A Game of Spies

by John Altman

  But he had not gotten into this for the purpose of doing what was right. He had become involved only from necessity, he reminded himself, in order to keep his secret. Perhaps he didn’t agree with the politics of the Nazis. It would have been difficult for any man in his position to agree with those tremendously intolerant politics. Perhaps he doubted the path along which Hitler was leading his people. But many others felt the same. And they had done even less than Brandt had done. They had simply sat back, watching and waiting to see what the outcome would be—or joined in, anticipating rich rewards.

  Politics were only politics. His life, in comparison, was his life. Who would expect a man to extend himself, once he had guaranteed his personal security, for the sake of politics?

  Nobody, was the answer. Nobody would expect that, except an idealistic fool.

  But if the girl failed to make it back to England, he thought, then perhaps Noyce would decide that he had failed to hold up his end of the bargain. Perhaps he would somehow contrive a method of letting the villagers know about Brandt’s predilections. He thought of his neighbors. The way they looked at him now was bad enough. The way they would look at him if they knew …

  That would be a fate worse than death. The shame would be too much to bear.

  But she would make it back, he thought.

  In any case, he could hardly wave a magic wand and make the airplane appear. Either it did or it didn’t. It was beyond his control.

  He reached the Fischerweg and closed the distance to his house, moving deliberately, suddenly feeling very old.

  He went back to his painting. But the desire to paint was gone. He just stood, looking out at the windswept harbor, thinking.

  Not his problem. He was finished.

  Nobody could blame a man for not extending himself beyond the point of personal interest. Those who did would be hypocrites.

  And who was to say, in any case, what was right and what was wrong? It was possible that by serving the British, Brandt had contributed to an evil even greater than that of the Nazis. There were very few absolute truths in the world, he thought. Hitler had done good things for Germany. If Brandt was to return to the field, to make certain that the plane arrived to meet the woman, he would be doing it for selfish reasons. To guarantee his own personal privacy. Not for any larger reason than that; and there was no point in pretending otherwise.

  The Nazis had been good for Germany, he thought again. They had brought his people from the brink of disaster to their current position, poised to conquer the planet.

  And if they’d given up a few things in the process …

  … such as free imperial city status, for the town of Lübeck; such as a man’s right to be whatever that man wanted to be, in a country where, during recent years, such men had enjoyed greater freedom of expression than in any other quarter of the world …

  … well, then it had been worth the sacrifice.

  He stared at the painting. This ancient German town. He could feel his inspiration deserting him. He had painted it too many times before. He had nothing else to add.

  Then a new painting occurred to him: the fabulous Unter den Linden of Berlin, which he had seen as a young man. A gorgeous avenue, wide and grand, with spectacular lime trees lining the edges like verdant soldiers standing at attention.

  He removed the canvas from the easel, replaced it with a blank one, and debated how to begin.

  Even before he’d applied the first stroke, he lost the will to proceed. For the Unter den Linden, of course, had been ruined by the Nazis. Hitler had cut down the lime trees to make space for his endless military processions. Now the pride of Berlin—a street called Under the Lime Trees—featured no lime trees.

  A travesty, he thought.

  He stood for some unknowable length of time, the brush held loosely in one hand, staring at nothing. The quality of the light changed, thinning, turning gold.

  Then, with a muttered curse, he set down the brush and turned back to the door.

  LAKE WANNSEE

  Hagen sat still for a moment after hanging up the telephone.

  Then, suddenly, he swept the phone off his desk in a fit of pique and a riot of fluttering papers.

  Hobbs, he thought.

  It would be a mistake to take it personally. It would be a mistake to confuse the professional with the personal.

  And yet that was precisely what he was doing.

  According to the report he had just received over the telephone, the man had murdered his agent with a savagery that struck Hagen as diabolically intentional. Frick had been butchered like a animal. As if Hobbs had made sadistic sport of the killing, he thought bitterly, knowing full well that an account would be delivered back to Hagen.

  It was a message of some kind, from Hobbs to him. A final twist of the knife, to drive home just how severely Hagen had underestimated the man. It almost seemed as if Hobbs had known the investment that Hagen had made in Frick, as if he had been determined to deny Hagen the satisfaction of a worthy successor …

  … no; he was reading too much into it. He forced himself to calm down.

  The situation was not beyond repair.

  In fact the situation—if Hagen was able to get far enough outside his personal interests to look at it rationally—could hardly have been better. The Bernhardt woman was at Gothmund, under observation by Himmler’s agents. The OKW clerk Klinger had delivered the false intelligence to her, and now she would pass it on to the British. The entire deception had gone flawlessly, from beginning to end.

  Except for Hobbs. Hobbs had proven far more capable than Hagen had assumed.

  What was driving the man?

  Hagen saw two possibilities. The first struck him as almost droll. Perhaps Hobbs was displaying such unexpected resourcefulness because he fancied the Bernhardt girl more than anyone had understood. Hagen had seen photographs of the two together, entering the Right Club in London years before—but he had also seen photographs of Hobbs with many other young women taken during those years. He had imagined that the Bernhardt girl was just another distraction to the man, with no special importance. But perhaps he had imagined wrong. He would never completely understand the lengths to which some men would go for certain women. Did they not realize that the world was overflowing with women, each much the same as the next?

