Berlin Red (9 page)

Down in the bunker, the briefing had been concluded.

The generals, having delivered their usual, bleak assessment of the situation above ground, were now sitting down to lunch in the crowded bunker mess hall where, in spite of the spartan surroundings, the quality of food and wine was still among the finest in Berlin.

Hitler did not join them. He remained in the conference room, thinking back to the day, in July of 1943, when Hagemann and a group of his scientists, including Werner von Braun and Dr Steinhoff, had arrived at the East Prussia Army headquarters in Rastenburg, known as the Wolf’s Lair. Hagemann’s team had come equipped with rare colour footage of a successful V-2 launch, which had been carried out from Peenemunde in October of the previous year.

In a room specially converted to function as a cinema, Hitler had viewed the film, in the company of Field Marshal Keitel and Generals Jodl and Buhle.

Previously sceptical about the possibility of developing the V-2 as a weapon, watching this film transformed Hitler into a believer.

When the lights came up again, Hitler practically leaped from his chair and shook Hagemann’s hand with both of his. ‘Why was it’, he asked the startled general, ‘that I could not believe in the success of your work?’

The other generals in the room, who had previously expressed their own grave misgivings, especially about the proposed price tag of funding the rocket programme, were effectively muzzled by Hitler’s exuberance. Any protest from them now would only be seen as obstruction by Hitler, and the price tag of that, for those two men, was more than they were willing to pay.

‘If we’d had these rockets back in 1939,’ Hitler went on to say, ‘we would never have had this war.’

And then, for one of the only times in his life, Hitler apologised. ‘Forgive me’, he told General Hagemann, ‘for ever having doubted you.’

He immediately gave orders to begin mass-production of the V-2, regardless of the cost. As his imagination raced out of control, his demand for nine hundred rockets a month increased over the course of a few minutes to five thousand. Although even the lowest of these figures turned out to be impractical, since the amount of liquid oxygen required to power that many V-2s far exceeded Germany’s annual output, his belief in this miracle weapon seemed unshakeable.

Although there had been many times since then when Hitler had secretly harboured doubts about the professor’s judgement, now it seemed to him that his faith had been rewarded at last. Even if it had come too late to ensure a total victory over Europe and the Bolsheviks, the V-2’s improved performance, if the full measure and precision of its destructive power could be proven on the battlefield, would not go unnoticed by the enemy. And it might just be enough to stop the advance of the armies which, even now, were making their way steadily towards Berlin.

But only if he stopped this leak of information that had been trickling out of the bunker.

‘Fetch me General Rattenhuber!’ he shouted to no one in particular.

Fifteen minutes later, SS General Johann Rattenhuber, chief of the Reich’s Security Service, entered the briefing room.

He was a square-faced man with a heavy chin, grey hair combed straight back over his head, and permanently narrowed eyes. From the earliest days of the National Socialist party, Rattenhuber had been responsible for Hitler’s personal safety. He and his team were constantly on the move, travelling to whichever of Hitler’s thirteen special headquarters was in use at any given time.

Some of these, such as the Cliff Nest, hidden deep within the Eifel Mountains, or the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg in East Prussia, were complexes of underground tunnels and massive concrete block houses, built to withstand direct hits from the heaviest weapons in the Allied arsenal of weaponry. From these almost impenetrable fortifications, Hitler had conducted his campaigns in the east and west. Other hideouts, such as the Giant in Charlottenburg, the construction of which had required more concrete than the entire allotment supplied for civilian air-raid shelters in the year 1944, had never been put to use.

Rattenhuber was used to departing at short notice. He was seldom given more than a day’s warning when Hitler decamped from one headquarters to another and, increasingly over the past few months, he had grown accustomed to being summoned at all hours of the day or night, to answer Hitler’s growing suspicions about his safety.

In Rattenhuber’s mind, ever since the attempt on Hitler’s life back in July of 1944, the Führer had been steadily losing his grip on reality. Having survived the bomb blast that tore through the meeting room in Rastenburg, Hitler had become convinced that providence itself had intervened. Although Rattenhuber did not believe in such lofty concepts, he was quietly forced to admit that it was no thanks to him, or to his hand-selected squad of Bavarian ex-policemen, that Hitler had emerged with nothing more than scratches and his clothing torn to shreds. Those were the physical results, but mentally, as Rattenhuber had seen for himself, Hitler’s wounds were much deeper. The sense of betrayal he felt, that his own generals would have conspired to murder him, would dog him for the rest of his days. Behind the anger at this betrayal lay a primal terror which no amount of concrete, or Schmeisser-toting guards or reassurance could ever put to rest.

