ANGEL IN JEOPARDY
Christopher Nicole
© Elizabeth Gill 2007
Christopher Nicole has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2007 by Severn House.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Voices from the Past
Incident in Geneva
The Conspiracy
The Doctor
Just Good Friends
The Directive
The Summons
The Führer
Incident in Stockholm
Crisis
Catastrophe
Epilogue
Prologue
‘What a magnificent tree,’ I remarked.
Some forty feet tall, with a thick trunk and many branches, its green foliage studded with deep-blue flowers, it was situated about a hundred yards behind and above the villa, which was built into the upper slopes of Montgo, the high, lion-like hill that dominated the Costa Blanca resort of Javea.
‘It is a lovely tree,’ Anna Fehrbach agreed, her voice soft and, when she spoke English, still retaining a trace of the brogue she had inherited from her Irish mother. ‘But it requires careful watching. It is a jacaranda and has an insatiable thirst. As you can see, we keep a hose on it several hours in every day. But as you also see, we planted it a good distance from the house and, more importantly, the swimming pool. I know some people here in Spain who planted a jacaranda about thirty feet from their pool; they thought it would give shade when they were lounging on the coronation. Well, it certainly did that, but its roots also went in search of moisture, and before they realized what was happening, those roots had eaten their way right through the concrete walls of the pool to suck out the water.’ She sighed, and looked around herself at the flower beds and weeping willows that she also cultivated. ‘I hope I am not boring you. I love this garden. I never had the opportunity to have a garden when I was a girl, or a young woman.’
‘You could never bore me, Anna,’ I assured her.
I was not attempting to flatter her; it was the simple truth. This was the fourth time I had been privileged to spend a few hours with Anna Ferhbach, the Honourable Mrs Ballantyne Bordman, best known as the Countess von Widerstand; the title, which loosely translates as the Countess of Resistance, would have been ridiculous in any average woman, but anyone who supposed that Anna Fehrbach was an average woman, or an average human being, would have been making a grave mistake. Several who had made that mistake had come to a sudden end.
She was now in her late eighties, and for walking on the uneven surface of the hillside used a stick. But she stood perfectly straight, her height still only an inch under six feet. I had never been privileged to see her legs, as nowadays she always wore trousers, but I could see from her waist and hips that they were very long, and from the exposed ankles and bare feet in her sandals had no doubt that they were still the legs for which, it was said, men had been prepared to die . . . and quite a few had. She remained very slim, a result of her many years of arduous physical training, but there was still sufficient shape to her shirt to remind one that men had not died to get their hands only on her legs.
Yet the erstwhile physical beauty that remained evident was as nothing compared to her face. Her skin had become a little tight, and there were crows’ feet seeping away from her eyes, but the perfection of her slightly aquiline bone structure remained, perhaps more obvious now than in the past, because the magnificent long, straight, pale-yellow hair that had once been her crowning glory was now white, and cut short. But the deep-blue eyes had not, I surmised, changed at all. Those eyes had never been other than soft when they had looked at me, but I knew enough about her to understand that they could become as cold as sapphires when necessary, just as I also knew that they had looked upon sights as terrifying as anything ever dreamed up by a Hollywood monster-movie magnate. But more important, they also masked one of the most remarkable brains in history, not merely because she had an IQ of 173, but because of the almost unearthly speed of thought, reaction and decision that had made her the most deadly assassin of her time – and enabled her to survive a hundred close brushes with her own death. They were eyes which, far more than her body or her hair or her face, had lured many a man, and woman, to disaster.
Sadly, I sometimes reflected, I had never known those eyes save in this twilight of her life, when she was utterly relaxed, willing, and even anxious to talk about her past before it was too late. The only visible evidence of what had once been was her exquisite jewellery, the tiny gold bars of her earrings, the gold crucifix round her neck, the huge ruby solitaire on the forefinger of her left hand, all so feminine, and so contrasting with the man’s gold Rolex on her wrist. She wore this jewellery, as I knew, less because she wished for decoration, than as a symbol of what she considered her greatest triumph. Save for the watch, it had been given to her by her Nazi masters, to enhance the image they wished her to project – that of the wealthy socialite. Obviously they had intended to reclaim it at some time. But they were all gone, and she was still here – with the jewellery. She found that immensely satisfying.
I had tracked this woman for some forty years, when I could spare the time, ever since I had first come across the occasional mention of her in the various memoirs I had studied while writing about the Second World War. I had been fascinated both by the legend of her beauty, by her ruthlessness, and by her sudden disappearance when still at the height of her powers, as much as by the many famous and infamous characters she had known intimately, both during World War II and during the chaotic years that had followed. Most historians of the period assumed that she had died; some refused to believe that she had ever lived. But I had been unable to accept that so vibrant a personality could either be a myth or have wound up in an unnamed grave. And as I had searched I had come across tantalizing snippets of information that had led me ever onwards – until I had been told of a lonely old woman who apparently lived with her memories and a single servant, a woman who moved with incredible grace, was clearly enormously wealthy, who had been born, I was able to discover, on 21 May 1920 – and who spoke several languages but, when she used English, had an Irish accent. All of those straws in the wind fitted with what I had already gleaned.
