The Spider of Sarajevo

by Robert Wilton

  He liked to arrive between nine and nine thirty in the morning. To be ahead of the day, as he put it. Have the equipment warmed up, his lists ready, for the start of business. Ready for the chief’s command, or the message coming in. But today the city was chaos, because of the parade, and he was at least fifteen minutes late.

  He knew in a fraction of a second that it was all wrong. The door to the wireless room – his wireless room – was only half open when he saw the first of the papers lying on one of the tables, and that was surely not how he’d left it. As the door opened farther there were more papers – papers everywhere, and the ledgers too! – thrown around the room. He was gaping, sick, wondering how it was his fault, wondering whom to tell, and the door wasn’t even fully open when something shoved him in the back and he was stumbling forwards and the door closed and when he turned there was a pistol pointing at his head.

  ‘Deutsch?’

  Hans continued to gape.

  ‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’

  Hans nodded.

  Knox nodded back at the man. ‘All right then.’ German it would have to be. ‘First, the rules. If you speak, if you resist, I will kill you. Please believe me.’ He pushed the pistol against the man’s forehead, hard, and the man froze, eyes crossing up at the barrel. ‘You do believe me, don’t you?’ A desperate nod, the barrel scratching against the forehead.

  ‘Good.’ Knox took his handkerchief. ‘Open.’ And stuffed it into the man’s mouth. ‘Get the list of frequencies for your regular contacts.’ Hesitation, and Knox clutched the man by the back of the head and started to push the pistol against his eye. The man staggered away and flapped at the ledgers on the floor until he found the right one. ‘Now sit.’ The man sat. Knox took the curtain cord that he’d borrowed from the filing room, and tied the man to his chair.

  He pulled the handkerchief from the mouth. ‘Decypher the list. You will realize that if I can get in here, I can also tell if you are trying any tricks.’ The man nodded. It was the best Knox could do. Simply asking for the German Embassy frequency would be an invitation to deception; if the man didn’t know what he wanted, under pressure he wouldn’t be able to produce credible bogus answers for all the frequencies. The man started to recite the destinations: offices in Vienna, in Berlin, individual offices in other cities.

  The German Embassy in London was ‘Sergius’, near the bottom of the list – a recent addition. Knox made the man repeat the list; again, the best he could do to check he wasn’t being tricked.

  He stuffed the handkerchief back into the man’s mouth. He reset the frequency to that for his listeners in London, Venice and the Adriatic, and transmitted details of the frequency used for the Germany Embassy in London. Then he turned the dial to that frequency. ‘Now, send the following message, in clear. You’re doing the transmitting because you’re faster and they’ll know your fist. But believe me that I know enough Morse to know if you’re playing games.’ He pushed the barrel into the man’s ear. ‘You do believe me, don’t you?’ Nod. ‘Right then. First his designation, and yours, as usual. Go!’ The man’s hand trembled over the transmitter key. ‘Relax, my friend, and you might live.’ The hand flexed, settled on the key, and started to tap out the letters.

  When the summons came, Thomson was quickly into the old man’s office in Whitehall. If he was surprised to see a woman in there, he didn’t show it. Handsome-looking female; seemed a bit anxious.

  The old man fluttered a message slip at him. ‘“Marsden apparently expected.”’

  ‘Ah…’ Grim smile from Thomson. ‘The gentleman in the Ports and Consulates Office has been indiscreet.’

  ‘I used the name of Marsden in no other message, to no other office.’

  ‘“Apparently” expected. The arrangement was that your man would say “certainly” if he could.’

  ‘That is true.’

  ‘This is certain enough for you?’

  ‘This is certain enough for me.’

  Knox dictated the second message slowly, a word at a time, wanting to check his own memory of it, wanting no mistakes, wanting the operator to feel that every letter was being monitored. There were substantial pauses.

  It was finished within a minute. When the words stopped coming, the man slumped back in his chair. And took a long breath.

  ‘I think you misplaced your coat,’ said a voice from behind him.

  Knox couldn’t restrain the startle. Another long breath. Very slowly, he raised the pistol over his head, then out to the side.

