Artillery of Lies (49 page)

Freddy had been listening carefully to all this. “Yes,” he said. “I see what you mean, sir. So Canaris knew he was lying.”

“Well of course he knew.”

“Yes … All the same, sir, he couldn't be sure whether or not Eldorado knew he was lying, could he?”

An ankle was getting stiff. The Director switched his feet around. “Couldn't he?”

“No, sir. I mean, for all Canaris knew, Eldorado might have been convinced that nobody had been turned. In that case Eldorado would have assumed that Canaris was lying to him.”

The Director stared. “Canaris
was
lying. I thought that was the one thing we were all agreed on.”

“Oh, absolutely. Except that I can't help wondering what Canaris made of Eldorado's response.”

“What response? He made no response.”

“Exactly, sir. Eldorado should have made a response if Canaris was lying. He should have told Canaris he was wrong, that no agent had
been turned as far as he knew. When Eldorado failed to deny that suggestion, surely Canaris must have realized that he was telling the truth.”

“Well of course he was telling the truth,” the Director said. “He was lying
and
he was telling the truth.”

“Yes,” Freddy said. “Well, thank you for straightening that out, sir. I think we can put the whole business aside now, don't you?”

“Not that it matters,” the Director said. “From what I hear, nobody gives a damn what Canaris says anyway.”

After their debriefing, Julie and Luis discussed the Santander expedition only once.

“All that fuss,” he said. “And what difference has it made to anything?”

“Absolutely none.”

“Garlic's dead. Christian's dead. Doesn't change anything, does it?”

They were walking in the park. Luis clapped his hands to drive away some pigeons clustered in their path. “Bloody birds,” he said. “Tell me, which is worse? Pigeons or chimneys?”

She stopped and leaned against a tree. He sat on the grass where he could get a better view of her legs.

“I must have thought I was on some Commando mission,” she said. “Here goes the plucky gal Commando to rescue her trapped buddy. Straight out of the comic strips.”

“At least you didn't do any harm.”

“Didn't do any good.”

“According to Freddy, half of all the war effort doesn't do any good.”

“That so? Which half?”

“Ah, there's the difficulty. He says you've got to win the war before you can decide.”

“And by then it doesn't matter,” she said.

They walked on, and that was the end of it.

Nobody could end the war. General Sir Stewart Menzies conferred with General William Donovan after their meetings on board the cruiser
Barcelona;
and they found themselves in broad agreement:
Communism was the greater threat, and if Germany (without Hitler) could keep Russia at bay, then it would surely be possible and desirable to negotiate a ceasefire in the west. They reported all this to their respective masters and they walked into a pair of brick walls. The only ceasefire that Churchill and Roosevelt would consider was German unconditional surrender. The fact that Russia was Communist was, for the moment, irrelevant; what mattered was the way a succession of vast and violent land battles kept two-thirds of the German army tied down in the east. The western allies needed their eastern partner to help them get an invasion army ashore in Europe. In the face of that massive fact, all the hopes and plans of Canaris and his fellow-conspirators were just chatter.

General Oster chattered too loudly. Canaris sacked him. The move came too late to save the
Abwehr
from constant scrutiny by Himmler's Gestapo. It wasn't just a matter of plotting to replace the regime. Down through the years, the
Abwehr
had been weakened by a whole series of acts of minor corruption, some of them linked with political attempts to bring the war to an end. For
Abwehr
agents who did a lot of traveling into and out of neutral countries—Switzerland, for instance—currency smuggling was an attractive sideline. There were all sorts of rackets in wartime Germany which could be hidden under the cloak of
Abwehr
activity. Inevitably, the cloak slipped and one or two rackets were investigated by civil or military police. The
Abwehr
did not come well out of these investigations. Canaris had to use all his political leverage to contain them.

By February 1944 his organization had lost Hitler's respect and Canaris himself was a tired and troubled man. The Gestapo missed no chance to point out the
Abwehr's
failings, and when a senior
Abwehr
officer and his wife walked into the British Legation in Istanbul and defected, it was the end of Canaris and the end of the
Abwehr.
Hitler dismissed the head and merged the agency with the Gestapo under Himmler's overall leadership, thus creating one wide-reaching national intelligence agency.

