The Winter Agent

by Gareth Rubin

  ‘No matter,’ Hitler said, as he returned to scanning the camp in front of them with a pair of field glasses, following the moving scarlet beam as it alighted on a Sherman tank – a model, Canaris presumed – and then a large wooden hut that looked like a communications post. There were soldiers in the camp too – some were mannequins, but there were at least fifty corporeal men milling around, some patrolling the exterior, wearing American uniforms. Canaris guessed they weren’t really POWs but civilian prisoners dressed in the clothing as practice targets. Skorzeny stepped forward and bowed. Canaris reciprocated, his bow a touch shallower than the younger man’s. ‘Skorzeny, will you instruct the admiral?’

  ‘Yes, my Führer,’ he replied. ‘But I think the admiral is about to see for himself.’ He pointed further along the valley to where black shapes were speeding through the dark. The searchlight swung around to make them glow red like the torches. Twenty jeeps were racing through the dark, men’s faces crowded into them, ten in each vehicle, it seemed. Their engines had been muffled but still whined, and the smell of their petrol fumes seemed to sweep up and over the watchers on the platform. Without apparent cause, every one of the patrolling guards fell to the ground. ‘Silenced weapons,’ Skorzeny told the men on the platform. They mumbled approval.

  ‘Who are the defenders?’ Canaris asked.

  ‘Undesirables.’

  In the distance a few of the men in the camp stopped still, seemed to understand what was approaching and then began to sprint away from the incoming vehicles, dropping weapons and helmets as they ran. Scores of troops jumped from the moving jeeps, which crashed through the camp, knocking down posts and tents. A few of the incoming soldiers leaped straight on to the escaping men. Canaris noted one shadow flit between tents, apparently unseen by the attackers, and scramble under the fabric side of a tent to hide inside, before one of the incoming soldiers with a large pack on his back ran over and stopped to listen. He shouted something into the tent – a recognition sign, it seemed – then slit through the fabric with a knife and slipped inside. Canaris heard the man within scream, then the attacker dragged him out. The roving red beam fell on them as the attacker seemed to calmly draw his knife through the man’s neck until it lolled to one side and the soldier tossed him to the ground.

  ‘They’ve been assigned specific targets,’ Skorzeny informed the men on the platform. ‘They have located them all.’

  Canaris heard sharp whistles, and the men, as one, ran out of the side of the camp. The whistles were immediately replaced by the diesel sound of panzer engines. He hadn’t seen the five gross metal beasts which emerged from dark camouflage netting to speed into the camp. But instead of the rattling carnage sound of their machine guns, the turrets were shooting horizontal spits of flame a hundred metres long. When the jets hit the tents and wooden huts they exploded into fireballs, consuming all around them. Canaris gazed up at the yellow-tinged sky.

  After half a minute there was little left but burning debris. A couple of voices in the camp were crying out, their strangled sound carried on the wind.

  ‘Ninety-eight seconds,’ Skorzeny announced to the assembled watchers. ‘And we can get that down.’

  ‘The Flammpanzers?’ enquired Canaris.

  ‘First the commando assault, then the deception phase, then the Flammpanzers will come in to ensure there will be no prisoners we have to feed.’

  ‘Your men have taken Pervitin?’

  ‘They could go for days.’

  Hitler was listening to their discussion without comment. ‘No doubt. No doubt,’ Canaris replied. ‘What is the latest regarding Parade?’

  Himmler chuckled. ‘Our man seems to have an aspect of genius about him.’

  ‘I’m glad. What form does this genius take?’

  ‘He has identified a secretary at the British Army Intelligence corps with Communist sympathies. This woman now believes she is passing vital information to Moscow in order to ensure that the future of Europe is red.’ Himmler laughed out loud. Canaris had to give Parade his due – it was a delicate move.

  ‘And what has she told us?’

