Prince of Spies

by Prince of Spies (retail) (epub)

  If you’re with someone else, they will most likely split you up before questioning you, so make sure you have the same story.

  Keep your hands out of your pockets, otherwise they may think you’re armed.

  Don’t argue when you’re stopped, but do appear slightly annoyed: if people are too compliant, that can look suspicious too.

  He had felt much of it was obvious, but they’d made him memorise it: they called these the Nine Steps, and a couple of times he’d been woken up in the middle of the night and forced to recite them. Now he was going through them in his mind.

  By the time they left the passageway, there was no sign of either Kurt to their left or Bruno to their right.

  ‘Walk a bit slower, Otto.’

  ‘You sound as if you’ve done this before.’

  ‘A bit quicker than that, though – just normal speed, that’s it. If we’re stopped, tell them we’ve been looking for a restaurant and walked up to Unter den Linden but decided to return to the hotel instead. Tell them we’re Danish businessmen and I don’t speak a word of German. Act confused as to why we’ve been stopped, but don’t be rude.’

  They paused at the junction with Kommandantenstrasse. As they looked up and down it, they could just make out the figure of Bruno, walking faster than Prince would have liked, though he was at least heading away from the restaurant rather than back towards it.

  No sooner had they crossed Kommandantenstrasse than they heard the sound of a car speeding towards them from behind and screeching to a halt.

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Otto.

  ‘Be calm. Remember what I told you to say.’

  A long black Mercedes sedan had pulled alongside them, its front wheels mounting the kerb in case they were disinclined to stop. Three men, clearly Gestapo, climbed out.

  ‘Halt: stand still and keep your hands by your sides. When I tell you, give us your papers, but do so slowly.’

  Prince glanced at Otto.

  ‘Don’t look at each other! You – move away from him, over here! Don’t you hear what I’m saying?’

  ‘My colleague does not understand or speak German, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I don’t care. Papers.’

  They each handed their papers over to a different officer, who studied them for a while and then consulted the man behind them. As he moved forward, Prince realised he recognised him: it was the shabbily dressed man who’d wished them good afternoon in the Tiergarten the previous afternoon.

  He spoke with a sharp working-class Berlin accent. ‘Where have you been?’

  Otto cleared his throat and shifted anxiously from foot to foot. ‘You can see from our papers that we are staying at the Excelsior on Askanischer Platz. We decided to see if we could find a restaurant to eat at tonight because we fancied a walk too, and the concierge kindly gave us passes. We went up Friedrichstrasse to Unter den Linden but couldn’t see anything we liked or that had a table, so we decided we may as well eat at the hotel after all. That’s where we’re heading now.’

  ‘Why have you come this way? You’ve gone round in a circle: why didn’t you go down Friedrichstrasse or Wilhelm Strasse or even Jerusalemer Strasse?’

  ‘You’ll have to excuse us, sir, but we’re guests in your city. We are not terribly familiar with it, and with it being so dark… I’m afraid we must have become disorientated.’

  ‘Enough. You come over here with me.’ It was one of the other Gestapo men, gesturing for Prince to join him a bit further down the pavement, away from Otto.

  ‘But my colleague doesn’t speak German!’

  ‘Shut up, unless you fancy spending the night as our guest in Prinz Albrecht Strasse. I can assure you it’s not nearly as comfortable as the Excelsior.’

  The Gestapo man fired questions at him. ‘What brings you to Berlin? Who have you met with? Where exactly have you been tonight? Did you visit any restaurant on Donhoff Strasse?’

  But Prince smiled apologetically, shaking his head. ‘Ich spreche nicht Deutsch… Dansk… Dänisch…’

  The man who’d followed them to the Tiergarten strolled over, speaking to the other man as if Prince wasn’t there.

  ‘I tell you, it’s a waste of time. They’re just two fucking Danish businessmen. The other one is well known to us: his company supplies the Reich. He’s never been any trouble. We’re wasting our time, come on.’

