XPD (27 page)

‘Well, where would we find another place as good as the flat I’ve got now?’ said Stuart. ‘Those people upstairs are paying more than double the rent I’m charged. And your sister is not going to want us both moving in there with her.’

‘It’s all right for you,’ she said. ‘Men always expect women to adapt to anything they want.’

Boyd Stuart put an arm round her and gave her a brief hug. It was a far cry from all those earlier declarations of sexual freedom. But, like all cries for freedom, Kitty King’s had been more concerned with getting concessions than with giving them. It would always be like this, he supposed. She would tell him what made her unhappy but refuse to face any of the practical difficulties that would come from changing things. She smiled in response to his comforting arm. ‘Drink your tea,’ she said. ‘And I’ll take the cups back. I only came down to the vault.’

‘For what?’ said Stuart. The ‘vault’ was the top-secret section of the archives stored in the basement strong room.

‘You’d never guess,’ she said. ‘To return the DG’s personal file.’

‘In the vault?’ They both laughed. It seemed like a good example of the Alice in Wonderland world in which they worked that something as innocuous as a biographical file should be locked away with such elaborate care.

‘He was in Switzerland for most of the war, wasn’t he?’

‘Except for the short time they let him serve with the army in Italy. He was deafened by the gunfire at Monte Cassino; that’s why he wears that hearing aid. He went back to Switzerland in time to work with Allen Dulles. They were negotiating the surrender of some German army units in Italy. He came back to work here in 1947.’ She repeated it as if it were some poem she had been compelled to learn at school.

‘I love you, Kitty.’

‘Don’t be silly, Boyd. Drink your tea. I must get back to work.’ She flicked through the DG’s file nervously, waiting for Stuart to finish his tea.

‘What’s that red sticker for?’ Stuart asked.

‘It’s a “stop mark”. The cover name must not be used at any time in the future. During the war, the DG used the name Elliot Castelbridge. It was common to have a cover name at that time. There was a wartime order, in case high-ranking department employees were captured by the Germans. Anyone who went to Switzerland or Sweden was redocumented into a permanent cover.’

‘The brief and exciting career of Elliot Castelbridge: eating warm fondue with cold wine, and waiting for the German surrender. Killed by a “stop mark”.’

‘You’re too hard on him, Boyd.’

‘He’s a Byzantine bastard,’ said Stuart without animosity.

‘Not at all. He is unmistakably Gothic.’

Stuart grinned. She was absolutely right. There was nothing of the devious oriental cunning that characterized so many of the senior staff of the department. The DG was a man of brutal bluffness, and even his appearance was more like the rough weathered stone of northern Europe than the smooth silks of the schism. ‘Don’t go.’

‘I must. Is your car here?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Will you be finished in time for dinner?’

‘There’s a very good new restaurant in Sloane Street.’

‘Just as long as it’s not curry.’ She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. For five minutes or more he sat there thinking about her, then he went back to work. He still needed ‘hard reference’ to the man in the film. Someone would be working all night on that one.

Chapter 23

The following morning, Tuesday, 17 July while Boyd Stuart and Kitty King were having breakfast together in his comfortable London apartment, the man whose face he had been seeking in the old Third Reich newsreels was breakfasting in a tall building in Hamburg. His name was Willi Kleiber and the breakfast was a business meeting at which eight senior business executives met together under the chairmanship of Dr Böttger. These were the trustees of the fund collected for the needs of Operation Siegfried, and the meeting was held in the private dining room of one of the banks which Böttger controlled.

Willi Kleiber sat on Dr Böttger’s immediate right. It was an appropriate seat for the man who had given so much of his time to the initial planning of Operation Siegfried, who not only had worked hard at the scheme but had actually introduced the idea into Dr Böttger’s head. Had Boyd Stuart seen the hatchet face of Willi Kleiber he would have called him Reichsbank Director Frank. And had Colonel Pitman’s cashier seen him before he shaved off the blunt moustache he had grown over Christmas 1978 he would have called him Peter Friedman, the
beau parleur
whose letters of credit secured him the millions that had crippled the bank.

It was early and Hamburg was enjoying clear blue skies. From this glass-sided conference room, high above the city, there was a view of St Michael’s Church and the Bismarck Memorial, and the sun and the morning breeze were making the dark water of the Elbe shimmer like hammered copper.

