Artillery of Lies (14 page)

Wagner said, “We have pictures of Eldorado?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then this is what you do. The new agents memorize his face. You signal Eldorado to be …” Wagner strolled over to a wall map of Britain. “To be in Liverpool at the railway station, platform one, at noon. Don't say anything to him about the agents. Let
them
find
him.”

“He'll think it odd if we don't give any sort of reason, sir.”

“Oh, tell him …” Wagner thought about it for ten seconds. “Tell him Winston Churchill will be there.”

“But Churchill is on a convoy to India, sir.”

“Exactly. That is why it is essential for Eldorado to check out a report that he's going to be in Liverpool.” Wagner took Fischer by the shoulders, turned him round, and gave him a gentle push toward the door. “Forget about the truth, Richard. Do what works.” He watched Fischer leave. “Sometimes I think you're too pure for this job,” he called after him.

Define the problem, Freddy Garcia told himself as the soup was served. How can you get an answer until you're sure what the question is? Very well. The problem is in two parts. Luis Cabrillo won't work unless we let him out, and we daren't let him out because he knows too much. Ditto Julie Conroy. OK. Nothing we can do to alter Part One. He's got to work, we can't drop him, far too valuable. So the only variable has to be Part Two.

The simple solution was to provide total round-the-clock protection for the pair. Hugely expensive and they would rapidly grow to loathe it.

For a wild minute of utter fantasy Freddy considered plastic surgery. Make Luis unrecognizable and the
Abwehr
could never find him. The fantasy disappeared with the soup plate.

Over some sort of mackerel pie—Freddy disliked mackerel but there was a war on—he wondered whether it might be possible to persuade the
Abwehr
that Eldorado, while generally sound and reliable, was neurotic about the possibility that the British might have turned a few German agents. Immunize the
Abwehr
against the truth by injecting them with a drop of it.

No, no, no. Rotten idea. Highly dangerous and it might raise suspicions that didn't at present exist. Forget it, forget it.

The rest of the mackerel pie produced nothing but fishbones.

The steamed currant duff contained very few currants. Freddy thought of convoys torpedoed in the heaving, freezing mid-Atlantic and told himself he was lucky. A small panic squeezed his lungs: he was running out of variables. Couldn't change the protection. Or the appearance. Or the
Abwehr's
preconceptions. What was left? Hypnosis? Brain surgery?

A five-watt lightbulb flickered feebly in a dim corner of his mind
and went out. He shut his eyes and worked very hard at making it come on again.

An hour later he was standing in front of the Director.

“It seems to me, sir, that our whole difficulty arises because someone told Eldorado about the supposedly universal scope of the Double-Cross System,” Freddy said. “Someone told him we run every German agent in Britain, and he of course believes it. Therefore the solution is to make him un-believe it.”

“Tell him he was misinformed? Think he'd swallow that?”

“No. It's got to be a lot stronger. Eldorado's got to convince himself that we don't control all the
Abwehr
agents. I can think of only one way to achieve that. He must meet some
Abwehr
agents who are quite obviously
not
under our control.”

The Director blinked rapidly for about four seconds and then laughed. “Nasty shock for young Eldorado.”

“It could be made into quite a dramatic occasion.”

“Do it,” the Director said. “Bamboozle him. Scare the Spanish pants off him. This is a serious business, Freddy. It deserves a codename.” He opened a folder and ran his finger down a list. “Shoelace,” he said. “That's the next allocated word. Operation Shoelace.” He wrinkled his nose so that his spectacles bounced. “Shoelace …” He stared across the desk. “Bit feeble.”

“How about ‘Bamboozle?'” Freddy suggested.

“Operation Bamboozle.” The Director let the sound hang in the air. He liked its punch and rhythm. “Bamboozle,” he repeated. “Yes.”

“Doubly appropriate,” Freddy said. “Eldorado's been doing it to others for ages. Now it's going to be done unto him.”

Brigadier Christian never succeeded in remembering the name that Wolfgang Adler had identified as the bad link in the Eldorado Network.

