‘Well . . .’ Colour crept into Katherine’s cheeks. ‘I volunteered. To be like you.’
Anna went to the sideboard, poured two glasses of schnapps. It was still not yet nine o’clock, but she desperately needed a drink. ‘To be like me.’ She handed a glass to her sister. ‘What did Mama and Papa say?’
‘Well . . . they weren’t happy.’
‘Because they think you have signed up to become an SS whore. They think I am an SS whore.’
‘They don’t know the truth.’
Anna frowned. ‘What truth?’
‘What you do.’
‘And you do – know what I do.’
‘Yes. Now. Dr Cleiner told me.’
Anna sat down. ‘You have been to the SD training camp?’
Katherine sat beside her. ‘I completed the course two days ago. That is why I am here. They told me I could come to see you before I commenced my final training.’
‘You have completed the initial course,’ Anna said slowly, remembering her own experiences, five years before. ‘You mean you have . . .’
‘I have killed a man, yes. He was a condemned criminal, anyway.’
‘And that makes you happy.’
‘Well . . . you had to do that, didn’t you? Dr Cleiner considers you his most successful pupil.’
If he does, Anna thought, it can only be because I defied him. But the implications of what she was hearing were shattering.
Katherine squeezed her hand. ‘And now we’ll be working together. I am so proud.’
Oh, you silly, silly girl, Anna thought. I have done what I have done for the past five years in order to keep you, and Mama and Papa, alive, even if they are not aware of that. But I am also committed to destroying every vestige of Nazism . . . and that now includes you. Did she dare tell her the truth? But that way lay suicide; she had no faith in her sister’s strength of character. She could only hope to rescue her when this whole filthy edifice came crashing down. Which meant an added responsibility, both then and now.
‘Hardly together,’ she remarked.
‘Oh, I understand that you are far senior to me,’ Katherine said.
‘Yes,’ Anna agreed. ‘But I am sure we’ll see each other from time to time. Now, I must change my clothes and get to the office. When do you start your final training?’
‘I start the day after tomorrow. They say it will take another month. I understand that it is to do with deportment and that sort of stuff.’ She followed Anna into the bedroom, looked at the jewellery on the dressing table. ‘Will I be given things like that to wear?’
‘When you have completed your final training, and if they are satisfied with you.’
‘Anna . . . will the additional training involve . . . I mean . . .’
Anna threw her shirt and slacks and camiknickers on a chair.
‘Anna?’ Katherine asked. ‘That mark on your side . . . you didn’t use to have that.’
‘True. I was shot.’
‘Shot?’ Katherine cried.
‘The risk goes with the job,’ Anna pointed out. ‘And as I am sure you can see, I wasn’t killed or even crippled.’ She clipped on her suspender belt and sat down to put on her black stockings. ‘Your final training will be intended to make you into a lady. Didn’t you like what happened at the SS school?’
Katherine licked her lips. ‘I didn’t know what to make of it, at first. But I kept telling myself that you had done it all. I still found it hard to accept.’
‘Well,’ Anna said, pulling on a clean pair of camiknickers and then her white shirt, and black calf-length skirt. Then she knotted her black tie, made sure it was the right length. Now she was correctly dressed as an SS secretary. She sat at her dressing table to apply make-up and brush her still damp hair, before securing it with a tortoiseshell clip on the nape of her neck. ‘It did happen to me, as it happened to all the girls who trained with me. We all had to strip naked and be “examined” by Cleiner; we all had to learn how to handle men, both physically and mentally . . .’
‘You mean you actually . . . used your mouth?’
‘Didn’t you? You must have, or you wouldn’t have passed.’
‘I hated it. And that was something I just couldn’t imagine you doing.’
‘Well, if it’s any consolation, I didn’t care for it much, either, then. Because I didn’t care much for any of the men we were given to practise on. If you ever get someone you can really like, it can be a dream.’
‘Anna, did you know that they all regard you with total reverence? They talk about how you shot your way out of England and the hands of the British.’
The only people I shot in England were three Gestapo agents trying to arrest me, Anna thought. I broke Anna Gehrig’s neck, after she had shot me.