  ‘But they were coming from that direction, weren’t they? Donhoff Strasse is just up there. Weren’t we supposed to be looking for more than one person?’

  ‘Maybe, but it’s obviously not one of these bastards, is it?’

  Prince’s sense of relief was short-lived. In the distance, there was the sound of shouting, loud voices, one of them possibly that of the young Luftwaffe officer. It was too far away to make out the words, but they were followed by pistol shots, four or five in very quick succession, fast enough to have come from a semi-automatic. Almost immediately there was a retort of gunfire. It sounded like a machine gun, and was followed by a brief scream, then more shouting and dogs barking.

  ‘Quick, we need to get up there. I told you we were wasting our time here. You two: go straight back to your hotel – now, move!’

  * * *

  Otto and Prince walked as fast as they felt they could get away with. Just before they crossed Wilhelm Strasse, Otto turned into a shop doorway and threw up.

  ‘You need to pull yourself together, Otto. We can’t afford to draw attention to ourselves. You look like a bag of nerves.’

  ‘Not without good reason! We were stopped by the Gestapo, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘That happens all the time in Berlin, I imagine. We must regard it as routine. The important point is they don’t suspect us.’

  ‘How the hell do you know that?’

  ‘Because they were talking freely in front of me, remember? They assumed I didn’t understand. The one we spotted in the Tiergarten yesterday described us as two fucking Danish businessmen and said they were wasting their time on us. If they’d suspected us of anything, they wouldn’t have let us go, would they?’

  ‘But what if they’ve caught Kurt or Bruno and they’ve confessed? And that shooting – what was that about?’

  Prince moved in front of Otto, grabbing him by the shoulders. ‘Pull yourself together! There’s nothing we can do about the others. We need to act normally: return to the hotel, go to the factory in Spandau in the morning and then fly back to Copenhagen in the evening as planned. If we do anything unusual, we’ll just be drawing attention to ourselves.’

  * * *

  For the second night in a row, Prince hardly slept. This time it wasn’t the heat or the noise but the events of that evening that kept him awake.

  The meeting with Kurt had been very productive: he’d answered the questions London had passed on to him and the information about Peenemünde felt like gold dust. If that didn’t satisfy London, then nothing would. Prince thought he could be home within a week, two at the most, and would finally see Henry.

  But then the drama: the woman in the hat. He’d been right in assuming she was watching him, but it wasn’t for the Gestapo. She must be on the same side as him, but who did she work for? Was she a companion of Kurt’s, there to watch his back?

  And then he wondered about Kurt: had he been followed to the restaurant? And how come they’d been able to escape with relative ease? Could it all be a web of deceit they’d been drawn into?

  He knew there was little they could do other than stick to their routine for the day, which meant being at the hotel entrance at a quarter to eight for the car to take them to Spandau Locomotive Engineering.

  * * *

  Otto hardly said a word in the car. He’d been more or less silent since they’d met in reception that morning. He’d clearly not slept, and the smell of vomit was still on his breath. The tension in the car mounted as they passed through Charlottenburg. Neither of them had any idea what had happened to Bruno after they’d spotted him in Kommandantenstrasse, just before
they were stopped by the Gestapo. The only straw they could cling to was that they both agreed the shooting appeared to have been further away, closer to the restaurant.

  To their relief, as the car pulled through the factory gates, Bruno was standing on the steps of the office block, peering anxiously out to the car park. The friendly engineer was in a terrible state. He looked pale and gaunt; his red-rimmed eyes had a haunted look to them.

  ‘Come this way,’ was all he said before leading them down a long corridor into a noisy basement workshop, the smell of grease and diesel fumes almost overpowering.

  ‘If anyone asks why we’re here, I want you to look at this.’ They were in front of a workbench with a long cylinder on it, not unlike an oxygen tank. Next to it were various springs and other small machinery parts, including a box of ball bearings with Mortensen Machinery Parts – Copenhagen on the lid. ‘No one can hear us, it’s too noisy here. Gather closer and keep looking at these parts as we talk. It must appear as if we’re studying them. I have a family, you know. My wife is pregnant. Do you know what would happen to them if I was caught? My children would be taken away from us and my wife would be sent to a concentration camp.’ He pushed some of the parts around the table, appearing to be on the verge of tears. His hands were shaking so hard he managed to knock some of the parts onto the floor.