  ‘The Allies are still planning for an amphibious landing in the summer. As soon as the precise locations and the army Order of Battle are decided she’ll pass us the names and mission objectives of every officer from Eisenhower down.’ Canaris could smell Himmler’s breath. It smelled of garlic. ‘Skorzeny’s commandos will clear the path for the Parade One deception to deploy. With the information from Parade’s new source, our units will take control of the artillery without too much trouble. We now expect a kill ratio of around fifty per cent of their infantry, forty per cent of armoured brigades.’ He stepped back, allowing Canaris to see Hitler’s eyes locked on his own, searching for something. ‘You agree, of course, Admiral?’

  ‘Yes, Reichsführer.’

  Much as he would have liked to disagree, Canaris saw that Himmler’s plan had been well conceived. There were thousands of Skorzeny’s men in French barracks, pressing rounds into magazines, waiting only for the enemy to come into view. Canaris watched two hundred of them hunting through the camp for anyone or anything left to kill.

  When it is all over, we will have to keep these wolves in cages, Canaris thought to himself. Before they devour their mothers and their fathers.

  The soldiers in the camp regrouped. A squad of three broke away and started jogging over to the observation platform.

  ‘Would you like to meet some of the men?’ Himmler asked Canaris, shooting the Führer a quick glance lit by the flames.

  ‘I would indeed.’

  The squad arrived and scaled up to the wooden platform as if they were walking on the street. They stood, stinking of sweat, their guns in their hands. One’s chest was soaked in dark, sticky fluid.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’ they declared, snapping to attention. The Führer watched them.

  ‘Men,’ Skorzeny called to them. ‘You did well. Fast. Now I introduce to you Herr Admiral Canaris.’

  Canaris lifted his hand, ready to return a salute. But it never came. Instead the three men raised their silenced pistols and pointed them directly at his chest. He froze. Skorzeny strode in front of him and their eyes met.

  ‘Wilhelm Canaris, I arrest you for treason against Adolf Hitler and the German Reich.’ He punched hard into Canaris’s stomach, crumpling the older man to his knees like paper.

  ‘My Führer …’ Canaris groaned, unable to think how to continue: Plead? Deny? Out of the corner of his eye he saw Himmler break a smile and Hitler raise his binoculars once more to view the defeated camp in front of them all. Skorzeny grabbed Canaris by his hair and wrenched his head up. Canaris’s spectacles fell to the wooden floor and he could see only blurring figures. ‘I have –’

  Himmler strode over. ‘You think I don’t know what you are planning? You think I haven’t been watching?’ He nodded to Skorzeny, who pulled a pair of steel handcuffs from his pocket and shackled Canaris’s wrists together. Canaris felt his heart beating irregularly. It occurred to him that he might be having a heart attack. He guessed what was coming soon, and it might well be preferable if his heart stopped beating now. He began crawling towards the edge of the platform. The fall wouldn’t kill him instantly, but it might halt his heart. Then a hand, too strong to be Himmler’s, took hold of his collar and jerked him back. A car drove up and a man jumped out, leaving the door open. A black hood was pulled over Canaris’s head. He heard Himmler’s voice. ‘Just wait, Admiral. It will come.’

  Part Three

  * * *

  CHAPTER 23

  1 June 1944

  Marc Reece lay on his bed, looking out at a London sky. The blue expanse was pricked with white barrage balloons. When he had first left the city for France they had been numerous. Now they were a contagion. As the morning spread, the promise of a true summer to come was noticeable in the heavier air.

  He had spent many mornings staring listlessly through the metal-framed window since he came back from France. I
t had been deep winter then and the fingers of the oak tree outside had dripped day in, day out from the rains. But over the months he had seen them bud red-brown with the spring breeze then burst into waxy green as summer sun forced through the recalcitrant clouds so they now provided thick hiding spots for crows and magpies.

  He had watched the first changes as he recovered from his injuries – those inflicted by the German whips and those by the bricks that fell on him when the bombs dropped. When he felt able to, he had started seeing people socially, trying to return to some sort of normality, even if it were just for an afternoon. Some of his old friends from the private boarding school in New Hampshire were over, stationed along the south coast and desperate to see London and the old, quaint English villages. ‘How’re the proper English girls treating you?’ one had asked. ‘Being friendly enough?’

