Adam Hall - The Quiller Memorandum

Oktober had watched her intently and now seemed satisfied. He was directly responsible for this agent, and any lapse in her efficiency would reflect on him.

The others present also relaxed. The Reichsleiter sat brooding for some seconds, and now he turned his gaze on me.

"You are said to have read the file."

There were three ways to play it: obstinate, worried, or dumb. The first way would be the most expected, with my record of obstinacy with Oktober.

"Yes, I've read it."

"Why did you decide to come here?"

"To get confirmation. The info might have been false. I'd never heard of Braun and I wanted to get him confirmed as well."

"And now you have done that."

"I have."

"What gave you the impression that you could leave here as freely as you came?"

"Experience. I've been trained to get out of places."

He sat with his hands bunched loosely on the desk; they were a child's hands, pink-fleshed, podgy, designed to clutch at whatever they touched, to possess the world piecemeal so that it need no longer be feared. A ring clung to one finger like a dead blue eye. He said without expression:

"A short time before you arrived there was a signal from our agents in North Africa. The nuclear test will be set in operation at 23.00 hours. That is in twenty minutes from now. It is a night operation designed partly to test the effects of radioactivity and its fringe properties in the total absence of sunlight." He got to his feet and moved heavily across to the plotting-table. "Sprungbrett is similarly a night operation. That is why we are able to avail ourselves of this supreme opportunity. For seven hours the entire Mediterranean area will be in darkness and – according to news reports – under a shroud of radioactive fallout. We shall thus be in sole command of that area even before the operation is launched, since news of that nature will of course create mass confusion and panic."

He took a corner of the dust-cover and jerked it from the plotting-table. "You may study the situation for yourself."

I moved to the table. Mediterranean area Longitudes 7°W to 3 5°E, Latitudes 32°- 42° in relief. All units in red counters assembled eastern seaboard Spain, seaboard Egypt and the toe of Italy. Blue areas Gibraltar, Algeria, Libya, Israel, Greece, Cyprus and Sicily. The indications were magnetic-tab.

I gave it a couple of minutes. When I looked up he was gazing at me with his pale-blue glittering eyes.

"What do you think, Herr Quiller?"

I checked the wall-clock. "He left it too late. Braun."

"That is so. He had no indication of our timing, and of course it doesn't appear on the file. At this moment our forces are standing-by in the operational areas. Within sixteen minutes from now the nuclear test will take place. Within ninety minutes of the news that it has misfired, ten times that many units will have reached the area by troop-transport. German officers-commanding are awaiting the signal at this moment." He turned away from the table. " So there is nothing you can do. Nothing. Seven years' meticulous planning has brought us to the brink of this operation, and it cannot be arrested in a quarter of an hour. You have the intelligence to see that."

It had become very quiet in the room.

I said: " I'm not convinced."

He turned to face me squarely and the pale eyes became sparks of light in the pouchy flesh. "It is not my concern to convince you, Herr Quiller. You are a mote in the sandstorm that is about to blow. But I am proud of Sprungbrett. It was my conception and I have nurtured it to maturity. It will thus please me to convince, you of its invincibility. In a few minutes we shall receive the news that will touch off our operation. From that same instant you will be free to leave. Then you will be convinced that there is nothing you can do. You are powerless. You are useless to me and to your Control. You are not, Herr Quiller, worth the expenditure of a single bullet."

He went back to his desk.

It was Inga who spoke, and not to me. She was standing in front of the desk. Her voice was rough. " Mein Keichsleiter… Let me convince an unbeliever. Let me show him Der Reliquie! "

The man said nothing. He seemed uninterested in her sudden outburst, but he gazed at her for a moment and then moved a podgy hand, granting the request.

She waited for me and I followed her to the far end of the room where I had noticed the curtains. They were a fall of black velvet with the swastika emblazoned on it. She stood erect in her military trenchcoat, the pride shining from her face.

"You asked me to show you the shrine."

Someone must have operated a switch; the velvet was split and its two halves drew apart. The niche was lighted by a single flame in a bowl of red marble. The relics were cradled in a vessel of clear crystal, and were pure white.

There are various reports on this subject. Witnesses were hard to locate in the holocaust of Berlin at the time. The most authoritative evidence was presented by British Military Intelligence in 1945. It was established that the corpses, of Hitler and Eva Braun were burnt in the garden of the Chancellery on the evening of April 30th, but no trace was found of the charred remains. These were removed in secret. A statement by Frau Junge (who was in the Fuhrerbunker during the last hours) said that the cremated relics were collected in a box and secretly taken to the Hitler Youth leader Axmann. The sacred relics would thus be passed on to the next generation, represented by the Hitler Youth.

The light of the small flame was reflected in the crystal, so that the bleached remains were seen as if enwrapped in fire.

Her face was there too, distorted by the curves of the glass and the flame's movement. She was staring into it. I remembered something she had said when she had first spoken to me of her childhood and the later years when she had defected from Phoenix. They had tried to make her go back. "I refused to go back, but I swore on something that they keep there that I would never talk." I had known it must be some kind of shrine, something sacred. She had also said: "The only god I had ever been told about was the Fuhrer."

Here was the holy sepulchre.

I watched her face in the crystal. She couldn't move; she could only stare. I knew how many times she must have come here before, to stand silently in communion with those who had peopled her child's world: the ‘grown-ups’ of the doomed Fuhrerbunker, Uncle Hermann, Uncle Guenther, her own mother… and her god. She had known them and loved them, and they had turned, before her child's eyes, into creatures stranger than the fiends of a fable; and she herself had become as suddenly a changeling, first a child, then a freak, a werewolf with a child's face.

This much remained of all that she had known as home cold bones and bitter ash, cradled forever in the chill of glass.

Then her face was suddenly gone and all I could see was her reflected hand, raised and held palm-flattened. From behind me her voice came, a soft screech – " Heil Hitler!"

There were other voices, breaking to a murmur of approval, and I turned to see the group of men who stood watching her, moved by her cry of faith.

The black velvet came together silently.

Unnervingly, a telephone began ringing. It was the Reichsleiter who answered. He listened for a few seconds and then nodded, saying only: "Good. Very good." He lowered the receiver tenderly. To the others he said "Gentlemen, we must wish ourselves good fortune in our endeavours."

They closed around the desk and one of them took his hand. Oktober spoke to him and was answered. He turned towards me and I watched the steel trap of his mouth open and shut on a shouted order to the man who had never left his post at the doors.