‘About how you shot and killed two enemy agents in Prague.’
Two enemy agents, Anna thought. The nadir of my career. At least so far.
‘About how you shot your way out of the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow.’
With Joe Andrews at my side, Anna remembered. She attached the tiny gold bars to her ears; the clips were also gold. Seven people for the Reich, she thought. And another fourteen they did not know of. And Heydrich. ‘You don’t want to believe everything you hear. Now, I have to go.’
‘Will I see you again?’
‘I said that we would get together, from time to time. But when will depend on what job you are given, and whether we are both in Berlin at the same time.’
She strapped on her Junghans watch; she did not wear her ring to the office, but her crucifix had never left her neck, as Katherine had noticed while she was dressing. ‘Anna . . . how do you go to church? I mean . . . well, how do you confess?’
Anna went to the door. ‘People like you and me do not go to church, Kate.’
Incident in Geneva
Anna walked to Gestapo Headquarters. It was not far, and walking was easier than summoning a taxi; the streets were so cratered and rubbled it was impossible to drive very fast and one never knew when one would encounter a ‘No Entry’ sign. People hurried to and fro, but most gave at least a glance at the tall, strikingly good-looking young woman, so officially dressed, and exuding such confidence. How little they knew, she thought.
She found it incredible that she actually felt a sense of homecoming when she entered this building, inferior only to that given her by her apartment. Of course she had now worked out of here for five years, but equally she was aware of the horrors that could go on in the cellars – she had once suffered those horrors herself, for a breach of discipline. But yet, so far as anyone knew, she was now ‘one of them’, her future no less than her past tied to them and their success. Thus she gave her invariable smile to those men and women who greeted her as she went up the stairs to her office, sat behind her desk and checked her diary. There was no mail. She never received mail.
There was nothing in her diary either. Himmler, not recently having employed her in her original role as the SD’s number one executioner, treated her as a super-secretary. What he wanted most was her brain; thus there were several files waiting for her to peruse, select the important items, and commit them to her photographic memory, to be recalled as and when he required the information. She picked up the first one and opened it, but she knew that this morning concentration was going to be difficult, even for her. Both Johannsson and Katherine – and thus, by extension, her parents – were on her mind, the trouble being that in cold terms Johannsson, and the fact that after more than a year she had been contacted by the OSS and given instructions, was by far the more important.
Her intercom buzzed.
‘Anna.’
‘Good morning, Anna.’ Himmler’s voice was as coldly impersonal as ever. ‘Come in, will you?’
‘Yes, Herr Reichsführer.’
She closed the file, left her office, smiled at the real secretaries in the lobby outside the Reichsführer’s office, knocked, and entered the huge room, blinking at the sunlight streamin
g through the great windows, one to each side of the full length portrait of Adolf Hitler, looking suitably noble, on the wall behind the large desk, and then came to attention and threw out her right arm. ‘Good morning, Herr Reichsführer. Heil Hitler.’
‘Heil!’ Himmler regarded her from behind the rimless glasses which largely obscured his eyes. If his black uniform was pristine, the cross-belts highly polished, it was still difficult to consider him as an insatiable god of war. The thinning pale hair, the equally pale and hardly noticeable moustache, the pasty complexion, the rimless glasses and the twitching hands – all combined to present a picture of anxious indecision.
Neither suggestion was the whole truth, Anna knew. Himmler was quite capable of ordering the execution of a thousand men, women and children, as he had done many times already, and he was now engaged in building a huge extermination centre at Auschwitz in Poland, to get rid of many thousands more of those, principally Jews, regarded by Hitler as unfit to belong to the Reich. But on the rare occasion he had been required to witness an execution he had been physically sick. Just as when he had sent her to Prague the previous year, her instructions to obtain the proof that Heydrich was seeking to usurp his powers, and perhaps even those of the Führer, he had shrunk from ordering the assassination of a man he had virtually created, and whom he had come to fear.
‘Anna!’ he said. ‘You exude so much health. You have been training.’
