He had never before known indecision, or known that it could tear a man apart.

  BERLIN, 15 MARCH 1940

  Superintendent Vogel picked up the telephone at Gestapo Headquarters and asked for the connection. It was not yet eight o’clock in the morning, but as usual he was already at his desk.

  “Deputy Commisioner Luftig,” came the voice on the line.

  “Good morning—Karl Vogel here.” The courtesies were exchanged. “This man who was killed last night at the Tiergarten Bahnhof, Detective Werner Fraenkel— you’ve had reports about him?”

  He waited impatiently. That deceitful bitch, he thought. I'll have her sent to Ravensbruck. And Yll have her brother shot.

  “Refresh my memory,” Luftig asked him ponderously. Vogel could hear the clink of a coffee cup in the background.

  “Fraenkel—one of my men—fell in front of a train at the Tiergarten Bahnhof at 6:43 last night. The platform was crowded, and in the blackout no one saw how it happened. The point is this, Konrad. This is the second man to have been killed while keeping surveillance on that woman Hedda von Gerlach.”

  “You’re not suggesting she did it?”

  “Of course not. But it could be someone she’s meeting.”

  He had to wait again. Luftig was so damnably slow in the morning.

  “Someone who wants to keep his identity secret.”

  “Exactly. The same man, possibly, who also killed SS-Lieutenant Mahler at the nightclub, and General von Fleig and his aides out at Zehdenick.”

  He thought of the “tall, very Aryan” civilian who was seen in Mahler’s company, “possibly an SS major or colonel in mufti.” Had that been the description in Detective Fraenkel’s head when he was pushed under the train?

  “So you’re,going to put the thumbscrews on this Hedda von Gerlach,” rumbled the voice of Luftig on the line.

  “Immediately.” He would supervise the interrogation personally. She would be shown what happened to people who deceived him.

  “That’s typical of you.” There came the clink of a teaspoon. “But slow down a bit. She might not even know this man. Or, if she knows him—which I agree seems more likely—she might not know that he’s killing off your surveillance men, either to protect her or himself, or both. He wouldn’t do it in front of her. He’d do it soon after leaving her. So you can turn your thumbscrews until she goes insane, and still end up none the wiser.”

  Impatiently Vogel said, “We shall simply ask her to name this man she’s been meeting. She*must have been there at the Tiergarten Bahnhof, or Detective Fraenkel wouldn’t have been there. And she had no legitimate reason for being there. She doesn’t normally break her journey home on the S-bahn. It was a secret rendezvous.” The words stuck in his throat. A secret rendezvous with another man. Who was he? And what did they do, perhaps somewhere at the hospital behind the locked door of an unused room, or even in her flat in Grünewald, where the surveillance men couldn’t see them? Did they laugh about him? Did she tell him she knew a high official in the Gestapo who wasn't . . . who couldn't ... His- whole body was growing hot at the thought, his cursed, useless child's body that sent them all into fits of silent laughter when he tried to play with them . . . By God in Heaven, when she was brought to the interrogation room in the basement here for him to play with, she wouldn't laugh then . . . she wouldn't laugh then . . .

  He could hear someone’s voice, a long way off, and became aware of the receiver gripped in his hand, slippery with sweat. Luftig’s voice, yes of course.

  “What did you say?” he asked him, releasing his breath.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “No. No. I was thinking. I missed what you said.”

  “I was saying,” Luftig told him in a tone of measured rebuke, “that you can offer this young woman extreme duress at Gestapo Headquarters, but still risk losing your objective—indeed, our objective, since I’m officially involved.” There was a friendly warning here, which Vogel didn’t miss. “Some women are extraordinarily loyal, you know, and this one might hold out to the death. It’s happened before, if memory serves, and not only with women.”

  Vogel knew he was referring to the Englishman, and that idiot Sergeant Grossfeldt. If Deputy Commissioner Konrad Luftig had been officially involved in the case of the Englishman, he would have come down on Vogel like a ton of bricks for letting him die.

