by Walter Ellis
“Yes, but …”
“Yes, but nothing. For all we know, they’re going to be looking out for you at the frontier. You’re the daughter of a leading government official. My duty is clear.”
“But Charlie … ”
Romero put a hand on Isabella’s shoulder. “He’s right,” he said. “He can’t risk it. So I’ll take you.”
Bramall closed his eyes in silent prayer. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
Isabella shifted her gaze between the two men, settling in the end on Romero.
“You’ll take me to Lisbon?”
“Sure, why not?”
Isabella looked relieved and pained at the same time. She turned to Bramall. “So what will you be doing while we’re risking our lives at the border?”
Bramall ignored the implied insult. “That depends on the situation. If I’ve got the material, but no one knows it – which I suppose is just about possible – my best approach is to get to the nearest frontier post and flash my official credentials. Don’t forget, I’m equerry to the Duke of Windsor, and right now the stupid bugger’s in Portugal.”
Romero considered this. “And if there’s a general alert, then what?”
“Then I sneak over on my own and we meet up at an appropriate point.”
“Like the railway station at Elvas?”
“Good idea. Perfect.”
“Just be careful is my advice. Bad things happen in border country. It’s easy to wind up dead.”
Bramall’s eyes narrowed. “Well you’d know, Eddy,” he said.
Isabella gave no sign that she detected the tension that had arisen between the two men. “If you do this for us,” she said to Romero, “what will you do afterwards? Will you not come with us to Lisbon?”
“What? And make my way over to England? Join the RAF or some such? I don’t think so. I’d take a day or so to let things settle, then head back to Madrid. I’m feelin’ better now – or maybe you hadn’t noticed – and there’s a few threads I wouldn’t mind pickin’ up.”
“I will miss you.”
“I’ll miss you, too, sweetheart, but there’s a war on, right?”
Bramall had turned away during the most recent exchange, as if suddenly preoccupied. Now he returned to the fray. “I spoke to Croft today, told him I’d get to Lisbon as soon as I could.”
Romero nodded. “What’d he say?”
“To watch my back.”
“Sounds about right.” Romero used a cocktail stick to pick at his teeth. “He knows the route you’re takin’ – right?”
“He knows I’ll be improvising. Hell, I don’t even know if I’ll get into the Legation, let alone walk out with their most closely guarded secret.”
“True enough, Charlie. Sure you’re the boss.” The Irishman turned to Isabella, switching to Spanish. “And what about you, Izzy? Heard anything from Luder?”
“He is due back tomorrow from Berlin. If he met with Heydrich and won approval for the scheme he and Papa were hatching, he won’t want to waste any time. He’ll want to get on with it.”
Romero grimaced. But it was Bramall who voiced what they were all thinking. “The way things are shaping up,” he said, “we may have to consider the possibility of a permanent solution to the problem of Señor Luder.”
“You mean kill him?” Isabella asked. The colour drained instantly from her face. “Madre de Dios, that seems so …”
“… permanent,” said Romero. “I think you’re right, Charlie. You want me to see to it?”
“It might be best,” Bramall said.
Isabella looked aghast. Her face turned pale.
“You’re going to have to get used to it,” Romero said, his voice suddenly cold. “If Luder lives, a lot of other people could die, including you.”
“Even so, I’m going to have to think about it. It’s such a …”
Bramall shook his head. “Eddy’s right. This is no time for finer feeling. It’s war: kill or be killed. If you ask me, Luder’s had it coming for a long time.”
Madrid: Villa Ortega, July 11
Isabella sat on her bed, thinking about events of the past few days. She didn’t like to admit it, but the truth was, she was scared to death. Romero had given her a handgun – an Italian automatic – and yesterday, while Bramall worked on how best to gain entry to the German Legation, he showed her how to use it. It was “just in case,” he said, but instead of making her feel more secure it only added to her growing sense of unease.
It was insane. She had always been the rebel; the one who stood up for fair play; the one who denounced the bullies; the one who, on one famous occasion, struck a particularly vicious nun with her hair brush. But teenage rebellion was one thing, taking a stand against Franco was something else. She was a patriot, she told herself, running her finger over the cold metal of the Beretta, not a revolutionary.
Not like Romero.
Bramall said he was the Scarlet Pimpernel of the barrios. But there was a terrible emptiness in his soul. In the short time she had known him, she had come to realise that he would never be at peace – not outside his kitchen, anyway. There would always be dragons to slay and windmills to tilt at. No form of government would satisfy him. His deepest passion was the struggle itself.
He reminded her of a Protestant pastor she had met in Argentina. He had been Irish, too, from Belfast. He preached the doctrine of Original Sin, which her local priest had always said was none of her business. The Pastor didn’t see it that way. The way he saw it, everybody’s life was a struggle to redeem themselves in the eyes of the Creator.
Bramall was different. He believed in comfort, tolerance and good living. She had asked him if these were the qualities most English people admired. He said yes, he rather thought they were, but not to confuse him with an Englishman. That made her smile. So where did the Empire fit in? she wanted to know. After all, one third of the world was pink on the maps. The English were forever sticking their noses in other country’s affairs, telling them how to live and run their governments.