But what consumed him now, was the story of this spy in the Chancellery.

Rattenhuber knew about Der Chef, whose jovial gossip had enlightened him to scandals which even he, in his role as guardian of all the bunker folk, had not known about before he heard it on the radio.

With his mind set on vengeance, Rattenhuber sifted through the list of Chancellery employees. For a while, he had fastened on a bad-tempered old janitor named Ziegler, who had worked at the Chancellery for years. Hauling him off to Gestapo headquarters, located in the crypt of the now-ruined Dreifaltigkeit church on Mauerstrasse, it was Rattenhuber himself who conducted the interrogation. But it quickly became apparent that Ziegler had nothing to hide. He was what he was – just a surly, ill-mannered floor-sweeper with a grudge against all of humanity.

After Ziegler, there were no more leads, and the stone-like face of Rattenhuber, the once-unshakeable Munich detective, was unable to conceal his helplessness.

Standing in the briefing room, Rattenhuber’s head almost touched the low concrete ceiling. Directly above him, an electric light dimmed and brightened with the fluctuating power of the generator.

Of all the fortresses which Hitler had put into use, Rattenhuber hated this bunker the most. Worst of all was the quality of the air. There were times when he had virtually staggered up the stairs to the main floor of the Chancellery building. Gasping, he would lean against the wall, two fingers hooked inside his collar to allow himself to breathe.

Hitler sat by himself. Except for a single sheet of paper, the table in front of him was bare.

Rattenhuber came to attention.

Hitler ignored the salute. Without even looking up, he slid the piece of paper across to Rattenhuber.

The general picked it up. It was a list of Knight’s Cross recipients. ‘Why am I looking at this?’ he asked, laying the page back on the table.

Hitler reached across and tapped one finger on the page. ‘It never left the bunker.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Indeed it is,’ Hitler confirmed, ‘because this morning, Der Chef broadcast it to the world.’

There was no need to explain any more. Rattenhuber knew exactly what this meant. The blood drained out of his face. ‘I will begin an investigation immediately,’ he said.

Slowly Hitler shook his head. ‘You had your chance,’ he muttered. ‘I am giving this job to Inspector Hunyadi.’

‘Hunyadi!’ exclaimed the general. ‘But he’s in prison! You put him there yourself. He is due to be executed any day now. For all I know, he might already be dead.’

‘Then you had better hope it’s not too late,’ said Hitler. ‘You have already failed me twice, Rattenhuber. First, you let them try to blow me to pieces. Then you stand around uselessly while this spy roams the bunker at will. Now I am ordering you to bring me Hunyadi. Fail me again, Rattenhuber, and you will take that man’s place at the gallows.’

Following the directions that Stalin had written down for him, Pekkala made his way to a narrow dreary street in the Lefortovo District of the city. He rattled the gate at 17 Rubzov Lane – a dirty yellow apartment building with mildew growing on the outer wall – until the caretaker, a small hunched man in a blue boiler suit with a brown corduroy patch sewn into the seat, finally emerged from his office to see what the fuss was about.

‘He’s just moved in,’ said the caretaker, when Pekkala had explained who he was looking for.

He unlocked the gate and led Pekkala to a door on the ground floor of the building. ‘In there, he should be,’ said the man, then shuffled back to the office, in which Pekkala could see a huge grey dog, some kind of wolfhound, lying on a blanket beside a stove.

Pekkala pounded on the door and then stood back. The curtain of the single window facing out into the courtyard fluttered slightly and then the door opened a crack.

‘Comrade Garlinski,’ said Pekkala.

‘Yes?’ answered a frightened voice.

‘I hear you’ve just arrived from England.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Only to talk.’

‘Who sent you?’

Pekkala held up his red Special Operations pass book, with its faded gold hammer and sickle on the front.

