Dennis Wheatley - The Black Baroness

'He only brought in the King's morning coffee. I saw him, through the doorway, set it down at the King's elbow and walk straight out again, so it couldn't have been the footman. One of the members of the Council must have found out something earlier, but had to wait for an opportunity, when he was unobserved, to pass a scribbled note.'

Gregory turned his gun over sideways and began to examine it as though he were just making certain that the mechanism was all in order. The footman had turned out a trump. Evidently, on realising that to give the King the paper openly might arouse the suspicions of any members of the Council who were traitors, he had conceived the brilliant idea of waylaying his colleague who was on duty upstairs and by some means or other arranging to take the King's coffee-tray in himself; after which it had been a simple matter to slip the folded message under the King's cup, where he would be bound to see it and could remove it without much chance that anyone else would notice what he was doing.

But Gregory knew that he was by no means out of the wood yet. The infuriated conspirators would immediately institute an inquiry among the guards at the various entrances of the Palace and the damning bottom strip of the paper which von Ziegler had signed would come to light. He might almost have put the thought into von Ziegler's mind by mental telepathy as the German snapped at Heering:

'Anyhow, what in thunder were your people on the gates doing to let the King through? Who was responsible for that?'

'Have patience,' the Major snapped back in a sudden spurt of rebellion against the airman's bullying.

'Colonel Ketch is now visiting the posts to find out. He will be here at any moment; then we shall know.'

Von Ziegler turned angrily away and began to pace impatiently up and down the room while Gregory, in his role of sympathetic co-conspirator, proceeded to ignore Heering's presence and began a slashing attack upon the inefficiency of the Norwegians who had bungled the job so badly.

Some moments later a broad-shouldered officer with a fine flowing moustache arrived. Von Ziegler evidently knew him already and Gregory rightly assumed that this was the Colonel Ketch whom Heering had just mentioned. Having stamped into the room the Colonel said with a worried frown:

'The King must have known that the gates were being watched, as he didn't go out by any of them. He and the Prince climbed over the wall of the tennis-court and dropped down into the street. One of the sentries saw them, but by the time the fool had gone inside and reported to his officer the King and the Prince had made off and were out of sight.'

'Donnerwetter!' roared von Ziegler. 'The lot of you shall answer to the Gestapo for this!'

Gregory snapped down the safety-catch of his automatic, drew out the magazine and began to toss it playfully up and down.

'Well, that's that,' he murmured with a sigh. 'We're out of luck this morning, and I suppose it's not much good our waiting here any longer.'

Von Ziegler looked round at him. 'There's no such thing as luck, Baron; only brains and organisation—as I propose to show this afternoon. Come on.' Without another word to the two Norwegians he shouldered his way past them and strode out of the room.

Gregory followed more slowly and, pausing in the doorway, said to the other two conspirators: 'I'm afraid you've made rather a mess of things, gentlemen, and in Germany such mistakes are not readily overlooked. Your only chance is to get out of the country while the going is good. There are still some neutral ships in the harbour and if I were you I should get on to one of them without an hour's delay.'

Having clicked his heels and bowed sharply from the waist he turned and left them.

His advice sounded like that of a sympathetic German who was not whole-heartedly with the Nazis and was sorry for two officers who had bungled a very important operation. Actually, it was a Machiavellian piece of cunning by which he hoped to ensure that those two traitors would get their just deserts.

If they fled up-country—as they probably would have done had he not spoken to them—it was highly probable that they would have evaded capture, for the Germans had only just landed in the capital; but if they followed his advice and went down to the harbour their capture was quite certain. No neutral ship would now be allowed to leave Oslo without German permission and if they were caught trying to get out of Norway the assumption would be that they had made up their minds to go over to the Allies; so what had only been a blunder in the first place would, in German eyes, be aggravated to deliberate treachery, and they would be dealt with accordingly.

Von Ziegler was already half-way across the courtyard when Gregory reached the door. As he followed the German he blessed King Haakon and the Crown Prince. Evidently they had had the wit to see that to present any kind of pass to a sentry on their own doorstep was certain to excite comment, so they had decided not to use the pass but to go out over the wall; and that, Gregory felt, had probably saved his life.

When he caught von Ziegler up the German was climbing in to his car. 'What d'you propose to do now?' Gregory asked.

'Go after them, of course. They can't have got far. Would you like to come with me, or would you prefer to go and let Quisling know how the Norwegians have ruined our admirable plan?'

Nothing was further from Gregory's wishes than to go and see Quisling at that moment, but he hesitated artistically before he said: 'I think perhaps I'd better go with you. It will now be a matter of a hold-up in the open, and as there are two of them you may need my help if they happen to be armed.'

'Right. Are you taking your own car or will you come in mine?'

'If I leave mine here somebody may pinch it, so I think I'll go under my own steam. I'll be close behind you.'

With a nod von Ziegler let in the clutch and his car streaked away. Gregory jumped into his and ran smoothly along behind him, knowing that with the roads now so choked with refugees the adventurous airman would not get very far at the pace at which he had set off. For ten minutes they wound in and out of the slow-moving traffic until they reached the Oslo Police Headquarters, outside which von Ziegler pulled up.

'What now?' thought Gregory. 'Surely the Nazi organisation can't have managed to get the Norwegian police force under its thumb.' But he was mistaken. After he had waited outside in his car for nearly forty minutes von Ziegler came out again and hurried up to him. His blue eyes were shining and a satisfied smile curved his strong mouth.

'We're on to them,' he said. 'Oslo is such a little place that everyone here knows the King and the Crown Prince by sight. I felt certain they'd be recognised by scores of people before they had gone ten miles. We had to wait until we could get reports of them from well outside the town so as to make certain in which direction they were heading. They've taken the road to Eidsvold, a small town about forty-five miles north from here.'

Two minutes later they had joined the stream of traffic heading north and Gregory settled down to what he knew would be a dreary chase. Had he been von Ziegler he would almost have wept with frustration at the impossibility of getting every ounce out of his car, but, as it was, he was quite content to loiter. In fact, he knew that the longer they were held up by the refugees the more chance the King would have of getting away, for even crowds who had been panicked from their homes would make way at the sight of their King, whereas they would certainly not give way to anyone who had the appearance of an ordinary civilian; but in this he had counted without von Ziegler.

Directly they were outside the town and the traffic was a little less congested the German pulled up at the roadside and took two large squares of paper out of his pocket, one of which he proceeded to paste on his own windscreen and the other on Gregory's. Both bore large printed inscriptions in Norwegian, which Gregory could not understand, but the airman said Swiftly: 'No good putting them on before we were out of that crush, but they'll help us a lot now. These notices say: "POLICE—URGENT!" and the small lettering underneath means 'Offence to obstruct".'