She rose and led the way into the lounge, sat in a leather armchair. The tray of coffee was immediately placed on the low table in front of her. Hamilton sat opposite. ‘Brandy?’ she asked.
‘Ah . . .’
‘Or perhaps you have a business meeting this afternoon? I am going to bed. I have had a long and exhausting trip to get here.’
‘I’d love a brandy.’
‘Two Hine Antique, Charles.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ He hurried off.
‘That fellow seems to be very fond of you,’ Hamilton remarked.
‘We’ve known each other a long time.’
‘You mean, you have lived in the Bahamas a long time?’
‘Is there anywhere else to live?’ She leaned forward. ‘Black or white?’
‘Oh, black, please.’
‘And sugar?’
‘Three lumps.’
Anna served. ‘I can see that you are a connoisseur. Of coffee,’ she added.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Simply that you know how to drink it. What do the Brazilians say? Coffee should be as black as night, as hot as hell, and as sweet as sin. And they should know, as they grow it. Thank you, Charles.’
The brandies were placed before them, and she raised her glass. ‘Your good health.’ She leaned back and crossed her knees, to his obvious gratification. So, you’re in real estate.’
‘You seem to know a great deal about me.’
‘I always like to know something about people I have known in my past.’
‘And I know so little about you.’
‘Oh, please, Mr Hamilton. If there is one thing that puts me off people, it is prevarication. You wouldn’t want to put me off you, would you?’
Now he did flush. ‘I . . .’
‘If you know that I was once married to Ballantine Bordman then you will know that I found it convenient to leave England in a hurry in April 1940. It was, as I recall, a considerable scandal.’
‘Well, I . . .’
‘I left England hours before being arrested by Special Branch, as a German spy.’
He finished his brandy. ‘You can say that, so calmly?’
‘It happened. So why not tell me what you are really doing here?’
He had regained control of himself. ‘As you appear to know, I am looking for real estate which might interest the firm I represent.’
She sipped coffee while she studied him. ‘Is that the truth?’
‘I am not accustomed to lying,’ he said with dignity. ‘I must apologize for just now. I could not believe my eyes when I saw you. Even after fourteen years. And to see that you had not changed at all! You could still be eighteen years old. Of course I knew about the scandal. But I didn’t know, nobody knew, how it had turned out. And to see you here, in a British colony . . . I mean, aren’t you wanted by the police? As a war criminal or something?’
He seemed genuinely upset. ‘Not any more,’ she said. ‘I was able to do the British Government a favour . . .’ More like two dozen favours, she reflected. ‘And they agreed to drop all charges against me.’
‘You mean you turned State’s evidence?’
‘That sounds so condemnatory. I helped them bring down the Nazi regime.’ Mainly, she thought, by killing as many of them as possible . . . including the arch-demon, Reinhard Heydrich. ‘Would you like another brandy?’
‘I would. But I don’t think it would be a good idea. So, you married a wealthy man and retired into private life?’
‘That is one way of putting it.’
‘With your own private island?’
‘They call them cays around here. But the accent is on the word private. I would hate to have that privacy interrupted by some ambitious reporter or journalist in search of a reputation-making story, which by definition would also have to be a reputation-destroying story.’
‘And your husband would like it even less, I suppose. I am assuming he knows about your past.’
‘Yes, he does, and yes, he would. And he is a very large and violent man.’ Which was a bit rough on poor Clive – who, having been an MI6 field agent for so much of his life, was just as capable of extreme and sometimes lethal violence as herself (although he would never claim to be quite in her class), but who was also, in his private life, the soul of good manners and polite behaviour. Which was all she had ever wanted to be, she thought sadly.
‘Well, don’t look at me,’ Hamilton protested. ‘I was just overwhelmed to see you again. I would never dream of revealing your secret to anyone.’
‘Thank you, Mr Hamilton. I truly appreciate that.’
‘On two conditions.’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘One is that you call me Mark.’
‘Mark. I like that. Very well, Mark. And the other?’
‘That you have dinner with me tonight, and perhaps show me some of the night life here in Nassau.’
‘I would love to do that, Mark. But I’m afraid I can’t.’
His turn to raise his eyebrows.
‘I have a previous engagement for dinner tonight. One which I’m afraid cannot be broken. It is a business matter.’
‘Oh!’ He looked quite upset.
Anna smiled. ‘But I should be free tomorrow.’
‘I got the impression that you were on your way back to your island. Cay.’
‘I am. But the cay will still be there in twenty-four hours.’ She finished her brandy and stood up. ‘Now I’m off to have my siesta; I need to be on the ball tonight. We’ll do something together tomorrow night, I promise.’
THE LAST ASSIGNMENT
Anna went upstairs, poured herself the bath she had wanted all day, while she undressed, and rang down for the laundry maid. Was she any further ahead?
There was a lot about Hamilton that was suspicious. And yet he could have been telling the truth. She did recall attending a cocktail party at Lady Pennworthy’s in 1939. But as there had been no one there of the slightest interest to her – professionally, that is, as a possible provider of information for Heydrich – her recollection was of colossal boredom.
