Алистер Маклин - Where Eagles Dare

He sipped his brandy and said to Kramer: ‘Enough?’

Kramer nodded.

‘Then compare it with my original.’

Kramer nodded. ‘As you say, the moment of truth.’

He picked up the note-book, slid off the rubber band and opened the cover. The first page was blank. So was the next. And the next . . . Frowning, baffled, Kramer lifted his eyes to look across the room to Smith.

Smith’s brandy glass was falling to the ground as Smith himself, with a whiplash violent movement of his body brought the side of his right hand chopping down on the guard’s neck. The guard toppled as if a bridge had fallen on him. Glasses on the sideboard tinkled in the vibration of his fall.

Kramer’s moment of utter incomprehension vanished. The bitter chagrin of total understanding flooded his face. His hand stretched out towards the alarm button.

‘Uh-uh! Not the buzzer, Mac!’ The blow that had struck down the guard had held no more whiplash than the biting urgency in Schaffer’s voice. He was stretched his length on the floor where he’d dived to retrieve the Schmeisser now trained, rock steady, on Kramer’s heart. For the second time that night, Kramer’s hand withdrew from the alarm button.

Smith picked up the guard’s carbine, walked across the room and changed it for his silenced Luger. Schaffer, his gun still trained on Kramer, picked himself up from the floor and glared at Smith.

‘A second-rate punk,’ he said indignantly. ‘A simple-minded American. That’s what you said. Don’t know what goddamned day of the week it is, do I?’

‘All I could think of on the spur of the moment,’ Smith said apologetically.

‘That makes it even worse,’ Schaffer complained. ‘And did you have to clobber me so goddamned realistically?’

‘Local colour. What are you complaining about? It worked.’ He walked across to Kramer’s table, picked up the three note-books and buttoned them securely inside his tunic. He said to Schaffer: ‘Between them, they shouldn’t have missed anything . . . Well, time to be gone. Ready, Mr Jones?’

‘And hurry about it,’ Schaffer added. ‘We have a street-car to catch. Well, anyhow, a cable-car.’

‘It’s a chicken farm in the boondocks for me.’ Jones looked completely dazed and he sounded exactly the same way. ‘Acting? My God, I don’t know anything about it.’

‘This is all you want?’ Kramer was completely under control again, calm, quiet, the total professional. ‘Those books? Just those books?’

‘Well, just about.’ Lots of nice names and addresses. A bedtime story for MI6.’

‘I see.’ Kramer nodded his understanding. ‘Then those men are, of course, what they claim to be?’

‘They’ve been under suspicion for weeks. Classified information of an invaluable nature was going out and false – and totally valueless – information was coming in. It took two months’ work to pinpoint the leakages and channels of false information to one or more of the departments controlled by those men. But we knew we could never prove it on them – we weren’t even sure if there was more than one traitor and had no idea who that one might be – and, in any event, proving it without finding out their contacts at home and abroad would have been useless. So we – um – thought this one up.’

‘You mean, you thought it up, Captain Smith,’ Rosemeyer said.

‘What does it matter?’ Smith said indifferently.

‘True. It doesn’t. But something else does.’ Rosemeyer smiled faintly. ‘When Colonel Kramer asked you if the books were all you wanted, you said ‘just about’. Indicating that there was possibly something else. It is your hope to kill two birds with one stone, to invite me to accompany you?’

‘If you can believe that, Reichsmarschall Rosemeyer,’ Smith said unkindly, ‘it’s time you handed your baton over to someone else. I have no intention of binding you hand and foot and carrying you over the Alps on my shoulder. The only way I could take you is at the point of a gun and I very much fear that you are a man of honour, a man to whom the safety of his skin comes a very long way behind his loyalty to his country. If I pointed this gun at you and said to get up and come with us or be gunned down, nobody in this room doubts that you’d just keep on sitting. So we must part.’

‘You are as complimentary as you are logical.’ Rosemeyer smiled, a little, bitter smile. ‘I wish the logic had struck me as forcibly when we were discussing this very subject a few minutes ago.’

