throat.’
Von Ulrich obeyed.
A pretty young woman dressed in a nurse’s uniform came rushing down the stairs. ‘Father!’ she said. ‘What’s happening?’
Macke wondered how many more people there might be in the house. He felt a twinge of anxiety. An ordinary family could not overcome trained police officers, but a crowd of them might create enough of a fracas for von Ulrich to slip away.
However, the man himself did not want a fight. ‘Don’t confront them!’ he said to his daughter in a voice of urgency. ‘Stay back!’
The nurse looked terrified and did as she was told.
Macke said: ‘Put him in the car.’
Wagner walked von Ulrich out of the door.
The wife began to sob.
The nurse said: ‘Where are you taking him?’
Macke went to the door. He looked at the three women: the maid, the wife and the daughter. ‘All this trouble,’ he said, ‘for the sake of an eight-year-old moron. I will never understand you people.’
He went out and got into the car.
They drove the short distance to Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Wagner parked at the back of the Gestapo headquarters building alongside a dozen identical black cars. They all got out.
They took von Ulrich in through a back door and down the stairs to the basement, and put him in a white-tiled room.
Macke opened a cupboard and took out three long, heavy clubs like American baseball bats. He gave one to each of his assistants.
‘Beat the shit out of him,’ he said; and he left them to it.
Captain Volodya Peshkov, head of the Berlin section of Red Army Intelligence, met Werner Franck at the Invalids’ Cemetery beside the Berlin-Spandau Ship Canal.
It was a good choice. Looking around the graveyard carefully, Volodya was able to confirm that no one followed him or Werner in. The only other person present was an old woman in a black headscarf, and she was on her way out.
Their rendezvous was the tomb of General von Scharnhorst, a large pedestal bearing a slumbering lion made of melted-down enemy cannons. It was a sunny day in spring, and the two young spies took off their jackets as they walked among the graves of German heroes.
After the Hitler–Stalin pact almost two years ago, Soviet espionage had continued in Germany, and so had surveillance of Soviet Embassy staff. Everyone saw the treaty as temporary, though no one knew how temporary. So counter-intelligence agents were still tailing Volodya everywhere.
They ought to be able to tell when he was going out on a genuine secret intelligence mission, he thought, for that was when he shook them off. If he went out to buy a frankfurter for lunch he let them shadow him. He wondered whether they were smart enough to figure that out.
‘Have you seen Lili Markgraf lately?’ said Werner.
She was a girl they had both dated at different times in the past. Volodya had now recruited her, and she had learned to encode and decode messages in the Red Army Intelligence cipher. Of course Volodya would not tell Werner that. ‘I haven’t seen her for a while,’ he lied. ‘How about you?’
Werner shook his head. ‘Someone else has won my heart.’ He seemed bashful. Perhaps he was embarrassed about belying his playboy reputation. ‘Anyway, why did you want to see me?’
‘We have received devastating information,’ Volodya said. ‘News that will change the course of history – if it is true.’
Werner looked sceptical.
Volodya went on: ‘A source has told us that Germany will invade the Soviet Union in June.’ He thrilled again as he said it. It was a huge triumph for Red Army Intelligence, and a terrible threat to the USSR.
Werner pushed a lock of hair out of his eyes in a gesture that probably made girls’ hearts beat faster. He said: ‘A reliable source?’
It was a journalist in Tokyo who was in the confidence of the German ambassador there, but was in fact a secret Communist. Everything he had said so far had turned out to be true. But Volodya could not tell Werner that. ‘Reliable,’ he said.
‘So you believe it?’
Volodya hesitated. That was the problem. Stalin did not believe it. He thought it was Allied disinformation intended to sow mistrust between himself and Hitler. Stalin’s scepticism about this intelligence coup had devastated Volodya’s superiors, souring their jubilation. ‘We seek verification,’ he said.
Werner looked around at the trees in the graveyard coming into leaf. ‘I hope to God it’s true,’ he said with sudden savagery. ‘It will finish the damned Nazis.’
‘Yes,’ said Volodya. ‘If the Red Army is prepared.’
