The Winter Agent

by Gareth Rubin

  ‘It’s a counter-attack against your bridgehead on D-Day. There were maps of the north-west coast: one of Normandy; one of the Pas de Calais. Each one had beaches and harbours marked on it, with German battalions moving towards them. They must be the different possible invasion points. The plans show the counter-attack for each one.’ So the Germans had been unsure where the invasion was coming – and then Reece had talked and told them. But there would be a time for self-recrimination. ‘There was a typed sheet; it said Parade was a Fascist recruited before the war.’ It was something, Reece noted, something about this man. ‘And there was an address that it said will be used to train special units for Parade One. Number 2, rue de l’Église.’

  ‘There must be a thousand rues de l’Église in France. Which one?’ Reece demanded.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Anything else at all?’

  ‘That’s all I can remember. Maxime, I –’

  Suddenly, they were both knocked to the floor. Another explosion was shaking the building, bringing down grit from the walls. Reece couldn’t understand what it could be – the planes had roared away minutes ago. Then he realized: the ammunition store. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘You can leave me here. I haven’t told them anything of use,’ Luc said plaintively. ‘After two days I gave them your cover identity – I was sure you would have broken into your reserve identity. I don’t even know what it is. I didn’t tell them about the photographs, and I’m being sent to a prison camp now. You can leave me here.’

  Reece was torn. He understood Luc’s fears, but the day before, Reece had told Klaussmann all. Somehow, he had been given another chance, to undo some of that damage. If Luc stayed, sooner or later the Germans would interrogate him again.

  ‘Luc, you’re brave. I can’t tell you how much braver you’ve been than me. But we can’t take the chance. I … I told them things.’ He felt Luc’s gaze burn into him. ‘Now they’ll question you again. They could bring your sister before you, and you know what the guards will do to her.’ Visions of Hélène entered his mind. He shook them and the moments of self-treachery away. ‘The best chance you have is to escape. Find your sister and tell her to hide with relatives.’ He saw the conflict on Luc’s face: the danger of running against the danger of staying.

  ‘An escape line?’

  ‘We’ll find one. Come with me.’

  Reece reached under Luc’s arm and hauled him to his feet. ‘I can’t walk so well. They worked on me.’

  Reece could see that his ankles were swollen and puffy. The joints had surely been beaten again and again. ‘We’ll make it.’ He supported Luc’s weight as they made their way out on to the landing.

  CHAPTER 22

  Detective measures

  Penetration. Double agents. Discretion needed in recruiting men and in contacting other organizations. Double agent may work well for an organization for a long time before any arrests are made.

  Hundreds of prisoners, men and women, had fled through the broken walls, but many others remained, and an awful wailing now filled the air, the sound of human pleading. It rose all around and, as he reached the ground floor, Reece realized that it was coming from mouths buried under rubble. Here and there, men and women were desperately digging through broken bricks to save their friends.

  ‘I’m a doctor!’ a Frenchman cried to Reece in German, seeing his stolen guard’s uniform. ‘Help us – he needs to get somewhere I can treat him.’ Reece knew that he had no time, he had to get away. There was more at stake than the lives of one or ten or five hundred men. He ran towards the opening in the wall. ‘Boche shit!’ he heard the doctor scream at his back.

  ‘I’m slowing you down. You have to run,’ Luc said urgently. He reached into the back of his own mouth and pulled out something white, a false tooth. A tiny glass capsule came out of it. ‘I’ve got it ready in case they catch me. Look, so many are getting out.’

  Reece knew he was right. Luc had a good chance, but Reece’s was better. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘Good luck.’

  He wished he could find and free Hélène, and the other agents too, but if he got Luc’s crumbs of information about Parade back to MI5, perhaps they could use them as a first step to identifying the man; or perhaps the address, 2, rue de l’Église, already appeared in Army Intelligence files and an op could be mounted to uncover exactly what the counter-attack entailed. In such exigencies, friendship and loyalty were burdens to decision.

