Ring of Spies

by Alex Gerlis

  SS-Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg was thrilled, of course. He was naturally claiming full credit for Agent Milton’s intelligence, but privately, within the RSHA, he did have the grace to acknowledge Rauter’s role in it. Indeed, on more than one occasion he’d told Rauter that his patience before activating Milton and the way he’d put in place Agent Byron as the radio operator and Agent Donne as the contact between the two was a perfect example of a well-run intelligence operation.

  You should write it up in a textbook on espionage, Franz! If only we’d had more operations like this then we wouldn’t be facing the… difficulties the Reich is going through at present.

  So trusted was he that Schellenberg had allowed him to move back to his old office in Tirpitzufer from Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Rauter knew he wasn’t in any danger – other than from RAF bombs and the encroaching Red Army. In Tirpitzufer, colleagues looked at him admiringly and not without a little envy. Franz Rauter, our number one spy master – who’d have thought it! Some of them had been sent to join front-line units in the east, their age and lack of combat experience deemed irrelevant.

  And along with the kudos, he found he was enjoying running such a successful and well-regarded operation. It was undeniably exciting.

  But by the afternoon of 6 February his mood had become more downbeat. A message had been received at Cuxhaven from Agent Byron and it was not good news. Word had reached Byron that MI5 seemed to have discovered that a man known as Chiltern was alive and were on to him. He wanted to know what he should do. Franz Rauter hadn’t come across the name Chiltern before. He locked the door of his office and removed one of Otto Prager’s notebooks from his safe. It took him a while to find what he was looking for among the pages of small, densely packed writing, some of it written horizontally, some vertically.

  Chiltern, he discovered, was a man called Arthur Chapman-Collins, a Nazi sympathiser and the man who’d first identified Milton as a potential agent back in 1933, as well as various other agents – including Agent Byron himself. Chapman-Collins had been suspected by MI5 in 1939 and the Abwehr had helped him fake his death. As far as Franz Rauter could tell, he had been told to vanish, but now it appeared he’d failed to do that. He’d obviously been careless; they all were in the end.

  Despite the chill of the afternoon, Rauter opened his office window and lit a cigar. He needed to think. If the British tracked down Chiltern, that could lead to Milton and Byron and the end of Rauter’s spy ring. He shivered at the very thought of it: the inquiry he’d face, the fall from grace, and only if he was very fortunate would he be spared a criminal investigation, which meant becoming a guest of the Gestapo. He’d probably end his days hiding in the ruins of a building on the outskirts of Berlin alongside old men and young boys as they tried to hold up the Red Army with weapons from the Great War.

  It didn’t take him long to decide what to do – he realised he didn’t have much choice. This was about his own survival as much as that of Milton, Byron and Donne. He remained by the open window long enough to finish his cigar, then closed it and turned back to his desk. He wrote four drafts of the message to Agent Byron. When he finally had one he was satisfied with, he put in a call: the senior cypher clerk was to report to him immediately.

  ‘Encode it, Manfred, and have it sent from Cuxhaven tonight. Have them repeat the transmission tomorrow. Do you understand?’

  Manfred said he did, but as he prepared to leave the room, Franz Rauter said he wanted one final look at the message. He read it through carefully, then nodded slowly and handed it back to the clerk. He was satisfied, but he’d wanted to be sure.

  He had, after all, just signed a man’s death warrant.

  Chapter 20

  London, February 1945

  Hugh Harper lay dying in one of the guest bedrooms of the extensive Georgian country house in Hampshire that had been home to his family for half a dozen generations. The distant New Forest was just visible in the fading light.