So I had taken my life in my hands, quite literally if her record was at all accurate, called at this villa on the hillside and embarked on the mental voyage of a lifetime. The woman herself! If it is possible for a man to fall in love with his own grandmother, I had done so. More importantly, I came upon her at a definitive moment, when she had understood that she was coming to the end of her life, and after so many years of the utmost secrecy, with the memory of who she was and what she had done no more than a whispered legend, she wanted to leave her memorial to the world. And here was a journalist arriving on her doorstep, obviously, as she quickly established, totally innocent of any connection with her past, but eager to learn. Thus she had welcomed me, and by the time of this fourth meeting, we were the closest of friends. So I ventured, ‘Do you regret your childhood? – I mean, the things you did not have, like a garden.’
‘That would have happened anyway,’ Anna pointed out, beginning to walk back towards the house. ‘My parents lived in a town house in the centre of Vienna, and they were both working journalists, like you. They had no time for gardens. But I had a very pleasant girlhood, until March 1938. I was the nuns’ favourite, because I was bright, hard-worki
ng, well behaved . . . Do you know, at the age of seventeen I was the youngest head girl the convent had ever had.’
‘And then you just disappeared. Do you think the nuns ever knew what happened to you?’
‘Oh, certainly. Up to a point. Everyone in Vienna knew that my father had been arrested for editing an anti-Nazi newspaper, and he and all his family carted off to, as they supposed, a concentration camp. They would have assumed that was the end, for us.’
‘And it would have been, but for you.’
‘Don’t make me sound like a heroine, Christopher. I was a seventeen-year-old girl, who was told, obey us, work for us, and your family will live and may even prosper. Disobey us, in any way, and your family will die. So I obeyed.’
‘But within two years you were fighting them, actively if secretly. That makes you a heroine, in my book.’
‘You say the sweetest things.’ She opened the back door and led me into the cool interior of the house, where Encarna, her maid, waited with an open bottle of champagne. I had always found Encarna hardly less fascinating than her mistress, because I had no idea how much she knew about that mistress, how close they were. Certainly Anna never attempted to be secretive in her presence. She handed me a glass, raised her own, and sipped. ‘Things turned out more fortunately than I had ever dreamed they could.’
‘But far more dangerously.’
She led me on to the naya and sat down, crossing her knees. ‘Being a spy, much more an assassin, is a dangerous business,’ she commented, with her usual ingenuousness.
‘And you were the best. By the time you were twenty-two you had . . . eliminated twenty-two people. Have you any thoughts about that?’
‘Nightmares, you mean? Some of them. The first – that poor, helpless concentration-camp inmate I was ordered to kill, simply to prove to the SD that I could . . . that was awful. Gottfried Friedemann . . . he was such an innocent, who had stumbled upon something too big for him to handle. The two British agents in Prague . . . I did not know they were British agents.’ She sipped champagne, reflectively.
‘That’s only four,’ I ventured.
‘The others . . . the NKVD people who raped and tortured me . . . I told you, I had never fired a tommy-gun before. I remember only a feeling of exultation as they came at me and I squeezed the trigger and watched them falling about. The Gestapo agents who tried to arrest me, that was pure self-defence.’
‘And the women? Elsa Mayers and Hannah Gehrig, and Hannah’s daughter, Marlene?’
‘They were all about to betray me, which would have meant an unpleasant end, for me and for my family. Hannah actually shot me, as you know.’
‘And you still bear the scar. On your ribcage.’
‘Yes.’ She glanced at me. ‘Would you like to see it?’
‘Ah . . .’
She smiled. ‘I will show it to you. When I know you a little better.’
‘And Heydrich? The secret one?’
Anna made one of her enchanting moues. ‘I hated him more than any man on earth. But I was his mistress for very nearly two years – his sexual slave, you could say. One cannot have that kind of relationship with a man, and not have . . . well, a relationship. I was actually relieved that my instructions from London were to set up the assassination for the agents they were sending from England, but under no circumstances to become involved myself. As far as I was concerned, it was execution by remote control.’
‘But you still had to take over yourself.’
‘I had no choice. In the first place, London’s instructions had been explicit: Heydrich had to die before he was returned to Germany. They felt, correctly, that he was going to be made Hitler’s heir, and immediately begin to share power, and they also felt, again correctly, that, evil as Hitler was, he was a child compared with Heydrich. And then, the assassination attempt went disastrously wrong. The tommy-gun to be used by the lead operative jammed, can you believe it? And his back-up, who was armed with a grenade, didn’t throw it accurately enough. Oh, Reinhard was very badly injured, but the doctors had no doubt that he would recover, and the assassins had all been killed or captured . . .’
‘So you finished the job yourself.’
‘It wasn’t difficult. As everyone knew how close I was to him, I had no difficulty in gaining access.’