The former
Abwehr
operations continued. Himmler had not coveted Canaris's department in order to dismantle it. He valued its established networks of agents and the rich and various strands of military intelligence which they reported. The Eldorado Network went on working and earning. Many of the reports which Himmler's new organization took and paid for concerned preparations for the Allied invasion of Europe. Everyone knew it was coming; the great
debate was about when and where it would go ashore. The possible landing sites stretched from the Belgian coast westward through the Pas de Calais and along the coast of northern France, around the peninsula of Normandy to Brittany and down to the Bay of Biscay: more than a thousand miles of shoreline to be defended.

Not that there was any guarantee that the Allies would strike at any of it.

They might invade the south of France. There were good arguments in favor of that, what with Allied control of the Mediterranean and a solid base in Italy. Or maybe the invasion route would be via Greece and Yugoslavia, where great help could be expected from Tito's partisans and there was the promise of an early link-up with the Russian advance. This was the “soft underbelly” of Europe for which Churchill had such a liking, as if the Continent could be attacked like an animal; although anyone who had fought in or around Greece in 1941 could have told him (as some did) that there was nothing soft about that bit of Europe; quite the reverse.

Scandinavia had its supporters too. Since the
Wehrmacht
had seized Norway so quickly and easily, perhaps it could be thrown out just as fast. Think what that would do to the German navy's attacks on the Arctic convoys to Russia! And from Norway it was just a short hop into Denmark, and Germany was around the corner …

The speculation was endless; but those who talked didn't know, while those who knew didn't talk. Luis and Julie didn't know, but that didn't stop them arguing the Second Front all around the coastline of Europe. It was a national sport, trying to second-guess the warlords. “No, it's got to be the short route,” Luis said. “Damn it all, you can
see
France from the cliffs at Dover.”

“But that's exactly what Eldorado's been telling Madrid,” Julie objected. For many months, the network had reported an accelerating build-up of troops and ships and aircraft in southeast England. Essex and Kent, Sussex and Surrey were so crammed with American and Canadian and British infantry and armor that—according to Knickers and Nutmeg—space had had to be found for a whole new American army group in the flatlands of Suffolk, Norfolk and Lincolnshire. “Why are we always pointing at the Pas de Calais if it's the truth?” she asked.

“Double-bluff. The enemy expects a deception plan. When we make so much fuss about the obvious invasion route he thinks it can't be true, it's a deception, Eldorado's sub-agents are being shown
what Allied Intelligence wants them to see, so the landings must be planned for elsewhere.”

She waited. “Like where else?”

Luis shrugged. “Somewhere a long way off, probably. My money's on the French Riviera. If I was Hitler that's where I'd be looking.”

“And maybe Hitler's right,” she said.

“No.”

“What makes you so sure? There's a lot to be said for the Med. The tide doesn't rush in and out like the Channel, for a start.”

“Sure. Nice weather, too. But it's a double-bluff. He's looking for a deception plan, isn't he? Fine. He's found it. What he doesn't know is that the phony attack is also the real attack.”

“OK, Luis. OK. For the sake of argument. But what if he doesn't buy the double-bluff? What if he buys the deception plan pure and simple?”

“Then he's an idiot.”

“He's an idiot with an awful lot of guns waiting in the Pas de Calais area.”

They stared at each other, Julie half-smiling, Luis frowning as his mind picked its way through this phantom maze.

“Maybe I should talk to Freddy,” he said. “Maybe it's time Eldorado told Madrid about the possibility of a double-bluff.”

“Madrid might not believe Eldorado,” she said. “Madrid might suspect that Eldorado has been sold a brand-new deception plan by British Intelligence. That would make it a triple-bluff. Look: our invasion build-up opposite the Pas de Calais is so obvious that the Germans know they're meant to ignore it, so that's what they
don't
do, because the last thing they're going to do is what
they
know
we
want them to do, except that in this case they know that we know what it is
they
think
we
want them to think, and then when Eldorado spells all that out to them they reckon his warning is just a further layer of deception. Therefore they do the opposite.”

