End of Spies by Alex Gerlis (best free ereader txt) 📗

Prince said he was very grateful, but the Russian hadn’t finished. ‘I’m not naïve; I’m a Red Army officer – a commissar. I know that politics matters and dictates the relationship between our countries, and of course my loyalty will always be to the Soviet Union. But I see no reason not to help you as a friend when I can – when our interests happily coincide. I don’t know if we’ll ever see each other again: I will return to Berlin, but my future may be uncertain. I just want you to know that you can trust me, and all I ask is that maybe one day you will ask after me.’

‘Of course, I—’

‘But use your discretion, please – it may not look good if people know I have a British friend!’

They embraced, and Gurevich told Prince the other car would drive him to Klagenfurt; he’d better get a move on.

Just before noon, the Daimler stopped in a side street in the centre of Klagenfurt. The driver – a heavily built man with notably thick eyebrows and bloodshot eyes – turned round and spoke for the first time, in a deep voice: walk along this block, take the first left and then turn right – the building you want will be ahead of you. You’ll spot your flag.

The building was the headquarters of the Field Security Section, and within minutes of announcing himself at the guard post, Prince was in Major Stewart’s office.

‘Where the hell have you been, Prince?’

Prince said he’d taken a roundabout route.

‘I don’t think people like you appreciate quite what havoc you wreak. Poor old Cuthbert at Munich has had something of a nervous breakdown. He’s being blamed for losing you. What’s this about you hitching a ride on an American plane to Vienna?’

Prince said that was for another time. His priority now was to get to Villach and find Hanne.

‘Oh, don’t worry about her, she’s fine – turned up at the FSS headquarters there very pleased with herself and with a group of bloody Slovenes in tow. She wants to be damn careful – these Slovenes think Carinthia is theirs by right, and we can’t be seen being too helpful to them. She thinks she may have found a house being used by the Nazis, but once she heard you were on your way, she decided to wait for you. I’ll go with you, Prince; can’t have you going freelance again, can we?’

‘We’d better get a move on then.’

‘Hang on. There’s a telegram for you from a chap called Bartholomew. Seems it’s urgent.’

Chapter 23

Germany, December 1945

Wolfgang Steiner had planned to remain in Berlin for a few days after meeting his contacts there in October. His intention was to leave no stone unturned in his search for Martin Bormann. He still believed there was a good chance the Reichsleiter was alive: Bormann was smarter than most people he knew, and he wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it turned out he was hiding in a cellar somewhere, being protected by a sympathiser, patiently biding his time until it was safe to make his next move.

He remained convinced that the absence of any news on Bormann’s whereabouts had to be a good sign. If he’d been captured by the Russians, the Americans or the British, they would quickly announce it – as they would if his body had been found. In Mitte and elsewhere in the Soviet sector, they sold a newspaper called Deutsche Volkszeitung, which was a communist publication but seemed to devote a good deal of coverage to the fate of important Nazis. Steiner scoured it daily but saw no mention of Bormann.

But his meeting with Willi Kühn had unsettled him. The schoolteacher had asked too many questions, and there was something about his manner that had made Steiner suspicious. Kühn may well have been a childhood friend of Bormann’s, but Steiner hadn’t detected much sympathy: he’d seemed curious about Bormann rather than concerned. As a result, Steiner had left Berlin the following day, travelling by bus and by foot and arriving three days later at the farm near Eggenfelden. He was relieved to find that Ulrich and Friedrich were no longer there.

‘They left perhaps two days after you did,’ Frau Moser assured him. ‘The younger one, he didn’t even say goodbye or thank me. Manners don’t cost anything, do they? Their parents should teach them manners.’

Steiner said nothing: they’d been gone for a week, so he reckoned they’d be a safe distance from the farm by now.

‘Did my cousin Jens telephone, by any chance, the one from Essen?’

Frau Moser assured him he hadn’t. There were no messages for him.

Steiner was exhausted after his journey, and all he wanted was to have a bath and go to bed, but he had something more important to do first. He unlocked the cellar door and moved the crates and old bicycles out of the way. Then he lifted the boxes of empty bottles and placed them on the floor, and removed the four leather suitcases from under the large tarpaulin, checking them thoroughly to make sure they each had the right number of notebooks and rolls of film in them.

Once he was satisfied that everything was in order, he locked them again, replaced the tarpaulin and put the boxes back on top.

He’d give it a few more weeks, and if there was still no sign of Bormann, he’d put his own plan into operation, as he’d intended all along.

As October had turned into November, Wolfgang Steiner had begun to have mixed feelings. Of course he still wanted Martin Bormann to be alive, and he felt a duty to help him escape on the Kestrel Line. There was no doubt that with Bormann safe, some kind of victory could be salvaged from humiliating defeat, although he also knew that rescuing the Reichsleiter would be perilous in the extreme: he would be putting himself in enormous danger. And as November moved on and a