The Unlikely Spy (13 page)
Authors: Daniel Silva
"I lost my wife to the blitz in 1940. I think I may have lost my only daughter tonight."
". . . on Earth as it is in Heaven. . . ."
"What a war, Sister, what a bleedin' war."
". . . as we forgive those who trespass against us. . . ."
"You know, Mervin, I get the impression Hitler doesn't much like us."
"I've noticed that too."
The emergency room erupted with laughter.
Ten minutes later, when the nun decided that prayer had run its course, the inevitable singing began.
"Roll out the barrel . . ."
Catherine shook her head.
"We'll have a barrel of fun. . . ."
But after a moment she found herself singing along with the others.
It was eight o'clock the next morning when she let herself into her flat. The morning's post had arrived. Her landlady, Mrs. Hodges, always slipped it beneath the door. Catherine bent down, picked up the letters, and immediately tossed three envelopes into the trash bin in the kitchen. She did not need to read them because she had written them herself and mailed them from different locations around London. Under normal circumstances, Catherine would receive no personal letters, for she had no friends and no family in Britain. But it would be odd for a young, attractive, educated woman never to correspond with anyone--and Mrs. Hodges was a bit of a snoop--so Catherine engaged in an elaborate ruse to make sure she had a steady stream of personal mail.
She went into the bathroom and opened the taps above the tub. The pressure was low, the water trickled from the spigot in a thread, but at least it was hot today. Water was in short supply because of the dry summer and fall, and the government was threatening to ration that too. Filling the tub would take several minutes.
Catherine Blake had been in no position to make demands at the time of her recruitment, but she made one anyway--enough money to live comfortably. She had been raised in large town houses and sprawling country estates--both her parents had come from the upper classes--and spending the war in some hovel of a boardinghouse sharing a bathroom with six other people was out of the question. Her cover was a war widow from a middle-class family of respectable means and her flat matched it to perfection, a modest yet comfortable set of rooms in a Victorian terrace in Earl's Court.
The sitting room was cozy and modestly furnished, though a stranger might have been struck by the complete lack of anything personal. There were no photographs and no mementos. There was a separate bedroom with a comfortable double bed, a kitchen with all modern appliances, and her own bathroom with a large tub.
The flat had other qualities that a normal Englishwoman living alone might not demand. It was on the top floor, where her AFU suitcase radio could receive transmissions from Hamburg with little interference, and the Victorian bay window in the sitting room provided a clear view of the street below.
She went into the kitchen and placed a kettle of water on the stove. The volunteer work was time-consuming and exhausting but it was essential for her cover. Everyone was doing
something
to help. It wouldn't look right for a healthy young woman with no family to be doing nothing for the war effort. Signing up to work at a munitions factory was risky--her cover might not withstand much of a background check--and joining the Wrens was out of the question. The Women's Voluntary Service was the perfect compromise. They were desperate for people. When Catherine went to sign up in September 1940 she was put to work that same night. She cared for the injured at St. Thomas Hospital and handed out books and biscuits in the underground during the night raids. By all appearances she was the model young Englishwoman doing her bit.
something
to help. It wouldn't look right for a healthy young woman with no family to be doing nothing for the war effort. Signing up to work at a munitions factory was risky--her cover might not withstand much of a background check--and joining the Wrens was out of the question. The Women's Voluntary Service was the perfect compromise. They were desperate for people. When Catherine went to sign up in September 1940 she was put to work that same night. She cared for the injured at St. Thomas Hospital and handed out books and biscuits in the underground during the night raids. By all appearances she was the model young Englishwoman doing her bit.
Sometimes she had to laugh.
The kettle screamed. She returned to the kitchen and made tea. Like all Londoners she had become addicted to tea and cigarettes. It seemed the whole country was living on tannin and tobacco, and Catherine was no exception. She had used up her ration of powdered milk and sugar so she drank the tea plain. At moments like these she longed for the strong bitter coffee of home and a piece of sweet Berlin cake.
