Orders from Berlin Read online

  ‘So Churchill’s in a bunker,’ said Hitler, smiling that same wolfish grin that appeared whenever he was particularly pleased or amused. ‘Is he living in it?’

  ‘I believe so,’ said Heydrich, who knew perfectly well that a large air-raid bunker had been constructed for the Führer’s use less than five hundred yards away from where they were sitting.

  ‘Driven down into the sewers like a rat while the bombs fall on his precious Downing Street – bombs that he’s brought down on his own stupid head. And he must be dealt with like a rat, dispatched without a second’s thought,’ Hitler continued in a louder voice, rubbing his hands in anticipation. ‘I like your plan, Reinhard. I like it very much. You have done well. Radio your agent and tell him to go ahead. The sooner Churchill is out of the way, the better for all of us.’

  ‘We can’t use radio,’ said Heydrich. ‘D says that the British intercepted the message that I sent to him after I saw you at the Berghof, although the good news is that my message was short and simply asked for details of his plan without giving away anything about the plan’s purpose.’

  ‘Was there an investigation?’

  ‘Not one that went anywhere. One man started asking questions, apparently, but D got rid of him before he could do any damage.’

  ‘And you’re confident that’s the end of it?’

  ‘Yes. And besides, the loss of the radio link doesn’t really affect us now. We will need to provide D with an intelligence briefing, like before, that contains enough quality information to ensure that Churchill wants to discuss it with him in person. We couldn’t do that in a radio message even if it was secure.’

  ‘How, then? I have already told you time is of the essence. We must strike while the iron is hot and before someone else starts asking questions. Can we use an aeroplane drop for the papers like we did before?’

  ‘No, it would require a radio message to D to tell him to collect the package, and we can’t risk that. We have to use the Lisbon route. With luck it’ll take less than a week. It’s usually quicker with messages going to London than when they are coming back. I can bring more pressure to bear on the Portuguese in Lisbon than I can on their embassy in London, and you can be sure I will use all my influence.’

  ‘A week,’ repeated Hitler, looking disgusted, but then after a moment he shrugged. ‘Very well, it seems we have no choice. What about the information to tempt Churchill into a meeting? There are areas that are off-limits. I hope you understand that, Reinhard?’

  ‘Of course. The intelligence should relate to the invasion, I think. Like before. But this time it needs to be something new—’

  ‘The invasion is dead in the water,’ Hitler interrupted irritably. ‘Goering has seen to that. I have ordered an indefinite postponement.’

  ‘But the British don’t know that,’ said Heydrich. ‘D says that they are still expecting a landing any day. Churchill will be thinking about nothing else. And he now believes that D has a source with access to our highest-level military conferences, ones at which you are present. We can say that you are considering cancelling Operation Sea Lion and that there is a debate going on inside the high command about whether or not to proceed. I already have most of what I need to tell D mapped out. Churchill will want to know more, and he will be tempted to think that he can influence the argument through leaked radio messages and the like for which he will need Secret Service advice.’

  Hitler had listened carefully. He stared at Heydrich for a few moments after the Gestapo chief had finished speaking and then got up without a word and went and stood at the window with his back to his visitor, looking out at the Chancellery gardens.

  ‘It’s reckless,’ he said, turning around. ‘A gambler’s throw, but we need to trust in chance sometimes. If hazard is what it is,’ he added musingly. ‘Because sometimes I think that it is more than chance that governs my destiny. You know where I was thirty years ago?’

  Heydrich shook his head, even though he knew the answer. He realized that it was the Führer’s turn to talk now and his role was to listen.

  ‘I was homeless, sleeping on a park bench in Vienna, barely able to keep body and soul together, painting pretty pictures for tourists. And now look where I am,’ he said, indicating the grandeur of the room with a sweep of his hand. ‘Heir to Frederick the Great and Bismarck; leader of a new Reich; the most powerful man in the world. This is no accident, no trick of fate. It is beyond chance. I’ve said it before – “I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.” And this wild plan of yours feels like it is meant to work partly because it is so improbable. So, yes, Reinhard, you have my agreement. Now make it happen – rid me of this stupid Englishman who thinks he can obstruct the march of history.’

