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

Maybe “missing” is the wrong word. To be more precise, we were informed last night by the Soviets that he was now working for them: he’s apparently in their sector of Berlin.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘We want to know what the hell you guys have to do with this, Gilbey. One day we tell you about Steiner, the next he defects to the Russians.’

‘Defected may not be quite accurate.’ It was the man from the Office of Strategic Services. ‘My feeling is that Steiner was lured to Berlin and then abducted by the Soviets. There is no way he’d have gone over to them voluntarily: it was in his interest to work with us. He had nothing to gain from becoming a Soviet agent. My guess is he won’t be in East Berlin for very long. The bastards will take him to Moscow and finish him off there.’

‘Well I’m obviously sorry to hear all this; it’s a damn shame.’ Gilbey was sitting up straight and doing his best to sound genuinely concerned. ‘But I do hope you’re not implying we were somehow involved.’

‘I’m saying,’ said Jenkins, some of the colour now returning to his cheeks, ‘that it’s one hell of a coincidence.’

‘Well it’s nothing to do with us, I can assure you, Joseph. I fear it is just that, a coincidence. Maybe Steiner was careless, who knows?’

‘According to our guys in Berlin, an NKGB commissar called Iosif Gurevich came to the Allied Kommandatura last night to tell them about Steiner. Does that name ring a bell?’

Tom Gilbey shook his head and said he was awfully sorry and only wished he could be more help.

‘You know him, don’t you, Tom?’

‘Know who, Roly?’

They were back in Gilbey’s office in St James’s. The departure from the US Embassy had been a swift and uncomfortable one. The man from the Office of Strategic Services had ended the meeting by saying they’d not heard the last of this matter. He’d be discussing it later that day with the ambassador.

‘The Russian commissar he mentioned.’

‘Gurevich?’

‘Exactly – I noticed you didn’t even write the name down. Who is he?’

‘He’s the NKGB officer who helped Prince in Berlin back in May, when he was looking for Hanne. Prince has kept in touch with him and he was the source for the information that gave us the Steiners.’

‘So…’

‘So it’s entirely possible that Prince somehow got a message to Gurevich and he organised Steiner’s abduction.’

‘So quickly?’

‘It would be a big error, Roly, to underestimate Prince’s resourcefulness. Do remember that he operated in Nazi-occupied Europe. He and Hanne are first-class agents.’

‘Good Lord.’

‘My view is that they were so appalled at being ordered to let the Nazis go that they took this course of action.’

‘But that’s appalling, Tom: disobeying orders like that… working with the Russians!’

‘That’s as may be, but knowing Prince and Hanne, I doubt there’ll be any evidence of that. I’m not sure if Bartholomew’s still in Trieste: I’ll have to see if the Field Security Section chaps there can resume the operation and arrest the Germans. Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Bloody hell, Roly – and to think I took the view life would be less complicated after the war, eh!’

They were interrupted by a knock at the door. It was Bentley, Gilbey’s boss, who nodded his head by way of greeting and glided into the room as if there was someone he didn’t want to wake up.

‘You’ve heard the news, I imagine.’

Gilbey said they had; in fact they’d only just returned from the American embassy, where an irate Joseph Jenkins had told them about the disappearance of Wolfgang Steiner into the Soviet sector.

‘I think we may be talking at cross-purposes here, Tom. I didn’t mean that news – which is news to me, in fact. I meant about Prince.’

‘He and his wife are on their way back here.’

Bentley shook his head. ‘That’s the thing, you see. They arrived in Klagenfurt on Tuesday afternoon and were due on a flight to Munich yesterday.’

‘Please don’t tell me they’ve been causing trouble?’

‘I’m afraid they have. As far as we can gather, they disappeared from their hotel in Klagenfurt early yesterday morning and there’s been no sign of them since.’

‘Yesterday morning – and we’re only being told now?’

‘I think the FSS chaps who were meant to be keeping an eye on them rather hoped they’d turn up before they had to break the bad news to London.’

It had been a particularly busy morning at the Bourne and Sons art gallery in Cork Street. Since the end of the war, business had been picking up, and that very morning they’d had a most promising meeting with an RAF officer who’d brought in a seventeenth-century Flemish baroque painting he’d inherited from an aunt. The impression gained by both Bourne and Ridgeway was that he wanted to sell it quickly and had little appreciation of its real value, aesthetic or financial. Ridgeway – who knew more about Flemish painting than Bourne – thought it was certainly from the Antwerp school, and with some judicious wording they could attribute it to a student of van Dyck.

By the time the man left and Bourne and Ridgeway had worked out the considerable profit they could make on the painting, it was close to one thirty. They decided they would close the gallery until three o’clock and have a decent lunch. Their plans were thwarted by a rapping at the steel-reinforced door that led on to the alley at the back of the gallery. Bourne peered through the security glass and it took him a moment to realise that the man in the bowler hat with a scarf wrapped round the lower half of his face was the Admiral.

He stepped back in shock: it went without saying that the Admiral had not been expected. In fact he hadn’t visited the gallery since before the war. After his release from internment two years earlier, he’d rarely left his home in the country, and had