Susan MacNeal - Princess Elizabeth's Spy

“—there’s a war on,” Maggie finished for him. “But you can’t afford to waste me behind a desk. I speak perfect French and German. I’m smart, smarter than you, most likely, and I—”

“I’m sorry, Miss Hope,” Burns said. “But when you’re over there, there’s not a lot we can do to keep you safe. And if something happens—and Lord knows it will—we need to know you can take care of yourself. I’m not convinced you’re up to it. And so I can’t, in good conscience, recommend you.”

“But, Mr. Burns—”

“I have a daughter your age, Miss Hope. I wouldn’t even consider dropping her behind enemy lines at all, let alone if I thought she might not survive.”

Maggie saw he was sincere, if narrow-minded. “Thank you, Mr. Burns,” she said, relenting, at least for the moment. She might have lost the battle, but she wasn’t ready to concede the war. “However, I must tell you I will take this up with Mr. Frain.” Surely Peter Frain, head of MI-5, who personally recruited her, would see the folly of Burns’s decision and set things straight.

“Of course, Miss Hope. Good luck to you.”

Mr. Burns watched her as she left, a pale and serious-looking girl with reddish hair, pretty when she smiled. He’d come to admire her grit, even if her performance hadn’t been up to par, and wished he had better news for her. Although the news he had would most likely keep her alive. Very few of the British spies dropped in France or Germany survived more than three months, if that. And no women had been dropped yet.

“Oh, well,” he muttered as he packed up her file. “Frain will find something for her.”

Abwehr was the German counterpart to MI-5, located at 76/78 Tirpitzufer, Berlin, in an imposing neoclassical building topped with huge black-and-red Nazi flags, snapping smartly in a cold wind under a brilliant blue sky. The Nazi spy organization had three main branches: die Zentrale, or the Central Division; Abwehr I, II, and III, which dealt with foreign intelligence collection, sabotage, and counterintelligence, respectively; and the Foreign Branch, or Amtsgruppe Ausland, responsible for the evaluation of captured documents. The Foreign Branch was run under the direction of Luca von Plettenberg.

Claus Becker answered to von Plettenberg and was in charge of information received from Britain, specifically. He was a short man, round, in his early forties, with an agreeable face and an infectious smile. A native Berliner, he’d worked as a grocery store clerk before joining the Nazi party in 1925, after reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He’d worked his way up through the SS before transferring to Abwehr in 1938. He was a bachelor, living in a spacious apartment in the Mitte district, and had a sweet-tempered miniature greyhound named Wolfgang, who went everywhere with him on a thin black leather leash. People at the Foreign Branch knew to be affectionate to Wolfgang if they wanted to keep their jobs.

Becker was sitting behind his desk in his office, facing two junior agents. Torsten Ritter and Franz Krause were both young, short, skinny, and swimming in their too-big gray uniforms—nothing like the robust blond men from the propaganda posters boasting Aryan supremacy. Still, they were smart, they were blue-eyed, and they were Nazis. The office was large, as was Becker’s mahogany claw-foot desk, over which hung a large official portrait of Hitler by Heinrich Knirr. The two junior agents sat on low black leather chairs, facing Becker.

“Come, Wolfie!” Becker called to his small greyhound, who ran to him, tail wagging, and licked his hands. “Sit!” he commanded. The slender gray dog went to his vermilion velvet pillow under Becker’s desk and settled down with nary a whimper.

Becker turned his attention to the junior agents. “And?”

Ritter began, “We have word our agent in Bletchley has managed to obtain an actual decrypt from their so-called Enigma machine.”

Becker gave a hearty chuckle, warm and rich. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Sir,” Krause said, “we received a short radio dispatch from London, telling us our contacts are working out their escape, with the decrypt, as we speak. They’ve asked us to have the money ready.”

Becker made a steeple with his hands, still smiling. “Ah, yes—the money. ” He leaned back in his chair. “You know, I have the utmost respect for your operation, I really do. But to suggest that England has broken our codes … a joke, surely.”

Ritter spoke up: “But they say there’s a whole group of British code breakers working on it. And they’ve done it. And they have a stolen decrypt to prove it.”

“If the British have broken it,” Becker objected, “why haven’t they shown their hand? Why haven’t they evacuated their cities when they know that air attacks are coming?”

Krause shrugged. “We’re not sure how fast they can break each message, sir.”

“If they can break them at all.” Claus looked up at the ceiling. “Which I sincerely doubt.”

“But the code can be broken, yes?” Krause insisted.

Becker sighed. “The Enigma machine has a hundred and fifty million million million ways of producing its cipher, according to how you set its three rotors and how you connect its plugs. It is, in a word, impossible to break.”

Ritter and Krause sat very still.

“However,” Becker said, “I will permit you to continue to work on what, I believe, is a wild-goose chase, if only so I will own your souls when it comes to nothing. By the way, there’s a huge air attack coming up soon, payback for the bombing of Berlin. If the British can decrypt our messages, surely they’ll evacuate the city in question. Then we’ll know if, indeed, they’ve broken it.”

Becker opened his desk drawer and took out a dried pig’s ear, passing it down to the dog, who began gnawing on it. “Good boy,” he said to Wolfie, rubbing the velvety fur on his back. “Oh, that’s my good, good darling boy!”

He looked back to the two agents. “In regard to more important matters, everything is in place for Operation Edelweiss. We have our two operatives ready to go. When Commandant Hess gives the word, the plan will commence. It won’t be long now.”

He rose to his feet, gave a delighted smile, and clapped his plump hands together. “That will be all.” Then he raised his right arm. “Heil Hitler!”

The two young men stood up, clicked the heels of their gleaming black boots together, and raised their arms in salute. “Heil Hitler!”

Wrapped in a magnificent green silk robe embroidered with red-and-gold dragons, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was lying in his bed at the Annexe to No. 10, working at his Box, which held all of his most important documents. His cheeks were flushed with anger. One memo, from Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Menzies of MI-6, on the topic of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and their many conversations with Walther Shellenberg in Lisbon, had him in a foul temper.

“Where’s Tinsley?” he bellowed to his butler, David Inces.

Inces was used to his employer’s temper. “Sir, she’s—”

Mrs. Tinsley, his head typist, appeared in the doorway. “Right here, Prime Minister,” she said, bringing in her portable noiseless typewriter and setting up at the desk. Inces left.

“Letter to the Duke of Windsor!” the P.M. barked.

Mrs. Tinsley waited, fingers poised over the keys.

He began dictating. “‘Sir, may I venture upon a word of serious counsel. Many sharp and unfriendly ears will be pricked up to catch any suggestion that your Royal Highness takes a view about the war, or about the Germans, or about Hitlerism, which is different from that adopted by the British nation and Parliament. Even while you have been staying at Lisbon, conversations have been reported by telegraph through various channels, which might have been used to your Royal Highness’s disadvantage.