The Eldorado Network

by Derek Robinson

  'In the end . . .' He swallowed. 'That's right. I killed him with a typewriter.'

  Julie hid her face in her hands. After a while she looked up. 'You killed him?' she said. 'I mean, dead?'

  Luis nodded. 'I had to.'

  'You mean you hit him with a typewriter and . . .'

  Again he nodded. 'I had to. You see, he was going for his telephone.'

  He looked into her eyes for a long moment. 'That can't be right,' he said. 'Can it?'

  'Oh, Luis . . .' She reached across and took his hand.

  'I can't eat any more,' he said. 'I'm sorry." His right hand was trembling more violently than ever. She helped him into the bedroom, helped him take off his clothes, helped him get into bed. She closed the curtains and went out. Five minutes later, when 'she looked in, he was asleep.

  Otto Krafft looked dreadful. For a man who had always been so trim and chipper, the change was almost shocking. His eyes looked as if he hadn't slept for a week, he had no appetite, and his nerves were a mess. 'Look, old chap, you obviously can't carry on like this,' Richard Fischer told him. 'Go and see the doctor, for God's sake.'

  Brigadier Christian noticed his changed condition, too. 'What's the trouble, Krafft?' he asked. 'Off your food, or something?'

  'No, sir. I don't know, sir,' Otto's thumbs fretted against his forefingers. He looked thoroughly wretched.

  'Well, I don't want you going around in«that state. You make me feel tired. Why don't you take a couple of days off?'

  Otto chewed his lip. 'I was just going to ask you if I might, sir.'

  'Take a week. Get up in the mountains, do a bit of skiing. Hartmann can handle your work. Go on, get out of this dump.' Christian watched him trail out. 'Overwork,' he said to himself happily. He liked to see his staff trying too hard.

  Luis slept the clock around. It was mid-afternoon by the time he had bathed and shaved and dressed, so he and Julie went out to have something to eat in one of the spacious tea rooms in the fashionable Rua Garrett, where the settees were comfortably cushioned and the waitresses were dressed in black and white like maids in an English stately home. 'Luis was hungry. They ordered hot sausage-rolls, pancakes with preserves, and pastries.

  Julie was wearing a new dress of grey silk. It made every other woman in the room seem lumpy. Luis enjoyed looking at her.

  'Listen, Luis,' she said, pouring tea, 'just give me the bare facts. Don't try and gussy it up. The bare facts are bound to be crazy enough anyway.'

  He described what had happened at the bank and how he had followed Alfred Krafft to Oporto. He told her about the bicycle, the room full of sharp edges, Bruno, the ammonia, the chase, the fight, the typewriter. 'The silly part about it is that I never wanted to hurt him,' he said. 'If only he had explained, we could have arranged something, I'm sure of it. But when he threw the ammonia, I had no choice. As it was he damn near got his hands on the gun before I hit him.'

  'So far, so bad,' Julie said. 'Now tell me what he could have explained. And keep it simple.

  'Oh, this was very simple. Alfred Krafft is related to Otto Krafft. You met Otto at the German Embassy. Brothers, probably. When Otto saw how much money Eldorado was making, he reckoned there was room for two in this business, so he invented an agent called Eagle. Alfred was already in Oporto, running his little shop, so Alfred became Eagle, just like me.'

  'Wait a minute . . . Otto didn't get this idea from you?'

  'Certainly not. He still thinks Eldorado and company are in England. Otto dreamed up his swindle all on his own.'

  'Coincidence.'

  Luis shrugged. 'We both saw the same way to milk the Abwehr, that's all. Actually, the Krafft brothers had a far better system, because Otto could write to Alfred and tell him what to put in his reports. < saw the letters.'

  'That's sweet,' Julie murmured. 'Sweet and neat and foolproof. So what went wrong?'

  'One of Eagle's reports contradicted one of Garlic's reports. When Christian heard about that, he ordered them to meet-- in Manchester, for some reason-- and straighten out the confusion.'

  'Oh my God,'Julie said. 'Poor old Otto must have filled his pants.'

  'Yes, he must. If he sent the order, Garlic would report that Eagle had failed to keep the rendezvous, and that would be the end of Eagle.'

  'But he had to send the order.'