Kleiber liked Hamburg. He liked its ever-changing weather, its bars and its restaurants, the smell of the sea and the fine clear German that its inhabitants spoke. His brief, and never to be repeated, attempt at marriage had taken place in this town. That would have blighted the location for some men, but Kleiber was able to accept the pleasures of past experiences without dwelling upon the miseries; he felt the same way about his time in the war. He seldom came here without seeing his ex-wife. She was still attractive and amusing, and always wanted to hear about Willi Kleiber’s latest sexual conquests. It was as if she got some perverse and vicarious enjoyment from these detailed descriptions of his lechery. More than once he fantasized about taking her back to his hotel room, undressing her and … But Willi Kleiber knew that that would never happen. Not because his ex-wife would not enjoy it – but because her new husband was a senior official with the BND. A man who went frequently to London for conferences with senior British intelligence officials was a contact too valuable to risk for the sake of an afternoon of grab-ass. Tomorrow he would be having lunch with both husband and wife. It was safer that way.

‘Things have not gone quite as smoothly as we’d hoped,’ admitted Dr Böttger. He was a scholarly-looking man, sixty years old, slightly plump, with silver hair and gold wire spectacles. His face was becoming flushed, Kleiber noticed. It was a sign of anxiety, like the way in which Böttger thrust his fist into the jacket of his expensive suit with enough force to break the stitching. ‘But the plan goes forward. When we took so much money from their bank in Geneva we expected them to offer these documents to us through Herr Kleiber’s man in Los Angeles. That proved to be a miscalculation on our part.’ Böttger twisted his head far enough to see whether Willi Kleiber showed some appreciation; actually it had been Kleiber’s miscalculation. Kleiber nodded with an almost imperceptible movement, but Böttger had become accustomed to such signals in the boardroom. ‘It was the sensible, logical thing to do,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps if these men had been Germans they would have reacted rationally … but they are Americans …’ Böttger smiled, hoping to draw a response from his colleagues but only Kleiber acknowledged the jest.

Dr Böttger pressed his lips with his fingertips. ‘All of us have given a great part of our lives to making Germany prosperous, strong and a good place to live,’ said Böttger. ‘Has anyone forgotten what we suffered under Hitler and his fellow criminals? Do I have to tell you what the Nazis did to our country and to our people; not just the physical destruction that came from the war, but the moral damage that the Nazi propaganda did to our children. Are you unaware of what our compatriots in the east suffer under a regime of Moscow-trained puppets? We live in the west, and we count our blessings; but German democracy is a delicate flower, transplanted from other climes. What we have built from the ashes of 1945 could be quickly destroyed by neo-Nazi madmen or by communist lunatics who would like to see Russian soldiers patrolling our streets.’

‘You’re right, Dr Böttger,’ said a voice from the far end of the table.

‘Hitler is dead,’ said Böttger. ‘Let him remain dead. We want no revelations, no so-called Hitler Minutes, no secret plans to bring Hitler out of the grave and adorn him with the glories of newsworthy historical triumphs. Make no mistake, there are men who would snatch political power from such apotheosis.’ He stroked his face. ‘What do the British care about Churchill’s reputation; they have history books full of such men. Democracy is the fabric from which their society is woven. It is our frail newly created democracy which needs the reputations of Churchill and Roosevelt and other such leaders who have proved that a man can be warm, well fed and happy, as well as being free to say what he likes and to vote his masters out of office. That’s why we must go to any lengths to make sure that Moscow doesn’t get these documents. Neither must they fall into the hands of the muck-raking journalists who think only of their careers. Nor of those men who’d tell us that Hitler was a twentieth-century Bismarck.’ He looked round at them. ‘Don’t weaken now, my dear friends, don’t weaken now.’

Dr Böttger sat down. There was no reaction to his speech except that each of the men now turned his attention to the German-style breakfast that had been set upon individual embroidered cloths around the long polished table.

Böttger fastidiously took a knife and cut the top from his boiled egg. The others followed his example. The formalities were finished. Now came the questions. Dr Böttger hated questions.

‘It is the violence that troubles me,’ admitted a frail, freckled man at the other end of the table. His name was Fritz Rau. ‘Several men have already been killed, you tell us. Can we be sure that this is the end of it?’ He was forbidden to eat eggs, butter or cheese, and now he nibbled carefully upon the black bread.

Böttger seized the nettle. ‘By no means. I have no doubt that there will be other deaths, simply because the men we are up against are determined upon a collision course.’