  ‘That’s good.’ Speaking English; accented. ‘Lay it on the floor beside you, stand, then kick it back towards me.’ Knox did so. ‘Now you may turn.’

  He turned. Dark hair, handsome; pistol in one hand, rock-steady, and Knox’s coat in the other.

  Vienna; the tram; Ballentyne’s body. ‘Hildebrandt, I believe.’

  The eyes widened. ‘You have the advantage.’ He didn’t act disadvantaged.

  ‘I saw you in Vienna. Ransacking the body of a friend of mine.’

  Again the interest, then a rueful smile. ‘Poor Ballentyne. We never did have the conversation I had promised him.’ The smile widened; inspiration. ‘Now I can have it with you instead.’

  Valentine Knox wasn’t familiar with fear, but he wasn’t a fool and he wasn’t without imagination. He looked at Hildebrandt, and knew him for a killing gentleman.

  ‘The unlocked door was our alert. We’re rather strict about security here. Then, the coat didn’t seem right.’ He threw it at Knox’s feet. ‘I have kept the tools; I don’t think you need further encouragement to foolishness.’

  ‘They weren’t mine anyway.’

  ‘Mm. Would you kindly release my wireless operator?’

  Knox did so. ‘No hard feelings?’ he said, as the man stood and slipped away as fast as he could, the chair scraping on the floor.

  ‘Get Kopp!’ Hildebrandt snapped in German. ‘Tell no one what has happened. Then come back here and resume your routine.’ The man nodded, and hurried out. ‘You have unsettled him,’ he went on to Knox. ‘And he was quite a good operator.’ He looked around the room. ‘You have been busy, I think. Did you find what you were looking for?’

  Knox smiled.

  ‘And your message?’

  ‘My mother. Likes to know where I am.’

  A polite chuckle from Hildebrandt. ‘You’ve no idea how much that British coolness amuses me.’ He leaned forwards. ‘It will not endure, my friend. Not in our cellar here. Down there… it will be very hot indeed.’

  MOST URGENT. SERIOUS… AGENTS… NEPTUNE CONSOLIDATE… ALTEMARK MINOS HARM… ALL MUST REPORT TO EMBASSY.

  [SS X/72/165 (TRANSLATION)]

  Krug had been looking forward to his meeting with Belcredi. He had his own ideas on the inclinations of the peoples of the Balkans and the Near East, and wanted to test the anthropologist a little. And Belcredi’s patrons in Germany – particularly the woman – were influential indeed and would bear cultivating.

  Belcredi was rather late, and when he was shown into Krug’s office the most obvious thing about him was a swelling under his cheek. ‘My dear sir!’ Krug began. ‘That looks…’

  His guest, embarrassed, mumbled an explanation about his tooth. Krug had to control a smile. He’d thought Hildebrandt’s description of the man’s haplessness rather overdone, but he did seem rather a fragile element. Which might be useful… Hardly the man to shape a masterstroke in the Near East. Krug offered him a chair, commanded coffee, and began to muse on how he might supplant him and improve his own position among Belcredi’s patrons.

  They had only started on the pleasantries when the telephone rang. Polite irritation on Krug’s face, but he answered quickly, and his guest saw the face change immediately. Surprise, and this time the emotion was genuine. A few half-words, and then Krug snapped an order, and replaced the earpiece.

  He contrived a smile, but couldn’t disguise his haste. ‘You must excuse me, my dear fellow. A rather urgent matter – in my wireless of
fice. Would you mind returning to the waiting room for a few minutes?’

  His guest looked a little irritated, but did as asked. It was more than a few minutes before he was back in Krug’s office, but Krug had recovered his poise. ‘Again, my apologies. A small—’

  ‘May I ask what?’

  Krug hesitated.

  ‘It seems you have controlled the situation, anyway.’