He looked at her and rolled his eyes. “If you ask me,” he said, “The English picked up the Empire in a fit of absence of mind and they’ll live to regret it.”
“What about Spain?”
“Much more cold-blooded. It was gold you were after and you didn’t mind how many millions died in the process.”
Isabella thought about the young men she knew, most of them Falange. They nearly all took the deaths of others in their stride, believing that only through war and conquest could Spain recover her national honour. Then she thought of her father and a shiver ran through her. You could change your friends, you couldn’t change your family. What really upset Isabella about her father, whom she loved, was that he had strayed so far from his own, honourable beliefs and allowed the weaker traits of his character to take him over. Once he was a man of principle – an army officer who simply wanted to do his duty. She remembered when she was tiny and he was promoted to captain. That was immediately after the election of 1931, which confirmed the new Republic. He didn’t object then to the reforms sweeping the country. According to her mother, he had even expressed doubts to her about the morality of opposing the workers’ strike – though when ordered into action against militant anarchists he had followed his orders to the hilt.
Fascism had destroyed him, replacing his beliefs in an enlightened order with the harsh dogmas of the Falange. Personal greed and ambition had done the rest. She wondered if he could ever come back. Her mother, she was sure, could see through the ruin of man he was today, back to the bright young lieutenant who captured her heart. She made allowances for him, poking gentle fun at his pretensions. But whatever light it was that once burned bright within her, it was all but extinguished today.
Isabella didn’t want that to happen to
her. She wanted to live life in her own way. If that meant taking up arms, then that was how it would have to be. But the change was so sudden and she was frightened. She was afraid of what would happen to her if she was caught and taken to the Interior Ministry for interrogation. She had heard the stories. The secret police would say she was a traitor. Serrano would make an example of her. She was also worried about her mother’s position, even that of her father. The thought that they might suffer for her wilfulness was hard for her to bear.
Luder had called her earlier from the airport to say that he had had a “magnificent” visit to Berlin and was looking forward “very much” to a walk with her that Saturday in the Retiro. He was extraordinary. It was as if the incident in her bedroom had not occurred. He had blocked it out. At the weekend, as he saw things, once his important business affairs were settled, he would select a light summer suit and stroll through the park with his adoring fiancée, flicking at leaves with his cane, touching the brim of his hat at the other damas y caballeros as they passed.
She would not allow him to possess her. She thought of Estéban, whom she had not even had the chance to meet, cut down by a Francoist bullet. She thought of the sacrifice and idealism of Bramall and Romero. And then she thought again of Luder.
And her heart hardened.
Chapter 9
Madrid: Hotel Paris, July 12
The insignia on the cuffs, four gold stripes surmounted by a single star, was apparently that of a Fregattenkapitän, or Commander, in the Kriegsmarine. Bramall was impressed. He picked up the jacket and examined it carefully: blue serge; German Eagle emblem on the right breast pocket; two rows of silver buttons. It had no medal ribbons, but that was hardly surprising. Aside from the events of recent months, the German Navy hadn’t fought an action since Jutland, in 1916. He held the material up to his nose. It didn’t smell of the sea; it smelled of tobacco.
Braithwaite didn’t waste time. Bramall had requested the uniform less than 48 hours previously, via Burns at the embassy. Without it, he said, he would be forced to pass up a unique opportunity to fulfil his mission. And now, here it was.
He couldn’t help wondering about the man who previously wore the uniform – a man killed in cold blood for the clothes on his back. He was an enemy of his country, a leading member of the Abwehr and quite possibly a Nazi. But he was also, in all probability, a husband and father, and a patriot, who believed he was doing no more than his duty.
It didn’t bear thinking about.
Getting hold of the German naval officer’s uniform had been one of those serendipitous affairs by which all wars are marked.
MacLeish, of MI6, agitated by the increased level and intensity of German surveillance around Gibraltar, was concerned about reports that Commander Gunter Rath, the Abwehr chief in La Linea, spent hours each day in the company of a newly-arrived Luftwaffe colonel, since identified as the leader of the airborne assault on the Belgian fortress of Eben Emael – one of the first and most dramatic actions of the campaign in the West. Prior to May 10, it was thought that Eben Emael was impregnable. Built on solid rock, bounded by water, it bristled with guns. The Germans took it with fewer than 400 men.
Organisation like that was dangerous. It spelt trouble.
Yet, despite his fears, MacLeish was extremely careful about the action he took. The Nazis outnumbered his men ten to one and enjoyed the tacit, sometimes open, support of the Spanish, who would be only too delighted to declare a diplomatic “incident.” If he moved too fast, the Abwehr would immediately adopt new security protocols, requiring his own men to adapt at short notice and exposing them to the risk of reprisals. Yet if he did nothing, nothing would be the sum total of his achievement. Some spur to action was needed – something that raised the ante and justified risk-taking. Braithwaite’s request, marked “most urgent,” for a bona fide officer’s uniform, complete with valid military ID, was just the ticket.
