Spy Sinker (29 page)

'I know of an American… A very competent fellow.'

'American? Is that wise?'

'He's the perfect choice. Free-lance; expert and independent. He's even done a couple of jobs for the opposition…'

'Now wait a moment, Silas. I don't want some KGB thug in on this.'

'Hear me out, Henry. We need someone who knows his way around over there; someone who knows the Russian mind. And this chap is on the CIA's "most wanted" list, so he'll not be telling the story to the chaps in Grosvenor Square.'

Sir Henry sniffed to indicate doubt. 'When you put it like that…'

'Persona grata with the KGB, unconnected with the CIA and arm's length from us. The perfect man for the job. He'll take on the whole show for a flat fee.'

'The whole show? What does that mean?'

'There will be blood spilled, Henry. There's no avoiding that.'

'I don't want any repercussions,' said the D-G anxiously. 'I'm still answering questions about the Moskvin fracas.'

Silas Gaunt painfully lowered his feet to the floor and leaned across to the table to find some bone-handled knives in the cutlery drawer. He put three of them on the table and picked them up one by one. 'Let me improvise a possible outcome. Body number one; slightly burned but easily identified. Body number two; badly burned but identified by plentiful forensic evidence.' He looked at Sir Henry before picking up the third knife. 'Body number three; burned to a cinder but dental evidence proves it to be Fiona Samson.'

'Very convincing,' said the D-G after a moment's reflection.

'It will work,' said Silas, grabbing the knives and tossing them into the drawer with a loud crash.

'But isn't someone going to ask why?'

'You have been following the reports about Erich Stinnes and his drug racket?'

'Drugs. It's true then?'

'Our KGB colleagues have wide-ranging powers. Security, intelligence, counter-intelligence, border controls, political crimes, fraud, corruption and drugs have become a very big worry for the Soviets.' He didn't want to go into detail about the drugs. It was a vital part of the operation: it ensnared Stinnes as a trafficker and Tessa Kosinski as an addict, but the D-G would get very jumpy if he knew everything about the drugs.

'Stinnes,' said the D-G. 'Has he given us any decent material since going back there?'

'He's playing both ends against the middle. He feels safe from arrest by us, and safe from his KGB masters too. That's what led him into his drug racket I suppose. He must be making a fortune.'

'I think I see what you have in mind: some drug-running gangsters engage in a shoot-out and Fiona Samson disappears.'

'Precisely. That's why we have to time events to coincide with the shipment of drugs. When Stinnes brings the consignment of heroin from the airport we'll bring Mrs Samson to one of his contact points on the Autobahn – still in the DDK of course – and have Samson there waiting for her. Stinnes will believe it's simply a rendezvous to tranship the drugs. We'll supply a vehicle: a diplomatic vehicle would be best for this sort of show.'

'And send Samson to get her?'

'Yes. But not Samson alone. Deserted husband and errant wife reunited after all that time: a recipe for trouble. I'll have someone else, someone calm and dependable, there to make sure it all goes smoothly.'

'And you say we have to bring in this American fellow? Couldn't we do it with our own people?'

Silas looked at him. 'No, Henry, we couldn't.'

'May I ask why, Silas?'

'The American has had dealings with Stinnes already.'

'Drug dealings you mean?'

Silas hesitated and suppressed a sigh. He didn't want to go into details. There would be problems getting everyone there. They would all have to be told a different story and Silas hadn't yet worked it out. Like the rest of them in London Central, Sir Henry had only the barest idea of what went on in the field. Silas had been closer. 'Let me give you an idea of what's entailed, Henry. We will have to have a body there to substitute for Mrs Samson, the body of a youngish woman. I don't propose we take a dead body through the checkpoints, especially not in a diplomatic vehicle, because if something happened the publicity would be horrendous. We'll also need to leave there a skull with the right dentistry. We don't want the Russians to start asking why there is an extra skull so the body will have to be decapitated. Decapitated on the spot.'

'So how
will
you get the body there?' said the D-G still puzzling over it.

'The body will walk there, go there, drive there… I'm not sure yet.'

'You mean alive?' Sir Henry was deeply shocked. His body stiffened and he sat bolt upright. 'What woman? How will he do this?'

'Better you don't ask, Henry,' said Silas Gaunt gently. 'But now you see why we can't use our own people.' He waited for a moment to let the D-G regain his composure. 'Bernard Samson will be there of course, but we'll use young Samson simply to bring his wife out. He will see nothing of the other business.'