  If that were the case, there was no need for special concern. Even if Hobbs did manage to reach Gothmund, he would do everything in his power to make sure the woman boarded the plane safely. And so he would be unwittingly playing, yet again, directly into Hagen’s hands.

  But the second possibility was disturbing. Perhaps Hobbs had somehow figured out the truth behind the operation. This seemed unlikely, almost to the point of impossibility. Yet if it were true, it could have serious repercussions. For if Hobbs managed to reach the woman and deliver a warning before she had safely boarded the British plane sent to evacuate her, then the operation might still be compromised.

  How could Hobbs have figured it out?

  He could not have. Even those with far more clues than Hobbs—Admiral Canaris and SD Chief Heydrich among them—had not figured it out. Only three men in all of Germany knew the details of the operation. That was how Hitler had wanted it, of course. In the upper echelons of the Nazi party, every man looked out for himself. Had the details fallen into the wrong hands, self-interest might have motivated any number of men to interfere with the completion of the operation.

  And so participants had been limited to three: Hitler, Reichsleiter Himmler, and Hagen himself.

  The idea had come from Hitler. When an airplane carrying the plans for the offensive against the West had gone down at Mechelen-sur-Meuse, the past January, the Luftwaffe officer on board had failed to burn the documents before they had fallen into the hands of the Belgian police. A lesser man than Hitler would have taken this development as a serious hindrance; but Hitler had managed to turn the situation to his benefit. From the debris of one operation, he had planted the seeds o
f another. He had personally devised the maneuver that had recently been put into effect, and as a result the Nazis’ chances of conquering the land to the west were far greater than ever before.

  Without Hitler’s hubris, the plan would never have been concocted. But without Hagen’s own inspired contributions, it never would have played out so well. For when Hitler had come to Himmler, looking for a method to deliver his false secrets, Himmler had come to Hagen—and Hagen had suggested the use of the Bernhardt woman.

  He already had known, of course, Hobbs’ true purpose in coming to Germany. The loss of the man Teichmann had caused anxiety throughout all of the Nazi intelligence organizations. It was only a matter of time before the British would take action to check the man’s information. In preparation for this event, the remaining members of the MI6 network had been placed under surveillance. As soon as the man Waldoff had rendezvoused in the park with the Bernhardt woman, Hagen had realized—as he already had suspected—that there was another network within Germany, a network still unknown to them. The Bernhardt woman was a part of this network, and Hobbs’ purpose in coming to Germany had been to make contact with her. And so Hagen had been able to give Hitler the perfect vessel for his deception.

  Hobbs had been allowed to reach the woman, and the woman had been allowed to reach the OKW clerk Klinger. Yet the secrets told by the clerk had been misleading—for Hagen had reached Klinger first.

  Now the Allies would expect a repeat of the Schlieffen strategy, which had nearly given the Germans such fine results during the Great War: a drive through the Low Countries and then Sedan, with the aim of capturing Paris. Their expectations would be validated by a feint to the north, and they would move in that direction to repel the anticipated attack. Then the Wehrmacht’s surprise strike through the Ardennes would catch them completely off guard. Paris would be bypassed, the port territory captured. And the Allied troops would be cut off from supply lines, surrounded, doomed.

  Yes, the deception had gone flawlessly. But if Hobbs had somehow managed to guess the truth, then he could not be allowed to reach the Bernhardt woman with a possible warning.

  From one pocket, Hagen removed a watch on a fine silver chain. He would go to Gothmund himself, this very evening. The woman was under surveillance by Himmler’s agents—but they did not know how capable the Engländer had turned out to be.

  Hagen would educate them on that development. And if in the process he found the chance to deal with Hobbs himself—to exact some measure of revenge for the loss of his prized agent Frick—that would just be a bonus.

  He stood. Time was short; but he dallied for another minute before leaving the office. The sense of betrayal, of disappointment, filled him with rage. It would not do to let the rage take control. He had spent too much time in offices lately, and not enough time in the field. If he planned on involving himself in the operation personally, he would need to do so with a level head. So the rage must be controlled.

  But his entire career, it sometimes seemed, had been a series of disappointments. Katarina; Frick; Hobbs. Why was it so? What had he done to deserve this?

  His rage, he realized then, was mixed with something else: a sense of panic. If a man did his level best and events still careened out of control, then what did a man have? He was simply flotsam on the tide of fate.

  He controlled his breathing. Steady; in and out.

  After a few moments, he felt calmer. He pressed his lips into a thin line and then went to the closet to find his customized black uniform. His work clothes.

  The uniform, he was pleased to discover, still fit.

  THE BALTIC SEA

  The unbroken plain of water gave way, on the distant horizon, to a dark shelf of land—the northern coast of Germany.

  Deacon’s body had been tingling with adrenaline ever since he had taken off from Sweden in the late afternoon. Now, however, it was reaching a new level. This was no mere confetti campaign, after all. This was something altogether different. Moreover, it was a chance at long-awaited justice.