  ‘What happened to you last night, Bruno?’

  ‘Nothing, would you believe it. I went down Kommandantenstrasse as Kurt had said and then caught the U-Bahn home from Moritz Platz. No one followed me, I wasn’t stopped, and there wasn’t even a security check on the train like there often is at that time of night. When I arrived home, I was in such a state I told my wife I felt unwell and stayed downstairs. You two obviously got back all right.’

  ‘The Gestapo stopped us, but they didn’t suspect us. They were about to let us go anyway when we heard a commotion from the direction of the restaurant. There was an exchange of gunfire: it sounded like a machine gun and a semi-automatic, but I can’t be sure.’

  Bruno looked thoughtful. ‘Kurt was carrying a Mauser, which is the semi-automatic pistol most Luftwaffe officers carry. If he fired his pistol and they fired back at him with machine guns, then he wouldn’t have stood a chance. If he’s been killed, I’m sorry, but at least no one will know about us.’

  ‘Can he be traced to you? If he has been killed and for some reason he was already under suspicion, they’ll be checking him out in detail now.’

  ‘I thought about that all last night, Otto. I went over every minute of every contact I had with him, believe me. The first time we met was at a conference for military scientists and engineers in early July at Humboldt University. Afterwards there was a big reception, the kind where hundreds of people mingle together. We just got chatting and he asked me what I did. He said he’d be interested in talking to me in further detail about how to cope with machinery operating at very high temperatures; he said the Luftwaffe might want to know more. We had one meeting at a bar on Unter den Linden, which was when I told him about your company and the high quality of your parts. He said he’d like to meet you when you were next here, which is how that dinner in August came about. I’d told him when you were going to be here, and he said he’d be in touch. Two days before you arrived, he bumped into me in the street and we agreed to meet at the restaurant. He never phoned me, and I can’t imagine there’d be anything in writing.’

  ‘But we don’t know for sure that he’s not been captured, do we? He could still be alive.’

  They left the factory at two o’clock. The car was to take them back to the hotel to collect their cases and then on to Tempelhof. As they pulled out of the factory, Otto slumped in his seat, mopping his brow. ‘I’m never coming back here again, never. When I get back to Copenhagen – if I get back to Copenhagen – I’m going to tell my boss I’ve had enough of travelling. I have no intention of ever leaving Denmark again; in fact, the way I feel now, I never want to leave my apartment again. If he doesn’t let me give it up, I’ll resign.’

  ‘Won’t that draw attention, though?’

  Otto turned to Prince, a slightly manic look on his face. ‘I don’t care, Peter, I really don’t care. I’m never coming back here again, ever.’

  * * *

  They both knew that if there was the slightest hint of suspicion over them, they’d be stopped at the airport, but it was an incident-free departure, though not without the inevitable tension.

  Their papers were fine, their visas were checked, their cases gone over and Otto was able to satisfy the Gestapo officers that the purpose of their visit had been to help the Reich. Their flight was at five past six, and they entered the departure lounge an hour before that. Otto went to the bar to buy them each a beer and came back with a copy of Der Angriff, the Nazis’ afternoon newspaper. Its front page was dominated by a head-and-shoulders photo of Kurt, under a stark headline: Luftwaffe officer killed in Mitte shooting.

  Oberst Albert Kampmann was killed following a shooting incident in the Mitte district of central Berlin last night. Der Angriff understands that Oberst Kampmann was taken to the Charité hospital, where he died of his wounds in the early hours of the morning. The 26-year-old officer had been in the service of the Führer since 1939 and was based at the headquarters of the Air Ministry on Wilhelm Strasse. The circumstances of the shooting are still unclear and are being investigated by the Gestapo special investigations unit at Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Anyone with any information regarding Oberst Kampmann are required to contact this unit or their nearest Gestapo office as a matter of extreme urgency. Citizens of Berlin are reminded that ultimate victory is a common cause and their vigilance in helping to inform on and root out enemies of the Reich is both a legal and a moral obligation.