  PART TWO

  ASSASSINATION

  CHAPTER 1

  It was like another world here on the other side of the green baize door that connected 59 Broadway to the next-door building where C had his office. Or rather suite of offices. Persons wishing to see C had to pass first through a narrow, rectangular anteroom between his two sentries – a pair of elderly, white-haired ladies wearing identical pairs of horn-rimmed glasses who were ceaselessly busy on Remington typewriters, sending out an endless stream of memos dictated by their invisible master. Known interchangeably as Miss Taylor and Miss Jones, they sat straight-backed behind matching desks, facing each other across a thin strip of blue carpet that ended at a big oak door. Above the lintel, a green light and a red light had been installed so that visitors would know when it was permitted to enter C’s presence, but as far as Thorn was aware, the lights had never worked. The secretaries were much more effective gatekeepers. Known universally as the twins, they ran C’s diary and fielded his telephone calls. All communication with the head of MI6 passed through them.

  Unlike their employer, the twins never smiled and they had no small talk whatsoever. They had come with C from the Admiralty when he succeeded Albert Morrison as director of MI6, and popular opinion in HQ was that they had been born as they were now, hatched in some secret government factory as fully fledged septuagenarian spinsters with steely eyes and bony, typing fingers. Their hard, unforgiving faces certainly indicated another side to C’s character that he usually kept under wraps, concealed behind his normal hail-fellow-well-met, debonair exterior. Thorn was a veteran of the corridors of power, and he knew full well that a man didn’t rise to C’s position without being ruthless where necessary along the way. He sometimes wondered whether it was the lack of a hard edge that had held his own career back and had earned C the nod over him when it came to choosing Albert’s replacement three years earlier, but he had always dismissed the thought. Drive and determination had never been his problem, and he knew himself well enough to realize that it was a fundamental lack of charm that had ruined his chances of promotion. Clubbable – that was the word for it. C was clubbable and he was not. It was as simple as that. All his life he had set people on edge rather than at their ease. And it was far too late to change now.

  It wasn’t that he was disqualified from further advancement by any accident of birth. Quite the opposite, in fact. Thorn was the youngest son of a baronet, a fully paid-up member of the English aristocracy. He’d grown up in a damp, cold manor house on the Welsh borders with a choleric father and a pair of handsome, daredevil brothers who hunted foxes in tight red coats at the weekend and believed that history had reached its apogee with the founding of the British Empire. Thorn didn’t disagree with them. He shared their values, but he’d always felt separated from them in some profound way. As a child, he’d sometimes caught his father looking at him in an odd way. He knew why now: he was the runt of the litter. He read too many books, he didn’t know one end of a horse from another, and – worst of all – he was a natural pessimist.

  The family didn’t fare well in the First World War. One brother was blown to bits at Neuve-Chapelle in 1915; another – the heir to the title – lost his right leg on the Somme. But Thorn m
issed it all. He was taken prisoner during a night patrol towards the end of his second week at the front and spent the remainder of the war eating cold potatoes in a POW camp north of Munich. The experience left him fluent in German but obscurely ashamed of himself, and his career since had been in large part an attempt to repay his country for a failure that wasn’t his fault.

  And now, as the bombs fell on London and the Nazi net was drawn ever tighter around the kingdom, Thorn felt that his world and his class were disappearing, sinking like a holed ocean liner, swallowed up in a tidal wave of total war. The future, if there was one, belonged to unprincipled arrivistes like Seaforth, and he felt there was nothing he could do to stop its relentless advance. Except that he had to try. Because Seaforth was a traitor and a murderer and was pursuing a plan whose villainy Thorn could only guess at. Any doubts that Thorn had had on that score had been removed by what he’d seen in Ava’s flat three days earlier. But, as Thorn knew full well, believing in Seaforth’s guilt was one thing; getting C to accept it was quite another. Seaforth was C’s golden boy, the goose that was laying the golden eggs with the gilt-edged intelligence reports he was getting out of Germany with such clockwork regularity. Thorn felt a wave of despondency sweep over him as he went into C’s office, leaving the staccato noise of the twins’ typewriters behind him on the other side of the thick oak door.