'Won't he…?'

'The American sub-contractor will stay behind and make sure the evidence is arranged to tell the story we want the Soviets to believe.'

'And you'll deal with this American direct?'

'No, Henry. I think that would reveal the Department's participation too obviously. I'll use a go-between. There is a fellow named Prettyman whom Bret uses for rough jobs. He's done a couple of things for us in the past. Very able, although not quite right for what I have in mind. I shall use him as a contact. No one will be told the full story, of course. Absolutely no one.'

'As long as you think you can manage this end.'

'Without Bret Rensselaer looking over my shoulder, you mean?' Silas pulled a face. 'We've managed this long.'

'I'll be glad when it's all done, Silas.'

'Of course you will, Henry. But we two old crocks have shown the youngsters a thing or two, haven't we?' They exchanged satisfied smiles.

There was a knock at the door and Mrs Porter brought tea for them. Tea was an elaborate affair at Whitelands, thanks to Mrs Porter. She arranged it on Silas' little table and the D-G pulled a chair up to it. There was buttered toast and honeycomb and caraway seed cake that only Mrs Porter could make so perfectly. That seed cake took the D-G back to his schooldays: he loved it. She poured the tea and left them.

For a few minutes they happily drank their tea and ate their toast like two little boys at a picnic.

'What was the truth about Samson's father?' the D-G asked as Silas poured more tea for them both. 'The real story, I mean. About the two Germans he was supposed to have shot?'

'Well, that's going back a bit. I…'

'There's no harm now, Silas. Brian Samson is dead, God rest his soul, and so is Max Busby.'

Silas Gaunt hesitated. He'd kept silent so long that some of the details were forgotten. At first the D-G thought he was going to refuse to talk about it, but eventually he said, 'You have to remember the atmosphere back in those days when Hitler was newly beaten. Europe was in ruins and everyone was expecting Nazi "werewolves" to suddenly emerge from the woodwork and start fighting all over again.'

'I remember it only too well,' said the D-G. 'I wish I could forget it. Or rather, I wish I were too young to have been there.'

'The Americans had no real intelligence service. Their OSS people were wasting their time looking for dead Nazis; Martin Bormann was at the top of the list.'

'Berchtesgaden. It's coming back to me now,' said the D-G. There was some sort of trap?'

'They had captured a Nazi war criminal named Esser – Reichsminister Esser – in a mountain hut near Hitler's Berghof. There had been a lot of Reichsbank gold found in that neighbourhood. Tons and tons of it was stolen by middle-rank US officers and never recovered. After they took Esser away, the Counter Intelligence Corps kept the hut – it was a house, really, a rather grand chalet in fact – kept it under observation. Martin Bormann's house was between Hitler's Berghof and this place they found Esser. The story was that there was penicillin and money and God knows what else hidden there for Martin Bormann to collect and get away to South America. It was all nonsense of course, but at the time it didn't seem so unlikely.'

'What was Brian Samson doing, there in the American Zone?'

'He was responsible for a prisoner from London: a German civilian named Winter,' said Silas. He offered the seed cake.

The D-G took a slice of cake. 'Winter, yes, of course.' He bit into it and savoured it like old wine.

'Paul Winter was a Nazi lawyer who worked for the Gestapo and who seemed to have an unhealthy amount of influence in Washington… a Congressman or someone. There was a tug of war between the State Department who wanted him released, the US Army who wanted him jailed, and the International Military Tribunal who wanted him as a defence lawyer. Meanwhile we had the blighter locked up in London.'

'He had an American mother: Veronica Winter. Her other son went to America and came strutting back in the uniform of a US Army colonel. Reckless people, Americans, eh? He wasn't even naturalized.'

'Very pragmatic,' said Silas, unwilling to make such generalizations.

'I seem to remember that the mother came of a good family. I heard that she'd died of pneumonia in one of those dreadful postwar winters. She was a friend of "Boy" Piper. Sir Alan Piper who was the D-G at one time.'

'Yes, "Boy" Piper was the one who sent me there to sort it out for the Department.'

'Go on, Silas. I want to hear the story.'

'There's not much to tell. The wife… Winter's wife that is, sent her husband a message…'

'Now this is the Nazi fellow?'