  ‘It’s not very subtle, is it?’

  ‘That’s the way the Nazis work. But it’s worrying, isn’t it?’

  Prince nodded. ‘Of course it is. He seems to have been alive at some stage. They could have got something out of him before he died. But then again, if they had, we wouldn’t be sitting here now, would we?’

  ‘They were on to him, though, weren’t they? Those last two sentences: it’s a clear message that they regard him as a criminal. There’ll be a thorough investigation. They could link him to Bruno and then us. They’ll know where we are in Copenhagen.’

  Both men sat in silence, their heads bowed, their beer untouched.

  ‘I tend to agree with what you said earlier, Otto.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘About never wanting to come back to this country again. Still, at least my job is done.’

  * * *

  At ten to six, they were led out of the departure lounge and along the front of the building to where their plane to Copenhagen was waiting. The group of passengers paused in front of another glass-plated lounge, waiting to be escorted across the apron to the plane.

  Prince looked through the window. She was standing there, this time wearing an elegant trilby-style hat with a neat floral arrangement on one side. The jet-black eyes darted around before settling on him, and the briefest of smiles crossed her lips. As the passengers were moved on, she raised her hand as if to adjust her hat, allowing it to form a fleeting farewell wave.

  Chapter 13

  London, December 1942

  ‘I say, Roly, would you believe it? There’s the most dreadful row going on at our local church – about this year’s Christmas carol service of all things. Most of the choir are vehemently opposed to “Silent Night” being included in the service. They claim it’s a German hymn and—’

  ‘Well it is, Tom – “Stille Nacht”. Don’t you remember we were made to sing it in German lessons?’

  ‘Don’t you start. Poor old Elizabeth has stuck her neck out by insisting it doesn’t matter. People are falling out with each other – her friend Marjorie refuses to speak to her and the vicar’s close to having a nervous breakdown. And now they’ve asked me to come along to the parish council to give my
opinion – as if I have one!’

  ‘They know what you do?’

  ‘Not as such, but most of the people in the village like to think they have an idea. I’d love to sit there and explain how I have to consider matters of life and death every day. I’d like to think that would give them some sense of perspective, but I very much doubt it. You know what village life is like, eh? Now then, talking of life and death…’

  They were walking slowly along a corridor somewhere underneath Downing Street. Gilbey had a sense they were passing under the Cabinet Office, perhaps even under Whitehall. They were going to use one of the new secure meeting rooms, which apparently had fresh air pumped into it.

  ‘You’ve seen Agent Laertes’ report, no doubt, Roly. Terribly helpful.’

  Pearson held out an arm to stop his companion. He needed to catch his breath. ‘Wait for the meeting, Tom, eh?’

  * * *

  The secure meeting room was less cramped and stuffy than the one they’d met in the previous month, but the air of tension was the same, as was Lord Swalcliffe’s evident irritation. Churchill’s principal scientific adviser sat on his own on one side of the table, files and pencils arrayed in front of him, fingers tapping impatiently and a generally unhappy demeanour about him.

  Air Vice Marshal Frank Hamilton and his colleague from the RAF intelligence branch sat at one end of the table, the wall behind them covered with charts and photographs. Long from the Ministry sat at the other end, while Pearson and Gilbey sat next to each other, opposite Lord Swalcliffe.

  ‘The lighting in here is far too bright.’

  ‘I think you may find, Lord Swalcliffe, that the lighting in the previous room we used was too dim.’

  ‘You don’t need to lecture me of all people on the difference between bright and dim, Pearson, I’m the scientist here. Now, this report – I’m not sure it’s anywhere as reassuring as you evidently think it is, Gilbey.’