  The room was in fact an office only in name. It was far more like the living room of an expensively furnished apartment, and HQ rumour had it that an equally capacious bedroom complete with a four-poster bed lay on the other side of the closed door behind C’s large mahogany desk. True or not, there was no doubt that there was a staircase or an elevator that allowed C to come and go undetected – an advantage that added considerably to his mystique and prestige.

  This lateral extension of HQ into the neighbouring house in the terrace was all C’s doing. Albert Morrison in his days as chief had inhabited a dreary office in the main building with small unwashed windows and second-hand Ministry of Works furniture, from where he had issued his directives amidst an organized chaos of books and papers. But C had refused to follow suit. Instead he had somehow managed to persuade the penny-pinchers over at the Treasury to approve the cost of purchasing the new space and converting it to his specifications, and Thorn had to admit that the results were impressive.

  C came out from behind his desk to shake his deputy’s hand and ushered him to one of two deep leather armchairs that were positioned on either side of a large marble fireplace in which a crackling fire was burning, made to Thorn’s astonishment of logs as well as coal. It was late in the day and the light was beginning to fade in the world outside, and the flames threw dancing shadows on the tall ceiling. A rectangular eighteenth-century portrait in an ornate frame above the mantelpiece showed one of C’s ancestors dressed in the uniform of the Household Cavalry, sitting astride an enormous warhorse with snorting nostrils.

  C sat down opposite his visitor. He was in his shirtsleeves, and a half-smoked Havana cigar burned between the fingers of his left hand, sending a column of thick blue-grey smoke up towards the chandelier overhead. The smell reminded Thorn of his visit to Churchill’s bunker with Seaforth two weeks earlier. He bristled at the memory, feeling a surge of anger against his enemy, but then he took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down.

  ‘I have a confession to make,’ he began, trying to sound contrite.

  ‘Well, maybe I’m the wrong person to bring it to,’ said C with a smile. ‘I’m not a priest, you know.’

  ‘It’s not that kind of confession,’ said Thorn. ‘It’s about the decoded message that Hargreaves showed us at the morning conference ten days ago.’

  ‘The one sent by someone in Germany pretending to me?’

  ‘Yes. I took it to Albert Morrison.’

  ‘You did what?’ C looked shocked, as if he couldn’t believe what Thorn had just said.

  ‘I thought he might know who the sender was. I know I was wrong—’

  ‘You’re damned right you were,’ said C, interrupting angrily. ‘That message was a top-secret document and Albert had no security clearance. I’m surprised at you, Alec. A man of your experience should have known better than to do something so stupid.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Thorn, bowing his head. ‘And I’m sorry. Believe me, I’ll regret what I did to my dying day. But I need you to know what happened afterwards. Albert wasn’t home, so I left him a note, and then, as soon as he got it, he came over here in a taxi.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because the police told me. I’d already gone home, but I think somebody intercepted him in the street out there,’ he said, pointing through the cigar smoke over towards the window, ‘and guessed why he was here. And then that somebody followed him home and murdered him because he knew too much. I’ve thought about it over and over again and that has to be what happened. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise – that Albert rushes over here and then two hours later he’s dead.’

  ‘Coincidences happen,’ said C, sounding unconvinced. ‘I read in the newspaper that Albert’s son-in-law has been charged with the murder. I don’t think the police would have done that if they had no evidence, now, would they?’

  ‘Well, that’s just it,’ Thorn said eagerly. ‘I was at Ava’s, Albert’s daughter’s, flat when they came to arrest him. He’s a doctor called Bertram Brive. But when I first got there, Bertram was out, and Ava was with someone we both know. She was with Charles Seaforth.’

