A Gathering of Spies (17 page)

Schroeder shrugged. “It is possible.”

“As a matter of fact, it is not possible. Andrew will never allow it.”

“No?”

“No. Not only does he not trust you—”

“He doesn't trust me?” Schroeder said, feigning hurt.

“Not only does he not trust you,” Winterbotham said, “but he has a higher priority than this operation. As a matter of fact, Rudolf, I happen to know that
neither
of us will be allowed to honor any meeting we arrange. Andrew is using us as bait … to trap a spy.”

Schroeder looked at him with slit eyes. He took another long, slow drag from his cigarette. “To trap a spy,” he mused.

“Yes.”

“So we will arrange this meeting …”

“Yes.”

“And then not be allowed to keep it.”

“Yes.”

“Because some other spy, who interests Andrew more than either of us, will be at the chosen place of rendezvous?”

“Exactly,” Winterbotham said.

“Why tell me this? Assuming, of course, that it is true.”

“Because if we ally ourselves, Rudolf, there's no need for us both to get buggered by Andrew.”

“Buggered,” Rudolf said. He tasted the word for a moment, then burst out laughing. “Oh, Professor, forgive me! You're so much more colorful when Andrew isn't around!”

Winterbotham, a tight smile on his face, waited.

“Oh! Well! Yes! All right, then, where were we? Ah, yes, there's no need for us both to get
buggered
.” He chuckled. “
Buggered
,” he said again.

“Rudolf,” Winterbotham said.

“Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Forgive me. It's just—”

“Do you want to go home?” Winterbotham asked.

Schroeder stopped laughing.

“My offer,” Winterbotham said. “We arrange our own
treff
, you and I, without Andrew's knowledge. It's the only way either of us will ever set foot on that U-boat. Once we reach Germany, we go our separate ways. All I care about, Rudolf, is my wife. As far as I'm concerned, the war can go on without me.”

Schroeder was looking at him, nonplussed.

“No doubt you have prearranged coordinates for your rendezvous,” Winterbotham said. “When they contact you to set it up, they'll use a number, won't they? Meet at location twelve, or location five, or use method seven, or method three, or go to country six. But you haven't yet told MI-Five the specifics of your system, have you? Andrew really should have gotten that from you by now. But according to the records, he hasn't. He's been lazy, perhaps. Or perhaps he's too fond of you.”

“Perhaps he trusts me,” Schroeder said.

“Perhaps,” Winterbotham said. “But not enough to let you go home, Rudolf, do not doubt that. In any case, my proposal is simple. When Hamburg tells you to meet at location five, you'll tell Andrew that location five is Plymouth. But it's Dover. You and I go to Dover while Andrew and the rest traipse off to Plymouth.”

“And how will you get us to Dover, Professor? I seem to be a prisoner here—if you haven't noticed.”

“The same way we're speaking right now. Security clearance alpha.”

“You're a liar,” Schroeder said.

“Do you think so?”

“I know so. Oh, Professor, you must try harder.”

“How do you mean?”

“You must have a very low opinion of my intelligence, Professor. You must believe that I'm a very stupid man. I'll admit I do not understand exactly what purpose you hope to serve with this charade—”

“Andrew has no interest in letting me get to Germany. So I've taken matters into my own hands.”

Schroeder hesitated.

“Tell me the system you've worked out with the
Abwehr
,” Winterbotham said. “What is location one?”

“Lunacy,” Schroeder said.

“It's your only hope of getting home, Rudolf.”

Schroeder shook his head. He finished his cigarette and ground it out beneath his heel. “You are serious?” he said then.

“I am.”

“You must truly love your wife—or truly despise your country.”

“What is location one?”

Schroeder grinned. “Location one,” he said, “is Ipswich. From midnight to four
A.M.,
Sundays. You stand on the beach, you flash a light two times. They'll send a dinghy to pick you up.”

“Location two?”

“You
are
serious, aren't you?”

“I have never been more serious in my life.”

“South of Dogger Bank. Fifty-three degrees forty minutes north, three degrees ten minutes east, twenty-six fathoms, midnight to four every Monday. Are you getting this?”

“I'm getting it,” Winterbotham assured him.

“You will get me home, Professor?”

“I'll do my best.”

“Location three,” Schroeder said, and lit another cigarette as he leaned forward.

LONDON

She knew they were looking for her.

She saw them everywhere—bobbies and plainclothesmen, old and middle-aged and youngish, obvious and subtle—but all with too-bright, too-hungry eyes. She had seen several young women being stopped and questioned, and even two being led away for what she assumed was further interrogation. But so far nobody had stopped her. Nobody had so much as asked to check her papers, although she was carrying a suitcase, which must have attracted attention.

Nobody had stopped her, she knew, because of the habit.

Katarina was not quite able to feel confident. She was too intelligent to feel confident, considering her situation and the evident size of the manhunt around her. But she was able to derive a bit of comfort from the habit, which was really a very excellent disguise. It had prevented her from being approached at all. And nobody had even needed to be harmed for her to acquire it, although Sister Abigail Harbert had suffered the unfortunate loss of a piece of luggage.

But the disguise was becoming less excellent with each passing hour. This was due to the simple fact that she was not able to stop anywhere to bathe or to rest. She looked—and smelled—like a woman on the run, if anybody cared to pay close enough attention.

“Excuse me, sister,” a man was saying, “can you tell me how to get to St. Paul's Cathedral?”

She smiled apologetically. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm a tourist myself.” Then she put her head down and moved away quickly before the man could take too close a look at her face.

She walked.

She had been walking for more than twenty hours now, all through the night, but there was nothing to do but keep walking. She had dared to return to Clive Everett's flat only long enough to wash the blood off herself, find the suitcase she had hidden, and change into the habit. Then she had felt her time growing short. She had fled.