  “But if we don’t put Hedda von Gerlach under interrogation?” Vogel asked cautiously.

  “You can do better than merely ask who the man is. Even if she told you, we might never find him. You’ll do best to trap him. Double the number of your surveillance men. Treble it. He can’t kill them all. Then you’ll have him, in the flesh.”

  “But that could take time,” Vogel protested. “It’s been ten days since Detective Hoffmann was murdered in the Grünewald district.” He wanted to see Hedda von Gerlach in that room downstairs. He wanted to hear her screaming, instead of laughing. But then, he could do that any time. He could do what he wanted.

  “Be patient,” Luftig told him easily. “Give him another ten days. This is an important criminal we’re after. He’s wiped out seven men, five of them in the elite and sacrosanct SS, including a general, and two of them in the Gestapo. To knock off a couple of men who are bothering his girlfriend is one thing, but why should he take pains to ambush and slaughter an SS general and his aides? Why General von Fleig, specifically? The Homicide Department has no answer to that. Will our man select another general, specifically, and leave him with his head blown off? We have to stop him.”

  Vogel was wiping the receiver with his handkerchief. Under his uniform his skin was beginning to prickle with sweat. “I’ll do as you say, Konrad. Your point’s well taken.”

  The Deputy Commissioner could now afford to take the heat off. “Simply a suggestion, my dear fellow. When we put our heads together we usually come up with the answer. It won’t be long now. Use your best men. Deploy them with discretion. Have them stand well off, and issue fieldglasses. Then the next time this man makes contact with Hedda von Gerlach, he’s yours.”

  NEAR SCHONEBECK, 15 MARCH 1940

  Twelve hours later, and a hundred and thirty kilometers southwest of Berlin, a black Mercedes staff car swung the beams of its hooded headlights across the moonlit waters of the Elbe and turned southwest, in the direction of the bridge. The small Opel cabriolet was already there, parked in the shadows below the trees.

  Martin got out and walked over to it.

  “What held you up?” Tempel asked him.

  “Troops on .the move north.”

  “I’ve been here an hour.”

  Martin couldn’t see Tempel’s face clearly, but he heard the bared nerves in his voice. “Where were you,” he asked him, “when it happened?”

  “Not far away.”

  So he’d seen it all, or most of it.

  “What happened to Jock?”

  “We don’t know. He remains a potential danger. Please bear that in mind.”

  “Noted.” If they’d managed to subdue the man before he could reach for his capsule, they’d work on him for days, weeks, and even Jock wouldn’t be able to do anything.

  “You have never,” Tempel said thinly, “been very secure. You must now take every conceivable precaution. At the same time”—something like disbelief came into his voice—“you must proceed with your operation. Those are the instructions from The Hague.”

  They listened to the distant rushing of the river, where a bough had drifted against one of the pylons of the bridge and got caught.

  “Will you be running me now?” Martin asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Who with?”

  Again he heard a kind of disbelief in Tempel’s voice. “They will send us a contact.”

  One director, Martin thought, one agent anpl a contact. The network must be under a great deal of pressure. He’d been held up by the massive troop movements that had been going on for days now, and there were rumors of the Netherlands and Denmark going next. That would knock out The Hague.

  “When I’m finally caught,” he said to Tempel, “will you still have someone to take over?” They’d been training Corbett, but he’d gone now. And there was no point in pretending he could finish Damocles alone, with so little support and no base.

  “When you are finally caught,” Tempel told him, “we shall bring our operation to a stop.” His voice was toneless now, as if he were reading from notes. “We successfully infiltrated you into the SS, and it’s as a spurious SS officer that you’ll be caught. That is inevitable. If you’re to go on at all, it must be in your present role. But we can’t do it twice, obviously. The others we were training were to go in clandestinely, Corbett leading them in a last-ditch operation. Perhaps The Hague will try to do that, with a new cell; but it won’t involve the SS, nor will it involve us. When you are finished, Damocles will be finished.”