The problem was, she wanted him to be telling the truth. It was a long time since she had encountered so attractive a man. Perhaps never. Indeed, she recalled that her initial reaction to Clive had been distinctly hostile – because he, as an MI6 agent who had instinctively sensed an enemy, had projected considerable hostility towards her, as he desperately tried to prevent her seducing his immediate charge, the Honourable Ballantine Bordman.
Her bath was ready just as the laundry maid arrived. Anna turned off the taps, wrapped herself in a hotel dressing gown, handed over the dress, and was promised that it would be returned by six. She closed and locked the door, took off the dressing gown and her jewellery, and sank into the water with a sigh of pleasure. She leaned back with her eyes closed, then soaped herself, slowly and luxuriously.
Clive had failed to achieve his objective. After all, she had been acting on Heydrich’s orders. But the initial hostility had grown as Clive had, even more desperately, tried to prevent Bordman from committing the ultimate folly of marrying her. At the time, she would have been more than happy had he succeeded; marriage to that fat oversexed slob had been the last thing she wished to experience. But, having been lured to her bed and in the throes of passion given her the information she had been told to obtain, Bordman had discovered that she was a virgin – the reason she had been selected for the assignment – and had insisted on acting the gentleman and proposing marriage. He had, in any event, fallen madly in love, if not with her, then certainly with her body and her SS-taught sexual capabilities. She was appalled. But Heydrich and his boss, Himmler, had been over the moon. If they had hoped that she could cause him to be indiscreet about his mission, as he had, they had never anticipated such a bonanza. Bordman had been not only a high-ranking diplomat but a prominent member of the British establishment. To have their tame agent installed at the very heart of that community, rubbing sh
oulders with all the top people in the land, had been beyond their wildest dreams.
Clive, as he later confessed, had been no less appalled, from the other side of the fence. He had tried to have her arrested on her arrival in England, and then to have her placed under round-the-clock surveillance. He had failed. The SD had given her a spurious title, Countess von Widerstand, a ridiculous choice because Widerstand means resistance, but her apparently aristocratic background had been painted in with meticulous and unarguable detail; and now, in addition, she was married into the British aristocracy.
Thus all his efforts to bring her down had been in vain, until that March day in 1939 when, as she was paying a private visit to Berlin, she had taken with her, in her handbag, the microfilm of secret documents she had stolen from Ballantine’s safe and photographed, instead of sending it through the spy network in London, as she was required to do. Heydrich had been furious – less, she thought, at the breach of security, than at the evidence that she would, when she felt like it, break his rule of absolute, immediate and unquestioning obedience to orders. It gave her immense satisfaction to know that in losing his temper and commanding her to be humiliated – strapped naked to a bar to be caned like a delinquent schoolgirl, then having electrodes attached to her genitals to make her suffer exquisite pain – he had been signing his own death warrant.
*
She shampooed her hair as she considered how a life can be changed, irrevocably and for ever by a single incident. Because three days later, when she had at last been able to leave her bed, she had gone for a walk . . . and encountered Clive, also on a visit to Berlin. As he had not known she was there, he had been equally taken aback; but when, in a mood of outraged defiance of the Reich and all it stood for, she had invited him into her apartment for a cup of coffee, it had seemed to him a golden opportunity to probe further, in the hope of discovering something that could be used against her to convince his superiors how dangerous she might be.
Half an hour later they had been in bed, and he had been halfway down the route she had led Ballantine, without any clear idea of where she wanted it to lead. But when they were interrupted by her SD minder and she disposed of the intruder with a single blow to the neck, he realized that to have her eliminated, or even arrested and deported, would have been a waste of a singular talent . . . if she could be ‘turned’ to work for Britain. To his delight, she had proved amenable – but he had no idea that her brain had been working in the reverse direction, calculating that by secretly working for the British she might be able to revenge herself on the Reich, without at the same time endangering her parents.
There had been no love involved in the transaction. However mutually satisfying they may have found each other, both of them had been working, in their different ways. It was only over the next few years of working together that mutual trust had developed into mutual respect, and then mutual admiration, and eventually (on her side, at least) love. Clive had been slower to reach that goal. She knew he had found it difficult to give his all, without reservation, to a woman with such lethal talents – and even more, to a woman who, although he had come to know her so well as a person, had, he always felt, had a part of her personality closed to all outsiders.
Well, he was not wrong there. If he respected, and indeed admired, the way in which she could apparently, at a moment’s notice, transform herself from a gentle and intensely feminine woman into an angel of destruction, he had no idea, no concept, of what that transformation involved. But then neither did she. She knew it had something to do with her SS training; but it had lurked in her subconscious before then, first surfacing early in her days at the training camp, long before she had known that she would be taught to kill and use her hands in unarmed combat, when one of the other girls had attempted to rape her, and in a moment of irresistible, concentrated but always cold fury she had broken her tormentor’s arm in two places. That incident had, in fact, alerted her instructors that they possessed something even more out of the ordinary than they had first supposed – which had led her, by the most remarkable route imaginable, to this bath in this hotel and would tomorrow take her back to her private paradise. By which time, she was resolved, it would all be history.