  ‘They are,’ he replied.

  He thought of Charlotte from time to time, but less than when he first arrived back. He had made an effort to divert himself from those thoughts.

  And, undoubtedly, in 1944, Britain was a happier nation than France. Yes, the rationing was the same, but the police patrols were far fewer and less threatening. The plays and books were largely uncensored and free to poke fun at anyone – even, within reason, the armed forces. And there wasn’t the anger and humiliation that rang on the paving stones of every street in every town across the Channel. Instead, there was a belief that destiny was finally on Britain’s side.

  Loose lips, they had been told, sink ships, and most newspapers had been circumspect about reporting the fact that hundreds of thousands of men – British, Commonwealth, American, and free forces from the occupied nations of Europe – had thronged the towns of southern England one week and seemingly disappeared the next. But many lips were discreetly talking of ships and of landing craft and gliders to convey troops behind the German lines. They were talking of a final confrontation with the Nazis.

  The very minute Reece had arrived back, he had informed Delaney of what Luc had seen in the photographs: that Parade One was a land-based counter-attack against the bridgehead; that Parade was a Fascist recruited before the war; and that an address, 2, rue de l’Église, was to be used as a training point for the op. Then there was what Charlotte had told him earlier and he had already transmitted: that Parade had killed a British official.

  Luc himself had turned up two weeks later, having come via Spain, but had been unable to add anything to the intelligence.

  It was then that Reece told Delaney he wanted to go back and see it through. ‘You’re exhausted,’ Delaney had replied. ‘You’re not ready for the field. You need to rest. Get your head straight. You’re a timer down to the last second.’

  He argued, of course, but Delaney was adamant. He wanted to work? Fine. The Finishing School needed good conducting officers who had been in the field. There was a new initiative, joint with the American Office of Strategic Services and the Free French, to drop three-man teams behind enemy lines just as D-Day hit, and Reece’s experience would be invaluable.

  Without joy, he took the job. It would be a contribution – something, even, to set against the way he had already betrayed them all.

  He spent two months filling the new agents’ heads with the reality of life under occupation: the sensation of being buried that comes when you can’t trust those around you. The grip around your chest as you wake up with a false name ready. He didn’t tell them the worst of what he had lived day by day. They probably had vague suspicions. Some were eager; some grim. Few naïve. It was different to how it had been at the beginning, when none of them knew what they were getting into. He wished them luck.

  And all the while he waited for word from Delaney that the information he had so nearly died for had led to the German spy. The telegraphed vindication of what he and the others had been through.

  But his hope counted for little as, bit by bit, it all came to nothing. It was, said MI5, no surprise that a spy for Germany had a history of Fascism, and they could identify no one in their own ranks or elsewhere who fitted the bill. MI6 managed to find a hundred rue de l’Églises – a clutch of them in Paris alone – but none stood out as significantly more likely than the others as the location of the training station.

  And there was no link to a British official’s death that Special Branch could dig up. ‘It’s just not enough,’ a superintendent told Reece in Delaney’s office. ‘A place. A time. That’s what we need. We can’t put five men on every death of a tax inspector or town-hall clerk. We have other work. I’m sorry.’

  Each time the news was relayed to Reece he felt a burst of anger that he experienced as a barely controllable urge to go out into the street and throttle the first person he saw. He told himself that it was the result of his failure to find Parade and to complete his mission. It wasn’t, he told himself, the three days he had spent in the pain of death and of death postponed. Nor the self-hatred that gripped his mind because, when the time had come, he had broken and told them what he knew. Each night, he slept for a few hours, waking at slight noises outside or a blade of light through the curtain.

  He thought about Parade as he walked down the street, mulling the fact that he could be passing the unknown agent at that very moment. They could have exchanged glances on the Tube. It could have been the man who asked him for a match in the cinema or held the door open at the Lyons Corner House. From time to time he had heard warnings on the radio about vigilance against foreign spies and he had wondered if the man reading that warning had even the faintest idea of what lay behind it.

