A Gathering of Spies (11 page)

Taylor said, “Perhaps it is a bit cruel of me. But you must admit, she is attractive.”

“Hm?”

“The girl,” Taylor said, nodding at the magazine on the bed.

“Ah,” Fritz said. He looked at the Varga girl again, then nodded. “She's not bad.”

“Just not bad?”

“I've seen better.”

“Like Anna Wagner?” Taylor said.

Something flickered in Meissner's eyes. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “yes. Anna Wagner, among others.”

“Tell me about Anna.”

“I've told you before, Andrew. Are things that lonely at home?”

Taylor smiled. “Tell me again, Fritz, if you don't mind.”

“Anna,” Meissner said. “Anna, Anna. So long ago, but I think I remember. A true beauty, Anna was. She worked in her husband's shop in Berlin—”

“What kind of shop?”

“A pastry shop.”

“Go on.”

“And she took a liking to me,” Meissner said, “and I to her. We were friends, for a time. Then she and her husband moved to America. And that was the end of it.”

“And suddenly, after ten years, she wrote to you.”

“Mm,” Meissner said.

“Why do you think she waited ten years, Fritz?”

Meissner shrugged. “Perhaps that's how long it takes for a wife to become bored enough of her husband to start thinking of old love affairs.”

“She wrote to you three times in two months. Then she stopped again.”

“Yes,” Meissner said.

“Why is that, do you think?”

“Andrew, you ask too much of me. Who could understand the mysteries of women?” He looked at Winterbotham and grinned a sly grin that spoke of male camaraderie.

“I suppose so,” Taylor said. “But I should warn you, Fritz, that we are in the process of reexamining the letters you received from Anna Wagner. I sincerely hope that we will not find anything, of course. Because if we were to find something, that would mean that you've been lying to me. And we've known each other far too long to be lying to each other.”

Meissner exhaled a cloud of smoke, seemingly unperturbed. “You won't find anything,” he said, “except the sad words of a sad woman who wishes she had never let me go.”

“Very good. That's all I wanted to know. Harry, do you have anything to add?”

Winterbotham shook his head.

“Then I suppose we'll be off.”

Winterbotham stood, pipe clamped between his teeth, and followed Taylor to the door.

“Ah! One more thing,” Taylor said, turning back with his hand on the knob. “Do you know the name Katarina Heinrich?”

“Katarina Heinrich?” Meissner said.

“Katarina Heinrich, yes.”

“No, I don't think so.”

“Right! Well, then, take care. I'll see you later in the week.”

“Pleasure,” Winterbotham said.

They left Fritz Meissner sitting on his bed, looking after them with a slight frown tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“What do you think?” Taylor asked.

“He's lying.”

“With any luck we'll find the proof in those letters. Then we can go back and confront him with that.” Taylor pinched out his cigarette and tucked it carefully into his breast pocket. “I almost hope we're wrong. If she's got the same training that Fritz had, she'll be a handful.”

“When do you expect she'll try to make contact?”

“It's been thirteen days since she went on the run. I would say she could reach England as early as next week.”

Winterbotham nodded. “I assume you're watching the ports.”

“As best we can. But there's an awful lot of cargo coming in from America these days, human and otherwise.”

Winterbotham frowned. Even in his sleep-deprived state, he had begun to get a clear picture of the tasks before him. Getting Ruth back to England was the priority. But to do that, he would need to move farther ahead with his masquerade for the
Abwehr
, convincing them he had information of use to them. To do that, he would need Schroeder to continue brokering the deal. To do that, he would need the full support of MI-5. And to get that, he would need to help them clear their plate of
their
top priority: finding the Heinrich woman before she got her information back to Germany.

Besides
, he reminded himself,
if she does get the contents of those blueprints to Berlin, and they do manage to build the chain-reaction bomb before the Americans, rescuing Ruth won't make any difference. We'll all be dead and Hitler's armies will be goose-stepping right down Downing Street
.

“Let's go have a look at those letters,” he said.

“Very good,” Taylor said. “Care to stop for a bite first? I've got a friend at the Savoy—”

“Now,” Winterbotham said.

