The Swiss Courier: A Novel (10 page)

“He doesn’t appear to be a flight risk; still, this matter cannot wait. You have twenty-four hours and not a minute more. Call me when he is safely in your custody. I expect no problems.”

“Of course, Reichsführer. You can count on me.”

Kassler heard the phone click, and then he set the handset gingerly on the cradle and reached into his breeches for a handkerchief. Himmler didn’t suffer fools—or unwise mistakes— gladly.

He dabbed his perspiring forehead and willed himself to calm down. After all, Engel had no idea he was a hunted man. Kassler still had the element of surprise in his hip pocket.

The Gestapo chief reached for the phone and dialed his office number. “Becker! Who’s leading the night brigade this evening?”

He heard a shuffling of papers until Becker had an answer. “Frisch, Sergeant Frisch.”

“Find him. Send him to my office. It’s urgent. I’ll be there shortly.”

After he hung up, Kassler heard a soft moan and the rustling of bedsheets beside him.

“Problems at the office, sweetheart?” The voice was slightly hoarse from sleep.

Kassler turned and regarded the raven-haired beauty, Sylvia Neddermeyer. She rubbed her eyes and yawned, as if she had awakened in the middle of the night instead of the early afternoon. She rose from the bed and slowly gathered his silk bathrobe around her nude frame. Her high cheekbones, model skin, and hourglass figure were hard to overlook. And the fact that she was one-sixteenth Jewish was a technicality he was also willing to ignore.

As long as she maintained her end of the bargain.

“Come back to bed. I can’t sleep when you’re not here to warm me.” She pouted for his benefit. “Besides,” she purred in a sultry voice as she loosely tied his robe, “I can tell you’ve been working too hard.”

Kassler smiled as Sylvia approached and slid into his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck.

Kassler nuzzled his face into Sylvia’s neck, breathing in the sweet, musky scent of her. Sergeant Frisch could wait. He had twenty-four hours, after all.

Dieter Baumann stared off into the half-empty train yard as the iron brakes of the IC Express squealed, signaling its arrival in Bern—Switzerland’s capital city and seat of the national government.

A festive mood filled the second-class railcar, with every seat taken by families anxious to visit loved ones on Swiss National Day. As the early afternoon train leisurely rolled underneath a massive cupola, men dressed in black stovepipe pants, pressed white shirts, and thin black ties reached for satchels in the overhead compartment. Their wives, adorned in embroidered blouses and bright dresses in various shades of crimson red—in homage to the predominantly red flag of Switzerland—gathered their children’s belongings and picnic baskets. The outfits worn by their offspring were pint-sized versions of their parents’ celebratory apparel.

Dieter regarded his olive-colored dungarees and simple dress shirt. No party clothes for him, or
wurst
and potato salad that afternoon. Instead, Dieter focused on the job he had to do. He exited the Bern Hauptbahnhof with a leather briefcase in hand and smoothly passed harried parents reining in hopped-up boys and girls sprinting for the exits. Within fifteen minutes, he arrived at the United States Embassy on Jubiläumsstrasse 93 where a pair of serious Marines studied the contents of his scarlet passport before phoning the office of Allen Dulles. Inside of two minutes, Dulles’s secretary— an American—arrived at the front door to escort Dieter into the inner sanctum.

“Mr. Baumann, it’s good to see you again,” the secretary, Priscilla Taylor, declared in a businesslike manner.

“And you as well, Mrs. Taylor.”

Early forties, unadorned in a navy blue dress skirt and matching jacket, and not bearing a wedding ring, the frumpy Frau Taylor was married to her work. As per Swiss custom, Dieter couldn’t bring himself to call an old maid like her a “miss.”

“I thought you’d be taking the day off,” Dieter breezily remarked as the pair walked along a granite-floored hallway toward the rear of the embassy.

“I doubt the Germans are on holiday today,” she replied, businesslike.

“True, but we are in Switzerland.”

“We didn’t take the Fourth of July off either,” she said curtly.

The ensuing silence told Dieter that Mrs. Taylor was in no mood to verbally spar with a Swiss operative from the Basel office. They remained mute as she ushered him into Dulles’s office.

