Vicary and Boothby left first, Boothby leading, Vicary behind him again. Descending the stairs in the dark was harder than climbing them. Twice Vicary had to reach out in the gloom and steady himself on the soft shoulder of Boothby's cashmere coat. The cat reappeared and spat at them from a corner. The foul smells were the same; only the order was reversed. They reached the bottom of the stairs. Vicary felt the soles of his shoes scraping over the soiled linoleum of the hall. Boothby pushed open the door. Vicary, stepping back outside, felt the rain on his face.
He was never happier to be out of a place in his life. Walking to the car, he watched Boothby, who was watching him. Vicary felt as though he had just peered through the looking glass. He had been given a guided tour of a secret world of deception he never imagined existed. Vicary climbed into the car. Boothby got in next to him and closed the door. They were driven to Kingsland Road, then south toward the river. Vicary glanced at Boothby once, then averted his eyes. Boothby looked pleased with himself.
Vicary said, "You didn't have to show me all that. Why did you?"
"Because I wanted to."
"What happened to need to know? I had no need to know all that. You could have tunneled my memo to Schellenberg and never told me about any of it."
"That's true."
"So why did you do it, to impress me?"
"In a way, yes," Boothby said. "You've impressed a great many people with your idea to leave Catherine Blake in place, including me. I realized I've underestimated you, Alfred--your intelligence and your ruthlessness. It takes a coldhearted bastard to send Peter Jordan back into that bedroom with a briefcase full of Double Cross. I wanted to show you the next level of the game."
"Is that how you think of this, Sir Basil, a game?"
"Not just a game, Alfred, the game."
Boothby smiled. It could be his greatest weapon. Vicary, gazing at his face, imagined it was the same smile he used on his wife, Penelope, when assuring her he had given up his latest little love.
The illusion of Kettledrum required Vicary to spend much of his day in his cramped office in St. James's Street--after all, they were trying to convince the Abwehr, and the rest of the department, that Vicary was still pursuing a German agent with access to top-secret material. He closed the door and sat down at his desk. He desperately needed sleep. He laid his head on the desk like a drowsy student and closed his eyes. When he did, he was immediately back in the grimy Hoxton flat. He saw the Pelican and he saw the Hawke. He saw the little boys in the filthy alleyway, pale malnourished legs poking from their shorts. He saw the moth turning to dust. He heard the organ music echoing through the grand cathedral. He thought of Matilda; guilt over missing her funeral flashed over him like hot water poured down his neck.
Damn. Why can't I turn it off just for a few minutes and sleep?
Then he saw Boothby, striding around the flat, telling the story of the Hawke and the Pelican and the elaborate deception he had foisted on Walter Schellenberg. He realized he had never seen Boothby happier: Boothby in the field, surrounded by his agents, Boothby drinking vile coffee from a chipped enamel mug. He realized he had misjudged Boothby or, more accurately, he had been misled by Boothby. The entire department had been. Boothby was a lie. The comic bureaucrat, preening around his grand office, the silly personal maxims, the red light and the green light, the ridiculous fetish about moisture rings on his precious furniture--it was all a lie. That was not Basil Boothby. Basil Boothby was not a pusher of paper. Basil Boothby was a runner of agents. A liar. A manipulator. A deceiver. Vicary, drifting off to sleep, found he loathed Boothby just a little less. But one thing troubled him. Why had Boothby lowered the veil? And why now?
Vicary felt himself descending into a dreamless sleep. In the distance Big Ben tolled ten o'clock. The chimes faded, only to be replaced by the muffled clatter of the teleprinters outside his closed door. He wanted to sleep for a long time. He wanted to forget about it all, just for a few minutes. But after a short while, the shaking began--gentle at first, then violent. Then the sound of a girl's voice--at first downy and pleasant, then slightly alarmed. "Professor Vicary . . . Professor Vicary. . . . Please wake up. . . . Professor Vicary. . . . Can you hear me?"