5

NEWFOUNDLAND BASIN, THE ATLANTIC OCEAN

MAY 1943

The
RMS Queen Mary
sailed through the night.

Her cargo holds were stocked with timber, meat, sugar, fuel oil, explosives, powdered milk, diesel, steel, tobacco, and lead. Her cabins and decks were filled with people: merchant seamen, American servicemen, Catholic missionaries, women from the Red Cross, and a handful of brave civilians who were willing, for reasons of their own, to risk the roving U-boat patrols scattered throughout the Atlantic.

Sister Abigail Harbert believed that she had just met one of the nicer people on board the
Queen Mary
, a young woman named Eleanor Lewis.
Young woman
was not the fairest way to think of her, perhaps, since she was actually very close to Sister Abigail's age, but Sister Abigail considered herself to have been made wise and ancient by her devotion to Jesus. Eleanor Lewis, on the other hand, had not yet accepted Christ as her savior. But she was a brave and kind young woman nonetheless, and Sister Abigail believed that she might very well be able to convert Eleanor Lewis before they pulled into port six days hence, if she kept at it.

Eleanor was a pretty young woman with dark-brown hair cut short, a conservative style of dress, and a wet look in her green-gray eyes. That wet look, to Sister Abigail, encouraged sympathy. Eleanor always seemed on the verge of tears, even when she was telling a story as inspiring as the one she had just finished telling.

“My darling Al,” Eleanor said, when Sister Abigail asked her why she was willing to risk the wolf packs roaming these black waters. “He was wounded in an accident last month—blinded when some G.I. threw his cigarette into a munitions dump. I got the letter two weeks ago and booked passage on the very next ship headed to England. Al needs me now. But I'm not sure he knows it. Do you know what he did? He said in his letter that we should break off our engagement. He doesn't want to burden me, he said, now that he's blind.”

Sister Abigail clucked sympathetically. “He sounds like a fine young man,” she said. “Has he accepted Christ as his savior?”

“Oh, I don't think he gives it much thought,” Eleanor said breezily. “Although being blind, now, he may change his ways. I wish this boat could go faster, I'll tell you that. He sounded hopeless in his letter. Just hopeless. But blind people can live very productive lives. Why, I just read about a blind man who's doing his part for the war. I read about him in
Time
magazine. He joined the Signal Corps and taught them how to make emergency repairs in the dark.”

“That's fascinating,” Sister Abigail said. “He's very lucky to have a young woman like you as his fiancée.”

“Oh, no, I'm very lucky to have
him
. He's wonderful.”

It was this selfless devotion that had impressed Sister Abigail so deeply. In this day and age, it was rare to find women who were willing to devote themselves so completely to their husbands. Women these days played baseball and worked in factories and dressed in two-piece bathing suits. They cared little for the old values, the Christian values. The war was taking its toll in countless ways, ways that wouldn't even reveal themselves until the war was long finished.

But with a few more young women like Eleanor Lewis around, Sister Abigail thought, they all might get through this with their priorities intact.

The story Katarina had told was half true.

Eleanor Lewis did indeed have a fiancé named Al, and he had indeed been blinded in the war. But the incident had occurred at Guadalcanal, the result of a Japanese bullet. Al
had
sent a letter to Eleanor telling her that he wished to break their engagement because he didn't wish to be a burden; but he had done this from the San Diego Naval Hospital, where he had been recovering. Then he had gone home to Dennison, Ohio, where Eleanor had informed him that she would stick by him through thick and thin. Their engagement had been resuscitated, with a date set in June. Then had come a piece of good news from the doctor: Al had some hope, although slim, of regaining partial sight in one eye.

Katarina had learned all of this from Eleanor Lewis shortly before killing her.

Now Eleanor Lewis and Al Burke were rotting in the basement of Eleanor's small frame house in Ohio. Katarina had met Eleanor Lewis at the Palace Movie Theater in Dennison, to which she had gained admission with her last fifty cents. By then she had been desperate, and Eleanor Lewis had provided her with a way out. The fact that her fiancé was blind only made things easier. Had he been left alive, an alarm would have been raised and her new identity would have been compromised. But Eleanor had been only too happy to invite her to dinner that night to show off her wonderful, worldly, heroic, half-blind fiancé.