A railway booking clerk, paid by MacLeish to keep tabs on movements in and out of the station at Algeciras, reported that Fregattenkapitän Rath had booked a first class ticket to Madrid, travelling on June 12. Given Rath’s importance in the drawing up of the projected attack on Gibraltar, it was reasonable to assume that he was going to report progress to his masters. He was also, as it happened, to travel alone.
MacLeish called on two of his most experienced men. Each spoke fluent German as well as colloquial Spanish and they had yet to let him down in a crunch. Landed by the Navy off Tarifa, a windswept village 10 miles west of the Rock, they masqueraded as a minor customs official and an Andalucian shipping agent, with the appropriate papers, before making their way on foot to Algeciras, where they sat in the station waiting room, reading the local rag, until Rath showed up just minutes before the scheduled departure. The German looked, as he always did, cool and serene – the very image of an Intelligence officer at the peak of his professional powers, supremely confident of his abilities.
Twenty minutes later, when the train for Córdoba, connecting with the Express to Madrid, finally turned up, belching smoke, causing several women to cough into their handkerchiefs, the two British agents joined the throng of passengers, taking seats diagonally opposite Rath.
The journey was scheduled to take an hour and 55 minutes, based on the 1928 timetable. But nobody on board believed that. “Not even Mussolini,” someone observed, “could get this train to Córdoba before lunchtime.”
There were only six passengers in the First Class section: Rath, the two MI6 agents, a Spanish businessman, dressed as if for a funeral, and an old lady, in her eighties, with wispy white hair, accompanied by her middle-aged daughter. The atmosphere on board was stifling, and the businessman and the two women soon dozed off. The Englishmen, to all appearances, followed suit.
Two hours out of Algeciras, the Abwehr agent, attaché case in hand, rose from his seat, yawning, and made his way to the servicios at the rear of the carriage. The two Englishmen opened their eyes. Thirty seconds later, they followed him. They could heard the sharp click of the lock on the toilet door. They stood patiently until they heard the flush, then, as the German opened the door to re-enter the corridor, the taller of the two British agents punched him, hard, in the throat, causing him to reel back into the cubicle. Falling onto the toilet seat, gasping for breath, he looked up just in time to see the second, shorter British agent strike him on the side of the head with a lead cosh, rendering him senseless.
Rath didn’t know it, but his life, from that point on, was over.
“So far, so good,” the taller Briton said. He sounded like, and probably was, a grammar school boy, from somewhere in North London – rather like Croft. “Fetch his case – and see there’s no one about.” As soon as his colleague was gone, the tall man flicked the lock on the toilet door back to ocupado and began stripping Rath of his uniform. By the time the shorter agent returned, tapping three times on the woodwork, the clothes were neatly folded, socks and shirt included. These were placed carefully inside the case, together with Rath’s wallet, ID, shoes and watch.
They looked at Rath. “Okay,” the shorter man said: “Time our friend here got some air.”
They waited until they saw through the toilet window that the train was about to enter a tunnel. Then, satisfied that they would not be disturbed, they dragged the German the two metres or so to the door at the end that connected the First Class carriage to the rest of the train. As the engine driver sounded his whistle, the unconscious Abwehr agent was heaved over the edge of the platform into the darkness, slap into the face of a brick buttress. He died instantly.
The two agents caught their breath and turned around. Examining them quizzically was the train conductor, his face a judicious blend of disapproval and unction. “Can I help you, señores? You know you are not supposed to be here.”
It was obvious he had seen nothing – which was fortunate for him. “A
thousand apologies, my good man,” the shorter agent said, in voluble Andalucian Spanish. “We were just getting some air.”
“Then perhaps you should have opened a window.”
“Very true.”
They went back inside.
“How long to Córdoba?” the taller agent asked as they resumed their seats.
“Five minutes. Ten, tops.” The shorter man was more obviously a product of some minor public school. He sounded a bit like Bramall.
“Bit of luck, that. If he hadn’t needed a slash, we’d have had to try for him on the Express. High risk, lots more people about.”
“Wouldn’t fancy that.”
“Me neither.”
“So, what do you think? Lunch?”
“You’re on.”
Upon their arrival in Córdoba, they dined in the station buffet, then sat on for a while, each nursing a beer. It wasn’t until eleven minutes past four in the afternoon, after the usual interminable delays, that the Express from Seville finally arrived, bound for Madrid.
It was past midnight when the train pulled in to Atocha station. The MI6 men went by taxi straight to the Hotel Paris, where a suitcase containing the dead German’s uniform and other effects, including his now-empty briefcase, were handed over, as arranged, to Bramall. Rath’s notes and diagrams, together with detailed aerial photographs of Gibraltar, were retained for MacLeish, who felt it only fair that he should get something out of the affair.
Inside the suitcase was a detailed description of the late Fregattenkapitän. He had been six feet one inches tall – almost the same height as Bramall – with black hair and grey eyes. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles and on his right cheek was a one inch scar pointing in the direction of his right shoulder. According to his military ID, he was from the Hanseatic city of Hanover, which, given his rank, suggested he would speak the German equivalent of Oxford English. Bramall took note. There could be no Viennese whine or throaty Berlin schnauze.