  'Yes. And as soon as he'd sent it, he telephoned Alfred in Oporto, told him to get the first train to Lisbon and intercept that letter before my man Stork turned up from the Spanish Embassy to collect it and send it on to London.'

  Julie shook her head. 'That was pretty damn desperate, wasn't it?'

  'It only seems desperate to us because we know better. All Alfred knew was what Otto had told him: that the letter was going to be claimed from the bank by someone who worked for the Spanish Embassy.'

  'I still think it was a hell of a gamble.'

  'Maybe. But what would you have done?'

  Julie sipped her tea.

  'And look at it this way,' Luis went on. 'Suppose they'd succeeded. Suppose Alfred stole the letter and therefore Garlic never heard about the rendezvous. Then Eagle could safely report that Garlic failed to appear.'

  'Eagle would be in the clear,' Julie said, 'and Eldorado would be in the soup.'

  'It was worth the risk.'

  He ate several sausage-rolls and a couple of pancakes.

  'What now?' Julie asked. 'Will you tell Charles Templeton?'

  'I think not,' Luis said. 'He would have to inform London. The British intercepted an Abwehr signal about Eagle. I don't want the Abwehr to intercept a British signal about Cabrillo. No, let's keep it a secret.'

  'It won't be a secret in Madrid. They're going to know that Eagle's disappeared.'

  'I've been thinking about that.' Luis brightened, 'Look, maybe I can help them. Suppose Garlic reports, via Eldorado, that Eagle kept the rendezvous but that he seemed very depressed and he talked of suicide. How's that?'

  'Lousy,1 Julie said. 'Suicidal for you. How can Garlic meet Eagle? As soon as Otto reads that, he'll know you're lying.'

  'Good heavens!' Luis exclaimed. 'So he will. I never thought of that.'

  'You'll just have to play it straight, Luis.'

  'You're absolutely right.' He took her hand. 'I really didn't want to do it, you know,' he said. 'I thought of it over and over again, coming back on the train .I'm sure he would have shot me if I hadn't . . . you know . . .'

  Julie linked her fingers with his, and squeezed.

  'Doing it with a typewriter makes it worse, somehow,' he said. 'And in front of the damn dog, too.' He looked down, blinking. 'I hope someone looks after that dog,' he said.

  'Yes.' She gave him a few moments to recover. 'Now let me tell you something. While you were having such an exciting time in Oporto, the Japs attacked America. So now we're in the war too.'

  'This war?' Luis exclaimed. 'Europe?'

  'Sure. Hitler declared war on the States. Don't worry, it's all legal. I thought that would make you happy.'

  'War on five continents!' Luis cried. 'My God, what a business opportunity!'

  Otto Krafft came back after a week's leave. He still looked tired, but his nerves were much more settled. The first person he went to see was Dr Hartmann.

  'Welcome back!' Hartmann said, shaking his hand. 'Yes, the fresh air has done you good, I can see that. Do you feel better?'

  'More or less. Has anything Happened?' Otto's voice was flat, as if he found it hard to make an effort.

  'The news is not good, I'm afraid. Yesterday we had a report from Garlic. Eagle failed to attend the rendezvous.'

  Otto nodded. He seemed unsurprised. 'Let's go up and see Brigadier Christian,' he said.

  Christian received them in the anteroom. 'My room's being redecorated,' he told them. 'Are you feeling better?'

  'I've heard about Eagle,' Otto said.

  Christian raised a warning finger. 'Let's not rush into judgement. There may be special factors, unknown circumstances which we--'
>
  'Eagle's dead.'

  Christian buffed his moustache with the back of his hand. Hartmann stared at Otto's profile. There were slight hollows in the cheek, he noticed. 'You sound as if you know something, Krafft,' Christian said.

  'I can't explain it all,' Otto said. 'When I left I kept worrying about Eagle. I knew there was something wrong. Perhaps I had a premonition. In the end I telephoned his branch office in Oporto.'

  'Was that wise?' Christian asked softly.

  'I said I was a customer. They said he'd disappeared in England, he was missing, they were getting worried. So I . . .' Otto swallowed a couple, of times. 'So I went to Oporto.'

  'Take your time.' Christian got up, stopped a rattling window, and sat down, carefully hitching his trousers. 'Now then: you went to Oporto.'

  'Yes. The branch manager was . . . was ... .' Otto blew his nose while he searched for the word. 'Was shocked. He'd just heard that Eagle had been found dead. Head bashed in.'