She finished the first cup and poured a second. She wanted to take a bath, crawl into bed, and sleep round the clock, but she had work to do, and she needed to stay awake. She would have been home an hour earlier if she moved around London like a normal woman. She would have taken the underground straight across London to Earl's Court. But Catherine did not move around London like a normal woman. She had taken a train, then a bus, then a taxi, then another bus. She had stepped off the bus early and walked the final quarter mile to her flat, constantly checking to make certain she was not being followed. When she finally arrived home she was soaked by the rain but confident she was alone. After more than five years, some agents might be tempted to become complacent. Catherine would never become complacent. It was one of the reasons she survived when others had been arrested and hanged.
She went into the bathroom and undressed in front of the mirror. She was tall and fit; years of heavy riding and hunting had made her much stronger than most women and many men. She was broad through the front of her shoulders, and her arms were smooth and firm as a statue's. Her breasts were rounded and heavy and perfectly shaped, her stomach hard and flat. Like almost everyone she was thinner than before the war. She undid the clasp that held her hair in a discreet nurse's bun, and it tumbled about her neck and shoulders, framing her face. Her eyes were ice blue--the color of a Prussian lake, her father had always said--and the cheekbones were wide and prominent, more German than English. The nose was long and graceful, the mouth generous, with a pair of sensuous lips.
She thought, All in all, you're still a very attractive woman, Catherine Blake.
She climbed into the tub, feeling suddenly very alone. Vogel had warned her about the loneliness. She never imagined it could be so intense. Sometimes it was actually worse than the fear. She thought it would be better if she were completely alone--isolated on a deserted island or mountaintop--than to be surrounded by people she could not touch.
She had not allowed herself a lover since the boy in Holland. She missed men and she missed sex but she could live without both. Desire, like all her emotions, was something she could turn on and off like a light switch. Besides, having a man was difficult in her line of work. Men tended to become obsessive about her. The last thing she needed now was a lovesick man looking into her past.
Catherine finished her bath and got out. She combed her wet hair quickly and put on her robe. She went to the kitchen and opened the door to the pantry. The shelves were barren. The suitcase radio was on the top shelf. She brought it down and took it into the sitting room near the window, where the reception was the best. She opened the lid and switched it on.
There was another reason why she had never been caught: Catherine stayed off the airwaves. Each week she switched on the radio for a period of ten minutes. If Berlin had orders for her they would send them then.
For five years there had been nothing, only the hiss of the atmosphere.
She had communicated with Berlin just once, the night after she murdered the woman in Suffolk and assumed her new identity. Beatrice Pymm. She thought of the woman now, feeling no remorse. Catherine was a soldier, and during wartime soldiers were forced to kill. Besides, the murder was not gratuitous. It was absolutely necessary.
There were two ways for an agent to slip into Britain: clandestinely, by parachute or small boat, or openly, by passenger ship or airplane. Each method had drawbacks. Attempting to slip into the country undetected from the air or by small boat was risky. The agent might be spotted or injured in the jump; simply learning how to parachute would have added months to Catherine's already interminable training. The second method--coming by legal means--carried its own danger. The agent would have to go through passport control. A record would be made of the date and port of entry. When war broke out, MI5 would surely rely on those records to help track down spies. If a foreigner entered the country and never left, MI5 could safely assume that person was a German agent. Vogel devised a solution: enter Britain safely by boat, then erase the record of the entry by erasing the actual person. Simple, except for one thing--it required a body. Beatrice Pymm, in death, became Christa Kunst. MI5 had never discovered Catherine because they had never looked. Christa Kunst's entry and departure were both accounted for. They had no hint Catherine ever existed.
Catherine poured another cup of tea, slipped on her earphones, and waited.
She nearly spilled it on herself when, five minutes later, the radio crackled into life.
The operator in Hamburg tapped out a burst of code.
German keyers had the reputation of being the most precise in the world. Also the fastest. Catherine struggled to keep up. When the Hamburg operator finished, she asked him to repeat the message.
He did, more slowly.
Catherine acknowledged and signed off.