Vicary, his head still resting on his folded hands, opened his eyes. For an instant he thought it was Helen. But it was only Prudence, a flaxen angel from the typing pool. "I'm so sorry to wake you, Professor. But Harry Dalton's on the line, and he says it's urgent. Let me bring you a cup of hot tea, you poor lamb."
41
LONDON
Catherine Blake left her flat shortly before eleven a.m., a light, cold rain falling. The darkening skies promised worse weather to come. She had three hours before her rendezvous with Neumann. On dreary days like these she was tempted to skip her painstaking ritual sojourns across London and proceed straight to the rendezvous site. It was monotonous, exhausting work, constantly stopping and checking her tail, jumping on and off underground trains and in and out of taxicabs. But it was necessary, especially now.
She paused in the door, knotting a scarf beneath her chin, looking into the street. A quiet Sunday morning, traffic light, shops still closed. Only the cafe across the street was open. A bald man sat in a window table reading a newspaper. He looked up for an instant, turned a page, and looked down again.
Outside the cafe a half dozen people waited for a bus. Catherine looked at the faces and thought she had seen one of them before, maybe at the bus stop, maybe somewhere else. She looked up at the flats across the street. If they're watching you, they'll do it from a fixed position, a flat or a room over a shop. She scanned the windows, looking for any changes, any faces looking back at her. She saw nothing. She finished tying her scarf, put up her umbrella, and started walking through the rain.
She caught her first bus in Cromwell Road. It was nearly empty: a pair of old ladies; an old man who mumbled to himself; a slight man who had shaved poorly, wore a soggy mackintosh, and read a newspaper. Catherine got off at Hyde Park Corner. The man with the newspaper did too. Catherine headed into the park. The man with the newspaper headed in the opposite direction, toward Piccadilly. What was it Vogel had said about the watchers of MI5? Men you would walk past on the street and never give a second look. If Catherine were selecting men to be MI5 watchers, she would have chosen the man with the newspaper.
She walked north on a footpath bordering Park Lane. At the northern edge of the park, at Bayswater Road, she turned around and walked back to Hyde Park Corner. Then she turned around and walked north again. She was confident no one was following her on foot. She walked a short distance along Bayswater Road. She stopped at a letter box and dropped an empty unmarked envelope into the slot, using the opportunity to check her tail once more. Nothing. The clouds thickened, the rain fell harder. She found a taxi and gave the driver an address in Stockwell.
Catherine sat back in her seat, watching the rain running in patterns down the window. Crossing Battersea Bridge, the wind gusted, causing the taxi to shudder. The traffic was still very light. Catherine turned around and looked through the small porthole of a rear window. Behind them, perhaps two hundred yards away, was a black van. She could see two people in the front seat.
Catherine turned around and noticed the cabbie was watching her in his rearview mirror. Their eyes met briefly; then he returned his gaze to the road. Catherine instinctively reached inside her handbag and touched the grip of her stiletto. The cab turned into a street lined with bleak, identical Victorian houses. There was not another human being in sight; no traffic, no pedestrians on the pavement. Catherine turned around again. The black van was gone.
She relaxed. She was especially anxious to make today's rendezvous. She wanted to know Vogel's response to her demand to be taken out of England. Part of her wished she had never sent it. She felt certain MI5 was closing in on her; she had made terrible mistakes. But at the same time she was gathering remarkable intelligence from Peter Jordan's safe. Last night she photographed a document
emblazoned with the sword and shield of SHAEF and stamped most secret. It was quite possible she was stealing the secret of the invasion. She could not be sure from her vantage point--Peter Jordan's project was just one piece in a giant, complex puzzle. But in Berlin, where they were trying to fit that puzzle together, the information she was taking from Peter Jordan's safe might be invaluable, pure gold. She found she wanted to continue, but why? It was illogical, of course. She had never wanted to be a spy; she had been blackmailed into it by Vogel. She never felt any great allegiance to Germany. In fact, Catherine felt no allegiance to anything or anyone--she supposed that's what made her a good agent. There was something else. Vogel had always called it a game. Well, she was hooked on the game. She liked the challenge of the game. And she wanted to win the game. She didn't want to steal the secret of the invasion so Germany could win the war and the Nazis could rule Europe for a thousand years. She wanted to steal the secret of the invasion to prove she was the best, better than all the bumbling idiots the Abwehr sent to England. She wanted to show Vogel that she could play his game better than he could.