  The journey to his impending death was not nearly as painful as he’d spent a lifetime imagining it would be, but it was accompanied by regrets, as he’d always feared. He felt like he’d been asleep for days and slightly resented his wife having moved him during that time into a spare bedroom for his final days on earth. He could, however, see her point and was determined not to make a fuss; he didn’t want to die with any rancour – there’d been enough of that in his life. He very much regretted his indiscretion in Paris a few years ago but felt now was not the time to raise it. He resolved to be as serene and dignified as he could manage. He’d spent the past hour thinking about his obituary in The Times. It would inevitably be somewhat sparse; they invariably were for people from his world.

  Senior civil servant… Home Office… service to his country…

  He hoped people would see through the code. He glanced at the wall, photographs of various animals hanging on the floral wallpaper. His eyes fell on Shooter, a red setter he’d got when they first married that had lived for fifteen wonderful years, quite the most outstanding dog he’d ever had. He felt tears fill his eyes and begin to trickle down his face and he wiped them away, annoyed at this display of emotion. With some effort he hauled himself up in bed and stared out at the willow tree in the middle of the lawn, its magnificent branches reminding him of a dancer frozen in motion. His grandfather had told him that his own grandfather had planted that tree and made him promise to care for it. Each year he waited for it to turn green once more, and when it did so, he’d be relieved he’d fulfilled his familial obligation. He felt his eyes fill with tears once more, at which moment his wife came into the bedroom more noisily than he thought was appropriate in the circumstances.

  He told her how he felt, reaching out for her hand.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Hugh: you have a nasty bout of influenza, and had you taken to your bed when you were first advised, you’d have probably been better by now. Instead you’re lying here feeling sorry for yourself. I imagine you think you’re dying as usual?’

  He tried to argue, insisting she was relying on the diagnosis of one doctor, a man well past retirement age. Perhaps a glass of whisky would aid his recovery…

  ‘You’ll take the tablets he gave you and drink honey, glycerine and lemon.’

  ‘But I heard him say I should drink.’

  ‘He didn’t mean alcohol, Hugh. Now come on, sit up and take these tablets.’

  Later that evening he felt slightly better, well enough in fact to leave his bed. Once he was satisfied his wife was asleep, he crept downstairs and found an unopened bottle of single malt where he hid them from her in the boot room. An hour later, he was in a strange world, brought about he assumed by a combination of his illness, the medication and the whisky. He felt detached from reality and realised his mind had a strange clarity to it, for once not dealing with multiple worries at the same time but instead able to concentrate on one subject.

  And as he lay there in the dark, the moon ahead of him broken up by the ghostly branches of the willow, his mind settled on the troubled search for the elusive Agent Milton. Richard Prince had come highly recommended, but it was probably no fault of his that no progress had been made. Harper had set King and Prince a deadline of the end of January to find Milton, and that deadline had passed a week ago.

  And now he had the generals on his back, insisting that the Allied plans for crossing the Rhine were being held up by his – his – failure to find the traitor.

  He was convinced that Prince’s instinct was correct, that their best way of finding Milton was through Arthur Chapman-Collins and the other attendees at the Pimlico hotel dinners. They’d made some progress – or so he’d thought – when they went to visit the chap at Brixton Prison. He played over and over in his mind what he’d said about Chapman-Collins; how he was living in London, right under their noses, staying with the King and Queen in the palace.

  Harper was convinced the answer to the riddle lay in those three words: ‘in the palace’ – so much so that
it had led to a major row with the royal household that had probably put paid to any slim chance he’d had of a knighthood. Harper’s brother-in-law had been at Marlborough with Tommy Lascelles, the King’s private secretary, and he’d hoped an informal approach would clear up the very remote possibility that Chapman-Collins could somehow indeed be at the palace with the King and Queen.

  But Lascelles said he was too busy and was in any case spending most of his time at Windsor, so Harper had been palmed off with a nervous assistant private secretary, who completely overreacted – panicked would probably be a better word – and assumed MI5 believed there was a German spy at Buckingham Palace. It would be fair to say that all hell broke loose. The King heard about it and asked Churchill what the hell was going on, as a result of which even more hell broke loose and it required what Harper had to acknowledge was the admirably calm intervention of Sir Roland Pearson before the whole business was sorted out. One fortunate consequence was that at least the nervous assistant private secretary did have every single member of the household checked out and it was established that Arthur Chapman-Collins was not posing as a footman or a lady of the bedchamber, which Harper had always thought was only an outside chance of at best.

