Orders from Berlin

by Unknown

  Bertram was writhing more than squirming now, and he kept putting his hand up to his neck, pinching the skin around his Adam’s apple. It was as if he were unconsciously seeking the bow tie that Twining had removed from him during the strip search and had not given back. Or maybe he was thinking about the noose, Trave thought with sudden understanding.

  ‘I need some time – time to think,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Quaid. ‘A very reasonable request. You can have as long as you need.’ Turning, he pressed a buzzer on the wall, and within moments Constable Twining appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Take Dr Brive to his cell,’ Quaid ordered. ‘And give him a cup of tea and a ham sandwich. He looks like he needs it.’

  Quaid seemed in no hurry to resume. He read his newspaper from cover to cover and then methodically worked his way through a pile of official papers on his desk until Twining reappeared. An hour and a half had gone by – Trave had timed it on the clock.

  ‘The prisoner is asking for you, sir,’ Twining said deferentially. ‘Says he wants to talk.’

  ‘All right, bring him back,’ said Quaid with a sigh. ‘Let’s see if he’s willing to listen to reason.’

  Bertram looked as nervous as before when he came into the interview room, but he seemed determined too, as though he’d come to a decision and was resolved to go through with it.

  ‘You’ll put what you told me in writing, will you?’ he asked Quaid. ‘So you can’t go back on it?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Quaid. ‘I’ll sign my undertaking at the same time as you sign your confession. Detective Trave here can witness our signatures. Will that work for you?’

  Bertram nodded. He looked like a beaten man. ‘I don’t want to see my wife if she comes here looking for me,’ he said. ‘I can’t face her, not any more.’

  BERLIN

  Heydrich dismissed the Lisbon courier with a cursory salute and slit open the package with a silver paper knife adorned with an eagle and swastika – a present from his wife on the occasion of his last birthday. The report was in English but he could read the language fluently. He grimaced at one point, but then nodded twice at the end as if satisfied with its contents and picked up the telephone. He was in luck. The Führer was in Berlin and would see him that afternoon.

  Heydrich sat back in his chair and closed his eyes, allowing his mind to travel back six years to when he’d first met Charles Seaforth on a warm September day just like this one, with the sun shining down on Berlin. It was a good time, full of promise. Hitler had succeeded to the chancellorship a year earlier, and the transformation of the country was already under way. The currency was stabilized, rearmament had begun, and you could sense the country’s new-found sense of purpose wherever you went. Heydrich’s star was on the rise, following that of his master. Three months earlier, Ernst Röhm and Heydrich’s other rivals in the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing, the SA, had been dispatched on the Night of the Long Knives, and his power base in the Gestapo and the SS was now unchallenged. Years of consolidation lay ahead as the party took control of every facet of life in the new Reich, but the way ahead was clear.

  Seaforth had come to Germany ostensibly on a covert operation to recruit agents for the British Secret Service, but his real purpose had been to seek out Heydrich and enlist in the service of the Führer. Heydrich had never encountered an enemy agent who displayed such a single-minded eagerness to betray the country of his birth. He had wanted money, but not an excessive amount, and Heydrich had sensed from the outset that the motive of financial gain was entirely secondary to his new recruit’s passionate, overarching desire to hurt England. This was what mattered to him – he appeared to have no great intrinsic interest in or enthusiasm for National Socialism and the new order in Germany. The resurgence of German power was important to him because he believed that it would lead to war. His certainty on this point had surprised Heydrich. War with England had seemed far from inevitable back in 1934, with a sympathetic government at the helm in London and the Führer moving cautiously step by step to consolidate his power. But Seaforth had been proved right, and his accurate prediction of the future had increased Heydrich’s respect for his new agent.