  So he clamped Luc on the shoulder and charged away, scrambling over piles of broken wood and brick. And then he was out into the air and the dim snow-filtered sunlight. The brightness shimmering off the white blanket made his eyes hurt as much as the dust that had coated them and he had to turn away for a moment.

  ‘You, come on, this way!’ a voice shouted. It was the guard with the sub-machine gun he had left a minute earlier. But immediately, a noise was drowning him out. A plane – a bomber – swept overhead, its twin engines sounding like a swarm of wasps. Reece could make out the RAF roundel on its side. And right behind, mirroring the Mossie’s movements, was a Luftwaffe FW 190.

  ‘Go on, boys!’ screamed the German guard. ‘Kill the bastards!’ The 190’s guns opened up, shooting a line of black flies against the white sky. The first burst missed, soaring away into the distance, but the second found its mark. As one, the bullets cracked into the British aircraft’s tailplane, sheering it away and crippling the bomber. Unable to fly, the Mosquito shivered in the air and began to tumble. The German cheered at the sight of it falling to the frozen ground. Reece knew in his bones that the two men in that plane had died to save his life. He felt guilt mixed with hatred towards the man beside him. He walked sharply away before he did something stupid that would scupper his mission and his freedom – the mission and the freedom that those men had died for. ‘Hey, come back!’

  ‘The Sturmbannführer has orders for me,’ Reece called over his shoulder.

  ‘Coward.’

  Once around the corner, he ran to the opposite wall, the east, where the first gap had been blasted. Through it he could see the main road, with houses on the other side. Streaming through were local people, rushing to help pull the injured and the dead from the rubble. He fought his way through, enduring the hate-filled stares of the townsfolk, and then he was out on to the road.

  He scanned the open fields opposite and, spotting no German patrols, sprinted across the soil, all the while glancing back towards the prison, wondering if he had abandoned more of his agents to prison camps. Scores of prisoners were running in every direction. Guards were now pouring out from the prison too, some with dogs straining against chains.

  Reece tore away his soldier’s tunic and dropped it to the hard soil. He had to get back to London. He had to tell them what Luc had seen. As he ran, he passed a small copse where the wooden frame and metal controls of Mosquito HX922/EG-F lay struck into the hard earth. He saw eight local people dragging the broken bodies of Group Captain Percy Pickard and Flight Lieutenant Bill Broadley from the mud-flecked wreckage.

  Charlotte gazed through the sleet-soaked window of a dark car. They had been driving for fifteen hours already. Through Strasbourg, across the border to Stuttgart, and on to Berlin, in the east. Along the way columns of troops and armour were rolling from the Fatherland towards the French coast to defend against the coming invasion.

  ‘Do you think we’ll win?’ the driver asked her as a convoy of armoured cars sped past, destined for the Atlantic Wall.

  ‘Who’s “we”?’ she replied, under her breath.

  She had visited Berlin once before – as an eighteen-year-old girl. Paris had been gay in the late twenties, but Berlin was like a circus run by madmen. She had stayed out all night, dancing; flirted with men and had them ply her with drinks until she left without telling them. She met artists, musicians and an actress who always wore men’s clothes.

  Now, houses and restaurants were without roofs, their windows blackened by incendiary bombs. People stood a
bout staring, as if they, like her, could think only of the same structures lit up at night, full of life – unable now to recognize the corpse of a building in front of them. The hundred-thousand-strong military marches along these boulevards had been the dividing line between the world of hedonistic joy and this one of deprivation. Berlin had been born, developed tumours throughout its flesh and was now dying with fluid in its lungs.

  ‘How far is it?’ she asked.

  ‘A few minutes.’

  The car turned on to Tirpitzufer, bouncing through weals in the road caused by the ice and Allied bombs, and drew up outside the building at number 76–8. Its neo-classical facade had all the austerity and conformity of the Nazi era but without the grand ambition. It was a second-wife of a structure – there to continue the tradition, without any of the expectations that had gone before it. Camouflage netting was strung across the street to obscure it from the air.