Unless Mark Hamilton got in the way – and she desperately hoped that he would not.
*
Hamilton sat on his bed. His entire body was tingling. Although he had not actually been able to touch her, he had sat within touching distance of her, inhaled her scent, listened to the soft melody of her voice, watched the movement of her hair, the sheer sheen of her legs, and, above all, gazed into the most compelling eyes he had ever seen.
If only it could be possible to stay here for ever, getting to know her, without ever having to think of her destruction. And that was an unthinkable thought – that if he did his job, all of that vibrant beauty would be reduced to dust. He wondered if, assuming the figures given him were correct, all of the apparent dozens of men who had got too close to her and perished for their temerity, had thought, with their last breath, that it had been worth it?
Botten had been the last, and had seemed to have been within reach of his goal. He had apparently never even seen the countess, but had employed a Mafia family to find her and carry out the job. He had told Moscow that he had succeeded, and that the hit would be completed in a week. Then both he and the family had simply disappeared off the face of the earth. Unfortunately, he had given Moscow no information as to how the plan was to be carried out, or the location of the victim’s home. Some victim!
Hamilton had found that hard to believe. He found it even harder to believe now, having met her. And yet, there had been something about her. She had not conveyed menace, or anything sinister. Simply an overwhelming confidence, the confidence of a woman who had no fear, because she had had a life of unbroken success, proved herself superior to any adversary time and again. And now he had joined the ranks of those adversaries. If she ever penetrated his cover, he wondered, how she would do it? And what would it feel like, to find himself looking into those huge blue eyes above the barrel of gun, knowing that he was living his last few seconds on earth? Suddenly he felt quite cold.
But the job had to be done; he had no desire to be reduced to dust himself. He sighed, and picked up the telephone. ‘I’d like to make a person-to-person call,’ he told the operator. ‘Long distance. It’s to a Mr John Smith, in London, England.’ He read the number from the note in his wallet.
‘Very good, sir. If you will hang up, I will call you back when the connection is made.’
‘Thank you.’ Hamilton replaced the receiver, looked at his watch. Two o’clock. That meant seven o’clock in England. They’d be having a pre-dinner drink.
He kicked off his shoes, lay back. Was she suspicious? He could think of no reason for her to mistrust him; but in any event he had to continue to allay her suspicions, hopefully gain an invitation to her cay. And he was going to enjoy that.
He had almost dosed off when the phone rang. ‘I have your connection, sir,’ the woman said.
‘Thank you.’ He sat up.
‘Yes?’ the familiar voice said.
‘I have made contact.’
‘At last. Give me the name and address, and then you may return.’
‘The name is Anna Bartley. I do not have the address.’
‘What?’
‘Yet. I will get it. The approach must be made with caution. Thus I may require another few days.’
‘Just get the address,’ the voice said. ‘We are waiting.’
The phone went dead.
*
The jangling seemed to come from another planet, only slowly penetrating Anna’s subconscious. Having not slept for thirty-six hours, even though her body and her mind were trained to such extreme exercises in stamina, she had been more exhausted than she had realized. I am getting old, she thought. Another reason for calling a halt, before that treasured stamina gave out.
She reached for the phone and pic
ked it up. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs Bartley,’ Charles said. ‘But there is a gentleman who wishes to see you.’
‘Another one?’ Then she realized who this one had to be; he was, after all, early. She wasn’t in the proper mood for what had to be done. But actually, she was in the best possible physical position to carry out her plan. ‘I assume this one’s name is Andrews?’
Charles was surprised. ‘Why, yes, ma’am. So it is.’
‘And he has checked in?’
‘No, ma’am. He has not done so.’ He sounded even more surprised. ‘He does not have any luggage.’
‘Thank you, Charles. Will you ask him to come up to my room?’
‘Ah . . . yes, ma’am.’
Anna replaced the phone, then got out of bed, went to the bathroom to wash her face and clean her teeth, and brushed her hair. Then she took the Walther from her shoulder bag, unlocked the bedroom door, and got back into bed – sitting up with the sheet arranged across her lap, her hair shrouding the pillow, and her right hand, holding the pistol, resting on her groin and thus concealed by the sheet. She did not suppose she was going to have to use it here in the Royal Vic, or anywhere else in Nassau; she certainly hoped she would not have to, even if she had the legal right to do so, but the sudden appearance of the gun could have a devastating effect on an adversary’s ability to concentrate.
A few minutes later there was a tap on the door.
‘It’s not locked,’ she called.
It swung open, and she gazed at the man, who was gazing at her. But, unlike Hamilton, he had looked at her often enough before, and in the nude. ‘Every time I see you,’ he remarked, ‘you are naked and in bed, with someone or other.’ He spoke with a soft southern drawl.
‘I am always naked when I am in bed,’ she pointed out. ‘I do not own any nightclothes. And as you can see, at this moment I am sharing my all only with myself. Sometimes it makes a pleasant change. I think you should close the door.’
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