  Seaforth’s hatred for his country was the reverse of everything that Heydrich stood for. Heydrich prided himself on his patriotism, but here he was, placing his trust in a man who wanted to commit high treason. Why? Partly, of course, because Seaforth’s story made sense. Heydrich had verified the details, and Seaforth certainly had no reason to love England after all that had happened to him. But Heydrich also instinctively recognized that the wellspring of anger that drove each of them forward was essentially the same, even if it led them in opposite directions. Heydrich had been enraged by the November criminals who had signed away the fatherland in 1918, just as Seaforth abhorred the British generals and politicians who had sent their people to die in droves year after year in the mud of Flanders and northern France. Only their conclusions separated them: Heydrich wanted to change his country, whereas Seaforth wanted to destroy his.

  But it was more than rage that they had in common – they shared a capacity to channel and direct their anger. Both were prepared to be extraordinarily patient in the pursuit of their goals; they did not take unnecessary risks but instead built slowly and carefully towards a position of power. For Heydrich, the policy had already paid dividends – he had complete power over the lives of everyone in the Reich through his control of the SD and the Gestapo. Seaforth’s rise had been slower, but the war had helped his cause with the concentration of MI6’s focus away from Soviet Russia and onto Germany, where his fictitious network of agents was located. With Seaforth’s help, Heydrich had been able to liquidate all the other high-level British agents operating inside Germany. He’d done it gradually, picking them off here and there so as not to give the game away either to Seaforth’s superiors in MI6 or to his own rivals in the Abwehr, the official Reich intelligence service run by Heydrich’s rival, the wily Admiral Canaris. But now, finally, Seaforth was the only MI6 spymaster receiving high-level intelligence from inside the Reich, and he was climbing the ladder of seniority inside the British Secret Service at a rate that would have been inconceivable two years earlier. One day soon he might become deputy chief, and MI6 would become an unwitting branch of the Gestapo.

  Yet now, out of the blue, after all the years of painstaking groundwork, Heydrich’s prize agent was proposing to risk everything on one throw of the dice. The assassination plan was a good one, and Seaforth had the capacity to carry it out – Heydrich had no doubt on either of these scores. The scheme could certainly succeed, but it was opportunistic in nature and depended on a fair slice of luck. Heydrich wondered why Seaforth wanted to expose himself in this way, but then he turned the interrogation light onto himself and was even more surprised at his willingness to agree to the idea. There was the political answer, of course. Churchill’s removal could make all the difference, and Heydrich would gain immeasurably if he received the credit for knocking England out of the war. But it was more than that. The recklessness of the plan and the boldness of the stroke appealed to Heydrich at a gut level. It felt like flying into combat again, wheeling his Messerschmitt fighter through the sky towards the enemy aircraft. Leaning back in his chair with a faraway look in his eye, he felt a deep sense of kinship with this Englishman whom he hadn’t seen in over a year and might well never see again. Charles Seaforth was a man after his own heart.

  At three o’clock Heydrich put on his cap, straightened his uniform, and walked out into Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. He preferred to walk; it was a beautiful day, and the Reich Chancellery was only two streets away. His two SS bodyguards fell into step behind him, but he paid them no attention. Heydrich had a deep-seated faith in his own inviolability that was to continue right up until the moment of his assassination in an unescorted, open-topped Mercedes staff car in Prague two years later.

  He turned left into Wilhelmstrasse and walked past the long stee
ly-grey marble façade of the massive Air Ministry building, thinking of Goering and the continuing inability of the Luftwaffe to win the air war over London. Heydrich had an acute sense of the shifting movements of power in Hitler’s court, and he had no doubt that Goering’s star was on the wane. If Seaforth’s plan succeeded, Heydrich had no doubt that he would eclipse not just Goering but all the other party bosses. The thought made him giddy and he had to steady himself for a moment before he passed through the outer gates of the Chancellery and entered the Ehrenhof, the court of honour, leaving his bodyguards behind. The Führer had a way of seeing into people’s minds, and Heydrich knew that he needed to have all his wits about him during the coming encounter.