Now she chided herself for having panicked. If only she had felt confident enough to remain in the flat for just a few more minutes, she almost certainly could have found several suitable outfits for herself left over from Clive's other conquests. As it was, her suitcase contained only the AFU, her purse, and the cotton dress she had worn from Los Alamos.

When the sun went down she would find a place from which to contact Hamburg again. If her message of the day before had gone through, if it had reached the right people, if they had recognized the code, if the British had failed to catch it, if OKW understood the import of the knowledge she was carrying in her head—
if, if, if, if, if;
so many
if
s—
if
all of those things had happened correctly, then they would have an answer for her that night. They would tell her where and when she would be extracted.

She was tired, but she kept walking.

Two plainclothesmen were speaking with a young woman by the cenotaph near Whitehall. She walked past them. A group of men was digging through a pile of rubble left by the previous night's bombing. One of the men was weeping. She walked past them. It was hard to know which were more tired, her arms or her legs. The suitcase felt like a chunk of lead; her legs felt like strips of raw meat. She had long before passed a level of exhaustion that she had thought was her limit. But there was nothing for it but to keep moving, always keep moving, trying not to draw attention to herself, waiting to make contact again with Hamburg.

She was too tired to feel afraid. She was too tired to feel sorry. She felt nothing but the throbbing pain in her arms and her legs.

From time to time as she walked, she thought of Fritz. Sometimes she saw him as he once had been: young and sleek, standing at the balcony of the hotel in Hamburg. Sometimes she saw him as he had been in Highgate: old beyond his years, emaciated, pale, weak. Soft, and a traitor.

She did not regret his death. She would have killed him herself had circumstances not taken care of the problem. She had no doubt that Fritz—the
real
Fritz—would have wanted this latest incarnation of himself wiped off the face of the earth. The British had done something to him, something terrible. They had indoctrinated him. They had shamed him.

Perhaps it was living among them for so long, she thought, that had affected his brain somehow. She had feared the same effect in herself after so much time spent in America. But Katarina saw little evidence, as she walked endlessly around London, that these were a likeable people. They were pale, as pale as Fritz had been himself, and they were crooked and thin and weak. They had not taken care of themselves after the first war; they had let an entire generation grow up wrong. How different from
her
people in Germany, athletic and handsome and resourceful and idealistic and bright!

The sky was threatening rain. She hoped it wouldn't start to rain.

She walked.

Her
people had thrived following their defeat in the Great War. Even in the midst of the poverty and the filth and the self-hatred and the self-denial, they had grown up quick and strong. Perhaps, she thought now, it had been the very adversity of their surroundings that had brought out the best in them. They had not rested lazily on their laurels the way the British had. They had worked, striving for something better. And, of course, they had enjoyed a hereditary advantage. They were Aryan, after all. See how easily she had defeated nearly a dozen British agents! Whatever ability had been in the British had been compromised over the centuries; their blood itself had been diluted through generations of intermingling.

But Fritz had been Aryan. How could he have turned so weak? He not only had allowed himself to be taken alive but had been working in their service.

Perhaps he had simply
absorbed
their inferiority, somehow, through extended contact with them. Or perhaps they had used more nefarious methods over the years, until he was willing to serve their purposes.

She had no doubt that Fritz had been acting as a double agent, sending back false intelligence with the AFU. And if he had been doing it, then it was possible—no, likely—that others had been doing it, too. She would have a word or two for the German spymasters, when she saw them again, about how much trust they should continue putting in their agents in Britain.

Thunder rumbled in the sky. She looked up, scowling.

Sometimes she thought that God Himself was against her.

But then she thought about the remarkable successes she had enjoyed so far, in getting out of America, in getting to Fritz—why, in stumbling across the information in the first place—and, to go back even farther, in having been born of pure blood, a white woman, a German, at this particular time in history, when her people were rising up against nearly insurmountable odds to claim their rightful place as leaders, and she knew that God was with her.

And if God would stay with her just a little longer, she thought, she would bear her message to Berlin, and their enemies would crumble before them like dust.

HOLLAND PARK

Winterbotham spent the night sitting in his library, exhausted but unable to sleep. Anticipation of the task that lay before him had sent him back to his vices.

The next day Schroeder would get his answer from Hamburg.

And soon after, God willing, Winterbotham would go into the Wolf's Lair.

The thought scared the hell out of him.

He thought of Ruth, hoping to draw his inspiration there—after all, it would be for her. But to his immense chagrin he was unable to summon the features of her face. He could imagine the shape of her head, the fall of her hair, the scent of her perfume. But the face itself was only a blur. So much time had passed …

He suddenly realized that he hadn't even looked at her photograph for months. Why was that? Because it would have been too painful? Or because he had been able to sleep through the night recently and hadn't wanted to take the chance of upsetting that?

In any case, he wasn't sleeping tonight.

He set down his drink, opened his desk, and removed a photograph that had been taken on their wedding day. Ruth was facing the camera, wearing the same odd half smile that had always come to her face so easily. It made one feel privileged to know her, that smile, as if one were being favored with some inside joke.

But the smile meant little. Winterbotham himself had gotten
real
smiles from Ruth, never half smiles. But only very occasionally.

Only when they had been earned.

He wondered how she had done for herself in Dachau. Ruth could be charming when she chose to be; but she did not often choose to be. She wore her contempt for her enemies openly. And the Nazis, in recent years, had been the primary target of her scorn. How bad, he wondered, had they made things for her? How bad had she made things for herself?

Maddening, impossible woman.

He returned the picture to the drawer, slid the drawer closed, and picked up his drink again. Outside, the storm began to taper away. It was, he suspected, only a momentary respite.

There was another photograph sitting on his desktop. He looked at it now over the rim of his glass as he sipped.