The taxi stopped. The cabbie turned around and said, "Are you sure this is the place?"
She looked out the window. They had stopped along a row of bombed and deserted warehouses. The streets were deserted. If anyone was following her they could not go undetected here. She paid off the driver and got out. The taxi drove away. A few seconds later a black van approached, two men in the front seat. It drove past her and continued down the road. Stockwell underground station was just a short distance away. She threw up her umbrella against the rain, walked quickly to the station, and bought a ticket for Leicester Square. The train was about to leave as she reached the platform. She stepped through the doors before they could close and found a seat.
Horst Neumann, standing in a doorway near Leicester Square, ate fish and chips from the newspaper wrapping. He finished the last bite of the fish and immediately felt sick. He spotted her entering the square amid a small knot of pedestrians. He crushed the oily newspaper, dropped it into a rubbish bin, and followed her. After a minute of walking he pulled alongside her. Catherine looked straight ahead, as if she did not know Neumann was walking next to her. She reached out her hand and placed the film into his. He wordlessly gave her a small slip of paper. They separated. Neumann sat down on a bench in the square and watched her go.
Alfred Vicary said, "Then what happened?"
"She went into Stockwell underground station," Harry said. "We sent a man into the station, but she had already boarded a train and left."
"Dammit," Vicary muttered.
"We put a man on the train at Waterloo and picked up her trail again."
"How long was she alone?"
"About five minutes."
"Plenty of time to meet another agent."
"Afraid so, Alfred."
"Then what?"
"Usual routine. Ran the watchers all over the West End for about an hour and a half. She finally went into a cafe and gave us a break for a half hour. Then to Leicester Square. She made one pass across the square and headed back to Earl's Court."
"No contact with anyone?"
"None that we observed."
"What about on Leicester Square?"
"The watchers didn't see anything."
"The letter box on Bayswater Road?"
"We confiscated the contents. We found an unmarked empty envelope on top of the pile. It was just a ploy to check her tail."
"Dammit, but she's good."
"She's a pro."
Vicary made a church steeple of his fingers. "I don't believe she's out there running around because she likes fresh air, Harry. She either made a dead drop somewhere or she met an agent."
"Must have been the train," Harry said.
"Could have been bloody anywhere," Vicary said. He thumped his arm on the side of the chair. "Dammit!"
"We just have to keep following her. Eventually, she'll make a mistake."
"I wouldn't count on that, Harry. And the longer we keep her under tight surveillance, the greater the chances are that she'll spot the tail. And if she spots the tail--"
"We're dead," Harry said, finishing Vicary's thought for him.
"That's right, Harry. We're dead."
Vicary tore down his church steeple to free his hands to smother a long yawn. "Did you talk to Grace?"
"Yeah. She ran the names every way she could think of. She came up with nothing."
"What about Broome?"
"Same thing. It's not a code name for any operation or agent." Harry looked at Vicary for a long moment. "Would you like to explain to me now why you asked Grace to run those names?"
Vicary looked up and met Harry's gaze. "If I did, you'd have me committed. It's nothing, just my eyes playing tricks on me." Vicary looked at his wristwatch and yawned again. "I have to brief Boothby and collect the next batch of Kettledrum material."
"We're moving forward then?"
"Unless Boothby says otherwise, we're moving forward."
"What are you planning for tonight?"
Vicary struggled to his feet and pulled on his mackintosh. "I thought some dinner and dancing at the Four Hundred Club would be a nice change of pace. I'll need someone on the inside to keep an eye on them. Why don't you ask Grace to join you? Have a nice evening at the department's expense."
