"No," Hitler said, waving his hand, "Rommel is correct. If the enemy is able to secure a beachhead, the war is lost. But if we destroy the invasion before it ever gets started"--Hitler's head tilted back, eyes blazing--"it would take months to organize another attempt. The enemy would never try again. Roosevelt would never be re-elected. He might even end up in jail somewhere! British morale would collapse overnight. Churchill, that sick fat old man, would be destroyed! With the Americans and the British paralyzed, licking their wounds, we can take men and materiel from the West and pour them into the East. Stalin will be at our mercy. He will sue for peace. Of this, I am certain."
Hitler paused, allowing his words to sink in.
"But if the enemy is to be stopped we must know the location of the invasion," he said. "My generals think it will be Calais. I'm skeptical." He spun on his heel and glared at Canaris. "Herr Admiral, I want you to settle the argument."
"That may not be possible," Canaris said carefully.
"Is it not the task of the Abwehr to provide military intelligence?"
"Of course, my Fuhrer."
"You have spies operating inside Britain--this report about General Eisenhower's arrival in London is proof of that."
"Obviously, my Fuhrer."
"Then I suggest you get to work, Herr Admiral. I want proof of the enemy's intentions. I want you to bring me the secret of the invasion--and quickly. Let me assure you, you don't have much time."
Hitler paled visibly and seemed suddenly exhausted.
"Now, unless you gentlemen have any more bad news for me, I'm going to get a few hours of sleep. It's been a very long night."
They all rose as Hitler walked up the stairs.
5
NORTHERN SPAIN: AUGUST 1936
He is standing before the doors, open to the warm night, holding a bottle of icy white wine. He pours himself another glass without offering to refill hers. She is lying on the bed, smoking, listening to his voice. Listening to the warm wind stirring the trees off the veranda. Heat lightning is flickering silently over the valley. His valley, as he always says. My fucking valley. And if the mother-fucking Loyalists ever try to take it from me I'll cut off their fucking balls and feed them to the dogs.
"Who taught you to shoot like that?" he demands. They went hunting in the morning and she has taken four pheasant to his one.
"My father."
"You shoot better than me."
"So I've noticed."
The lightning is quietly in the room again and she can see Emilio clearly for a few seconds. He is thirty years older, yet she thinks he is beautiful. His hair is gray-blond, the sun has made his face the color of oiled saddle leather. His nose is long and sharp, an ax blade. She wanted to be kissed by his lips but he wanted her very fast and rough the first time, and Emilio always gets what he fucking wants, darling.
"You speak English very well," he informs her, as if she is hearing this for the first time. "Your accent is perfect. I could never lose mine, no matter how hard I tried."
"My mother was English."
"Where is she now?"
"She died a long time ago."
"You have French as well?"
"Yes," she answers.
"Italian?"
"Yes. I have Italian."
"Your Spanish is not so good, though."
"Good enough," she says.
He is fingering his cock while he speaks. He loves it like he loves his money and his land. He speaks of it as though it is one of his finest horses. In bed it is like a third person.
"You lie with Maria by the stream; then at night you let me come to your bed and fuck you," he says.
"That's one way of putting it," she answers. "Do you want me to stop with Maria?"
"You make her happy," he says, as if happiness is grounds for anything.
"She makes me happy."
"I've never known a woman like you before." He sticks a cigarette into the corner of his mouth and lights it, hands cupped against the evening breeze. "You fuck me and my daughter on the same day without blinking an eye."
"I don't believe in forming attachments."
He laughs his quiet, controlled laugh.
"That's wonderful," he says, and laughs quietly again. "You don't believe in forming attachments. That's marvelous. I pity the poor bastard who makes the mistake of falling in love with you."
"So do I."
"Do you have any feelings?"
"No, not really."
"Do you love anyone or anything?"
"I love my father," she says. "And I love lying by the stream with Maria."
Maria is the only woman she has ever met whose beauty is a threat to her. She neutralizes that threat by pillaging Maria's beauty for herself. Her mane of brown curly hair. Her flawless olive skin. The perfect breasts that are like summer pears in her mouth. The lips that are the softest things she has ever touched. "Come to Spain for the summer and live with me at my family's estancia," Maria says one rainy afternoon in Paris, where they are both studying at the Sorbonne. Father will be disappointed, but the idea of spending the summer in Germany watching the fucking Nazis parading around the streets holds nothing for her. She did not know she would be walking straight into a civil war instead.