  For most of the flight, Deacon had been thinking about justice. There was a pleasant irony to be found, he thought, in the fact that it would come from this flight over churning black water. Twenty-five years before, a similar flight, but moving over a different body of water, had ended in the murder of his parents. The zeppelin bombing raids of Kaiser Wilhelm, the first major aerial bombardment in history, had ravaged his family—and many other innocent Britishers—with indiscriminate carnage.

  But his vengeance would be softer, subtler, more honorable. The Germans, on that night in October 1915, had pummeled their enemies with a clenched fist of fire. Now he would find retribution with a glove of silk. He would peck them a stolen kiss in the night, and at the same time would sweep their plans for world domination right out from under their goose-stepping heels.

  The Lysander felt good under his touch—responsive, but not overeager. The plane had not originally been built with this purpose in mind. It had been built for observation, and the occasional “army cooperation”: snagging messages with a dangling hook, strafing ground targets with one of its twin Browning machine guns. But now, thanks to a few simple modifications, it was an entirely different beast. It could sneak into enemy territory, land on a field the size of a large postage stamp, and take off again from rough terrain. A quick kiss in the night. But one that would change the course of history.

  Lofty thoughts. But then, he’d always had a flair for drama.

  Besides, beneath the adrenaline was something else. A constant undertow of fear that threatened to sweep him away, to drag him under. If lofty thoughts kept that at bay, then so be it.

  So be it, he thought.

  He nudged the controls in his hands, and the sea beneath him turned to land.

  GOTHMUND

  Hagen found the men clustered in a group, their nerves crackling.

  “Report,” he said.

  The Gestapo man who stepped forward had uneven eyes, a nose reddened from too much drink, and fingers stained brown from too much tobacco.

  “The girl is sitting on the edge of the field. Just waiting, it seems. The fisherman left her alone several hours ago. Braun—spyglass.”

  The spyglass was handed to the Gestapo man, then to Hagen. He raised it to his eyes and immediately found the girl, sitting on a log, looking as if she were waiting for a bus.

  He kept watching as the man talked on.

  “We have two agents posted on the far side of the lake. Two others in the bushes along the western perimeter of the field. Two others along the eastern. And ourselves.”

  Hagen handed the spyglass back. “No sign of the Engländer?”

  “None, Herr Obersturmführer.”

  Hagen wondered how the man had chosen that rank for him. He considered correcting him, then decided against it. If they believed he was Gestapo instead of SD, they would be more willing to take his orders without complaint.

  “Is the fisherman still under observation?”

  “No, Herr Obersturmführer. We needed the manpower here. Besides, he’s done his work already.”

  “He should be arrested,” Hagen said.

  “When it’s finished, Herr Obersturmführer, I’ll see to it myself.”

  “The girl is not to be interfered with. She must believe that she has thrown off any pursuit. If Hobbs does appear, he must be apprehended silently.”

  “The men have their orders, sir. No gunfire.”

  “Let me have the glass again.”

  He trained the spyglass back on the Bernhardt girl. Such an ordinary-looking girl, he thought. Such a fragile shell, for such a vital operation. But that was the stroke of genius. No one would suspect that she had been part of a brilliant deception. She did not even suspect it herself.

  It might even have been worth losing Frick, he thought then. It might have been worth losing a dozen men, or a hundred, or a thousand, to get the girl safely onto that plane.

  There would be other pupils, other pr
otégés. Besides, there had always been something slightly off about Frick, hadn’t there? His eagerness to volunteer for duty on the front in Poland. His peculiar way of being in a room and not being there at the same time. And something in his eyes—something unnatural.

  He handed the spyglass back again.

  Hobbs would not make it, he thought. He may have found unexpected resources within himself, but a man was what a man was. And Hobbs, in Hagen’s opinion, was not much of a man.

  He looked up at the sky. The night was brilliantly clear, with the heavens sprawled in all their glory. The dark clouds were very high, so high that they seemed to brush against the stars themselves. He could not have wished for better weather. The operation would be a success.

  There was nothing he liked better than a successful operation.

  Soon now, he thought.

  Soon.

  Hobbs could live without the leg.

  Exhibit A, he thought; the fact that he was still moving.

  The leg was still attached to his body, but it was useless—beyond useless; an encumbrance. And yet he continued moving, leaning on the rifle in one hand and an improvised walking stick in the other. He was approaching the extraction site, and he had done it without the leg. So life would go on. He and Eva would return to England and live in the country, in a beautiful house, and life would go on. They would have many children. The children would bring him the things he needed without his having to stand. He would take up cribbage. And he would cheat.

  But first, he would need to get on that plane with Eva.

  He would manage it.

  Behind him the town of Gothmund lay slumbering. He had circled it, deciding instead to head directly to the field. He didn’t know what day it was, but it must have been late. And if he had guessed correctly, they would have had the fisherman under surveillance in any case. But if he had guessed correctly, they would also allow Eva to get aboard the plane. She would be allowed to reach the field. So the field it was.