Luis's head had sunk lower and lower under the weight of her reasoning. “They do the opposite,” he repeated. “What's that?”

“I can't go through it all again,” she said. “You'll just have to wait and see.”

He got out of her bed and began putting on his clothes. “I can't be expected to make love to you
and
organize the Second Front,” he said. “Are you wearing my socks? I can't find my socks … Look, why can't we live together? It would save all this dressing and undressing.”

“We can't live together,” Julie said, “because you're such a tremendous pain in the ass, Luis.”

“That's a double-bluff,” he said. “When you get to know me better you'll discover that I'm really a tremendous pain in the ass.” He found his socks and put them on. “Back to work,” he said.

Larbert 17 was a three-man pillbox made of concrete. It was one of a chain of pillboxes that guarded a valley through which roads and railways ran between Glasgow and Edinburgh. The chain had been built in a hurry in 1940 when it seemed more than possible that a German invasion fleet might steam up the Firth of Forth and put ashore a horde of infantry in field-gray and coalscuttle helmets who would seize Falkirk and Larbert, stream down the A80 to Dumbarton, Muirhead, Stepps and Carntyne, from where they could take a tram to anywhere in Glasgow they pleased. It was the sort of thing that had happened to Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, so why not to Scotland? Hence the pillboxes: chunky, five-sided concrete cells with narrow gun slits.

Larbert 17 was set on a hillside that overlooked a road bridge. In 1940 it was camouflaged green and brown but by the spring of 1943 nature had done a much better job. Moss, lichens, brambles and ivy left little of the concrete exposed. The pillbox blended gently into the hillside, forgotten and ignored by everyone except the farmer's dog.

The farmer raised sheep in the fields beyond the hillside. By springtime his ewes had lambed but that didn't mean they couldn't get into trouble. They wandered off, found (or made) gaps in the hedge, fell over, got their fleece trapped in brambles or thorn trees, struggled, exhausted themselves, sometimes died. Or they might plunge a leg in a rabbit-hole and be stuck. Those were the ewes. The lambs, of course, were twice as daft. So the dog—a border collie with a bit of spaniel somewhere in his ancestry—had a nose for accidents. He could smell distress or injury a long way off. Especially he could smell death. One day he let his master know it. The dog led him to Larbert 17. The farmer took one look inside and went to Larbert police.

That was in the morning. At midafternoon Inspector Hogg picked up José-Carlos Coelho at the Department of Pathology and drove him
the thirty-odd miles to Larbert 17, which was being guarded by a local constable.

“I thought this might be useful experience for you,” Hogg said to Coelho. “Assuming it's the same man, of course.” They had to duck to get through the cramped entrance at the rear.

It was the same man. Laszlo Martini lay in a corner under a couple of sacks. Hogg had a flashlight. “He looks smaller,” Coelho said.

Laszlo was smaller. He looked like a child: a bearded child, a circus freak. His face was turned to the gun-slits. Presumably he had been looking at the sky.

After he had squirmed through the bathroom window he had escaped the police by no more than a minute; but as he was on a bus, a minute was plenty. Laszlo had earned the rewards of daring and (considering the pain he was in) of courage. He had crossed Coelho's back garden, found a gate into an alley, and instead of running along the alley he had found another gate into another back garden, off the next street. It could have been full of large and angry men with spades or hoes, ready to challenge him. He was lucky: it was empty. As he made his way to the street he wrapped a woolen muffler around his battered face. What he needed was a bus, any bus, going anywhere, and obligingly one trundled around the corner.

He could only mumble and gesture to the conductress; in the end she lost patience and gave him a ticket to the end of the ride. Laszlo was trembling, and he dropped his ticket. She thought maybe he had the flu and that's why he was all wrapped up. Anyway, he got off the bus long before the end of the ride, as she told the police when they questioned her. But that was next day. Laszlo had taken several more bus rides by then. He was out in the countryside, slowly starving to death.