  ‘Ah, was she now?’ said C archly. ‘I was wondering when the conversation was going to come round to him.’

  ‘Hear me out,’ said Thorn, ignoring the gibe. ‘I need you to understand the sequence of events. Albert’s murdered and Seaforth, who hardly knew him, turns up at the funeral and starts paying attention to Ava, whom he’s never met before. And then three days later he’s in her flat when she finds a cuff link in her husband’s desk that matches one the killer left at the murder scene. And not only that – I got her to admit that Seaforth picked the locks on the desk drawers to enable her to look. There was no one else in the room, and he had the perfect opportunity to plant the evidence.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ asked C, looking unimpressed.

  ‘Because he murdered Albert and he needs someone else to take the blame. Can’t you see what I’m saying?’ asked Thorn, allowing a note of special pleading to creep into his voice.

  ‘Yes, I do see. But I also wonder whether you’re allowing your emotions to get the better of you?’ asked C, leaning forward with an air of apparent concern. ‘Albert’s death must have been a great blow to you. I know how close the two of you were. And we both know you’ve had issues with young Seaforth for some time.’

  ‘Are you saying it’s affected my judgement?’ asked Thorn angrily.

  ‘Well, has it?’

  ‘No, absolutely not. You’re right I don’t like Seaforth, but that’s not the reason I’m here. There are other things he’s done …’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, look at the way everyone else’s German agents have gone west – put up against the wall or sent to labour camps. But his intelligence gets better each week. Doesn’t that tell you anything?’

  ‘We’ve been over all that,’ said C, shifting in his chair, beginning at last to show signs of impatience. ‘Have you got anything else, Alec, or is this really just another one of your hunches?’ he asked, his voice laced with sarcasm.

  But Thorn had come too far now to back down. ‘Did you get Hargreaves’s memo the other day?’ he asked. ‘About the earlier radio message that they’ve matched to the one we discussed in the meeting, both using the same code?’

  ‘Yes. Sent four days earlier, giving a date for a drop, no doubt from an aeroplane, but no location. Signed C. Not exactly a breakthrough, is it?’ said C, who prided himself on his encyclopaedic memory for all the documents that passed across his desk.

  ‘The place had obviously been agreed in
advance,’ said Thorn. ‘But that’s not what matters. The point is that this isn’t some run-of-the-mill mission like you thought it was before. The date of the drop was the same day as the radio message, which means that the agent receiving the message wasn’t likely to be the one picking up whatever equipment or documents were being flown in. There’s got to be a sleeper of some kind monitoring the location. And the people involved are using radios and a code that’s been hard to break, which points to a sophisticated operation, one that we should be taking seriously.’

  ‘And MI5 are taking it seriously,’ said C. ‘I can assure you of that. It’s just it’s their job to deal with it, not ours. We’re in the business of foreign intelligence, in case you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Unless it’s one of our agents who’s involved,’ Thorn countered. ‘Did you know that Seaforth was away on the day after the message about the drop was sent? He never came into work at all.’

  ‘Gone to meet the sleeper agent instead, I suppose you’re saying. Did he give a reason for his absence?’

  ‘He phoned Jarvis in the morning to say he was sick. But he looked healthy enough when he came in the next day. I can tell you that.’

  C took a pull on his cigar, looking silently at Thorn as if weighing all that he’d said. ‘It’s not enough, Alec, and I think you know that,’ he said finally. ‘What you’re telling me is all circumstantial. You say that your dislike for Seaforth has nothing to do with you accusing him, but I’m not so sure of that. I’m sorry to say it, but, unconsciously or not, I think you’re trying to get rid of him because he’s after your job. And yes, I do think it’s affecting your judgement. This vendetta is going to have to stop. I’ve warned you before and I’m not going to warn you again.’

  Thorn thought of responding. But instead he bit his tongue. He wasn’t a fool, whatever C might think. There was clearly nothing to be gained by further argument unless he wanted to earn himself an early retirement. C had made up his mind about Seaforth and he wasn’t going to change it, whatever Thorn had to say.