“Ah, Mister Baumann, thank you for coming on such short notice,” said the angular Dulles, rising from a burgundy-colored, padded leather chair. “Have you eaten lunch?”

“I had a croissant on the train.”

“Well, help yourself to some cheese and fruit if you’re hungry.” Dulles, dressed in a tweed jacket and matching tie, waved his right hand toward a silver platter overflowing with red grapes, ripe peaches, and a rectangular block of Appenzeller cheese.

“Maybe I’ll have something before I go.” Though Dieter’s stomach growled, his physical needs weren’t important at the moment.

“Very good.” The six-foot, two-inch American spymaster, of medium build and impeccably groomed gray hair parted to his right, stretched his arms as he stepped up to a window overlooking a small courtyard. “Mr. Baumann, our cryptologists in the basement are having a devil of a time cracking intercepts from German operatives inside Switzerland these days. After four days of no matches, they’ve abandoned those prefix codes that Miss Mueller pinched from the safe last week. Disinformation, I’m afraid.”

Dieter had been told to expect this by his Nazi contact. “I’m sure you’re right, Mr. Dulles. We had to leave the apartment in a hurry, so maybe there was something we missed. You recall how—”

Dulles interrupted him with a wave of the hand. “I read the report. I know the mission was botched.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far, sir. But, perhaps in the rush to escape, Fräulein Mueller may have inadvertently overlooked an indicator sheet to launch the real codes.”
Best to blame
her.

Dulles sighed and rubbed his forehead. “As you say. I may come back to that, but for now, let’s move on to other things.” The spymaster consulted a yellow legal-size pad, and for the next thirty minutes, peppered Dieter with inquiries about various field agents, what his contacts in the Swiss Army were saying, and the flow of refugees sneaking into Switzerland. The Basel station chief answered diligently, knowing his responses satisfied the curious cat.

Precisely at 2:30 p.m., a knock interrupted their meeting. Mrs. Taylor entered with a sterling silver set and a pair of chocolate éclairs. “Time for afternoon tea,” she sang out as she set the service on a wooden side table.

“Where did you find the éclairs?” Dulles asked. “You must have paid a king’s ransom for them.”

“Actually, the bakery around the corner exhausted its monthly ration of chocolate. It’s Swiss National Day, remember?” She winked at Dieter. “Please enjoy them, sir.” Then she offered a slight curtsy.

Dieter accepted a chocolate éclair while Mrs. Taylor poured him a peppermint tea. Then, as abruptly as she arrived, she exited.

With her out of earshot, Dieter thought about his next sentence very carefully before uttering it.

“I heard on the BBC shortwave last night that Patton’s Third Army broke out of the Normandy hedgerows and is moving east.” Dieter casually dropped a cube of sugar into his tea.

“Yes, very good news,” Dulles said. “If anyone can kick the Germans’ rear ends all the way to Berlin, it would be General George S. Patton and those pearl-handed pistols of his.”

“Is Patton meeting much resistance?” Dieter probed, but ever so slightly.

Dulles pursed his lips, as if he was thinking how to word his reply. “The word from London is that two Panzer divisions have stalled the advance in the St. Lô region, but I’m confident ol’ Blood and Guts will drive a stake through their lines. Patton doesn’t stand still very often.” Dulles sipped his tea before setting the hand-painted cup on a saucer. “I’m certain that Operation Cobra will be successful. In fact, I wouldn’t put it past Patton to maneuver around the southern flank and surround the German defenses, which have bottled up Monty and the British Expeditionary Force near Caen.”

Operation Cobra? Dieter hadn’t heard that before. That meant Patton’s Third Army wasn’t racing for Paris but would come back around and strike German forces from the rear. A classic pincer movement.

“Is the Resistance helping out?”

Dulles finished chewing a mouthful of pastry. “I had forgotten how good the Swiss are with chocolate. To answer your question, yes. The French underground are bothering the Krauts like a nest of mosquitoes. Blowing up bridges, sniper attacks, that sort of thing.”

Dulles seemed unusually chatty. This meant Dieter knew he had to reciprocate in some way. “Some of my contacts in the Swiss Air Force say that American pilots are dropping from the sky like unexpected drops of rain. Just in the last week, a dozen B-17 bomb crews limped into Swiss airspace after getting shot up over Germany.”