42
BERCHTESGADEN
"I'd feel better if those bastards were in front of us instead of behind us," Wilhelm Canaris said morosely as the staff Mercedes sped along the white concrete autobahn toward the tiny sixteenth-century village of Berchtesgaden. Vogel turned and glanced through the rear window. Behind them, in a second staff car, were Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler and Brigadefuhrer Walter Schellenberg.
Vogel turned away and looked out his own window. Snow drifted gently over the picturesque village. In his foul mood he thought it made the place look like a cheap postcard: Come to beautiful Berchtesgaden! Home of the Fuhrer! He was annoyed at being dragged so far from Tirpitz Ufer at such a critical time. He thought, Why can't he stay in Berlin like the rest of us? He's either buried in his Wolfschanze in Rastenburg or atop his Adlersnest in Bavaria.
Vogel had decided to make something good out of the trip; he planned to have dinner and spend the night with Gertrude and the girls. They were staying with Trude's mother in a village a two-hour drive from Berchtesgaden. God, how long had it been? One day at Christmas; two days in October before that. She had promised him a dinner of pork roast, potatoes, and cabbage and, in that playful voice of hers, promised to do wonderful things to his body in front of the fire when the children and her parents had gone off to bed. Trude always liked to make love that way, somewhere insecure where they might be caught. Something about it always made it more exciting for her, the way it had been twenty years ago when he was a student at Leipzig. For Vogel the excitement had gone out of it long ago. She had done it--done it intentionally--as punishment for sending her to England.
Watch me and remember this the next time you're with your wife.
Vogel thought, My God, why am I thinking of that now? He had managed to hide his feelings from Gertrude, the way he had managed to hide everything else from her. He was not a born liar, but he had become a good one. Gertrude still believed he was a personal in-house counsel to Canaris. She had no idea he was the control officer of the Abwehr's most secret spy network in Britain. As usual, he had lied to her about what he was doing today. Trude believed he was in Bavaria on a routine errand for Canaris, not ascending Kehlstein Mountain to brief the Fuhrer on the enemy's plans to invade France. Vogel feared she would leave him if she knew the truth. He had lied to her too many times, deceived her for too long. She would never trust him again. He often thought it would be easier to tell her about Anna than confess he had been a spymaster for Hitler.
Canaris was feeding biscuits to the dogs. Vogel glanced at him, then looked away. Was it really possible? Was the man who had plucked him from the law and made
him a top spy for the Abwehr a traitor? Canaris certainly made no attempt to conceal his disdain for the Nazis--his refusal to join the party, the constant stream of sarcastic remarks about Hitler. But had his disdain turned to treachery? If Canaris was a traitor, the consequences for the Abwehr networks in Britain were disastrous; Canaris was in a position to betray everything. Vogel thought, If Canaris is a traitor, why are most of the Abwehr networks in England still functioning? It didn't make sense. If Canaris had betrayed the networks, the British would have rolled them up overnight. The mere fact that the overwhelming majority of the German agents sent to England were still in place could be taken as proof that Canaris was not a traitor.
Vogel's own network was theoretically immune from treachery. Under their arrangement, Canaris knew only the vaguest details of the V-Chain. Vogel's agents did not cross paths with other agents. They had their own radio codes, rendezvous procedures, and separate lines of finance. And Vogel stayed clear of Hamburg, the control center for English networks. He remembered some of the idiots Canaris and the other control officers had sent to England, especially in the summer of 1940, when the invasion of Britain seemed at hand and Canaris threw all caution to the wind. His agents were poorly trained and poorly financed. Vogel knew some were given only two hundred pounds--a pittance--because the Abwehr and the General Staff believed Britain would fall as easily as had Poland and France. Most of the new agents were morons, like that idiot Karl Becker, a pervert, a glutton, in the espionage game only for the money and the adventure. Vogel wondered how a man like that managed to avoid capture. Vogel didn't like adventurers. He distrusted anyone who actually wanted to go behind enemy lines to work as a spy; only a fool would actually want to do that. And fools make bad agents. Vogel wanted only people who had the attributes and intelligence necessary to be a good spy. The rest of it--the motivation, the tradecraft, the willingness to use violence when necessary--he could provide.