The old town of Venhoven on the River Maas was a little over five miles from the German border. Denham knew it from a driving trip he’d made with his father to Germany years ago. It had been their halfway stop for the night. The country along the frontier to the east, where the hotel was located, was undulating, wide open farmland, the strategic sweep into the Low Countries that had made it the scene of countless battles. Without the cover of trees or buildings, he thought, it would be harder for the SD to pull any tricks.
It was a tiring day-and-a-half’s journey, driving from London to Harwich, waiting for the car to be winched onto the ferry, and sailing to the Hook of Holland. He drove through the night with Friedl sitting next to him, having eaten a light meal on the crossing.
‘Hope Nat’s all right looking after the cat,’ Denham said, to break the silence.
‘He’ll manage.’
Friedl was watching the suburban lights of Rotterdam passing in the darkness. Denham had spotted at least four cars with German number plates behind them for long stretches of the road but told himself there was nothing odd about that. They were heading east after all.
It was a leaden, dim morning with a sharp wind picking up when they pulled into the forecourt of the Hotel Mertens at 7:00 a.m. on the Thursday. They had more than a day and a half to spare before the handover. Plenty of time to notice if there were any suspicious comings or goings.
Friedl had been eager to accompany him, but on the strictest understanding that no part of the plan involved crossing into the Reich. He seemed determined to share the danger, Denham thought, perhaps to atone for his unwitting role in Denham’s arrest and torture. But for Denham’s part, he was thankful for an extra pair of eyes and ears.
He absolutely did not trust Heydrich. A hundred times in his head he went over that telephone conversation. The man had agreed to the deal too easily. And the more Denham thought about it, the harder he found it to believe that Heydrich would simply comply.
The most exposed and dangerous part of the plan lay in the journey itself. Heydrich’s men might easily have shadows on them as soon as they arrived in the Hook of Holland. If they could do that, then they could ambush the car anywhere along the way and simply take the dossier. True, all they’d get was a bogus dossier, containing a handful of genuine drawings from the bank vault wrapped around a sheaf of worthless papers. But Denham, too, would be cheated if he didn’t get the Liebermanns. So if SD agents did stop the car, the safest thing was to make sure they found no dossier at all, bogus or otherwise. Then there was still at least a chance of holding them to their word.
After a long discussion in Chamberlain Street, Eleanor had come up with a precautionary plan. She would send the bogus dossier by parcel courier from the US embassy in London to arrive at the hotel the same day as Richard.
Then she would take a flight to Berlin.
Richard, preoccupied with practicalities, was slow to absorb this last part.
‘What?’
‘As a precaution,’ Eleanor said, ‘to make sure the Germans are honouring the deal. I want to know for certain that they’ve told the Liebermanns of their impending release…’
Denham was incredulous. ‘How? Jakob and Ilse are under house arrest.’
‘I’ll get a message to them…’
Denham flatly refused to go along with it.
‘That’s absolutely insane. The Germans know you’re involved in this. The Gestapo probably have a file on you. You publicly humiliated Willi Greiser for Christ’s sake. You can’t just fly into Berlin pretending you’re on a weekend’s vacation. They’ll be suspicious, my love.’
‘And if I were there officially, invited by the embassy?’
Denham looked at her blankly.
She reached into her handbag and handed him a folded page of newspaper, which he opened out on the kitchen table, puzzled. It was torn from a week-old New York Times.
‘FBI closes in on Alvin “Creepy” Karpis…’
‘Bottom left,’ she said.
Near the foot of the page was the heading U.S. AMBASSADOR'S DAUGHTER TO WED SOVIET DIPLOMAT with a head shot of a laughing Martha Dodd.
‘Good God,’ Richard said, holding the page closer.
Ambassador Dodd, it seemed, had surprised the State Department by announcing his daughter’s engagement to a Mr Boris Vinogradov, thirty-four, press attache at the Russian embassy, Berlin…
‘The intelligence services will have her for breakfast,’ he said.
‘And look who’s got herself invited to the engagement party.’
Eleanor was holding up an embossed invitation with her name inscribed across the top in a girlish hand. ‘May first, US embassy, Berlin. The invitation arrived this morning. I’m staying with the Dodds.’
‘You’re not going.’
Denham spent the rest of the evening trying to talk her out of it, listing every risk she was running. But her mind was set firm.
They went to bed that night without talking. The next morning, when he saw that no words he could ever say would make her change her mind, he insisted she take Rex’s telephone number in Berlin in case something went wrong. ‘But remember he’s a reporter, so his phone may be tapped.’
A fter a breakfast with Tom over which they assured him they’d be back in a few days from a driving trip, Eleanor said her goodbyes to Denham and Friedl and watched the Morris Oxford depart Chamberlain Street. Then she gave the keys of the house to Nat and left to enact the next part of the plan-the delivery of the genuine List Dossier from the vault of the Zavi-Landau Bank to the hands of David Wyn Evans. After that, she would hurry by taxi to Croydon Airfield for her flight to Berlin.
Denham had telephoned Evans two days before leaving to arrange the details of the handover. At 9:00 a.m. Evans would be waiting in his car outside the bank on Idol Lane while Eleanor retrieved the dossier from the vault. She would hand it to him inside the car.
Denham had described Evans to her, even imitating his Valleys accent. She was warned to expect Bowler Hat Man at the wheel. Partly as a joke for the diffident Welshman, whom he’d grown to like, he’d suggested a double password, more as a dig at Evans’s profession than anything cloak-and-dagger. ‘No password, no dossier,’ Denham said. They agreed on: ‘Will I see you at Biarritz this season?’ to which the response had to be, ‘No, I vacation in Rhyl,’ a North Wales seaside town for which the words drab and tawdry fell someway short.
A sombre rush-hour crowd on the Tube. She stood swaying among men in black bowlers, drawing their glances when they thought she wasn’t looking. A valise over her shoulder contained an embassy diplomatic pouch where she’d concealed five hundred reichsmarks for any unseen eventuality; between her feet a small, lightish case contained her clothes, and a single gown. It had been a headache to pack so little, but she would be back in three days, all going well. And in time for the coronation on the thirteenth. Her eyes moved between the headlines in the newspapers open around her. BASQUE TOWN NOW HEAP OF RUINS. Four hours of bombing. GERMAN PLANES ATTACK IN RELAYS. Escaping villagers machine-gunned from the air. Dear God. Why?
A mood of resignation pervaded London. Not surprising when the papers were filled daily with aggression and atrocity.
A smaller piece in the same papers baffled her but was, in its way, as depressing as the bombs. She had to squint as the carriage shook. LORD LONDONDERRY IN FRIENDSHIP TALKS
WITH HITLER. On another: LORD LONDONDERRY LEADS ANGLO-GERMAN UNITY TALKS.
The silver key in her purse. Had she and Richard the means to change all this?
She arrived several minutes early at the bank and was obliged to wait ten long minutes to be shown down to the vault. She was back outside on the lane, with the dossier inside her valise, within sixteen minutes.
No sign of a car.
She glanced at her watch. Her flight was at 11:00 a.m. Not much time. It was cold here in the shade. Maybe the lane was too narrow for the car to wait. Yes, that must be it. Following the kerb to the end she turned the corner and gave a small shriek.
A broad man in a bowler hat was walking quickly towards her. He stopped when he saw her, said, ‘This way,