  Dr Hartmann recoiled.

  'Where did this happen?' Christian asked.

  'London. The police said it was robbery.'

  'And what do you think?'

  Otto rested his elbows on his knees and pressed his hand-kerchief against his eyes. 'I think MI5 killed him, sir,' he : said, his voice breaking.

  Christian nodded. 'It was not your fault, Otto,' he said. "You did all you could. Don't feel guilty.'

  Otto stood up, wiping his eyes. Christian gestured towards the door, and Otto went out.

  The two men sat in sombre silence for a while. 'A remarkable demonstration of loyalty,' Christian remarked.

  'Yes, indeed,' Hartmann agreed. The window rattled again, and Christian gave it a frown. This was obviously one of those days.

  After the killing of Eagle, Julie Conroy stopped talking about going to Oporto. She had always been aware that what Luis did was risky; now the knowledge that it was murderously dangerous made her feel that any criticism would be petty. The danger did not come from the Portuguese police; reports of the murder dropped out of the newspapers after a couple of days, and Luis was certain that there was no way in which he could be linked with Alfred Krafft. But the whole affair emphasised even more violently that to work with the Abwehr was to take a ride on a tiger.

  Luis's response was to work harder. In the first six weeks of 1942 the Eldorado Network added two more sub-agents: 'Haystack,' who ran a hotel in London, and 'Pinetree', a British employee at the American Embassy. This made a total of seven, plus Bluebird and Stork in the Spanish Embassies at London and Lisbon. Luis was anxious to fill the vacuum left by Eagle. His enormous appetite for work always impressed Julie, and sometimes depressed her too: there seemed to be no limit to his ambition, yet -- as far as she could tell-- no purpose to it, either. Luis, it seemed, wanted to succeed because he enjoyed being a success. For him, the Second World War was a sales territory. She was reminded of her father, striving to sell more Coke in Indiana than ever before. Luis Cabrillo really did aim to become the first spy millionaire. It puzzled and annoyed her until it finally provoked her into challenging him again.

  'What are you going to do with all this money, Luis?' she asked one day towards the end of February, when he was checking his bank statements.

  He smiled, and dropped the statements into a file. 'What would you like me to do with it, Julie?'

  'You mean you haven't any ideas?'

  'Money is always useful.'

  'Only if you spend it. The stuffs no good otherwise.'

  'That's a very practical point of view. I don't think I'm practical. For me, business is a romantic thing.'

  'Luis, you're about as romantic as a claw hammer.'

  He nodded. 'The claw hammer is a very romantic tool. You can build anything with a claw hammer.'

  'Maybe.' She looked around, at the desks and shelves and filing cabinets. 'But you're not actually building anything, are you? This is all nothing. It doesn't exist.'

  He nodded happily. 'That's the whole point, Julie. I've invented a way to make money out of war without actually hurting anyone.'

  'Otto's brother wasn't hurt?'

  'That was an accident. Self-defence.'

  'Defending what, Luis? Your life, or your business?'

  She could see that he was getting bored with this discussion. 'I don't see how one can be separated from the other,' he said, 'Do you?'

  'I guess not. I just wish that. . .'She screwed up a paper, threw it at a waste basket, and missed. 'I wish that we were helping the Allies, that's all.'

  'Oh so do I. That was my original idea, remember. But they didn't seem to want me when I offered, and now they probably don't need me at all.'

  Julie reluctantly accepted the force«of his argument. Britain had massive allies in Russia and the U.S.A. Why should anyone bother about an eccentric freelance intelligence agent who traded exclusively in fiction from a neutral backwater?

  She got on with her work, which included dealing in an ever wider range of commodities for Bradburn & Wedge. The income from the degreasing patents financed a brisk trade in impregnated papers, and when the first two shipments of lemonade crystals got torpedoed in the Mediterranean, von Klausbrunner came back for more. The war had created a seller's market; Julie bought almost anything she found: stocks of pencils, tablecloths, underwear, tennis rackets, candles, shoes. Bradburn & Wedge prospered, paid its taxes, and allowed Luis to get on with his work with out interference from the Portuguese Government.

  Nevertheless, one other worry troubled Julie, and it refused to go away.