  The security officers minutely examined the papers that identified her as an Abwehr agent and checked her name against a list of those expected to arrive today. When this, too, approved her entry she was escorted up to the third floor, led along a corridor and shown into a soundproofed meeting room with a window looking down over the street. It contained only a polished table, five wooden chairs, a larger leather-bound chair at the head of the table, a board on which papers could be clipped and a black Bakelite telephone.

  After placing a folder containing the fruits of her theft from Beggar on the table, she went to the window and lit a cigarette, letting it burn as she looked down on the people outside. She could hear their thoughts: a mish-mash of continued and unswerving belief in the Führer, Folk and Fatherland from some; an understanding that the war was lost from others. From the rest, there was only helplessness in the face of a brutal destiny. Her cigarette seared down.

  When it had nearly burned away a man entered the room. He came in alone, although a younger man appeared to have accompanied him thus far and was now waiting dutifully outside. Admiral Canaris, wearing his naval uniform, sat in one of the discreet wooden chairs, not the leather one, and opened the folder, examining the photographic prints and negatives within. On the wall above him a clock swung its brass pendulum in a regular motion: left, right, left … Opposite it was a large framed portrait of Adolf Hitler.

  ‘I expected these days ago, Miss Dubois,’ he said.

  ‘The Gestapo were looking for me. I had to remain out of sight for a while.’

  ‘Troublesome people. But you made it in the end. These may prove useful to us,’ he said, placing his hand on the envelope.

  ‘Have you seen Parade’s latest sked?’ She spoke through blue smoke.

  ‘A little more about their invasion planning, but nothing spectacular. However, something has happened that touches on our project. It begins with Sturmbannführer Klaussmann.’

  ‘That man’s a pig.’

  ‘Well, he’s a roasted pig now. The RAF hit Amiens prison four hours ago and he was inside at the time.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Yes, I imagined you would say that. I would like you to attempt to clarify something. Parade alerted the Gestapo to your cell’s attempt to free your comrade on the road to Amiens, but I am still unclear as to how he gained that information in the first place. Is it possible that he has a source within Beggar itself?’

  ‘It’s possible. But I transmitted the plan to hit the transport to London in advance. So it’s more likely his source is in London.’

  ‘Yes, that seems more likely.’ He was thoughtful for a moment. ‘Now, something else you should …’

  The admiral’s young adjutant entered and handed Canaris a slip of paper. He read it and handed it back. ‘Tell him to stay where he is. This is not the time.’ The young man left again. ‘Miss Dubois, I apologize. As I was saying, something else you should know is that, when the airstrike hit, Klaussmann was interrogating your circuit organizer.’

  ‘Maxime,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Maxime. He was arrested in Amiens on information directly from Parade himself. Curious, isn’t it, how this man seems focused on having Maxime caught? It seems almost … personal.’ He studied Charlotte. ‘Would you care to know Maxime’s condition?’ She shrugged. ‘Well, in any case, it’s actually a little hard to assess, since the object of the airstrike was clearly to free as many prisoners as possible. He is now hiding in a French ditch somewhere – the same for the rest of his circuit, as it happens.’ He watched for a flicker of emotion at the news. ‘It seems he held out against Klaussmann for two days, but I’m afraid his resolve was not unlimited.’ She placed her cigarette in the ashtray. ‘Had it not been for the airstrike, Himmler would have kept it secret that he was in Gestapo custody. Luckily for us, the RAF drew some attention to the prison.’

  ‘Lucky,’ she said.

  ‘Well, then. Our best course of action would seem to be to continue our attempt to identify Parade.’

  ‘All right.’ She blew a line of smoke out of the side of her mouth. She was certain that Canaris was party to the planning of Parade One – even though he refused to divulge to her exactly what it entailed, beyond that it was a counter-attack to the Allied invasion. What he wanted was the identity of the spy. But Himmler was keeping that information to himself, apparently revealing only that Parade had been watching Reece. ‘What will you use Parade for?’ Whatever it was, Himmler would not be happy.