The door opened a little wider now and the frightened-looking man who had, until the week before, been the head of operations at Unit 53A, the British Special Operations listening post at Grantham Underwood, appeared from the shadows. Even though it was the middle of the afternoon, Garlinski had been asleep. With orders not to leave the flat, he had little else to do except to make his way through the meagre rations that had been left for him in the kitchen. ‘Talk about what?’ he asked the stranger.

‘An agent of yours named Christophe,’ answered Pekkala.

Garlinski blinked at him in astonishment. ‘How the hell do you know about that? I haven’t even been debriefed yet.’ And now he opened the door wide, allowing Pekkala to enter.

Inside, there was almost no furniture; only a chair pulled up next to the stove. The walls were bare, with fade marks on the cream-coloured paint where pictures had once hung. His bed was a blue and white ticking mattress lying on the floor, with an old overcoat for a blanket.

‘Look where they dumped me,’ said Garlinski. ‘After all I’ve done, I thought I’d get some kind of hero’s welcome. Instead, I get this.’ He raised his hands and let them fall again with a slap against his thighs.

With only one chair between them, both men sat down with their back against the wall. Sitting side by side, they stared straight ahead as they conversed.

‘What is it you want to know?’ asked Garlinski.

‘Why were you in such a hurry to leave England?’

‘I thought that my cover was blown,’ explained Garlinski, ‘or that it was about to be, at any rate.’

‘What happened?’

‘I was on my way home from the relay station,’ explained Garlinski. ‘In my briefcase, I had several messages that had come in from SOE agents which I planned to copy and send out to Moscow that evening.’

‘Why were you bringing them home with you?’

‘Because that’s where I kept my transmitter,’ said Garlinski. ‘Of course, we weren’t allowed to leave with these messages, but since I was in charge of the relay station, no one ever checked. Until last week, that is.

‘I got stopped at a police checkpoint two blocks from my house. They were looking for black marketers. When they opened my briefcase, they saw the messages and decided to hold on to them until they had been cleared.’

‘Couldn’t you have told them you were working for SOE?’

‘I could have, but it would only have made things worse. SOE would have come down on me like a ton of bricks for removing messages from the station.’

‘What did you tell the police?’

‘I said I was trying to invent a new code for the army to use. I went on about it long enough that they must have thought I was telling the truth. They still held on to the messages, though, and I knew it was only a matter of time before someone figured out what I was up to. That’s why I had to leave.’

‘How did you get out of the country so quickly?’ asked Pekkala.

‘There was a safe house, right outside the underground station at the Angel up in Islington. I went straight there and your people arranged for my disappearance.’

‘Did SOE ever suspect you might be working for Russian Intelligence?’

‘If they did, I wouldn’t be here now, but I don’t know how much better off I am, left to rot in a place like this.’

‘At least you are alive.’

‘If you can call this living,’ muttered Garlinski.

‘How do you know about Christophe?’ asked Pekkala.

‘Only that the agent’s messages come through our station. My job is simply to take in the raw material, decode it and send it up the chain, and all as quickly as possible. What I can tell you is that the stuff Christophe sent us was usually a mixture of gossip, scandal and shuffles in the High Command. I hear the British use it on the radio stations which they broadcast into enemy territory. It was all pretty straightforward until about ten days ago.’

‘What happened then?’

‘We intercepted a message from somewhere on the Baltic coast, mentioning something about a “diamond stream”.’

‘What does it mean?’ asked Pekkala.

Garlinski shrugged. ‘Whatever it was, it got their attention up at Headquarters. They contacted Christophe, asking for more information, photographs and so on. They’re afraid it might be some kind of new weapons system – one of the miracles the German High Command keep promising will turn the tide of the war. But whether Christophe was successful or not, I don’t know.’

‘The British have come to us, asking if we might be prepared to get Christophe out of Berlin.’

‘Berlin?’ Garlinski turned to face Pekkala. ‘And what fool are you sending on that suicide mission?’

‘That fool would be me,’ replied Pekkala.

‘Well, I’m sorry for you, Inspector, because none of it matters now anyway.’

‘Why do you say that?’ asked Pekkala, rising to his feet.

‘The enemy is done for and they know it. All but a few of them, anyway.’

‘It’s those few we have to worry about,’ Pekkala said as he headed for the door.

‘Put in a good word for me, could you?’ asked Garlinski. He spread his arms, taking in the hollowness of the dirty room. ‘Tell them I deserve more than this.’