  Somewhere around midnight, he began to think on different lines. They’d taken the phrase too literally. What if ‘in the palace’ didn’t actually mean Buckingham Palace itself, or indeed any other royal palace, but another type of palace? His mind drifted as he walked through that area around Buckingham Palace and St James’s, an area he knew well: it was where his mother’s parents had lived and where he himself often walked on his way to his own town apartment. The pale green luminous hands on his bedside clock told him it was one o’clock as he strolled down Buckingham Gate and decided to turn left into Wilfred Street, and almost immediately saw the pub on the corner of Catherine Place.

  It was the small hours of Thursday – 8 February – when Hugh Harper had his revelation about the Palace Arms, a pub where he’d drunk a few times. He set his alarm for six o’clock. He’d call Lance King first thing.

  * * *

  Early the same morning, Jim Maslin was woken by the sound of a key turning in the main door of his small flat in Shepherd’s Bush. He was confused at first and glanced at his wristwatch on the bedside table: it was seven o’clock. By the time he reached for the knife he kept under the bed, the figure of a man was silhouetted in the doorway of the bedroom, leaning casually against it, his hat at a rakish angle and the lit end of his cigarette glowing orange-red in the gloom.

  ‘Having a lie-in, Agent Donne?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Byron, I could have stabbed you.’

  ‘Well you were certainly taking your time about it. Get dressed quickly and come into the lounge. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  Fifteen minutes later, Agent Donne was sitting next to Agent Byron at the small table, staring at the map Byron had sketched. His tea had turned cold in its cup, an unpleasant film shining on its surface. He no longer felt like drinking it but was already on his third cigarette, the remains of the other two stubbed out in the saucer.

  ‘What time did you say your shift is today?’ Byron asked.

  ‘I told you, twelve noon to eight o’clock, but there’s always overtime on that shift. Last night I didn’t leave till eleven. I had to walk all the way back here.’

  Byron held his wrist high, the dial catching the gloomy light of the tiny room. ‘It’s nearly half seven now. Let’s go through it once more. Mornings are the best time to catch him anyway, and you can travel into town during the rush hour. You’ll need to be away by a quarter past eleven to be sure of being at work by twelve.’

  ‘And when did you say you were told about this?’

  ‘Last night, but as I said, no more questions. They stressed that it’s urgent. The number 11 bus will take you straight to Victoria Street. To get back to the hospital, pick up the 36 in Grosvenor Place… there, see it?’

  Agent Donne lit another cigarette, a mixture of nerves and excitement causing his hand to tremble slightly. ‘I’d better get a move on, hadn’t I?’

  ‘You better had. And whatever you do, not a word about this to Milton, you understand? He doesn’t need to know.’

  Maslin nodded.

  ‘That knife you were going to wave at me…’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Let’s have a look.’

  Agent Byron studied the knife like an expert valuing a piece of rare ivory, running his finger along the blade. ‘It’s not good enough. Here – take this.’ He placed a flick knife on the map.

  ‘I’ve got to be at work myself later and I won’t finish till late. Whatever you do, don’t take any overtime tonight. Make sure you’re back here by nine. I’ll call you then – I’ll have to let them know what happened. I’ll ask if you saw Mother today, and assuming all goes well, you say yes and that she was a bit off colour.’

  ‘And if it didn’t go well?’

  Agent Byron said nothing, but his expression made his feelings about that quite clear.