But the war does not intrude on Emilio's insolent enclave of paradise in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It is the most wonderful summer of her life. In the morning the three of them hunt or run the dogs, and in the afternoon she and Maria ride up to the stream, swim in the icy deep pools, sun themselves on the warm rocks. Maria likes it best when they are outside. She likes the sensation of the sun on her breasts and Anna between her legs. "My father wants you too, you know," Maria announces one afternoon as they lie in the shade of a eucalyptus tree. "You can have him. Just don't fall in love with him. Everyone is in love with him."
Emilio is talking again.
"When you return to Paris next month there's someone I want you to meet. Will you do that for me?"
"That depends."
"On what?"
"On who it is."
"He will contact you. When I tell him about you he will be very interested."
"I'm not going to sleep with him."
"He won't be interested in sleeping with you. He's a family man. Like me," he adds, and laughs his laugh again.
"What's his name?"
"Names are not important to him."
"Tell me his name."
"I'm not sure which name he's using these days."
"What does your friend do?"
"He deals in information."
He comes back to the bed. Their conversation has aroused him. His cock is hard and he wants her again right away. He is pushing her legs apart and trying to find his way inside her. She takes him in her hands to help him, then digs her nails into him.
"Ahhhh! Anna, my God! Not so hard!"
"Tell me his name."
"It's against the rules-I can't!"
"Tell me," she says, and squeezes him harder.
"Vogel," he mutters. "His name is Kurt Vogel. Jesus Christ."
BERLIN: JANUARY 1944
The Abwehr had two primary kinds of spies operating against Britain. The S-Chain consisted of agents who entered the country, settled under assumed identities, and engaged in espionage. R-Chain agents were mainly third-country nationals who periodically entered Britain legally, collected intelligence, and reported back to their masters in Berlin. There was a third, a smaller and highly secretive network of spies, referred to as the V-Chain--a handful of exceptionally trained sleeper agents who burrowed deeply into English society and waited, sometimes for years, to be activated. It was named for its creator and single control officer, Kurt Vogel.
Vogel's modest empire consisted of two rooms on the fourth floor of Abwehr headquarters, located in a pair of dour gray stone town houses at 74-76 Tirpitz Ufer. The windows overlooked the Tiergarten, the 630-acre park in the heart of Berlin. Once it had been a spectacular view, but months of Allied bombing h
ad left panzer-sized craters in the bridle paths and reduced most of the chestnut and lime trees to blackened stumps. Much of Vogel's office was consumed by a row of locked steel cabinets and a heavy safe. He suspected the clerks in the Abwehr's central registry had been turned by the Gestapo and he refused to keep files there. His only assistant--a decorated Wehrmacht lieutenant named Werner Ulbricht who was maimed fighting the Russians--worked in the anteroom. He kept a pair of Lugers in the top drawer of his desk and had been instructed by Vogel to shoot anyone who entered without permission. Ulbricht had nightmares about mistakenly killing Wilhelm Canaris.
Vogel officially held the rank of captain in the Kriegsmarine, but it was only a formality designed to give him the rank necessary to operate in certain quarters. Like his mentor Canaris, he rarely wore a uniform. His wardrobe varied little: an undertaker's charcoal suit, a white shirt, a dark tie. He had iron-gray hair that looked as though he had cut it himself and the intense gaze of a coffeehouse revolutionary. His voice was like a rusty hinge; after nearly a decade of clandestine conversations in cafes, hotel rooms, and bugged offices, it rarely rose above a chapel murmur. Ulbricht, deaf in one ear, constantly struggled to hear him.
Vogel's passion for anonymity ran to the absurd. His office contained only one personal item, a portrait of his wife, Gertrude, and his twin girls. He banished them to Gertrude's mother's home in Bavaria when the bombing started and saw them infrequently. Whenever he left the office, even for a few moments, he removed the portrait from the desktop and locked it away in a drawer. Even his identification badge was a riddle. It contained no picture--he had refused to be photographed for years--and the name was false. He kept a small flat near the office, reached by a pleasant walk along the leafy banks of the Landwehr Canal, for those rare nights when he permitted himself to escape. His landlady believed he was a college professor with a lot of girlfriends.
Even inside the Abwehr little else was known of him.
