried out. The Polish government commuted it to life imprisonment on grounds of ill health and held him for the last twenty-seven years of his life in surprisingly good conditions at Barczewo prison, where he died peacefully on November 12th 1986, at ninety years of age. At no point during this whole period did the Russian authorities demand his extradition so that he could be put on trial for the appalling crimes he committed as
Reichskommissar
of the Ukraine, nor did they even pressure the Polish government to carry out the original death sentence.

I looked away from the screen and, as the printer began to spit out page after page, started wondering how on earth somebody could be capable of killing four million people. The sheer size of the slaughter was scooting around unstoppably inside my head. I couldn’t even imagine myself killing one person, just
one
, let alone four million.
Four million
dead human beings! Not to mention the
Ostarbeiter
, the slave laborers who also perished from disease, from accidents or simply from exhaustion. If each dead person was represented by just a single coin, and we put four million of them inside a single room, imagine how huge the pile would be. Unthinkable. What went on in somebody’s mind to make them capable of doing something like that and not giving a damn about it? It scared the living hell out of me.

The last member of this group of three was the young Helmut Hübner. Born in Pulheim near Cologne in 1919, he studied economics, ancient languages and history at the University of Bonn and became an active and enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth. Not long after war was declared, he joined the Luftwaffe with the rank of lieutenant and soon became a celebrated fighter pilot. In 1943 he was the pilot with the most confirmed kills in his squadron and, despite being shot down on four occasions, he parachuted safely to ground every time. For all these achievements and more, he was awarded the highest military decorations, including the Iron Cross. According to the Athens War Museum database, Hübner was widely acknowledged as a supremely skilled handler of the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Heinkel He 219, and he developed a brilliant attack maneuver so effective that it soon came to be included in the Luftwaffe’s training manuals. He picked his target from the enemy aircraft, went into a controlled high-speed nose-dive, pulling out of the dive five hundred yards below his target’s tail, and then climbed at a low angle, losing speed to improve the accuracy of his aim, until opening fire with his 20mm cannon from a hundred yards and downing the target. He then climbed back up to a safe height at full power at a twenty-degree angle to the horizon and chose his next victim.

At the beginning of 1944, Hübner was posted to the Luftwaffe’s Air Service Command I, based in Königsberg, integrated into General Reinhardt’s Army Group Center and tasked with the defense of East Prussia. The Soviet General Staff’s plan for the East Prussian Offensive involved two coordinated attacks on the exposed flanks of the Army Group Center in a pincer movement to the north and to the south of the Masurian lakes. The Russian advances towards Marienbad and Königsberg were designed to cut off the Army Group from the rest of Germany, leaving them only one supply line from the sea, then to besiege and defeat them, and finally occupy the whole of East Prussia. Hübner was in command of a squadron of Stukas, the famous Junkers Ju 87G dive-bombers, and fought bravely against the Soviet armored columns but was unable to prevent the overwhelming Allied air raid which destroyed half of Königsberg on August 31st, 1944, let alone the final collapse and surrender of the city on April 9th, 1945. The future industrialist was set free after a lenient trial in Munster six months after the end of the war, and was believed to have returned to his family home in Pulheim. There he kept his head down until his re-emergence in 1965 as a prosperous bakery magnate.

The final jewel in this not-so-glorious crown was Vladimir Melentyev, the art collector who had asked us to deliver him the Krylov painting. I have to say here that Läufer’s research on Melentyev was his absolute masterpiece. He hacked a ride onto the mainframes of two major American software companies, both household names, which he accessed indirectly by piggybacking onto a dozen untraceable computers. With this massive number-crunching capacity at his fingertips, he launched a coordinated assault on the classified files of the Stasi, KGB and FBI, and discovered that Vladimir Melentyev’s real name was Sergei Rachkov, born in the small Russian village of Privolnyy, near Stavropol, in 1931. Rachkov joined the army when he was seventeen years old, and served as a military policeman in prisons, forced labor camps and psychiatric hospitals until he was twenty-five. At that point, he was signed up as a special agent of the recently-created Committee for State Security, the
Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti -
better known as the KGB. For the first few years, he earned his daily bread checking out members of the Russian armed forces for their loyalty to the communist regime, until in 1959 he was suddenly withdrawn from this everyday secret police work and assigned to a much higher level operation codenamed ‘Peter the Great’. Despite Operation Peter the Great being officially an initiative of the MVD - the
Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del
or Ministry of Internal Affairs - it was in fact under the direct control of the central governing body of the Soviet Union, the Politburo, and run in person by the new chairman of the USSR’s council of ministers and all-powerful president, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev.