  * * *

  It was 9.30 when Hugh Harper woke up. For the first time in days he felt better. His temperature had subsided, he was no longer bathed in perspiration and the aches and pains had largely gone. When he sat up in bed, it was no longer with difficulty. He gazed out over the lawn. The willow tree appeared to have grown more leaves overnight and now had a green hue to it. It was only then that he realised he’d slept through his alarm clock. He’d meant to call Lance King three and a half hours earlier. He hurried downstairs and straight to his study.

  ‘By the sounds of it you’re better, sir?’

  ‘Never mind that, Lance. I think I know what palace Curtis could have been referring to.’

  ‘Go on, sir.’

  ‘There’s a pub on the corner of Wilfred Street and Catherine Place: the Palace Arms. It is, as Curtis said, right under our noses.’

  There was silence at the other end of the line before Hugh Harper heard what sounded like a suppressed cough followed by King’s reply. ‘Oh my God, sir… you’re right!’

  * * *

  The woman had been very clear.

  They’re on to you but you’re not to panic.

  Which was easy enough for her to say, but who in his situation wouldn’t at least worry – be scared to death, to be honest?

  They know nothing about this place. They only know about Gerrards Cross. They’ll have no idea you’re using the name Rodney Bird.

  Somehow that didn’t sound particularly reassuring.

  Stay in this apartment. Don’t leave it. Don’t let anyone in. The landlord will keep an eye on you and bring you food. If you stay put and don’t do anything stupid, you should be all right. We’ll sort something out. Do you understand?

  He said nothing and she repeated the question; he said yes, he did understand. She was very firm and clear. He regarded her as excessively bossy and he didn’t like being told what to do by a woman, but he did realise he had no choice. He’d stay in the attic flat above the pub – as cramped and stuffy as it was – and hope it didn’t take them too long to sort something out. He wasn’t a fool, though; she had a cheek to warn him not to do anything stupid.

  * * *

  Agent Donne had studied Byron’s hand-drawn map one more time before he was satisfied he’d committed it to memory. He tore it into shreds and burnt them in the sink, using the cup of untouched tea to flush them down the plughole. He pushed the few remaining scraps through with the end of a teaspoon.

  The journey took a bit longer than he’d anticipated, and it was just before nine o’clock when he got off at Victoria Street and walked up Palace Street and from there into Catherine Place. The Palace Arms was a handsome four-storey corner building at the end of a residential street. He walked past it into Wilfred Street, where he found a narrow alley giving access to the rear of the building and an outside staircase leading up to the fourth-floor attic.

  Before leaving his flat in Shepherd’s Bush, h
e’d worked out his story in case he was stopped. He’d prepared the knapsack he took to work with him: it usually contained his vacuum flask, sandwiches and a spare pullover. He’d found a screwdriver and a hammer in the flat and had packed them along with his brown work coat. He’d left out the flask to create some space. At the bottom of the staircase he put on the work coat and checked that the flick knife was still in his trouser pocket.

  The door to the attic apartment opened directly onto the staircase. There was no reply to his knock at first, and when he knocked again, there was a hollow echo as if the place was deserted. After a while, though, he became aware of a floral curtain twitching in the small window next to the door. He knocked once more.

  ‘Good morning, sir, I’m sorry to bother you, but it’s about the electricity – the landlord asked me to check it.’ He held up the screwdriver as proof of his innocent purpose. The door had opened on a chain, with the face of a man just visible behind it.

  ‘What did you say?’

  He goes under the name of Bird: looks like one too, apparently.

  ‘I said I’m here from the landlord to fix the electricity, Mr Bird.’

  Inside the attic, Rodney Bird hesitated. The woman had said not to let anyone in, but this didn’t sound like it was just anyone. This was someone sent by the landlord, who they trusted, and only the previous day he’d told the landlord about the cupboard.

  ‘Ah, so you’re the maintenance man, are you?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Rodney Bird’s hand froze on the chain. Don’t do anything stupid, the woman had told him, and he hoped this didn’t count as stupid. He could always telephone the landlord; he was only a few floors below him.