  As Reece’s frustration grew he found himself staring at maps of the French coast. Somewhere on this stretch of land falling into the Atlantic Ocean the Parade One units would be waiting with their secret plan to drown the Allied troops in the breaking waves. He stared at the pages until his vision blurred.

  But today he had decided on a new course. He would no longer sit around frustrated at Special Branch’s lack of progress. They couldn’t devote the time to the search, he had been told. But he had so much time to sit and do nothing but think, it was driving him out of his mind.

  Dressed in a grey suit, Reece walked quickly to the local library near his flat in Dulwich, south-east London. ‘I need to read some newspapers,’ he told the steely white-haired woman with outsized spectacles at the enquiries desk.

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘All of them. For the last two years.’

  She sighed and pointed him towards the newspaper room. ‘They’re bound. You can’t take them away.’

  ‘I understand.’

  For the next five hours he leafed through page after page, looking for reports of unusual deaths or disappearances of government officials in the London area at least a few months earlier. Whenever he found one, he noted down the location and any details.

  So Reece sat in the cold library, watching the lacklustre bulbs drop a little illumination on to people huddling together for warmth around the desks.

  Delaney had pointed out that they didn’t even know for certain where in Britain the man had been killed. That was true, but if Parade was embedded in the highest levels of British intelligence, he was likely living in the London area. Reece’s research therefore came up with three plausible incidents within the previous twelve months: an Air Raid Precautions warden found drowned in a canal in Hackney; a council official who disappeared while assessing damage at a bomb site in Richmond; and a policeman found stabbed in an alleyway in Erith.

  ‘Damn it, Maxime. Leave it to the professionals; 5 knows what it’s doing,’ Delaney said angrily. They were in the anteroom to his office in Baker Street. His secretary rose and discreetly left.

  ‘How many of them have been a field agent in enemy territory?’ Reece returned in the same tone. ‘None, I bet. I have. I know far better than they do what to look for.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘Choice of weapon. Location. Something small that you only recognize from experience.’


  Delaney glared at him then led the way into his office. A slim man was in the corner, drinking a glass of water. ‘This is Huw Evans,’ Delaney told him. ‘He’s our liaison from 5.’

  ‘Hello, Maxime,’ Evans said, placing his glass on the windowsill. ‘I wanted to tell you in person that we’re on top of the investigation, and it’s progressing. Of course, any information you can add will be gratefully received and considered. You might find the nugget we’ve missed.’

  ‘Go through the newspapers, like I did. There must be something there.’

  ‘Leave it now,’ Delaney interjected. Reece threw up his hands in exasperation. It was no better than the last war, when aristocratic imbeciles had been chosen to direct battles fought by a hundred thousand men. He went to the window. Outside, a group of nurses were talking to American airmen, sharing cigarettes. Reece glanced suspiciously at Evans. ‘Anything you can say in front of me, you can say in front of him,’ Delaney informed him.

  Something seemed to close over Reece like a cloak. It was the sense of fury at himself that he had come to know as his constant shadow, creeping behind him from the second he woke to the one before he drifted into light, interrupted sleep. ‘I told them everything I knew. The invasion points.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘They’ll have sent it straight to Berlin.’

  ‘Yes,’ Delaney sighed. ‘They will.’

  ‘We could change the plans, make land somewhere else instead. We …’ He was grasping at straws, trying to quell the anger.

  ‘We’ve been through this. We can’t just change the plans. It’s not like we picked the invasion zone out of a hat. We need deep enough harbours for the troopships, wide beaches for the landing craft; it needs to be the right distance from Paris but close enough to England for the RAF to cover us … Twenty different factors. You know this as well as anyone. All we can do is attempt to discover what Parade One is – how the hell it involves our warships or that bloody radio frequency – and pray it doesn’t cut our boys down on the beaches.’ Reece turned away and stared into the corner of the room. In another office someone was talking into a telephone. Delaney paused, considering something. ‘Look, there’s something you should know. A someone, really. Someone we have in custody.’