"Perhaps we should check with the RAF again."
"I just checked with the RAF."
"Anything?"
"Nothing."
"Well, call the Royal Navy--"
"I just got off the telephone with the Citadel."
"And?"
"Nothing."
"Christ!"
"You've just got to be patient."
"I'm not endowed with natural patience, Harry."
"I've noticed."
"What about--"
"I've called the ferry in Liverpool."
"Well?"
"Shut down by rough seas."
"So they won't be coming from Ireland tonight."
"Not bloody likely."
"Perhaps we're just approaching this from the wrong direction, Harry."
"What do you mean?"
"Perhaps we should be focusing our attention on the two agents already in Britain."
"I'm listening."
"Let's go back to the passport and immigration records."
"Christ, Alfred, they haven't changed since 1940. We've rounded up everyone we thought was a spy and interned everyone we had doubts about."
"I know, Harry. But perhaps there's something we missed."
"Such as?"
"How the hell should I know!"
"I'll get the records. It can't hurt."
"Perhaps we've run out of luck."
"Alfred, I've known a lot of lucky cops in my day."
"Yes, Harry?"
"But I've never known a lucky lazy cop."
"What are you driving at?"
"I'll get the files and make a pot of tea."
Sean Dogherty let himself out the back door of the cottage and walked along the footpath toward the barn. He wore a heavy sweater and an oilskin coat and carried a kerosene lantern. The last clouds had moved off. The sky was a mat of deep blue, thick with stars, a bright three-quarter moon. The air was bitterly cold.
A ewe bleated as he pulled open the barn door and went inside. The animal had become entangled in the fencing earlier that day. In her struggle to get free she had managed to slash her leg and tear a hole in the fence at the same time. She lay now on a bed of hay in the corner of the barn.
Dogherty switched on his radio and started changing the dressing, humming quietly to calm both their nerves. He removed the bloodied gauze, replaced it, and taped it securely in place.
He was admiring his work when the radio crackled into life. Dogherty bolted across the barn and slipped on his earphones. The message was brief. He sent back an acknowledging signal and dashed outside.
The ride to the beach took less than three minutes.
Dogherty dismounted at the end of the road and pushed the bicycle into the trees. He climbed the dunes, scrambled down the other side, and ran across the beach. The signal fires were intact, ready to be lit. In the distance he could hear the low rumble of an airplane.
He thought, Good Lord, he's actually coming!
He lit the signal fires. In a few seconds the beach was ablaze with light.
Dogherty, crouching in the dune grass, waited for the plane to appear. It descended over the beach, and a moment later a black dot leapt from the back. The parachute snapped open as the plane banked and headed out to sea.
Dogherty rose from the dune grass and ran across the beach. The German made a perfect landing, rolled, and was gathering up his black parachute by the time Dogherty arrived.
"You must be Sean Dogherty," he said in perfect public school English.
"That's right," Sean replied, startled. "And you must be the German spy."
The man frowned. "Something like that. Listen, old sport, I can manage this. Why don't you put out those bloody fires before the whole world knows we're here?"
PART TWO
14
EAST PRUSSIA: DECEMBER 1925
The deer are starving this winter. They leave the woods and scratch about the meadows for food. The big buck is there, standing in the brilliant sunshine, nose pushing into the snow for a little frozen grass. They are behind a low hill, Anna on her belly, Papa crouching beside her. He is whispering instructions but she does not hear him. She needs no instruction. She has waited for this day. Imagined it. Prepared for it.
She is slipping the shells into the barrel of her rifle. It is new, the stock smooth, unscratched, and smelling of clean gun oil. It is her birthday present. Today she is fifteen.
The deer is her present too.
She had wanted to take a deer earlier but Papa had refused. "It is a very emotional thing, killing a deer," he had said, by way of explanation. "It's hard to describe. You have to experience it, and I won't let that happen until you are old enough to understand."
It is a difficult shot--one hundred and fifty meters, a brisk icy crosswind. Anna's face stings with the cold, her body is shuddering, her fingers have gone numb in her gloves. She choreographs the shot in her mind: squeeze the trigger gently, just like on the shooting range. Just like Papa taught her.