She killed Eleanor first. Eleanor was the one more likely to cause trouble, after all. Al was easy. He had tried to come to his fiancée's rescue and had tripped over her corpse.

Katarina wanted to be proud of what she had done. It had been resourceful; it had been effective; and it had been for the Fatherland. But thinking back on it, she felt nothing but disgust and shame.

She had killed a blind man as he lay sobbing over his fiancée's corpse.

The act had enabled her, at least, to book passage on the
Queen Mary
. She had discovered nearly three thousand dollars in an El Duelo cigar box underneath Eleanor's bed. Before boarding she had colored her hair, cut it into a bob, changed her wardrobe. She felt fairly certain that the FBI had no idea where Catherine Danielson Carter had gone. She believed that her chances of reaching Fritz in London were better than they had ever been.

And yet she was unable to take much pleasure from it.

She had gone soft, at some point.

It was distressing.

WOHLDORF, NORTH HAMBURG

A sleek staff Mercedes carried Hagen up a long, wandering drive to a gabled mansion. As he stepped out of the car he saw a flicker of movement to his right—a man standing off to the edge of the porch, among the trees. The man glistened in black. After a moment, Hagen realized that the man was beckoning to him.

After another moment, he realized that the man was Himmler.

He smiled, as he always did when he saw Himmler.

“
Herr Reichsleiter
,” Hagen said. “
Heil
Hitler!”

“
Heil
Hitler!” Himmler said back.

He was an officious little man, Heinrich Himmler, who looked more like a banker or an accountant than like the head of the SS. Today he was wearing the black uniform of the Gestapo, with the death's-head insignia prominently displayed—he had wanted to frighten somebody, Hagen thought, or at least to intimidate—but on Himmler himself the outfit looked ill-fitting, several sizes too large. If one did not know what this man was capable of …

Hagen knew what this man was capable of.

Himmler, in Hagen's opinion, was both the primary architect and the greatest creation of the Third Reich. Hitler was fine as a figurehead, and priceless as an orator, but with his penchant for grandiosity and his lack of ability to make concrete decisions, he needed harder men to handle the day-to-day business of Nazi Germany.

Himmler, an ex–chicken farmer, was a hard man. Even better, his hardness was balanced, in Hagen's view, by a great natural sympathy and sensitivity. Hagen had seen this firsthand not so long ago, when Himmler had come back from a tour of the front lines in Russia. The
Reichsleiter
had witnessed the execution of a hundred Russian Jews there, including women and children. The sight had put him into a state of extreme nervous agitation—and Himmler was a man who prided himself on his lack of nerves. But he had demonstrated his immense capability as well as his boundless sensitivity by his reaction to the executions. He had in structed his SS to create more humane methods of execution, even going so far as to personally tender the suggestion of gas chambers.

They began to walk around the outskirts of the grounds without speaking. The mansion behind them was the epicenter of Germany's wireless receiving operation; two vast underground bunkers housed dozens of booths containing radio sets and trained signal receivers. It was an
Abwehr
headquarters, and Hagen wondered why Himmler had requested to meet him there, of all places. Now, as they strolled through the sparse forest on the mansion's eastern side, he realized that Himmler was waiting to gain distance from the house before speaking. Walls had ears, and Nazi walls had more ears than most.

The day was splendid, warm and dry, with a soft wind. Hagen found himself enjoying the walk. They moved for five full minutes without speaking, past a susurrous duck pond, into the fringe of the forest. Then Himmler stopped and looked back over his shoulder to make sure they had not been followed.

“From this place they can hear the whisper of men a thousand miles away,” Himmler said quietly, “and yet, with all their equipment, they cannot hear us, here, within a stone's throw.”

At forty-two, the
Reichsleiter
usually appeared his age, but today he seemed older. The skin under his bespectacled eyes was tight and shiny. His hair was unkempt. He had been awake all night, Hagen guessed.