  Krug smiled. ‘Indeed. I’ll tell you, my friend. Since you have been so involved in our activities against the British – on top of your own, more civilized work. The British, as you know, sent agents against me in Vienna. Or rather, they thought they did. Instead, they fell into my trap, and you played your part in our success. They seem to have become desperate, and they sent another man – here.’ Krug stirred his coffee. ‘I had warning of it, of course, thanks to my network in London. Quite an impressive fellow, apparently. He was earlier than expected, but we have him anyway. I have now taken steps to rectify the little damage that he managed to do.’ He took a sip, and found that it was cold. ‘Hildebrandt has him in the cellar now, and will encourage him to tell us all that he knows.’ There was something like real discomfort on Krug’s face, and then he suppressed it. ‘Then he will die.’

  ‘I would like to see this man.’

  ‘Really?’

  A shrug. ‘I have met at least one British agent. Perhaps I know him. Before he…’ An uncomfortable smile. ‘It is amusing to see a proud man who learns his mistake.’

  Krug smiled. ‘You’re right. Let’s have him up. Hildebrandt likes it in the cellar, and such places, but then his suits are so much cheaper than mine.’ He rang for his secretary, and gave the instruction.

  A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door, and Krug called the invitation. He saw Belcredi stand and edge away from the door as it opened. The first man in was Major Valentine Knox, hands tied behind his back and face cut and bruising; the second, pushing him and holding a pistol casually at his side, was Hildebrandt.

  Both of them saw Krug first, and then saw his guest. When they saw his guest, both of them gaped stupid.

  There was no regular postal service to the island of the Counts di Lascara in the middle of the Adriatic. But at two or three ports, a boat going in the right direction might be persuaded to make a delivery there.

  On the 28th of June a steamer anchored off the island; just long enough for a man to row ashore, and pass a package to a boy who’d come to see what was going on, and row back again.

  Isabella di Lascara found the package on the doorstep when she returned from riding. It spent another half an hour on a table, while she washed. Deliveries were rare, but there was little in the world to interest her.

  Inside the package, when she finally opened it, she found a pair of man’s slippers, which she did not recognize as being in the Albanian style, and a pipe.

  ‘Ballentyne!’ For once, Count Paul Hildebrandt’s control had gone.

  And from Knox: ‘Good Lord…’

  Hildebrandt’s surprise was long enough for Ballentyne to have the pistol out of his pocket and up level. ‘Drop it!’

  Anger had replaced surprise in Hildebrandt’s eyes, but too late. He put the pistol on the floor. Ballentyne pulled a wad of cloth from inside his cheek. ‘Untie him.’ It took a few moments for Knox’s hands to come free, and they did so in obvious pain. ‘Over there.’ Ballentyne gestured Hildebrandt away from the door, until both he and Krug were covered by the pistol.

  Knox flexed his hands, rubbed the wrists. Then he stepped forwards and punched Hildebrandt in the face. The German staggered back against the wall, and came away with the clattering of a picture and a bleeding nose.

  Ballentyne said, ‘Feel better?’

  ‘Much.’

  ‘You—’ – Krug was clutching for reality – ‘You are Ballentyne?’ And a glance of vicious accusation at Hildebrandt.

  The voice was quiet, flat. ‘I don’t seem to have any identity any more’– the memory of sending the package to Isabella; a final bid to belong – ‘except that I was faster than your friend Mr Belcredi. He got hit by the tram, not I. In the few seconds before the people from the tram made their way back, I got his jacket off and laid mine over him.’

  Hildebrandt: ‘And the reports that were sent in the last weeks?’

  ‘A bit overstated. I’ve been trying out some ideas of my own among the Muslims of south-eastern Europe. You’ll get no tickle from them for a while. I knew this place had some kind of significance for Belcredi; I knew if I didn’t follow the trail to the end, I’d never be able to rest easy. I’ve spent the last few weeks brushing up my German and trying to get to y—’

  ‘Halt!’ A shout from the door, and Ballentyne started to turn and then saw Knox’s urgent eyes and reaching hand and managed to stop himself. The man in the doorway had a pistol of his own, and it was pointing at Ballentyne’s chest.

  Ballentyne laid his pistol on the floor and stood, empty. The man in the doorway shifted round until he could watch both the Englishmen.

  A great breath, and the life came back into Krug’s face, and the control. The scale of the chaos had only fuelled his appetite to dominate it. ‘So we are back where we started,’ he said. ‘With a bonus.’ He glanced at Ballentyne, and then to Knox. ‘You: what is your real name?’