Dulles didn’t seem impressed. “Colonel Harris of the American Military Legation—he’s on the second floor—has been keeping me briefed.”

Dieter expected the American spymaster to say that. “Has the Colonel told you that Swiss Me-109s and anti-aircraft guns shot down four U.S. bombers last month?”

Dulles straightened up in his chair. “Why would the Swiss shoot down our bombers? Surely they know better than that.”

Dieter shrugged. “Depends on your point of view. They see themselves as Swiss, defending national airspace. And remember, the Schaffhausen
was
bombed last month by the Americans—”

“Clearly an accident. The crew got confused. Schaffhausen is north of the Rhine—”

“Twenty Swiss, including women and children, were killed. That’s why some of the Swiss”—Dieter barely caught himself from saying
our
—“flight crews have been, how you say, trigger-happy.” He kept his voice matter-of-fact and unemotional. He knew whom he was dealing with.

“I see. What about the Swiss authorities handing Jews back over to the Germans—is that still happening?”

Dieter was relieved to change the subject. “Jews escaping into Switzerland, if caught by the border patrol or local police, are being escorted immediately to the Basel frontier. That’s the official policy coming out of Bern. The Jews will do anything not to be put into German custody. I’ve heard about it all—bribes, sex, whatever. Yesterday a young Jewish couple and their baby jumped off the Mittlere Brücke rather than be handed over to the Germans.”

“Ghastly. Did they escape?”

Dieter shook his head. “Their bodies were pulled out of the Rhine by firemen.”

A buzzer sounded on Dulles’s desk, followed by the entrance of Miss Taylor. “Your next appointment has arrived, sir.”

Dieter took that as his cue to exit. He rose, and Dulles extended a hand.

“Mr. Baumann, thank you for coming to Bern on what should be a holiday for you.”

“It’s no big deal. Besides, the Germans aren’t taking off today.” Dieter shot a glance at Frau Taylor. He noted the smallest hint of a smile on her face, and he couldn’t help but return a slight smile, understanding how even the most stoic often crumbled under his charm.

Allen Dulles watched Baumann exit his office as a strange uneasiness settled over him. He tapped a plug of West Virginia tobacco into his cherrywood pipe. “Miss Taylor, do you trust him?”

His secretary hesitated for a moment. “Mr. Baumann’s operational skills have been excellent, and he can be quite charming. He must be agreeable if he’s cajoling that much information from the Swiss and German operatives here in Switzerland. But there’s something ‘off’ about him, like he’s trying too hard.”

“Hmmm,” Dulles muttered. He’d seen plenty of men like Baumann in his day.

When Allen Welsh Dulles joined the Secret Intelligence Branch (SI) following America’s entrance into the war, he was taught to train case officers, run agent operations, and process intelligence reports. In the fall of 1942, Washington asked Dulles to set up shop in Switzerland because the neutral country was fertile ground for intelligence gathering—smack in the middle of Europe and surrounded by Axis countries. Since the Germans, Russians, and British were using landlocked Switzerland to spy on each other following the invasion of Poland, Dulles’s nascent network was playing catch-up. He found that sending Allied agents
into
Germany had scant hope of eluding the Gestapo, but travel between the Reich and neutral Switzerland was free enough to bring certain Germans to him. Hence the need for field agents with mother-tongue ability to speak German. Men like Dieter Baumann.

Dulles struck a wooden match and drew a puff. “He was curious about General Patton today—a little too curious.” A wisp of smoke rose in the air. “Send a message to Jean-Pierre. Tell him I want Dieter Baumann put under surveillance. Very discreet. No reason to spook him.”

Priscilla Taylor scribbled on her notepad, then looked up. “There’s one more thing, sir. Our contact from Heidelberg sent this eyes-only message while you were meeting with Mr. Baumann.”

Dulles opened the sealed envelope and scanned its contents.

“I have to contact Washington on this.” Dulles felt the knot in his gut tighten. “Something must be done immediately.”

“Are you sure Sergeant Frisch hasn’t reported?” Kassler, back at Regional Headquarters, knew his question sounded accusatory, but this was
important.

Corporal Becker, standing before his desk, deflected the critical tone. “I’ve yet to locate him, sir. His bunkmate said he slept until noon and then left on a walk.”