'Yes, Paul Winter the Nazi lawyer.'

'In prison?' asked the D-G, who wanted to get it quite clear.

'He wasn't in prison, in a billet. He'd been released in order to defend Esser. The Nazis accused at Nuremberg were permitted to choose anyone they wanted, even POWs from a prison cage, as their lawyers. The message said she was in this damned mountain hut, so off he dashed. He hadn't seen his wife since the war ended. His brother was a US colonel as you said: he got a military car or a jeep or something and they both cleared off without waiting for permission.'

'To Berchtesgaden?'

'And in particularly foul winter weather. I remember that winter very well. When this fellow Paul Winter got to the mountain house, his wife Inge was waiting for him. She'd had a child; she wanted money.'

'Did he have money?'

'There was a metal chest buried up there. Esser had taken it there and hidden it. During their sessions together he told Paul where it was. Then I suppose Esser must have told Inge Winter that her husband knew. They dug it up. It was gold; a mixed collection of stuff Esser had collected from the Berlin Reichsbank vaults, leaving a signed receipt for it.'

'And her child was Esser's,' supplied the D-G.

'How did you know?'

'It's the only part of the story that sticks in my mind.'

'Yes. Paul Winter must have suspected it wasn't his. They'd been married for ages and never been able to have a child. I can imagine how he felt.'

'And the two Winter boys were killed. But how did they get shot?'

'That's the question, isn't it? If you want the truth they were shot by a drunken US sergeant who thought they were werewolves or deserters or gangsters or some other sort of toughs who might hurt him. That region was plagued with deserters from both sides who'd formed gangs. They stole army supplies on a massive scale, ambushed supply convoys, robbed banks and weren't too fussy about who they hurt.'

'The story I heard… '

'Yes, there were lots of stories. Some people said that the Winters were shot by mistake: by someone who was trying to kill Samson and the General who was with him. Some said they were shot by the sergeant acting on secret orders from Washington. Some said Max Busby shot them because he was in love with Paul Winter's wife, or, in another version, involved in some black-market racket with her. It's impossible to prove any of those stories wrong, but believe me, I went into it thoroughly. It was as I told you.'

'But the report said Brian Samson had shot them,' said the D-G. 'I remember distinctly. He was bitter about it right up to the day he died.'

'Ah, yes. That was later. But at the time no one had any doubts. It was the drunken sergeant who was arrested and taken back to the cells. Only when the Americans asked for Samson to go and give evidence to their inquiry did things change. We couldn't let Samson face any sort of questioning of course: that's been Departmental policy since the beginning of time. When we refused to let Samson go down there, the Yanks suddenly saw a chance to get it all over quickly and quietly. By the time I arrived there, all the depositions were scrapped and new ones written. Suddenly they could produce eyewitnesses prepared to swear that Samson accidentally shot the two men.'

'That's despicable,' said the D-G. 'That verdict went on Samson's record.'

'You're preaching to the converted, Henry. I protested about it. And when "Boy" Piper wouldn't support me I made a devil of a fuss. Sometimes I think I blotted my copybook then. I was forever marked as a troublemaker.'

I'm sure that's not true,' protested the D-G without putting much effort into it.

'I don't blame the Americans for trying it on; but I was furious that they could get away with it,' said Silas mildly. 'You couldn't entirely blame the men who perjured themselves. They were American soldiers, draftees who hadn't seen their families for ages. An inquiry might easily have kept them in Europe for another year.'

'Was Busby a party to this?'

'Busby was the Duty Ops Officer at the Nuremberg CIC office that night. He was getting a lot of stick because he was in command of the party. He preferred an accident with some foreign officer as the guilty party.'

'I can see why there was such bad feeling between him and Samson when he came to work in Berlin.'

'That's why Busby went to work for Lange's people: Brian Samson wouldn't have him.'

'And the wife?'

'She took the gold, probably changed her name and disappeared from the story. There was no sign of her by the time Samson got to the house, and I never found her. She left Esser to face the hangman, and took her daughter and went into hiding; perhaps that's what Esser wanted her to do. She was a very resolute and resourceful young woman. She worked in a nightclub in Garmisch, so she would have had no trouble in contacting the people from whom she could buy permission to live in the French Zone, which is what she did. That removed her from the British and the US jurisdiction. Eventually she got a French passport and took her gold and her baby…'