‘Of course, Herr Reichsführer. I train every morning, either in the gymnasium or in the park.’
‘How I wish that all of my staff were as dedicated as you. Sit down.’
Anna sat before the desk.
‘Are you pleased to have your sister in the department?’
‘I am surprised, sir. I think I should have been advised.’
‘She volunteered, you know.’ A subtle reminder that she had been conscripted.
‘So I believe, sir.’
‘You have seen her?’
‘This morning, before coming to work.’
‘And what do you think? I have not met her yet, but I am told she is very nearly as striking as you.’
‘Very nearly, sir.’
‘And I am sure she will turn out to be as dedicated. Tell me, Anna, are you a happy girl?’
She was utterly surprised. ‘I think so, sir.’ Part of her training had been to learn how to lie, convincingly.
‘But you are aware of what is going on?’
Alarm bells jangled in her brain. ‘I try to be, sir.’
‘I am talking about the Kursk offensive.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said cautiously.
‘We committed almost our entire Panzer army, to shatter the Russian salient, pinch out their forces, and regain everything we lost at Stalingrad last February.’ He stared at her.
‘And the battle has commenced, sir.’
‘The battle is over, Anna. The final communiqué has just arrived. We have been beaten.’
It was Anna’s turn to stare. ‘Those were the new Tiger tanks.’ Though she had advised MI6 of the coming battle plans, and had no doubt that the information had been passed on, she had still expected the Russians to lose.
‘The Soviets knew of our plans and anticipated them. How, I do not know. But our forces are falling back everywhere.’
Another triumph, she thought. But one which might bring with it unimaginable catastrophe. If from an Allied point of view any Russian victory had to be tremendous news, the thought of the Russians entering Berlin, with her condemned to death by the Kremlin, before the British and Americans could gain a foothold on the continent, was terrifying.
‘Add to that,’ Himmler said, ‘this landing by the Allies in Sicily, it is a pretty sombre picture. In fact . . .’ Another long stare. ‘Can I trust you, Anna?’
Anna got her brain into gear. ‘I hope so, sir.’
‘I hope so, too. I made you what you are, you know. Everything you have is a gift from me.’
‘I do understand that, sir.’
‘Without me, you are nothing. But as long as I am here to protect you, the world can be at your feet. And that of your sister.’
He certainly believed in laying it on with a trowel. ‘I appreciate that, sir.’
‘So, we stand or fall together, eh?’
God forbid! she thought. But she said, ‘Of course, sir.’
‘So everything I say to you, every instruction I give you, is in the most complete confidence.’
‘I understand that, sir.’
‘So there is something I wish you to do for me, which must be known only to you, me and the person you are going to visit.’
‘Sir?’
Himmler opened a drawer and took out a large envelope, the contents of which he emptied on to his blotting pad. ‘I have had these prepared for you.’ He held them up in turn. ‘One passport, in the name of Anna O’Brien. I always think it is better to retain one’s Christian name, where possible, to avoid mistakes. You are a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, and therefore neutral. A first-class return train ticket to Geneva. Now . . .’ He reached down beside his chair, and lifted an attaché case from the floor, placing it on his desk; it was obviously very heavy. ‘In Geneva you will visit a Herr Laurent, to whom you will deliver this case. I have written down his address; memorize it and then burn it. You will open the case for him, and he will check the contents. Then he will give you a receipt, and you will return here. Understood?’
‘Ah . . . yes, sir.’ She could only wait, as he could not possibly stop there.
As he also understood. He produced a key and unlocked the case. ‘Come round here.’
Anna got up and stood at his shoulder, gazing at the piles of bills, pounds sterling, French francs, Swedish kroner, Italian lire, even US dollars. ‘Herr Laurent will convert this money to Swiss francs, and give you a receipt in that denomination, as well as in American dollars.’
‘Yes, sir. May I ask . . .’
‘I actually have no idea what it will amount to, in Swiss francs. I believe that in US dollars, it totals something like half a million.’
‘I see, sir.’