Kurt Vogel was born in Dusseldorf. His father was the principal of a local school, his mother a part-time music teacher who gave up a promising career as a concert pianist to marry and raise a family. Vogel earned a doctorate of law from Leipzig University, where he studied civil and political law under two of the greatest legal minds in Germany, Herman Heller and Leo Rosenberg. He was a brilliant student--the top of his class--and his professors quietly predicted Vogel would one day sit on the Reichsgericht, Germany's supreme court.
Hitler changed all that. Hitler believed in the rule of men, not the rule of law. Within months of taking power he turned Germany's entire judicial system upside down. Fuhrergewalt--Fuhrer power--became the absolute law of the land, and Hitler's every maniacal whim was immediately translated into codes and regulations. Vogel remembered some of the ridiculous maxims coined by the architects of Hitler's legal overhaul of Germany: Law is what is useful to the German people! Law must be interpreted through healthy folk emotions! When the normal judiciary stood in their way the Nazis established their own courts--Volksgerichtshof, the People's Courts. In Vogel's opinion the darkest day in the history of German jurisprudence came in October 1933, when ten thousand lawyers stood on the steps of the Reichsgericht in Leipzig, arms raised in a Nazi salute, and swore to "follow the course of the Fuhrer to the end of our days." Vogel had been among them. That night he went home to the small flat he shared with Gertrude, burned his law books in the stove, and drank himself sick.
Several months later, in the winter of 1934, he was approached by a small dour man with a pair of dachshunds--Wilhelm Canaris, the new head of the Abwehr. Canaris asked Vogel if he would be willing to go to work for him. Vogel accepted on one condition--that he not be forced to join the Nazi party--and the following week he vanished into the world of German military intelligence. Officially, he served as Canaris's in-house legal counsel. Unofficially, he was given the task of preparing for the war with Britain that Canaris thought was inevitable.
Now Vogel sat at his desk, hunched over a memo, knuckles pressed to his temples. He struggled to concentrate over the noise: the rattle of the old lift as it struggled up and down the well just beyond his wall, the splatter of freezing rain against the windows, the cacophony of car horns that accompanied the Berlin evening rush. He moved his hands from his temples to his ears and pressed until there was silence.
The memo had been given to him by Canaris earlier that day, a few hours after the Old Fox returned from a meeting with Hitler at Rastenburg. Canaris thought it looked promising, and Vogel had to agree. "Hitler wants results, Kurt," Canaris had said, sitting behind his battered antique desk like an impervious old don, eyes wandering the overflowing bookshelves as though searching for a treasured but long-lost volume. "He wants proof it's Calais or Normandy. Perhaps it's time we brought your little nest of spies into the game."
Vogel had read it once quickly. Now he read it more carefully a second time. Actually it was more than promising, it was perfect--the opportunity he had been waiting for. When he finished he looked up and murmured Ulbricht's name several times as if he were speaking directly into his ear. Finally, receiving no reply, he rose and walked into the anteroom. Ulbricht was cleaning his Lugers.
"Werner, I've been calling you for five minutes," Vogel said, his voice nearly inaudible.
"I'm sorry, Captain. I didn't hear you."
"I want to see Muller first thing in the morning. Make me an appointment."
"Yes, sir."
"And Werner, do something about your damned ears. I was shouting at the top of my lungs in there."
The bombers came at midnight as Vogel dozed fitfully in his office on a stiff camp bed. He swung his legs to the floor, rose, and walked to the window as the aircraft droned overhead. Berlin shuddered as the first fires erupted in the districts of Pankow and Weissensee. Vogel wondered how much more punishment the city could absorb. Vast sections of the capital of the thousand-year Reich had already been reduced to rubble. Many of the city's most famous neighborhoods resembled canyons of crushed brick and twisted steel. The lime trees of the Unter den Linden had been scorched, as had many of the once-glittering shops and banks lining the broad boulevard. The renowned clock at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church had been stilled at seven thirty since November, when Allied bombers laid waste to one thousand acres of Berlin on a single night.
The memo ran around in his head while he watched the night raid.