The more he studied the files at
Abwehr
headquarters, the less confidence he felt in his ability to re-create his conversation with Adler. The names of the sub-agents jostled in his mind—Nutmeg and Knickers, Haystack and Garlic, Pinetree and Seagull and Hambone—until they were all utterly interchangeable. Christian finally abandoned the chase and went back to the raw material, the
files of agents' reports. If Adler had spotted something incriminating it must still be there. Christian went on the hunt. If the SD had infiltrated their man into the Eldorado Network, it could only be in order to discredit the network and eventually destroy it. Steal the jewel from the
Abwehr's
crown and you were halfway to stealing the crown itself. Christian did his best to suppress his anger but that sort of treachery enraged him. He had heard Admiral Canaris say that Eldorado was worth at least one panzer division to the
Wehrmacht,
and here was Himmler's SD trying to sabotage that panzer division while it was fighting its very hardest, and all to feed Himmler's political jealousies! Christian prided himself on being a plain soldier—he certainly wasn't a member of the Nazi party—and he had a simple code of honor. All those helping Germany win this war deserved the best. All the rest deserved to be shot.

He saw little of General Oster. After that bizarre and bewildering guided tour of Great Architectural Triumphs That Hitler Never Built, Christian had worried whether the General was suffering from the severe strain of his job. To be Chief of Staff of the
Abwehr, a
vast organization responsible for German military intelligence throughout the world—that was enough to crack any man. In particular Christian worried about Oster's sarcastic, sneering remark directed at the Fuehrer:
This was a war to satisfy Hitler's vanity and make him famous.
What on earth was that supposed to mean? It made no sense. On the other hand as soon as Christian had spoken up for sanity and had had the courage stoutly to defend the war which was, as he had said, “for the benefit of the German people,” Oster had changed tack.

But his new tack had been almost as strange:
Sooner or later, every war comes to an end.
Followed by something about doing a deal with the west, and Eldorado being a very good go-between, so keep his warm and happy.

That puzzled Christian. He tried to look at it from every angle and he got nowhere. There was nobody he could trust to ask for an objective opinion. He even wrote out a complete transcript of Oster's conversation, as well as he could remember it. On paper it looked even worse. It was almost too bad to be true. What in God's name did Oster think he was playing at?

Christian stared at his transcript. It was laid out like the pages of dialogue in a play. And suddenly he realized: that must be the answer. That explained everything.

Oster had been playing a part. Christian had arrived in Berlin in
very peculiar circumstances. Oster had decided to test his strengths and check his loyalties. Was Christian the sort of man who could be tempted to drift under pressure from the powerful opinions of a superior officer? Did he have a mind of his own, or would he agree to anything just because Oster said so? Lean on Christian, and how did he react? That was obviously what Oster had been trying to find out.

But how about Eldorado, “the best go-between we could have?”

Christian solved that one in no time.

When the Fuehrer unleashed his secret weapon—or weapons, because the news was full of the ceaseless efforts of brilliant German scientists to place revolutionary means of victory in the hands of the fighting man—then hostilities would end overnight. The enemy's resolve would crumble like a sugar-lump in a rainstorm. How best could the Fuehrer negotiate with a nation like Britain that was in a state of collapse? (And of course without Britain, America was helpless.) Fast, reliable channels of communication would be essential. Who better than Eldorado? That was obviously what Oster had been driving at, and it was a brilliant idea.

Christian acted. He signaled Madrid
Abwehr
to get some radio sets into Eldorado's hands pretty damn quick. When the crunch came, he didn't want to have to depend on the Spanish diplomatic bag.

While he was at it, Christian sent a few more signals to Madrid. German naval intelligence had failed to find any sign of the special convoy.
Query Eldorado re his Churchill India-bound report,
Christian ordered.
Luftwaffe
intelligence had been skeptical about another item.
Query Eldorado re report on Low-level Parachute,
Christian ordered.
Query Eldorado re Buranda: who/what/where?
He signed the signals
Oster
and went off to a well-deserved lunch.