She would have moved to return to her seat, but he suddenly put his arm round her thighs and hugged her against him. ‘This is merely the first instalment, and it is yours as much as mine. I am taking care of our future, Anna. I am sure you understand as much as I that things are not going well. We are being crushed. Oh, it may take a few years yet, and in those years the many secret weapons our scientists are working on may well come to fruition and turn the tide back in our favour. But a sensible man covers every possible angle.’
‘Of course, sir,’ Anna agreed, her brain racing. ‘Have you then abandoned the intention of succeeding the Führer?’ That had, after all, been behind his wish to get rid of Heydrich.
‘I would like you to forget that we ever discussed such a possibility. It is not our place to do so, in such a time of crisis. And frankly, my dear girl, one has to wonder, supposing things do not change for the better, if there will be anything worth succeeding the Führer for. But as I have said, I intend to cover every possible contingency. Both for you and for me. Always remember that.’ He closed the case, locked it, and held out the key. This was attached to a fairly long looped cord. ‘Wear this around your neck, and do not take it off until you hand over the case.’
Anna dropped the loop over her head, raised her hair over it, and then pulled down her tie and unbuttoned the top of her shirt to lower the key and settle it next to her crucifix.
‘The most fortunate of keys,’ Himmler remarked, watching her. ‘You will of course be adequately armed for this mission, just in case someone tries to rob you.’ He held out a sheet of paper. ‘Should anyone official attempt to prevent you completing your mission, whether at the border or anywhere else, here is your carte blanche.’
Anna scanned the sheet of SS notepaper, on which he had written: The bearer of this note is travelling on official business for the Reich, and is to be given any assi
stance that she may require. Reichsfüher Himmler.
‘Is that satisfactory?’ he asked.
‘Entirely, sir.’
‘However, bearing that in mind, it follows that under no circumstances must you open that case to anyone but Herr Laurent.’
‘And if someone insists?’
‘Handle it as you think best. Whatever happens, whatever you have to do, you will have my full support . . . providing the contents of the case are not revealed. So. Any questions?’
‘When am I to leave?’
‘Immediately. You may go home to pack an overnight bag, and then Colonel Essermann will pick you up at a quarter to twelve, in order that you may catch the twelve o’clock train. A seat has been reserved for you. You will be in Geneva by nine o’clock tonight. You are booked into the Hotel Gustav. It is small, quiet and discreet, but I understand it is comfortable.’
‘Yes, sir. This room . . . is it ensuite?’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Is that important?’
‘It is to me. Privacy is important.’
‘I understand. I will have one of my secretaries telephone and make sure that it is ensuite. Now, sleep with the case beside you. Call on Laurent at nine tomorrow morning. He is expecting a messenger, and will respond to the word ‘donation’. Once he has checked the amount, and given you the receipt, you will return here. You will report to me the moment you are back, no matter what hour that may be.’ He opened the deep drawer of his desk and took out a bottle of schnapps and two glasses, poured, and held one out. ‘To the success of your mission. But I know that you will not fail me. Heil Hitler!’
*
Anna took a taxi from Gestapo Headquarters to within a block of Antoinette’s Boutique, paid the driver off, and walked the rest of the way, the precious attaché case in her right hand. It was extremely heavy but, apart from not wishing to be driven to the door, she needed to give her heart time to settle down, and her mind time to evaluate what had just happened.
Her boss was preparing to do a runner! And take her with him! And Katherine? What was he thinking of – setting up a harem in his retirement? But he had placed his life in her hands. Save that she did not know if she dared take it. She could only betray him to Hitler, and she had no idea what the response might be. Although the Führer had expressed an interest in her work, and indeed in her – so much so that she had almost feared he was going to take her over for himself – the events of the past year had been so dramatic, and indeed, from his point of view, traumatic, that she had only seen him once or twice, and then fleetingly. But she did know that he relied on Himmler more than anyone else in his government, save perhaps for Dr Goebbels, and to accuse the Reichsführer of potential treason might rebound catastrophically.
Angel in Jeopardy: The thrilling sequel to Angel of Vengeance (Anna Fehrbach Book 4) Page 3