  The great marble walls, lined with square and rectangular windows, reared up on all sides, defining in strict shape the rectangle of blue sky above. Not a curve or a flourish had been allowed to interrupt the stark symmetry of the architecture. The courtyard was not empty – helmeted, black-uniformed SS guards stood at exactly spaced intervals around the sides. But they were immobile, trained to rigid stillness, and the silence, broken only by the sound of Heydrich’s boots crossing the marble floor, added to the impression of overwhelming power that the construction was intended to convey. Heydrich felt it as a unique silence – not an absence of noise, but a presence in its own right, bearing down on him from all sides.

  He climbed the steps leading to the entrance and went inside, passing through a dark, windowless hall inlaid with red mosaics and on into the long gallery, the famous centrepiece of the building, lit by a parade of high windows looking out over the Voss-Strasse. There was no furniture anywhere, not even a trace of carpet to relieve the severity of the design. Slippery marble floors were just the right surface for slippery visiting diplomats, according to Hitler.

  The huge bronze doors at the end of the gallery beckoned and threatened, but Hitler’s office was halfway down on the right, with the intertwined AH initials of his name monogrammed above the doorway, where two steel-helmeted SS soldiers from his personal protection unit stood guard with their guns at the ready.

  Heydrich was known and expected. The doors opened and he stepped inside. The office was vast, far larger and grander than any office he’d ever seen. Heavy tapestries and huge baroque paintings adorned the blood-red marble walls, and Hitler’s desk was placed intentionally at the far end, so that visitors would have a final journey to make across the thick carpet towards the dictator’s presence. It was a room designed to intimidate, but that was not Hitler’s intention today. He wasn’t sitting at his desk; instead he was standing in front of a large marble-topped table positioned under one of the tall windows looking out over the Chancellery gardens, examining an architectural model of a building that Heydrich did not recognize. He was bareheaded, wearing a black tie and a brown military jacket with a swastika armband.

  ‘Do you know what this is, Reinhard?’ asked Hitler, looking up at his visitor and acknowledging his raised-arm salute with a nod of his head. Heydrich was encouraged by the Führer’s use of his first name. Hitler was notoriously unpredictable, and Heydrich needed him to be in a receptive mood.

  ‘No. Please tell me,’ said Heydrich, pretending to be interested. He knew nothing about architecture but was aware that it was a subject dear to the Führer’s heart.

  ‘It is a design for my mausoleum. It will be built in Munich across from party headquarters. You can see it is modelled on the Pantheon in Rome. See, here is the rotunda and in the roof directly above the sarcophagus, you have the oculus,’ said Hitler, pointing.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Heydrich. It was a word he’d never heard before.

  ‘The round opening, the eye. And just like in Rome, there is no glass. The sunlight and the rain, even the snow in winter, fall onto the tomb, connecting it to the elements. It is perfect.’

  Hitler clasped his hands together, a characteristic gesture when he was pleased. But Heydrich was horrified. There was so much to do, yet here was the Führer planning his own funeral.

  ‘Don’t worry, Reinhard,’ said Hitler, laughing as he sensed Heydrich’s discomfort. ‘I am not dying just yet. But nor do I feel that I will live to be an old man, which is why I am in a hurry. Perhaps when we have accomplished all that we need to do in the world, then there will be time for me to return to architecture. I would like to build, but first we have to destroy,’ he said wistfully. There was a faraway look in his eye.

  ‘Thank you for seeing me at such short notice,’ said Heydrich after a moment, when Hitler showed no sign of abandoning his examination of the mausoleum. ‘I wanted to talk to you about the assassination plan we discussed before. I have heard from our agent in England this morning …’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hitler, shaking his head as if dismissing his dreams. ‘I am eager to hear what he has to say. Come, let us sit down and you can tell me all about it.’

  Hitler walked over to the fireplace and sat in an armchair. Heydrich sat at right angles to the Führer on an enormous sofa the size of a small lifeboat. He took off his SS cap and held it in his hands. A valet came in and served tea and cakes. Hitler gestured with his hand to the plate, and when Heydrich declined, he ate one of them himself with obvious enjoyment.