The wind gusts. She waits.
She rises onto one knee and swings the rifle into firing position. The deer, startled by the crunch of snow beneath her, raises its massive head and turns in the direction of the sound.
Quickly, she finds the buck's head in her sight, accounts for the crosswind, and fires. The bullet pierces the buck's eye, and it collapses onto the snowy meadow in a lifeless heap.
She lowers the gun, turns to Papa. She expects him to be beaming, cheering, to have his arms open to hold her and tell her how proud he is. Instead his face is a blank mask as he stares first at the dead buck, then at her.
"Your father always wanted a son, but I didn't give him one," Mother said as she lay dying of tuberculosis in the bedroom at the end of the hall. "Be what he wants you to be. Help him, Anna. Take care of him for me."
She has done everything Mother asked. She has learned to ride and shout and do everything the boys do, only better. She has traveled with Papa to his diplomatic postings. On Monday, they sail for America, where Papa will be first consul.
Anna has heard about the gangsters in America, racing around the streets in their big black cars, shooting everyone in sight. If the gangsters try to hurt Papa, she'll shoot them through the eye with her new gun.
That night they lie together in Papa's great bed, a large wood fire burning brightly on the hearth. Outside it is a blizzard. The wind howls and the trees beat against the side of the house. Anna always believes they are trying to get inside because they are cold. The fire is crackling and the smoke smells warm and wonderful. She presses her face against Papa's cheek, lays her arm across his chest.
"It was hard for me the first time I took a deer," he says, as if admitting failure. "I almost put down my gun. Why wasn't it hard for you, Anna darling?"
"I don't know, Papa, it just wasn't."
"All I could see was the damn thing's eyes staring at me. Big brown eyes. Beautiful. Then I saw the life go out of them and I felt terrible. I couldn't get the damned thing out of my mind for a week afterward."
"I didn't see the eyes."
He turns to her in the dark. "What did you see?"
She hesitates. "I saw his face."
"Whose face, darling?" He is confused. "The deer's face?"
"No, Papa, not the deer."
"Anna, darling, what on earth are you talking about?"
She wants desperately to tell him, to tell someone. If Mother were still alive she might be able to tell her. But she cannot bring herself to tell Papa. He would go insane. It would not be fair to him.
"Nothing, Papa. I'm tired now." She kisses his cheek. "Goodnight, Papa. Sweet dreams."
LONDON: JANUARY 1944
It had been six days since Catherine Blake received the message from Hamburg. During that time she had thought long and hard about ignoring it.
Alpha was the code name of a rendezvous point in Hyde Park, a footpath through a grove of trees. She couldn't help but feel jittery about going forward with the mee
ting. MI5 had arrested dozens of spies since 1940. Surely some of those spies had spilled everything they knew before their appointments with the hangman.
Theoretically, this should make no difference in her case. Vogel had promised her she would be different. She would have different radio procedures, different rendezvous procedures, and different codes. Even if every other spy in England were arrested and hanged, they would have no way of getting at her.
Catherine wished she could share Vogel's confidence. He was hundreds of miles away, cut off from Britain by the Channel, flying blindly. The smallest mistake might get her arrested or killed. Like the rendezvous site, for example. It was a bitterly cold night; anyone loitering in Hyde Park would automatically come under suspicion. It was a silly mistake, so unlike Vogel. He must be under enormous pressure. It was understandable. There was an invasion coming; everyone knew it. The only question was when and where.
She was reluctant to make the rendezvous for another reason: she was frightened of being drawn into the game. She had grown comfortable--too comfortable, perhaps. Her life had assumed a structure and a routine. She had her warm flat, she had her volunteer work at the hospital, she had Vogel's money to support her. She was reluctant, at this late stage of the war, to put herself in danger. She did not regard herself as a German patriot by any means. Her cover seemed totally secure. She could wait out the war and then make her way back to Spain. Back to the grand estancia in the foothills. Back to Maria.