  Standing close to him in the shadows, Martin could feel Tempel’s tension, as if the air itself was vibrating with it. Even so, he was unprepared.

  “I warned them about Corbett! I warned them!” It was no longer Tempel’s voice, but a soft screech in the night. “He was too confident! Too heroic! I told them!” Then he was suddenly bending over with his hands clasping his stomach and his breath coming in spasms, his rimless spectacles catching the reflection of the moonlit river as he crouched motionless, struggling for breath. After a while he began talking again, but very quietly now, with a soft rush of words that he seemed to want to get out before anything could stop him. “I told them we didn’t want any heroes. I said heroes were dangerous. All Corbett could think about was you being caught, or killed, or both, and getting his orders to go in. I told Haslam, but it was no good. It was no good.” He tried to stand straight, but the pain wouldn’t let him.

  “What did Corbett do?” Martin asked him. He was beginning to understand this man’s fury.

  “He tried to steal some files from a Gestapo office.” Martin drew a quick breath. “On his own?”

  “On his own. Without instructions” He was slowly straightening up, but still holding his stomach. “Without instructions. He wanted to be a hero, you see. A hero.” He was silent for a long time, recovering his breath, and when he spoke again his voice was quite normal. “So here are the remains of Damocles. Two men standing under a tree, one of them crippled with stomach pains. Before I brief you, I should tell you that The Hague is perfectly ready to receive you through the escape lines and get you to England, if you feel you’ve done enough.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Or you would have let Gantz try to take you out.” The glasses flashed again to the river’s reflection as he turned his head to look directly at Martin. “The implications of Damocles are too far-reaching to allow personal considerations the slightest importance. But we are alone, and there will come a time, as we both realize, when we shall no longer be able to make contact. So I would like you to know, Colonel Brink-mann, that I am grateful for what you have done so far, on behalf of my brother.”

  Hans Gerhart Tempel, Martin remembered, who had died in the camps. But it meant nothing to him.

  “What I’ve done so far, I’ve done for myself. And what I’m going to do, I’m going to do for myself. I want their blood.”

  24

  FURSTENWALDE, 17 MARCH 1940

  General Egon von Kassel was dining late. It was almost eleven o’clock. But this didn’t trouble him in the slightest. The others—Heidel and Maihof—had wanted to hold the meeting over dinner, but he had dissuaded them. He was a man of some sensitivity—many called him capricious, and he graciously conceded that they might be right; indeed he was pleased with the word, for only those with power and authority could afiord caprice and expect other mortals to tolerate it.

  He preferred, for instance, to eat alone—or more precisely, to dine alone. Luncheon was a necessity, a means of replacing energy and meeting with his fellow officers in the course of duty; but to dine was to celebrate, and to celebrate so many things: the ending of the day, the simple fact that he was here to enjoy it— unlike poor von Fleig, for example—and of course the excellence of the pheasant and the nobility of the Cotes de Beaune ’35 and the artistry of the heavy silver and the cut glass that reflected the glitter of the chandelier above the table. It would be correct to say that when SS-General Egon von Kassel dined, he made a meal of it; and he preferred to do it alone, without the social demands of distracting conversation.

  Tonight’s meeting had gone well. They had all of 267 them been concerned over the appalling murder of Artur von Fleig only eight days ago; you could call it an assassination, considering the importance of the man. And not only that. The documents had been seized. (There was no file on those ultrasecret papers. They did not even come under the classification of Geheime Reichssache—Secret Business of the Reich—since any business of the Reich had to have the tacit approval of the Führer himself, through official channels and proper delegation. If the Führer were .to see the documents before the time was ripe, Generals von Kassel, Heidel and Maihof could well find themselves thrown out of their commands, or worse. The means of global domination, the so-called atomic bomb, must be presented to the Führer as a practical, feasible proposition, supported by the physicists—Ayran and non-Aryan— whose work could produce the miracle.)