  ‘I am Major Valentine Knox; British Army.’

  ‘Sent here by the Comptroller-General for Scrutiny and Survey, yes?’ Krug’s triumph.

  Knox said nothing.

  Krug breathed it in. ‘Major, I must commend you on your daring, your… élan. It is only when we look for a word for an empty quality, that we learn what the French have given Europe, no? Your… resilience. And yet I must inform you that it has been futile.’ He pointed. ‘I knew of your advent. I knew of your mission. I wanted you here. You were here a day earlier than we were warned of, which was why you managed to get in here, but that did not matter.’

  He smiled. ‘You have about you the air of the martyr. You think you have done your duty, and may die proud.’ He shook his head. ‘You have done… nothing. My operator has told me what you sent – that desperate, nonsensical message. What did you think? That you would so confuse the German Embassy, the German network, that they would all be persuaded to reveal themselves? What were those meaningless words, anyway? “Neptune” and “Minos” and so on?’

  Knox looked at him for a moment, then shrugged.

  Hildebrandt said quietly, ‘They are words in German Military Intelligence code.’

  ‘But do they mean anything? In this context, in this order?’

  ‘No.’

  Krug shook his head again, pitying. ‘In the end, rather a feeble stratagem. You hoped to provoke an excitement in the network, no? To make the agents reveal themselves somehow? It has had the opposite effect to what you intended. We immediately warned the German Embassy about the violation of our codes here – your pillaging of our documents – and the compromise of security. Even if you knew something of the German code, you have lost it because already that code is being changed as a result of your adventure here. The German network in Britain is even farther from you than when you started. It is out of your reach.’

  Knox’s face, as watched by Ballentyne: stone, refusing defeat. Then from somewhere deep a flame, burning in his eyes and then warming his whole face. The shoulders pulled up even straighter.

  The door pushed open wider, and the cleaning woman stepped into the office.

  The five men saw her as a woman, as a servant; they saw the headscarf, the swirl of skirts, the loose smock and the chemise beneath. And because they saw all these things and nothing more, and because it was the day of madness, they took an extra second to see that when she pulled her hand from the folds of her clothes it held a pistol.

  Even the guard, the one man with a weapon ready, could not truly see what was happening. The woman had time to glance at each of the faces in turn. The pistol swung with her eyes, and then pistol and eyes hardened at Hil
debrandt, and by the time the guard had his own weapon up she had pulled the trigger.

  It clicked. It did not fire.

  The pistol in the guard’s hand, a 1912 Model Steyr, was less fallible than its nineteenth-century forebear. It cracked once, and the woman was flung to the ground.

  Again, the five men stood looking at her, and not seeing.

  ‘Who – who is she?’ Krug, trying to deal with this final insult to the order of his office.

  Ballentyne crouched over her, laid his palm on her forehead, and when he looked up again Knox saw that his eyes were moist. ‘Her name is Besa,’ he said. He looked at Hildebrandt. ‘When you came for me in the village, it was her brother that you murdered.’

  ‘She came all this way – for that?’

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Ballentyne said. ‘That someone should still care about a single life.’ He looked down at the woman again, at her beautiful face, now pale. Her eyes flickered, winced. She clutched at her stomach, clutched for his hand.

  He let her hold it as she weakened, let her pull it against her body. Felt the last warmth of her stomach; felt the butt of the second pistol, tucked into her waistband under the loose shirt.

  Her eyes came open again, wild and urgent and lovely. Ballentyne smiled at her, and murmured a word in a language that only they could understand, then stood and the pistol came up with him. Yet again, the guard was caught; he found himself staring into the void of the ancient muzzle while his own weapon was down. Beyond the muzzle, the features of the Englishman were a blur.

  Ballentyne swung round to face Hildebrandt, and shot him between the eyes.

  A moment of shock, as they all realized that this time the pistol had fired, realized that Hildebrandt was now lying broken and still on the floor. And then the guard’s pistol came up and Knox flung himself forwards and there was a shot and a roar of pain, and Knox had the man by the throat and was driving him to the floor and punching him in the face, punching him and punching him until he was still.