It took several minutes to find her codebook and several more to decode the message. When she was finished she stared at it in disbelief.
EXECUTE RENDEZVOUS ALPHA.
Kurt Vogel finally wanted her to meet with another agent.
8
HAMPTON SANDS, NORFOLK
Rain drifted across the Norfolk coast as Sean Dogherty, done in by five pints of watery ale, tried to mount his bicycle outside the Hampton Arms. He succeeded on his third attempt and set out for home. Dogherty, cycling steadily, barely noticed the village: a dreary place really--a cluster of cottages along the single street, the village store, the Hampton Arms pub. The sign hadn't been painted since 1938; paint, like nearly everything else, was rationed. St. John's Church rose over the east end. The graveyard lay at the edge of the village. Dogherty unconsciously blessed himself as he passed the lych-gate and pedaled over the wooden bridge spanning the sea creek. A moment later the village disappeared behind him.
Darkness gathered; Dogherty struggled to keep the bicycle upright on the pitted lane. He was a small man of fifty, green eyes set too deeply in his skull, a derelict gray beard. His nose, twisted and off center, had been broken more times than he cared to remember, once during a brief career as a welterweight in Dublin and a few more times in drunken street fights. He wore an oilskin coat and a woolen cap. The cold air clawed at the exposed skin of his face: North Sea air, knife edged, scented with the arctic ice fields and Norwegian fjords it had passed before assaulting the Norfolk coast.
The curtain of rain parted and the terrain came into view--broad emerald fields, endless gray mudflats, salt marshes deep with reeds and grass. To his left a wide, seemingly endless beach ran down to the water's edge. To his right, in the middle distance, green hills blended into low cloud.
A pair of Brent geese--down from Siberia for the winter--rose out of the marsh and banked out over the water, wings pumping gently. A perfect habitat for many species of birds, the Norfolk coast once was a popular tourist destination. But the war had made bird-watching all but impossible. Much of Norfolk was a restricted military zone, and petrol rationing left few citizens with the means to travel to such an isolated corner of the country. If they had, they would have found it difficult to find their way around. In the spring of 1940, with invasion fever running high, the government took down all the road signs.
Sean Dogherty, more than other residents of the Norfolk coast, took special note of such things. In 1940 he had been recruited to spy for the Abwehr and given the code name Emerald.
The cottage appeared in the distance, smoke lifting gently from the chimney only to be sliced off by the wind and carried across the broad meadow. It was a smallholding on rented land but it provided an adequate living: a small flock of sheep that gave them wool and meat, chickens, a small plot of root vegetables that fetched good prices these days at the market. Dogherty even owned a dilapidated old van and transported goods from neighboring farms to the market in King's Lynn. As a result he was given an agricultural ration of petrol, more than the standard civilian ration.
He turned into the drive, climbed off his bicycle, and pushed it along the pitted pathway toward the barn. Overhead, he heard the drone of Lancaster bombers setting out from their Norfolk bases. He remembered a time when the planes came from the other direction--the Luftwaffe's heavy Heinkels, sweeping in over the North Sea toward the industrial centers of Birmingham and Manchester. Now the Allies had established supremacy of the skies, and the Heinkels rarely ventured over Norfolk.
He looked up and saw the curtains of the kitchen window part slightly, saw the blurry image of Mary's face through the rain-streaked glass. Not tonight, Mary, he thought, eyes consciously averted. Please, not again tonight.
It had not been difficult for the Abwehr to convince Sean Dogherty to betray England and go to work for Nazi Germany. In 1921, his older brother, Daniel, was arrested and hanged by the British for leading an Irish Republican Army flying column.
Inside the barn Dogherty unlocked a tool cabinet and took down his Abwehr-issue suitcase transceiver, his cipher pad, a notebook, and a pencil. He switched on the radio and smoked a cigarette while he waited. His instructions were simple: turn on the radio once each week and stand by for any instructions from Hamburg. It had been more than three years since the Abwehr had asked him to do anything. Still, he dutifully switched on his radio at the instructed time and waited for ten minutes.
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