  The seizing of the documents had concerned them as much as the shocking death of their comrade. But after due discussion it was felt that there was no risk of those vital papers being brought to Hitler’s personal attention. On the contrary. It was more likely that some other faction was out to beat them to the goal of presenting the Führer with the means of world mastery. The ranks of the SS, unfortunately, were plagued with intrigue, power-seeking and betrayal, and this shocking tragedy could well be an example.

  It had been decided at the meeting tonight that (1) they should bide their time and eschew panic, (2) they should wait a while before handing a copy of the documents to Heydrich, who was to have received the originals from the hand of von Fleig on that fatal night, and (3) they should go into intense action as soon as the coast seemed clear again, and present the atomic feasibility study to the Führer as soon as possible, before another attempt was made to stop them.

  The dream, thought Egon von Kassel, was still intact. A dream as dazzling as theirs would not be realized without travail, and they must he prepared for a few setbacks, however temporary. As to the matter of finding out who had killed von Fleig—which they would dearly like to know—they need do absolutely nothing. Investigation was still in progress, and on a massive scale, involving Schellenberg’s Security Service of the SS, the Greater Berlin Police Department and the Gestapo. It wouldn’t be long before they found the culprit.

  Egon von Kassel was thus able to enjoy his dinner as usual. The Rhine salmon had been poached—in the culinary sense—to perfection; the venison from the Black Forest was proving both succulent and rich in flavor; and his young manservant Alexis had roguishly hinted at the possibility of crepes suzette to grace the conclusion of the festivities. There was but one flaw to spoil the mood, and that was easily attended to.

  “Herr General?”

  The boy left his post beside the door to the kitchen, behind the General’s chair. This arrangement was precise; to dine alone was to dine alone, and he preferred not to be watched by his servant.

  “The music is a little too loud,” he told Alexis. He watched the boy, slim-hipped in his short white jacket, cross to the radiogram and turn down the volume little by little, watching his master.

  “Just there,” the General nodded.

  Alexis went back to his post without a word and without a further glance; he knew his master’s wish for privacy at the table. The General listened to the brooding intonations of Bax’s Fifth Symphony, savoring its dark intensity and allowing his mind to luxuriate in the rich succession of its cadences; in its theme, he fancied, he could detect the power and the purpose of the Führer’s own magnificent struggle to take his country and his countrymen out of the shadows of past humiliation and into die golden light of their true and glorious destiny.

  And he would be there, in the forefront of affairs and by his Führer’s side. To the men who had offered him the keys to world conquest, their leader could grant no less than everlasting honor and acclaim.

  The venison finished, hs knife and fork were at rest on the gold-rimmed Dresden plate no more than fifteen seconds before Alexis, soft-footed and attentive, came to remove them and to change the wine and napkin.

  “My compliments, if you will, Alexis, on the venison.”

  “Ill tell François at once, Herr General.”

  Herr General . . . Herr General . . . The boy was punctilious in the extreme, all the time he was on duty. But later, in the privacy of the black silk sheets, he would call him Egon, of course.

  There followed the prescribed interval of ten minutes or so, before the presentation of the dessert. There must be time to allow the palate to rest and prepare for change, for the monocle to be polished and reset against the clear blue eye, and for the somber moods of Arnold Bax to beguile the spirit and bear it onward to the day of triumph awaiting the New Germany and the New German World. . . .

  Tonight the interval before the dessert was rather longer than usual, but the General charitably decided he would make no comment when Alexis returned. Crepes suzette, too, had its caprices, and should not be hurried.

  He was not to know that the boy was already dead, or that the figure approaching him from behind his chair was not that of Alexis. He may have caught the sound of an indrawn breath, or felt the soft rushing of the air on his right side; but there was no time to turn. The force of the blow sent him sprawling across the table with one of the chair legs buckling and the tallstemmed glass of Moselle spinning against the crystal fruit bowl before it shattered, its fragments scintillating in the light of the chandelier as General von Kassel’s monocle flew from its cord and the bright blue eye began clouding. . . .