One thing that had seriously worried Eldorado's
Abwehr
controllers when his first reports began reaching them was his sloppy accountancy. Obviously he didn't fully understand the British monetary system. The classic case was his claim for a rail fare of £1 23s 18d. Richard Fischer had kept that claim and now he showed it to the four recruits. “This should be a death warrant,” he said. “Anyone in England who thinks this price exists is asking to be caught and shot. What's wrong with it?”

They all looked at Docherty.

“The letter ‘s' means shillings and the letter ‘d' means pence,” he said. They were all speaking English and Docherty enjoyed delivering his words in an Irish brogue as thick as shoe-leather. “You get twenty shillings to your pound and twelve pence to your shilling.”

“So what's the correct statement for this rail fare?” Fischer asked, and waved at Docherty to be silent.

Stephanie Schmidt thought like mad and got there first. “Two pounds and four shillings and six pennies,” she said, and held her breath until Fischer nodded.

“You are in London and you enter a pub and ask for a large whisky,” he said. “The barman serves it, you ask how much, he says eighteen pence. Is he too a spy?”

“Either a spy or a spycatcher,” Martini said.

Ferenc Tekeli said, “He could just be a foreigner. There must be thousands of foreigners in London now.”

“No, he's English,” Fischer said. “Eighteen pence is a common way of saying one shilling and sixpence when that is the full price. Similarly a price may be quoted entirely in shillings, without reference to pounds. Twenty-three shillings for a coat, for instance.”

“Jesus Christ,” Martini said angrily. “What have the British got against the decimal system?”

“And don't forget,” Docherty warned them, “there's four farthings to the penny, as well.”

“In everyday speech,” Fischer went on, “a pound is known as a quid, a shilling is a bob and there is a half-crown coin worth two-and-six that is commonly called half-a-dollar. Perversely the British have no such coin as a crown. Or a dollar. Is that all clear? Now then: weights and measures. Forget the metric system. Twelve inches make one foot, three feet one yard, and one thousand seven hundred and sixty yards equal one mile.”

“We can't remember all that,” Martini protested.

“British schoolchildren master it without difficulty,” Fischer told him.

“Chinese children talk Chinese,” Martini pointed out. “So what?”

“I was in China last year,” Docherty said. “Bought a small Chinese infant for half-a-dollar. Spoke perfect English.”

“Moving on to the British system of weights,” Fischer said. “We start with the ounce. Sixteen ounces make one pound. Fourteen pounds make one stone, eight stone one hundredweight, twenty
hundredweight one ton. Right, let's go over those. Here's an actual example. Butter costs half-a-crown a pound but your weekly ration is only three ounces, so how much should you pay?” Fischer gave an encouraging smile. Everyone but Docherty looked blankly helpless.

Schmidt said, “Three ounces?”

Docherty sucked in his breath. “And lucky to get it,” he said.

“Put it another way,” Fischer said. “How much change would you expect from a pound note?”

Next day there was a written examination on British currency and systems of measurement. Schmidt accused Laszlo Martini of cheating by looking at her answers. He denied it, she slapped his face, he bloodied her nose, she kicked him in the balls. It was not the only angry dispute. They all competed fiercely—for practice time on the Morse keys; at the firing range; in the explosives department; in the gymnasium, where they learned how to kill without weapons. There were many squabbles. Brigadier Wagner approved. “Aggression!” he said to Dr. Hartmann. “That's what war's all about, isn't it?” Hartmann returned a bleak smile. As far as he could see, war was all about terrifying danger in squalid discomfort and he intended to stay as far away from it as possible.

Freddy Garcia found Luis and Julie on the terrace, enjoying a rare spell of sunshine. “Good news!” he announced. “You're out of jail. Quarantine is over. Where would you like to go?”

“Templeton said he'd take us to see the Changing of the Guard,” Julie said, “but then he went away.”

Luis climbed on to the top of the terrace wall. “I want to meet the King,” he said. He began walking, arms outstretched. “Also the Queen.”

“Don't know about that, old boy.”

“You're bloody useless, Garcia. I bet the
Abwehr
could get me to meet Herr Hitler.”