ABWEHR/BERLIN XFU0465848261
TO: CANARIS
FROM: MULLER
DATE: 2 NOV 43
ON 21 OCTOBER CAPTAIN DIETRICH OF ASCUNCION STATION DEBRIEFED AMERICAN ASSET SCORPIO IN PANAMA CITY. AS YOU KNOW SCORPIO IS ONE OF OUR MOST IMPORTANT AGENTS IN AMERICA. HE IS HIGHLY PLACED IN NEW YORK FINANCIAL CIRCLES AND IS WELL CONNECTED IN WASHINGTON. HE IS PERSONAL FRIENDS WITH MANY SENIOR OFFICERS AT BOTH THE DEPARTMENTS OF WAR AND STATE. HE HAS MET PERSONALLY WITH ROOSEVELT. THROUGHOUT THE WAR HIS INFORMATION HAS BEEN TIMELY AND HIGHLY ACCURATE. I REMIND YOU ABOUT THE INTELLIGENCE HE SUPPLIED TO US ON THE AMERICAN ARMS SHIPMENTS TO THE BRITISH.
ACCORDING TO SCORPIO, A RENOWNED AMERICAN ENGINEER NAMED PETER JORDAN WAS RECRUITED BY THE AMERICAN NAVY LAST MONTH AND DISPATCHED TO LONDON TO WORK ON A HIGHLY SECRET CONSTRUCTION PROJECT. JORDAN HAS NO PREVIOUS MILITARY EXPERIENCE. SCORPIO KNOWS JORDAN PERSONALLY AND SPOKE WITH HIM BEFORE HIS DEPARTURE FOR LONDON. SCORPIO SAYS THE PROJECT IS DEFINITELY CONNECTED TO THE ENEMY'S PLAN TO INVADE FRANCE.
JORDAN IS RESPECTED FOR HIS WORK ON SEVERAL MAJOR AMERICAN BRIDGE PROJECTS. JORDAN IS A WIDOWER. HIS WIFE, THE DAUGHTER OF AMERICAN BANKER BRATTON LAUTERBACH, WAS KILLED IN AN AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENT IN AUGUST 1939. SCORPIO BELIEVES JORDAN IS HIGHLY VULNERABLE TO APPROACH BY A FEMALE ASSET.
JORDAN IS NOW LIVING ALONE IN THE SECTION OF LONDON KNOWN AS KENSINGTON. SCORPIO HAS PROVIDED THE ADDRESS OF THE HOUSE AS WELL AS THE COMBINATION OF THE SAFE INSIDE THE STUDY.
SUGGEST ACTION.
Vogel noticed a wedge of light from the doorway and heard the scrape of Ulbricht's wooden leg against the floor. Th
e bombing disturbed Ulbricht in a way he could not put into words and Vogel could never understand. Vogel removed his key ring from the desk drawer and went to one of the steel cabinets. The file was inside an unmarked black folder. Returning to his desk, he poured himself a large cognac and opened the cover. It was all there: the photographs, the background material, the performance reports. He didn't need to read it. He had written it himself and, like the subject, he had the curse of a flawless memory.
He turned a few more pages and found the notes he had made after their first meeting in Paris. Beneath it was a copy of the cable sent to him by the man who discovered her--Emilio Romero, a wealthy Spanish landowner, a Fascist, a talent spotter for the Abwehr.
SHE IS EVERYTHING YOU ARE LOOKING FOR. I'D LIKE TO KEEP HER FOR MYSELF BUT BECAUSE I AM A FRIEND I WILL GIVE HER TO YOU. AT A REASONABLE PRICE OF COURSE.
The room felt suddenly bone-chillingly cold. He lay down on his army cot and covered himself in a blanket.
Hitler wants results, Kurt. Perhaps it's time we brought your little nest of spies into the game.
Sometimes he imagined leaving her in place until it was all over, then finding some way of getting her out. But she was perfect for it, of course. She was beautiful, she was intelligent, and her English and her knowledge of British society were faultless. He turned and looked at the photograph of Gertrude and the children. To think that he fantasized giving them up for her. He had been such a fool. He switched off the light. The air raid had ended. The night was a symphony of sirens. He tried to sleep but it was no good. She was under his skin again.
Poor Vogel. I've made a shambles of your heart, haven't I?
The eyes in the photograph of his family were boring into him. It was obscene, looking at them, remembering her. He stood up, went to his desk, and locked the picture away in his drawer.
"For God's sake, Kurt!" Muller exclaimed as Vogel entered his office the following morning. "Who's cutting your hair these days, my friend? Let me give you the name of the woman who does mine. Maybe she can help you."