  Heydrich glanced up at the portrait of Bismarck hanging over the fireplace, rehearsing what he had to say while he waited for the valet to leave the room. He knew that the picture was there to underline Hitler’s legitimacy as leader of the Reich, succeeding the man who had achieved the unification of Germany seventy years before. But Bismarck had wanted nothing more, trying to keep peace with the Russian bear through a complex system of alliances, whereas the Führer was itching to send his armies east into the steppes. Only the war with England was stopping him. Hitler rightly wanted to avoid the Kaiser’s mistake of fighting on two fronts, and Heydrich believed that he had the means to ensure that that would not be necessary.

  ‘So, tell me – how does Agent D intend to rid us of fat Mr Churchill?’ Hitler asked. His mocking tone belied his obvious interest in the answer to his question. He sat rigid in his chair, looking hard at Heydrich.

  ‘He suggests that we provide him with sufficiently valuable intelligence to ensure he gets another summons from Churchill, and then, once he’s inside the room, he proposes to shoot Churchill with a handgun from close range and then turn the gun on his superior, a man called Alec Thorn,’ said Heydrich, speaking in a matter-of-fact tone of voice. ‘This should take no more than a few seconds, and then when people hear the gunshots and rush into the room, D will say that Thorn shot Churchill and that he killed Thorn while he was wrestling the gun away from him. If all goes well, the end result should be that Churchill will be dead and our agent will get the credit for having tried to save him. And then with any luck, he will replace Thorn as deputy head of MI6.’

  ‘And Halifax will replace Churchill as prime minister and will straight away make peace with Germany,’ said Hitler. ‘It sounds too good to be true. How is our man going to get a gun past Churchill’s guards?’

  ‘He says he wasn’t searched when he was called in to discuss the Operation Sea Lion intelligence that I sent to him. He was issued with a special pass, and apparently that got him through all the security barriers.’

  ‘And this Thorn man – why should they think he wants to kill Churchill?’

  ‘Our agent is working on a cover story. Thorn ran agents in Germany for years until D identified them for us and we dealt with them. He used to spend a lot of time here, although less so recently. Our aim is to have Thorn unmasked as the double agent working for us. With my help, D can make it sound plausible.’

  ‘Aim, you say! There is a great deal of difference between aiming a gun and hitting the target,’ Hitler said dubiously. ‘How do we know that Thorn will accompany our man to this get-together?’

  ‘He did before, and Churchill told them at the last meeting that if our agent receives significant new intelligence about the invasion, he will want to see them both again. Th
orn hates our man, apparently, and contradicts everything he says, and Churchill likes to hear the two different points of view.’

  ‘Very democratic,’ said Hitler with a sneer. ‘All right, let’s say for the sake of argument that he can get the gun into Churchill’s office and take this other man along with him. That still doesn’t explain how he’s going to get Churchill on his own. What about the bodyguards? How is our agent going to deal with them?’

  ‘He won’t have to,’ said Heydrich. ‘Churchill told his bodyguard to leave and shut the door behind him when he saw D and Thorn last time. He wants to keep secret intelligence secret. It’s not that far-fetched if you think about it. Look at us now – there are no bodyguards in the room with us, and I haven’t been searched.’

  ‘But you are not an assassin, and it is not appropriate for you to talk as if you are one,’ Hitler said sharply.

  ‘I am very sorry. Please forgive me,’ said Heydrich, cursing himself for his stupidity. He had been resolute in his determination to choose his words carefully before the interview began.

  But he needn’t have worried – Hitler waved away the apology. He was too interested in what Heydrich had to say to let himself be distracted by a momentary irritation.

  ‘Where is all this going to take place?’ he asked. ‘In 10 Downing Street?’

  ‘Perhaps, although Churchill’s underground bunker is also a possibility. That’s where D saw him last time. It’s in the same area of London.’