Catherine turned into Hyde Park. The evening traffic in Kensington Road faded to a pleasant hum.
She had two reasons for making the rendezvous.
The first was her father's safety. Catherine had not volunteered to work for the Abwehr as a spy, she had been forced to do it. Vogel's instrument of coercion was her father. He had made it clear her father would be harmed--arrested, thrown into a concentration camp, even killed--if she did not agree to go to Britain. If she refused to take an assignment now, her father's life would surely be in danger.
The second reason was more simple--she was desperately lonely. She had been cut off and isolated for six years. The normal agents were allowed to use their radios. They had some contact with Germany. She had been permitted almost no contact. She was curious; she wanted to talk to someone from her own side. She wanted to be able to drop her cover for just a few minutes, to shed the identity of Catherine Blake.
She thought, God, but I almost can't remember my real name.
She decided she would make the rendezvous.
She walked along the edge of the Serpentine, watching a fleet of ducks fishing the gaps in the ice. She followed the pathway toward the trees. The last light had faded; the sky was a mat of winking stars. One nice thing about the blackout, she thought: you could see the stars at night, even in the heart of the West End.
She reached inside her handbag and felt for the butt of her silenced pistol, a Mauser 6.35 automatic. It was there. If anything appeared out of the ordinary she would use it. She had made one vow--that she would never allow herself to be arrested. The thought of being locked up in some stinking British jail made her physically sick. She had nightmares about her own execution. She could see their laughing English faces before the hangman placed the black hood over her head and the rope around her neck. She would use her suicide pill or she would die fighting, but she would never let them touch her.
An American soldier passed in the other direction. A prostitute clung to his shoulder, was rubbing his cock and sticking her tongue in his ear. It was a common sight. The girls worked Piccadilly. Few wasted time or money on hotel rooms. Wall jobs, the soldiers called them. The girls just took their customers into alleyways or parks and raised their skirts. Some of the more naive girls thought fucking standing up would keep them from getting pregnant.
Catherine thought, Stupid English girls.
She entered the trees and waited for Vogel's agent to show.
The afternoon train from Hunstanton arrived at Liverpool Street Station a half hour late. Horst Neumann collected his small leather grip from the luggage rack and joined the line of passengers spilling onto the platform. The station was chaos. Knots of weary travelers wandered the terminus like victims of a natural disaster, faces blank, waiting for hopelessly delayed trains. Soldiers slept wherever they liked, heads pillowed on kit bags. A few uniformed railway policemen meandered about, trying to keep order. All the porters were women. Neumann stepped onto the platform. Small, agile, bright-eyed, he sliced his way through the dense crowd.
The men at the exit had AUTHORITY written all over them. They wore rumpled suits and bowler hats. He wondered if they were looking for him. There was no way they could have a description. Instinctively, he reached inside his jacket and felt for the butt of his pistol. It was there, tucked in the waistband of his trousers. He also felt for his billfold in his breast pocket. The name on his identity card read James Porter. His cover was a traveling pharmaceutical salesman. He brushed past the two men and joined the crowd jostling along Bishopsgate Road.
The journey, except for the inevitable delay, had gone smoothly. He had shared a compartment with a group of young soldiers. For a time they had eyed him malevolently while he read his newspapers. Neumann guessed any healthy-looking young man not in uniform would be subjected to a certain amount of contempt. He told them he had been wounded at Dunkirk and brought back to England half dead aboard an oceangoing tug--one of the "little ships." The soldiers asked Neumann to join them in a game of cards, and he beat the pants off them.
The street was pitch dark, the only light provided by the shaded headlamps of the evening traffic working its way along the road and the pale blackout torches carried by many of the pedestrians. He felt as if he were in the midst of a child's game, trying to perform a ridiculously simple task while blindfolded. Twice he smashed straight into a pedestrian coming in the opposite direction. Once he collided with something cold and hard and started to apologize before noticing it was a lamppost.
He had to laugh. London certainly had changed since his last visit.