  Luis had been unlucky when his Garlic report contradicted Eagle's information, but it was the kind of bad luck that was always likely to happen; in fact it was increasingly likely, now that Eldorado was enlarging his team. It was amazing that he had got away with his inventions for so long, but surely someone in Berlin should have noticed discrepancies by now? The longer he survived, the more she worried. The Abwehr was a big, professional organisation with some very intelligent and hardnosed people at the top. Why were they so certain of Eldorado? Or-- even more worrying -- if they suspected that Eldorado was cheating them, what were they doing about it?

  Chapter 57

  At first, Hitler's declaration of war against the United States slightly alarmed Brigadier Christian. He had visited a cousin in Minnesota in 1934, and he remembered Americans as a very energetic people. However he soon stopped worrying when, in the three months after Pearl Harbour, the Japanese captured a vast empire that stretched from the borders of India to the edge of Australia, and all at very little cost. Clearly the Americans would have more than enough to do in the Pacific. This was confirmed in Christian's mind when he heard that the U-boats had actually profited from America's entry into the war: they were sinking so many American vessels that the Allies were now losing ships faster than they could replace them.

  In fact there seemed to be very little that the Americans could do to help anyone. In the spring of 1942 the Russians launched three counter-offensives; all failed disastrously; and the Americans watched helplessly as the German armies thrust east and south, aiming for the oilfields of the Caucasus. In North Africa, Rommel attacked suddenly, threw the British out of Libya and got within sixty miles of Alexandria; there was nothing the Americans could do about that, either. Nor was there much the British could do to harm Germany except revive the bombing offensive that had been such a failure in 1941. It soon became obvious that the R.A.F. was still incapable of precision bombing: bigger raids merely caused even more indiscriminate damage. Christian was angry when he heard about the first thousand-bomber raid, on Cologne in May. Two weeks later, he read with satisfaction in a secret Abwehr report that life in Cologne was virtually back to normal. 'Good,' he said to himself. 'Let the stupid British keep wasting their strength.'

  Christian felt content. He enjoyed his work, and he enjoyed the approval of his superiors. Now that he was head of Madrid Abwehr they usually gave him anything he asked for: more men, more money, more office space. Report
s reached him regularly from the Eldorado Network (now expanded to nine with the recruitment of new sub-agents in Plymouth and Belfast) and they were eagerly received in Berlin. The loss of Eagle had been a blow, but the damage was only temporary. For a while, Otto had withdrawn into a state of silent self-reproach. However, after Christian had given him control of one of the new sub-agents ('Hambone', a telephone operator in Belfast) he slowly brightened up, and everyone felt better.

  Then Wolfgang Adler came back.

  Christian found him sitting in the anteroom one afternoon when he returned from lunch. Wolfgang stood up respectfully. He was wearing a new Wehrmacht officer's uniform, and his face was deeply windburned. He looked tired but composed.

  'Well, well,' Christian said. Wolfgang nodded, and gave a wry smile.

  'You'd better come in,' Christian said. 'Is this an official visit, or what?' They went into his office and sat in his new armchairs.

  'No, it's not official,' Wolfgang said. His voice had changed; it was deeper and easier. Christian noticed grey flecks in his hair, and creases radiating from his eyes. There were also new lines bracketing his mouth. He looked ten years older. 'I mean it's legal, I haven't deserted or anything.' Wolfgang gave a little laugh. 'That's one thing about the Russian Front: nobody deserts. Nowhere to desert to.'

  Christian thought about that and decided to let it pass. 'What do you want here?' he asked.

  'Nothing, really. The fact is, I'm on convalescent leave. They gave me a month to recuperate. Frostbite, mainly. You see?' He pointed to his left ear, half of which was missing. 'And a few toes. Also I got a shell splinter in the back, but mainly it was frostbite. They said I could go anywhere I liked to recuperate, and I couldn't think of anywhere else so I said Madrid. At least it's nice and warm here.'

  'And when your leave is up? What then?'

  'Oh back to Novgorod. Provided Novgorod's still there.'

  Christian nodded. 'I'm sorry to hear about your injuries, Adler.'

  'Oh, well.' Wolfgang stretched his legs and placed the heel of one boot on the toe of the other. 'It wasn't as bad as it might have been. Funny thing: you remember my arm and leg used to hurt when I was here? Well, they stopped hurting as soon as I got to Russia. Odd, that.'