Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

After an early dinner, Fegelein and Elsa Batz had just dozed off when the telephone rang beside their bed.

Elsa sat up, immediately awake. Nobody ever calls with good news after suppertime, she thought. She looked across at Fegelein, who lay sleeping beside her, a pillow over his face as if he were trying to smother himself.

The phone rang again.

‘Hey,’ said Elsa, nudging Fegelein with her foot.

He grunted and rolled over on to his side.

‘It’s probably for you,’ she told him, raising her voice.

Fegelein turned on to his back again, tossing the pillow aside. ‘Then pick it up!’ he told her sharply. ‘The phone’s on your side of the bed.’

Cursing under her breath, she picked up the receiver and handed it to him. ‘I suppose you don’t want me around for this call, either,’ she snapped.

‘How the hell should I know?’ he replied. ‘I don’t even know who is calling.’

Elsa pushed aside the black cord that attached the receiver to the telephone and slipped out of the bed. Then she retreated to the kitchen, shutting the door behind her.

It was Hauer on the phone. ‘I’ve had some success,’ he told Fegelein.

‘Some?’ barked Fegelein, still half asleep. ‘What do you mean “some”?’

‘Using one of the branch codes from the Abwehr files, I was able to obtain a partial translation of the document, which amounted to about a fifth of the words. The branch code was not exactly the same, but it appears to overlap in some places.’

‘What did it say?’ demanded Fegelein.

‘I managed to translate the words “arrival”, “location”, “Christophe” and “diamond” in that order.’

‘Diamond?’

‘Correct,’ replied Hauer. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

‘Yes. Maybe. Never mind. But what the hell is Christophe?’

‘You’re paying me to decode the message,’ answered Hauer, ‘not to interpret what it means.’

‘Are you sure that’s what it said?’

‘If the coding sequence hadn’t worked,’ explained Hauer, ‘it wouldn’t have said anything at all.’

‘Fine.’ Fegelein slammed down the phone.

The kitchen door opened and Elsa stuck her head out. ‘Do you want tea?’

‘No!’ he shouted, and followed that up with a string of obscenities.

‘You’re insane,’ Elsa told him. Then she slammed the door shut.

Fegelein sat on the bed, trying to encompass what he had just been told. The words which Hauer had untangled from the coded message appeared to confirm that the leak from the bunker was real, and not, as he had suspected, simply the result of Hitler’s increasingly paranoid frame of mind. But the more Fegelein thought about it, the less sure he became that this was the same leak.

The information that Hitler had pointed to as having been smuggled from the bunker was all just gossip. There was nothing of any military value. All that the Allies could do with these scraps of chat was to serve them back to the place where they had come from, with no more purpose than simply to embarrass those who heard it. If the Allies could only know how well this little game had played out, Fegelein told himself, they would be more than satisfied.

But the message hidden in this Goliath cipher was different. The Diamond Stream programme was a high-value military secret.

In that moment, Fegelein reached a conclusion which was so simple and, now that he had thought of it, so obvious, that he immediately accepted it as the truth. This secret, thought Fegelein, had nothing to do with the rumours mongered by Der Chef on Allied radio. In his search for the leak, Hunyadi had stumbled upon a completely separate operation.

There were only three people, aside from himself, who had studied the blueprints of the Diamond Stream device that Hagemann had brought to the bunker.

One was Hitler, the other was his own boss, Heinrich Himmler, and the last person was the man who drew them in the first place – General Hagemann.

He could safely rule out anyone else. An assortment of high-ranking officials had seen Professor Hagemann lay out those plans on Hitler’s briefing table, but none of them would have been able to decipher what they meant well enough to relay the information to the Allies. And none of them had even touched the plans, let alone had time to draw or photograph them.

Fegelein could rule out Hitler and Himmler right away. That left only Hagemann.

It seemed so perfectly clear to Fegelein that he wondered why he had not suspected it from the start, even without the decoded message.

Believing that the war was lost, Professor Hagemann was attempting to ingratiate himself with the enemy, in order to secure better treatment when the last shots had been fired, but also to be able to continue his work. Hagemann was a scientist, after all. Those people had no moral direction. To them, their work was everything. They didn’t care who they were working for, as long as they were left alone to pursue their calculations.

Fegelein decided that he must speak to Hitler directly. He would tell the Fuhrer everything he knew, before Inspector Hunyadi figured it out for himself. Breaking the news, and maybe even preventing Hagemann from carrying out this act of treachery, would raise Fegelein to the stature he had always craved among the rulers of this country. All previous sins would be forgiven.

Fegelein picked up the phone, ready to call the bunker switchboard. But then he paused, as the idea, which had seemed so brilliant only a moment before, now began to unravel.

How would he explain the manner by which he had decoded the message? No one would believe him if he said that he’d done it himself. Then it would only be a matter of time before it emerged that he had failed to turn over the list of reserve Abwehr agents to the proper authorities. It wouldn’t take the SS long to track down Hauer, and Fegelein had no doubt that the bastard would tell them whatever they wanted to hear if it meant saving his own skin.

Even if the SS did arrest General Hagemann, they would hang Fegelein from the same noose.

Fegelein returned the phone receiver to its cradle. Only one course of action remained and that was to tell Hunyadi nothing. At best, that would buy him some time before Hunyadi found the source of the leak on his own and Hitler’s vengeance took its course. Fegelein had seen with his own eyes what became of the conspirators in the attempt to assassinate Hitler in July of the previous year. Films had been made of men slowly hanging to death from meat hooks. For a while, it had seemed as if the butchery would never end. Fegelein knew that, eventually, he would be implicated, whether he was guilty or not. His offer to help the inspector would be more than enough to seal his fate.

For Fegelein, the time had come to put in motion a plan on which he had been working for months. In the apartment of his mistress, he had hidden two forged Swiss passports – one made out to himself and the other in the name of Lilya Simonova – along with travel permits to Geneva and enough cash and jewellery to make a new start with Lilya.

The idea of escaping with his wife had never entered Fegelein’s mind. And as for Elsa, he felt sure that she would understand. She had accepted her role as his mistress for precisely what it was and no more – a business transaction. Fegelein did not love Elsa and, as far as he knew, she had never expected him to.

But Fegelein had fallen deeply and permanently in love with Lilya Simonova. He had never told her this, not in so many words, because he was afraid that she would misunderstand his true feelings, and would think that he was simply trying to add her to what was, under the circumstances, an embarrassingly long list of conquests.

In addition to not confessing his love, Fegelein had also neglected to tell Lilya that he planned to run away with her to Switzerland. Fegelein had kept quiet about this because he knew that if he did not pick precisely the right moment, she would refuse on principle to come along. But now circumstances had changed and Lilya would be forced to realise that if he was arrested on charges of treason, then she would almost certainly be next.