He was born Nigel Fox in London in 1919 to a German mother and an English father. When his father died in 1927, his mother returned to Germany and settled in Dusseldorf. A year later she remarried--a wealthy manufacturer named Erich Neumann, a stern disciplinarian who wasn't about to have a stepson named Nigel who spoke German with an English accent. He immediately changed the boy's name to Horst, allowed him to take his family name, and enrolled him in one of the toughest military schools in the country. Horst was miserable. The other boys teased him because of his poor German. Small, easily bullied, he came home most weekends with blackened eyes and split lips. His mother grew worried; Horst had become quiet and withdrawn. Erich thought it was good for him.
But when Horst turned fourteen his life changed. At an all-comers track meet he entered the 1,500 meters in his school shorts and no shoes. He finished well under five minutes, stunning for a boy with no training. A coach from the national federation had watched the race. He encouraged Horst to train and convinced his school to make special provisions for the boy.
Horst came alive. Freed from the drudgery of the school's physical education classes, he spent afternoons running through the countryside and the mountains. He loved being alone, away from the other boys. He was never happier. He quickly became one of the best junior track athletes in the country and a source of pride for the school. He joined the Hitler Jugend--the Hitler Youth. Boys who had picked on him years earlier suddenly were vying for his attention. In 1936, he was invited to attend the Olympic Games in Berlin. He watched the American Jesse Owens stun the world by winning four gold medals. He met Adolf Hitler at a reception for Hitler Youth and even shook his hand. He was so excited he telephoned home to tell his mother. Erich was immensely proud. Sitting in the grandstand Horst dreamed of 1944, when he would be old enough and fast enough to compete for Germany.
The war would change all that.
He joined the Wehrmacht early in 1939. His
physical fitness and lone-wolf attitude brought him to the attention of the Fallschirmjager, the paratroopers. He was sent to paratroop school at Stendhal and jumped into Poland on the first day of the war. France, Crete, and Russia followed. He had his Knight's Cross by the end of 1942.
Paris would end his jumping days. Late one evening he went into a small bar for a brandy. A group of SS officers had taken over the back room for a private party. Halfway through his drink, Neumann heard a scream from the back room. The Frenchman behind the bar froze, too terrified to go investigate. Neumann did it for him. When he pushed back the door he saw a French girl on the table, arms and legs pinned down by SS men. A major was raping her; another was beating her with a belt. Neumann went in on the run and delivered a brutal blow to the major's face. His head struck the corner of a table; he never regained consciousness.
The other SS men dragged him into an alley, beat him savagely, and left him for dead. He spent three months in a hospital recovering. His head injuries were so severe he was declared unfit to jump. Because of his fluent English he was assigned to an army intelligence listening post in northern France, where he spent his days sitting before a radio receiver in a cramped, claustrophobic hut, monitoring wireless communications originating across the Channel in England. It was drudgery.
Then came the man from the Abwehr, Kurt Vogel. He was gaunt and tired, and under different circumstances Neumann might have thought he was an artist or an intellectual. He said he was looking for qualified men willing to go to Britain and conduct espionage. He said he would double Neumann's Wehrmacht pay. Neumann wasn't interested because of the money, he was bored out of his skull. He accepted on the spot. That night he left France and returned to Berlin with Vogel.
A week before coming to Britain, Neumann was taken to a farmhouse in the district of Dahlem just outside Berlin for a week of briefings and intense preparation. Mornings were spent in the barn, where Vogel had rigged a jump platform for Neumann to practice. A live jump was deemed out of the question for security reasons. He also brushed up his skills with a handgun, which were impressive to begin with, and silent killing. Afternoons were given over to the essence of field work: dead drops, rendezvous procedures, codes, and radio. At times the briefings were handled by Vogel alone. At other times he brought his assistant, Werner Ulbricht. Neumann playfully referred to him as Watson, and Ulbricht accepted it with an uncharacteristic relish. In the late afternoons, with the winter light dying over the gentle snowy landscape of the farm, Neumann was allowed forty-five minutes for running. For three days he was permitted to go alone. But on the fourth day, his head filling with Vogel's secrets, a jeep shadowed him from a distance.