Daniel Silva - The Unlikely Spy

The taxi stopped. The cabbie turned around and said, "Are you sure this is the place?"

She looked out the window. They had stopped along a row of bombed and deserted warehouses. The streets were deserted. If anyone was following her they could not go undetected here. She paid off the driver and got out. The taxi drove away. A few seconds later a black van approached, two men in the front seat. It drove past her and continued down the road. Stockwell underground station was just a short distance away. She threw up her umbrella against the rain, walked quickly to the station, and bought a ticket for Leicester Square. The train was about to leave as she reached the platform. She stepped through the doors before they could close and found a seat.

Horst Neumann, standing in a doorway near Leicester Square, ate fish and chips from the newspaper wrapping. He finished the last bite of the fish and immediately felt sick. He spotted her entering the square amid a small knot of pedestrians. He crushed the oily newspaper, dropped it into a rubbish bin, and followed her. After a minute of walking he pulled alongside her. Catherine looked straight ahead, as if she did not know Neumann was walking next to her. She reached out her hand and placed the film into his. He wordlessly gave her a small slip of paper. They separated. Neumann sat down on a bench in the square and watched her go.

Alfred Vicary said, "Then what happened?"

"She went into Stockwell underground station," Harry said. "We sent a man into the station, but she had already boarded a train and left."

"Dammit," Vicary muttered.

"We put a man on the train at Waterloo and picked up her trail again."

"How long was she alone?"

"About five minutes."

"Plenty of time to meet another agent."

"Afraid so, Alfred."

"Then what?"

"Usual routine. Ran the watchers all over the West End for about an hour and a half. She finally went into a cafe and gave us a break for a half hour. Then to Leicester Square. She made one pass across the square and headed back to Earl's Court."

"No contact with anyone?"

"None that we observed."

"What about on Leicester Square?"

"The watchers didn't see anything."

"The letter box on Bayswater Road?"

"We confiscated the contents. We found an unmarked empty envelope on top of the pile. It was just a ploy to check her tail."

"Dammit, but she's good."

"She's a pro."

Vicary made a church steeple of his fingers. "I don't believe she's out there running around because she likes fresh air, Harry. She either made a dead drop somewhere or she met an agent."

"Must have been the train," Harry said.

"Could have been bloody anywhere," Vicary said. He thumped his arm on the side of the chair. "Dammit!"

"We just have to keep following her. Eventually, she'll make a mistake."

"I wouldn't count on that, Harry. And the longer we keep her under tight surveillance, the greater the chances are that she'll spot the tail. And if she spots the tail-"

"We're dead," Harry said, finishing Vicary's thought for him.

"That's right, Harry. We're dead."

Vicary tore down his church steeple to free his hands to smother a long yawn. "Did you talk to Grace?"

"Yeah. She ran the names every way she could think of. She came up with nothing."

"What about Broome?"

"Same thing. It's not a code name for any operation or agent." Harry looked at Vicary for a long moment. "Would you like to explain to me now why you asked Grace to run those names?"

Vicary looked up and met Harry's gaze. "If I did, you'd have me committed. It's nothing, just my eyes playing tricks on me." Vicary looked at his wristwatch and yawned again. "I have to brief Boothby and collect the next batch of Kettledrum material."

"We're moving forward then?"

"Unless Boothby says otherwise, we're moving forward."

"What are you planning for tonight?"

Vicary struggled to his feet and pulled on his mackintosh. "I thought some dinner and dancing at the Four Hundred Club would be a nice change of pace. I'll need someone on the inside to keep an eye on them. Why don't you ask Grace to join you? Have a nice evening at the department's expense."

"I'd feel better if those bastards were in front of us instead of behind us," Wilhelm Canaris said morosely as the staff Mercedes sped along the white concrete autobahn toward the tiny sixteenth-century village of Berchtesgaden. Vogel turned and glanced through the rear window. Behind them, in a second staff car, were Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler and Brigadefuhrer Walter Schellenberg.

Vogel turned away and looked out his own window. Snow drifted gently over the picturesque village. In his foul mood he thought it made the place look like a cheap postcard: Come to beautiful Berchtesgaden! Home of the Fuhrer! He was annoyed at being dragged so far from Tirpitz Ufer at such a critical time. He thought, Why can't he stay in Berlin like the rest of us? He's either buried in his Wolfschanze in Rastenburg or atop his Adlersnest in Bavaria.

Vogel had decided to make something good out of the trip; he planned to have dinner and spend the night with Gertrude and the girls. They were staying with Trude's mother in a village a two-hour drive from Berchtesgaden. God, how long had it been? One day at Christmas; two days in October before that. She had promised him a dinner of pork roast, potatoes, and cabbage and, in that playful voice of hers, promised to do wonderful things to his body in front of the fire when the children and her parents had gone off to bed. Trude always liked to make love that way, somewhere insecure where they might be caught. Something about it always made it more exciting for her, the way it had been twenty years ago when he was a student at Leipzig. For Vogel the excitement had gone out of it long ago. She had done it-done it intentionally-as punishment for sending her to England.

Watch me and remember this the next time you're with your wife.

Vogel thought, My God, why am I thinking of that now? He had managed to hide his feelings from Gertrude, the way he had managed to hide everything else from her. He was not a born liar, but he had become a good one. Gertrude still believed he was a personal in-house counsel to Canaris. She had no idea he was the control officer of the Abwehr's most secret spy network in Britain. As usual, he had lied to her about what he was doing today. Trude believed he was in Bavaria on a routine errand for Canaris, not ascending Kehlstein Mountain to brief the Fuhrer on the enemy's plans to invade France. Vogel feared she would leave him if she knew the truth. He had lied to her too many times, deceived her for too long. She would never trust him again. He often thought it would be easier to tell her about Anna than confess he had been a spymaster for Hitler.

Canaris was feeding biscuits to the dogs. Vogel glanced at him, then looked away. Was it really possible? Was the man who had plucked him from the law and made him a top spy for the Abwehr a traitor? Canaris certainly made no attempt to conceal his disdain for the Nazis-his refusal to join the party, the constant stream of sarcastic remarks about Hitler. But had his disdain turned to treachery? If Canaris was a traitor, the consequences for the Abwehr networks in Britain were disastrous; Canaris was in a position to betray everything. Vogel thought, If Canaris is a traitor, why are most of the Abwehr networks in England still functioning? It didn't make sense. If Canaris had betrayed the networks, the British would have rolled them up overnight. The mere fact that the overwhelming majority of the German agents sent to England were still in place could be taken as proof that Canaris was not a traitor.