Colin Forbes - Double Jeopardy

He was now watching the police launch entering the harbour. As it swung round, broadside on, heading for its berth, he saw the powerboat being towed in its wake. Turning away, he made sure no one was watching him and checked his watch strapped well above the wrist. Then he strolled across the road, pushed open a door and walked into the Hauptbahnhof.

Before he entered the phone booth he checked to make sure no one was coming out of the office marked Polizei. Once inside the booth he called the number and waited. From an apartment block in Stuttgart a girl's voice answered.

`Edgar Braun,' he replied. -

`This is Klara. I'm just going out so I only have a minute…'

'A minute is all it will take…' He paused. The agreed opening had confirmed to each the other's identity. 'I thought that you would like to know the expected consignment has arrived…'

`So quickly?'

She sounded startled. The man who called himself Braun frowned, It was most unlike the girl to lose her detachment. Whoever's body was inside the powerboat had clearly been found much earlier than expected.

'Are you sure?' she demanded.

'Of course I'm sure.' He bridled. 'You want the details?' he suggested nastily.

'That won't be necessary.' Her voice had resumed its normal cold tone. 'Thank you for calling…'

`And my fee?' Braun persisted.

`Waiting to be collected at the Post Office in the usual way two days from now. And continue in your present job. Remember, jobs are not so easy to get at the moment…'

He was left staring at the phone. The bitch had broken the connection. He shrugged, left the booth and returned to his pitch on the pavement. Braun knew what he had to watch for but beyond phoning a girl called Klara he had never met – and the fact she had a Stuttgart number – he knew nothing about the organisation he was spying for.

In the luxurious penthouse apartment in Stuttgart Klara stared at herself in the dressing-table mirror. An ex-model with a superb figure she was twenty-seven years old. Her sleek black hair was attended to weekly by the city's top hairdresser and there was a small fortune in her wardrobe of clothes.

She had dark, sleepy-looking eyes, fine bone structure and was a chain-smoker. She was hesitating before she picked up the white telephone and called the man who owned the apartment. She lit a fresh cigarette and dialled the number in southern Bavaria.

Inside the moated schloss many miles north-east of Lindau a firm, leathery hand picked up the receiver. On his third finger the man wore a large diamond ring. Beneath his strong jaw he wore a solid gold tie-slide. Attached to his left wrist was a Patek Philippe watch.

'Yes!'

No identification, just the single curt word.

'Klara calling. It is convenient to talk?'

`Yes! You received the fur I sent? Good. Anything else?'

The voice had a gravelly timbre, a hint of impatience that they must go through this identification rigmarole before they could get to the point. Like Klara earlier, he sounded startled when she relayed Braun's message.

'You say_ the consignment has arrived already?'

'Yes. I knew you would be relieved…'

The sixty-year old man she was talking to was not relieved. He concealed his reaction but he was alarmed at the speed with which the police had discovered the body of the Englishman.

The reference to the 'consignment' confirmed that Warner had been liquidated on schedule as planned. The further reference to 'has arrived' told him the corpse was already in police hands. He repeated almost the same words Klara had used to Braun.

'Are you quite certain? It is very quick…' 'I wasn't there to witness the collection,' she said, her voice tinged with sarcasm. 'I'm reporting what our observer told me less than five minutes ago…'

'Remember who you're talking to,' he told her. He replaced the receiver, took a Havana cigar from a box on his desk, clipped off the end and lit it with a gold lighter.

In her Stuttgart apartment Klara was careful to replace her own receiver before she used the four-letter word. He might share her bed, pay the rent, buy her clothes but he didn't bloody well own her.

She lit a fresh cigarette, studied herself in the mirror and began manipulating an eye pencil. The trouble was Reinhard Dietrich was a millionaire industrialist, a considerable landowner and a well-known politician. And she never let herself forget that she was consorting with one of the most dangerous men in West Germany.

Tuesday May 26

Tweed sat behind his desk in the first floor office of a house which overlooks Regents Park in the distance. Through thick-lensed spectacles he gazed at the pile of relics taken by the Lindau Water Police off the dead body of Charles Warner.

The hub of Britain's Secret Service is not – as has been reported – in a concrete building close to Waterloo Station. It is situated inside one of many Georgian buildings in a – crescent, most of which are occupied by professional institutions.

The location has a number of advantages. On leaving the building there are different directions one can take. To check whether anyone is following you the simplest route is to walk straight into Regents Park. In the open parkland it is impossible for a shadow to conceal his presence.

Only a few paces away is the entrance to Regents Park Underground. Unlike most other stations you descend in a lift to reach the platforms. Again, anyone following has to show himself by stepping into the same lift.

`Pathetic what a man carries about with him,' Tweed remarked.

Keith Martel, the only other occupant in the room, lit a cigarette and wondered whether Tweed was criticising the relics because they offended his sense of order or commenting on the poverty of what a man left behind. He decided it was the latter.

There was about twenty years' difference in the ages of the two men. Martel, tall, well-built, dark-haired and with an air of supreme self-confidence, was twenty-nine. His most prominent feature was his Roman nose. His most outstanding characteristic was insubordination.

He chain-smoked, using a black holder. He spoke German, French and Spanish fluently. He was a first-rate pilot of light aircraft and helicopters. He swam like a fish and hated team sports.

No one knew Tweed's age. Five feet eight inches tall, wiry and with a ramrod back, he had the appearance of an ex-Army major – which he was – and his grey moustache matching his thatch of hair was neatly trimmed. Behind the spectacles his eyes bulged and held a haunted look as though expecting the worst.

'It usually happens – the worst. Count on it,' was his favourite maxim.

Events had an uncanny habit of proving him correct. It was this fact – his reputation for solving problems – and his caustic manner which had persuaded the new head of the department to sidetrack him into the post of Chief of Central Registry. Also the new supremo, Frederick Anthony Howard, had taken an instant dislike to Tweed when they first met in some mysterious past.

`What do you make of it all, Keith?'

Tweed gestured to the possessions of Warner spread in a gap on his desk he had cleared amid tidy piles of dossiers. Martel picked up several slips of paper and tickets extracted from the dead man's wallet.

Warner had been a squirrel, stuffing his wallet with odd items, other agents would have thrown away. But Martel knew it was not carelessness: Warner had worked on the basis that if ever anything happened to him while on an assignment he should leave his successor clues.

'What was he doing in Germany?' Martel asked as he examined the collection.

'On loan from me to Erich Stoller of the Bundesnachrichtendienst. I owe Erich and he needed an outsider who could pass for a German to infiltrate this Delta outfit in Bavaria – neo-Nazis, as you well know. They cleverly keep just inside the law so they can't be banned.'