  ‘If I need you for any duties, you will be informed, Miss Dubois. It’s best not to pry beyond your current responsibilities.’ He placed the folder in his briefcase and knitted his fingers together on the polished table. ‘Bear in mind that I took something of a chance with you. The position of your race is more precarious than ever.’ He checked his wristwatch. ‘I have an appointment with the Führer. There is something I am to observe, and he’s not the sort of man you keep waiting.’ He bade her goodbye and she watched him leave, his young adjutant in his wake.

  She waited a minute before leaving too. As she stepped out on to the street Charlotte thought back to her eighteen-year-old self. Goebbels had since closed all the theatres, but the cinemas were still open. Perhaps there was one she could sit in and work out her next move.

  She walked a few roads lined with ornate lamp posts, many of them bent in the middle or lying on the ground. Men in once-fine clothes pulled handcarts bearing their few remaining possessions. A pair of women wore black crêpe dresses, clinging to custom as a crutch.

  Something rose in the air, a whining sound that warned bombers would be above them in seconds. And something else: palls of thick grey smoke pumped from the ground to hide the city from the aircraft overhead. It seemed the whole city was on fire even before a single plane had been sighted.

  A dirty white tram came to a rattling halt and its passengers spilled out, running for cover. Charlotte hurried in the wake of a score of aged people, down some steps into a dank cellar that smelled of urine. The wooden door closed and they were in perfect darkness, listening to the distant thuds and closer shouting. One of the bombs must have hit the building above them, because the ceiling shook and dropped flakes of wood.

  ‘God watch over us!’ an old woman began to whimper. ‘Forgive us for the sake of your Son.’

  ‘For his sake, be quiet. It’s bad enough without you,’ a girl’s voice ordered her. ‘I have to go to the welfare office. We haven’t got a single slice of bread. It’ll be closed by the time this is over.’

  Someone lit candles and, as the soft light glowed, Charlotte saw they were in a chamber with close to twenty others huddled on benches. The room connected to another that looked to have a similar number of occupants. It was impossible to say how many more chambers there were beyond. They were designed like that, she knew, so that if one room panicked, the contagion wouldn’t spread to the others.

  ‘Is there another way out of here?’ a young man asked.

  The girl ignored him and began to sing a song with a childish music-hall rhythm. ‘Everything will pass over; ev
erything will have an end. Every December has a May …’

  Canaris’s car came to a halt in some godforsaken field around a kilometre from the cliffs of the northern coast. It had been an eight-hour drive into the night and his muscles were aching. As soon as he hauled himself out he felt the sea salt settling on his skin, carried by a wet haar. He pulled his collar up a little. He was getting too old for such foul weather.

  He stepped out to see a few planes idling nearby, including a Fliegerstaffel FW 200 Condor. So the Führer had arrived. Canaris steeled himself a little. Two members of Hitler’s personal guard armed with Werke sub-machine guns saluted him, and he returned their salute.

  ‘Heil Hitler.’

  ‘Heil Hitler.’

  ‘The Führer requests the admiral’s presence on the viewing platform.’

  ‘Lead the way.’ They took him by red-tinted torchlight to a wide platform held up by scaffolding. A clutch of eight or nine figures was already aboard it, lit amber from an unseen source. Canaris walked over and, politely declining the offer of aid, climbed the metal ladder. Each step clanged out as he rose up, cursing the weather again. A couple of flaming torches were burning at the top – an unnecessary bit of Munich-rally-era theatrics, he felt – allowing him to make out all the faces he had expected to see and had seen up close more times than he cared to remember: Hitler himself, Himmler, Jodl, Rommel and a few other assorted Wehrmacht luminaries. And one more: Otto Skorzeny was the only one wearing camouflage fatigues rather than a heavy overcoat. Black in the firelight, the long, deep scar that ran from the left side of Skorzeny’s mouth almost to his ear made his face more unattractive than it had been before.

  Skorzeny was watching a scene played out in the shallow valley between them and the coastline. A model Allied camp, complete with command post, vehicles and anti-aircraft defences was being picked out piece by piece by a roving red searchlight.

  ‘Heil Hitler,’ Canaris said, raising his arm. The Führer flipped his palm over his shoulder. ‘I apologize for my lateness. A matter I had to attend to overran.’