‘I had not fully understood that when we began,’ said the frail man. ‘I wonder how many of us would have authorized the formation of the Trust, had we realized that money was to be paid to hired killers.’

There was a shocked silence but it did not last long. Willi Kleiber stood up. He was a powerfully built man who liked to attend reunions of his infantry regiment and sing the old wartime songs over steins of dark Bavarian beer. Kleiber said, ‘I understood it, and everyone I spoke to understood it.’ He smiled. ‘Everyone who is not hard of hearing understood it.’ It was a powerful voice. Kleiber was seldom contradicted.

‘My hearing is not defective,’ said the frail man, Rau.

‘We must leave the operational side of the matter to Willi,’ said Dr Böttger. For one moment he felt a wave of panic, believing that Rau must have discovered something about the British diplomat they had killed by mistake in Los Angeles. Kleiber’s attempt to kill the British secret agent had been another error. Willi Kleiber was inclined to solve problems by eliminating his opponents. But Böttger had agreed to using Kleiber as ‘operations chief’ and now they were stuck with him, so they must give him all the support he needed.

‘Does “operational side” mean killing people we don’t like?’ said Fritz Rau.

‘Yes,’ said Böttger. He looked round the table anxiously before sipping some black coffee. Fritz Rau had once been one of the cleverest scientists in German industry. Even today he could sometimes be found white-coated in the laboratory of the vast chemical combine that he virtually owned, testing out some new ideas he had jotted down on the back of an envelope. Böttger knew that the silence of the other men present was due largely to the respect that Rau commanded amongst them. Böttger began to worry that Rau’s doubts could undermine the whole of Operation Siegfried.

‘You’d better understand this, gentlemen,’ said Böttger. He held a coffee cup in one hand, as if this vitally important thought had only this moment come to him. He looked slowly at all the faces. There had always been this weakness for melodramatic style in Böttger. The truth was that he had used such mannerisms in his climb to his present exalted status. ‘You’d better understand that each and every one of us has already committed a crime. We are all accessories to murder. It is as simple as that. I believe that what we are doing is what every German who loves his country will approve. If we closed down Operation Siegfried tomorrow, our plans unfulfilled, what then? Can we bring those men back to life? No. And what if one of us decided to go to the police or to the Foreign Ministry and tell them of our plan? Shall I tell you what would happen? Everyone associated with Operation Siegfried would be ruthlessly hunted down and rigorously punished. We’d probably be sent to prison for the rest of our lives. And, quite apart from the criminal liability of what we have done, what of our colleagues? I am sure that, like me, you have secured the generous help of your business partners and colleagues in falsifying books to make the large cash appropriations available to the Trust. We have also dispersed and hidden the funds we stole from the bank in Geneva. Many people were involved in that. They didn’t ask questions; they did it because they were friends. Is their repayment to be betrayal? I say no. I say that we must now hold fast, as the English held fast in 1940, and as our people held fast in 1944 while the Russians came ever closer and the Anglo-American bombers tore our cities to pieces. Hold fast, silence your doubts, my friend. Do what must be done.’

Böttger smiled as he reached the end of his harangue. For a moment he feared the worst. He waited until he saw his smile reflected in the anxious faces round the table, but then he knew he had won them over. Even poor little Fritz Rau seemed temporarily reassured.

Willi Kleiber spoke next. ‘There will be no violence for the sake of violence, Dr Rau,’ he promised. ‘In our lifetimes there has been enough killing and none of us wants more of that.’

He paused and looked round the table. They were all men he had known for ten or fifteen years. Willi Kleiber owned and personally managed one of the finest security organizations in Europe. All these men had done business with his company. Some of them shared their darkest secrets with him; he had helped more than one of their children involved with drug peddlers, and ferreted out the secrets of two transgressing wives. Not even the tax man knew as much about these men as Willi Kleiber knew. He said, ‘Dr Rau has asked if the operational side of things means killing people we don’t like. Dr Böttger said yes. With all due respect to Dr Böttger, I must be allowed to correct him. There is no place in this delicate operation for personal animosities. The only people who will be killed are those who have knowledge which is dangerous to our cause. The list of executions will be as short as I can possibly make it. Everyone here in this room may rest assured about that. I killed men in the war. I killed them in hand-to-hand combat. It was disgusting. It was not something about which I will ever be able to tell my children. Dr Böttger has selected me for the operations side of this plan simply because he knows that I do not relish violence. I am your sword arm, gentlemen. Be confident that I will not strike down the innocent.’