‘It is perhaps as well it didn’t,’ Smith admitted.

‘But – but Colonel Wilner?’ Kramer said. ‘Field-Marshal Kesselring’s Chief of Intelligence. Surely he’s not–’

‘Rest easy. Willi-Willi is not on our pay-roll. What he said he believed to be perfectly true. He believes me to be the top double agent in Italy. I’ve been feeding him useless, false and out-of-date information for almost two years. Tell him so, will you?’

‘Kind of treble agent, see?’ Schaffer said in a patient explaining tone. ‘That’s one better than double.’

‘Heidelberg?’ Kramer asked.

‘Two years at the University. Courtesy of the – um – Foreign Office.’

Kramer shook his head. ‘I still don’t understand–’

‘Sorry. We’re going.’

‘In fact, we’re off,’ Schaffer said. ‘Read all about it in the post-war memoirs of Pimpernel Schaffer–’

He broke off as the door opened wide. Mary stood framed in the doorway and the Mauser was very steady in her hand. She let it fall to her side with a sigh of relief.

‘Took your time about getting here, didn’t you?’ Smith said severely. ‘We were beginning to get a little worried about you.’

‘I’m sorry. I just couldn’t get away. Von Brauchitsch–’

‘No odds, young lady.’ Schaffer made a grandiose gesture with his right arm. ‘Schaffer was here.’

‘The new girl who arrived tonight!’ Kramer whispered. He looked slightly dazed. ‘The cousin of that girl from the–’

‘None else,’ Smith said. ‘She’s the one who has been helping me to keep Willi-Willi happy for a long time past. And she’s the one who opened the door for us tonight.’

‘Boss,’ Schaffer said unhappily. ‘Far be it for me to rush you–’

‘Coming now,’ Smith smiled at Rosemeyer. ‘You were right, the books weren’t all I wanted. You were right, I did want company. But unlike you, Reichsmarschall, those I want have a high regard for their own skins and are entirely without honour. And so they will come.’ His gun waved in the direction of Carraciola, Thomas and Christiansen. ‘On your feet, you three. You’re coming with us.’

‘Coming with us?’ Schaffer said incredulously. ‘To England?’

‘To stand trial for treason. It’s no part of my duties to act as public executioner . . . God alone knows how many hundreds and thousands of lives they’ve cost already. Not to mention Torrance-Smythe and Sergeant Harrod.’ He looked at Carraciola, and his eyes were very cold. ‘I’ll never know, but I think you were the brains. It was you who killed Harrod back up there on the mountain. If you could have got that radio code-book you could have cracked our network in South Germany. That would have been something, our network here has never been penetrated. The radio code-book was a trap that didn’t spring . . . And you got old Smithy. You left the pub a couple of minutes after I did tonight and he followed you. But he couldn’t cope with a man–’

‘Drop those guns.’ Von Brauchitsch’s voice was quiet and cold and compelling. No one had heard or seen the stealthy opening of the door. He stood just inside, about four feet from Mary and he had a small-calibre automatic in his right hand. Smith whirled round, his Luger lining up on the doorway, hesitated a fatal fraction of a second because Mary was almost directly in line with von Brauchitsch. Von Brauchitsch, his earlier gallantry of the evening abruptly yielding to a coldly professional assessment of the situation, had no such inhibitions. There was a sharp flat crack, the bullet passed through Mary’s sleeve just above the elbow and Smith exclaimed in pain as he clutched his bleeding hand and heard his flying Luger strike against some unidentified furniture. Mary tried to turn round but von Brauchitsch was too quick and too strong. He jumped forward, hooked his arm round her and caught her wrist with the gun and thrust his own over her shoulder. She tried to struggle free. Von Brauchitsch squeezed her wrist, she cried out in pain, her hand opened and her gun fell to the floor. Von Brauchitsch seemed to notice none of this, his unwinking right eye, the only vulnerable part of him that could be seen behind Mary, was levelled along the barrel of his automatic.