Unfortunately, their security was so good that Läufer, however hard he tried, couldn’t find out what Operation Peter the Great was all about. Documentation of the operation simply didn’t exist. All searches resulted in just the occasional brief reference to it, without turning up a single file out of the millions scanned by Läufer’s virtual investigators which contained any useful information on the scope and content of what looked to have been one of the most important and most secret projects of the now-dissolved Soviet Union. Neither Khrushchev’s death, nor the arrivals of Leonid Brezhnev, then Yuri Andropov, then Konstantin Chernenko and finally Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 made even the slightest difference to the active status of Operation Peter the Great. Which sent Melentyev-Rachkov in the guise of a simple prison guard named Stanislaw Zakopane to Barczewo Prison, shortly after the arrival of a certain Erich Koch.

My capacity for surprise was already so overloaded that the odd extra shock or two just couldn’t raise my adrenaline levels any further, as I ploughed my way through every single one of Läufer’s documents. He had been sweet enough to have had the last set automatically translated from the Russian, thank goodness. But there still were a few more bits of useful information in Melentyev-Rachkov’s personal file stored in the old KGB computer system, sketching out his extraordinary life of high risk, daring and downright criminality. Judging from the files, Rachkov was an intelligence agent with sophisticated tastes and habits, who was perfectly fluent in several languages and utterly cold and heartless towards his fellow human beings.

With the accelerating collapse of the Soviet system in the light of Gorbachev’s
Glasnost
and
Perestroika
, Rachkov rapidly transformed himself into a corrupt power broker, taking full advantage of his access to privileged information as a KGB agent. He had left Poland when Koch died in 1986 and returned to a Moscow already socially and economically disintegrating. He and many other KGB officers soon got involved in the many Russian crime syndicates which became increasingly rich and powerful in a very short time. According to the FBI, it took Rachkov a little less than a decade to fight his way to the top of one of the mafia gangs which specialized in supplying Russian and South American drug cartels with submarines, armored attack helicopters and surface-to-air missiles. He soon took a controlling interest in various banks conveniently located in Caribbean tax havens, which he used to launder the enormous sums of money accumulated through his criminal activities. This money funded his purchases of some of the most successful nightclubs and casinos in South Florida, not to mention various hotel chains all over the world. Now, at sixty-seven years old, he had again reinvented himself, this time as Vladimir Melentyev, an elegant art collector, respected businessman and all-round philanthropist, who lived quietly in his beautiful castle close to Tbilisi, in the Republic of Georgia, between Armenia and Turkey. Internationally-respected firms of lawyers and accountants handled his many business affairs, while their day-to-day management was left in the capable hands of his son, Nikolai Sergeyevich Rachkov.

I read and re-read my way through the huge pile of pages I had printed out. I could see the clear connections between all the different stories, and all the many loose ends as well. There were things which so far made no sense at all, for the lack of some key bit of information, but other pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were beginning to come together in a perfect fit. Koch and Sauckel, Sauckel and Koch. The Second World War, Helmut Hübner, Krylov’s
Muzhiks
, a KGB officer, Operation Peter the Great. What the hell could all this mean? What kind of explosive cocktail did the mix of all these ingredients add up to?

To cap it all, the night before our next Group meeting, I finally received Uri Zev’s translation of the
Jeremiah
inscription which I had decoded with the Atbash cipher and sent to Roi. Of the resulting three German words -
Bernsteinzimmer. Gauforum. Weimar
. - I only understood the third. But enlightenment was soon to arrive, and it wasn’t pretty.