‘And no one was suspicious?’
‘A great many people were suspicious. But by then I was under the protection of Himmler, who, as I told you, was more than happy to see the back of Heydrich; at that time he aspired to be Hitler’s heir himself.’
‘So you landed on your feet, as usual.’
Another moue. ‘That is one way of putting it.’
‘And to this day, no one knows the truth of it.’
‘You do, now.’
‘You never even told Clive Bartley?’
‘No. I was tempted, but I never did tell him the whole truth. To the world, to history, Heydrich died as a result of wounds suffered in the grenade explosion.’
‘And was his assassination your greatest coup?’
‘Heydrich? Good God, no. Even then, there were much bigger fish to be fried. The biggest fish of all.’
‘You don’t mean . . . But . . .’
‘Yes,’ Anna Fehrbach said. ‘I had my failures, too.’
Voices from the Past
Stefan Edert’s greatest pleasure was overseeing the Countess von Widerstand train. In this summer of 1943 he had been her personal coach for two years, and whenever she had been in Berlin she attended the gymnasium for a workout several days a week – which, ever since her return from Prague the previous May, had been just about every week. Yet he never tired of watching her.
He could do no more than that, as she had established at their very first meeting, in the summer of 1941. He could watch her run, sweatshirt straining across her nipples. He could watch her on the indoor range, when she used her pistol with such relentless speed and accuracy. He could watch her doing fifty press-ups, the smooth muscles in her shoulders rippling, her buttocks thrusting against her shorts. He could even wrestle with her on the mat, occasionally pinning her, while always aware that to her it was a game, and that, had it been the real thing, she would have disposed of him before it had even begun.
Above all, he could watch her shower, as now, face turned up to the flooding water, hair soaking, flesh glistening as the liquid flowed over hills and into valleys he dreamed of exploring. But they would remain dreams, unless a miracle happened. She allowed him these intimacies because to her he was not a man: he was her trainer. Sometimes he was so frustrated he felt like strangling her. But that too was impossible: he knew she could kill him before his fingers could close on her throat. And then he wondered if she ever had any sexual impulses at all. Of course she must have. She had been Reinhard Heydrich’s mistress for more than a year. But it was now more than a year since ‘the Hangman’, as he had been known, had been murdered by Czech patriots. And in that time her name had not been linked with anyone else – not even with her boss, Heinrich Himmler. If only he could break through that cocoon of self-possessed reserve.
Anna stepped from the bath, towelled vigorously. ‘Are you satisfied?’ she asked, her voice low, caressing.
‘You are in perfect physical shape, Countess.’
‘I meant, have you looked at me long enough for one morning.’
‘Oh . . . ah . . .’ He knew he was flushing. ‘It is my business to look at you. To be sure of your condition.’
‘And you are pleased. That makes me very happy. Do you still have that photograph you took of me, a couple of years ago?’
‘It is on my mantelpiece.’
Anna wrapped her wet hair in a towel, put on her camiknickers. ‘What does your girlfriend think of that?’
‘I do not have a girlfriend, Countess. I have your photograph.’
Anna paused in pulling on her slacks. ‘And you can get off on that?’
Stefan licked his lips. ‘I did not mean to insult you.’
>
‘You did not insult me, Stefan. I am complimented. But I am sorry you have such a sterile existence.’ She fastened her slacks, picked up her shirt.
‘May I take another?’
‘Have I changed that much, in two years?’
‘No, but the photo is . . . well . . .’
‘Perhaps a little tattered? Yes, Stefan, you may take another photograph of me.’
‘I have my camera here.’
‘I do not wish to be photographed like this.’
‘But you would . . .’
‘Take off my clothes? Of course. But even so, I have no make-up, my hair is a mess . . . Listen, come to my apartment . . . tomorrow evening when I am home from work. I will pose for you there.’
Stefan could not believe his ears. ‘I can come to your apartment?’
‘I have just invited you, Stefan. Six o’clock tomorrow evening.’ She replaced the towel round her head with a cloche. ‘Ciao.’
*
It was not far from the SD gymnasium to the apartment building, also owned by the SD, where Anna lived, and she enjoyed the early-morning stroll, even if she was surrounded both by the evidence of last night’s air raid and by anxious people, on their way to work, reading their newspapers and muttering to each other. The contrast between the immaculate, ebullient city to which she had returned from England in 1940, one step ahead of the British SIS, as her SD masters supposed, and these increasingly decrepit and depressing surroundings, was so great as to be unbelievable.
In 1940, the only word had been victory. People smiled, and cheered at every bit of good news from the west. In the summer of 1940 there had been no eastern front to think about. But even in 1941 there had been nothing but victories. Now . . . the government, for which she officially worked, insisted that victory in Russia was still just around the corner, and would certainly be achieved this summer. The thousands of German families who had had a husband, a father, or a son serving at Stalingrad found that very hard to swallow, even if no one dared say so in public.
Angel in Jeopardy_The thrilling sequel to Angel of Vengeance Page 1