thought,’ Hitler continued in a louder voice, rubbing his hands in anticipation. ‘I like your plan, Reinhard. I like it very much. You have done well. Radio your agent and tell him to go ahead. The sooner Churchill is out of the way, the better for all of us.’
‘We can’t use radio,’ said Heydrich. ‘D says that the British intercepted the message that I sent to him after I saw you at the Berghof, although the good news is that my message was short and simply asked for details of his plan without giving away anything about the plan’s purpose.’
‘Was there an investigation?’
‘Not one that went anywhere. One man started asking questions, apparently, but D got rid of him before he could do any damage.’
‘And you’re confident that’s the end of it?’
‘Yes. And besides, the loss of the radio link doesn’t really affect us now. We will need to provide D with an intelligence briefing, like before, that contains enough quality information to ensure that Churchill wants to discuss it with him in person. We couldn’t do that in a radio message even if it was secure.’
‘How, then? I have already told you time is of the essence. We must strike while the iron is hot and before someone else starts asking questions. Can we use an aeroplane drop for the papers like we did before?’
‘No, it would require a radio message to D to tell him to collect the package, and we can’t risk that. We have to use the Lisbon route. With luck it’ll take less than a week. It’s usually quicker with messages going to London than when they are coming back. I can bring more pressure to bear on the Portuguese in Lisbon than I can on their embassy in London, and you can be sure I will use all my influence.’
‘A week,’ repeated Hitler, looking disgusted, but then after a moment he shrugged. ‘Very well, it seems we have no choice. What about the information to tempt Churchill into a meeting? There are areas that are off-limits. I hope you understand that, Reinhard?’
‘Of course. The intelligence should relate to the invasion, I think. Like before. But this time it needs to be something new-’
‘The invasion is dead in the water,’ Hitler interrupted irritably. ‘Goering has seen to that. I have ordered an indefinite postponement.’
‘But the British don’t know that,’ said Heydrich. ‘D says that they are still expecting a landing any day. Churchill will be thinking about nothing else. And he now believes that D has a source with access to our highest- level military conferences, ones at which you are present. We can say that you are considering cancelling Operation Sea Lion and that there is a debate going on inside the high command about whether or not to proceed. I already have most of what I need to tell D mapped out. Churchill will want to know more, and he will be tempted to think that he can influence the argument through leaked radio messages and the like for which he will need Secret Service advice.’
Hitler had listened carefully. He stared at Heydrich for a few moments after the Gestapo chief had finished speaking and then got up without a word and went and stood at the window with his back to his visitor, looking out at the Chancellery gardens.
‘It’s reckless,’ he said, turning around. ‘A gambler’s throw, but we need to trust in chance sometimes. If hazard is what it is,’ he added musingly. ‘Because sometimes I think that it is more than chance that governs my destiny. You know where I was thirty years ago?’
Heydrich shook his head, even though he knew the answer. He realized that it was the Fuhrer’s turn to talk now and his role was to listen.
‘I was homeless, sleeping on a park bench in Vienna, barely able to keep body and soul together, painting pretty pictures for tourists. And now look where I am,’ he said, indicating the grandeur of the room with a sweep of his hand. ‘Heir to Frederick the Great and Bismarck; leader of a new Reich; the most powerful man in the world. This is no accident, no trick of fate. It is beyond chance. I’ve said it before — “I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.” And this wild plan of yours feels like it is meant to work partly because it is so improbable. So, yes, Reinhard, you have my agreement. Now make it happen — rid me of this stupid Englishman who thinks he can obstruct the march of history.’
PART TWO
CHAPTER 1
It was like another world here on the other side of the green baize door that connected 59 Broadway to the next-door building where C had his office. Or rather suite of offices. Persons wishing to see C had to pass first through a narrow, rectangular anteroom between his two sentries — a pair of elderly, white-haired ladies wearing identical pairs of horn-rimmed glasses who were ceaselessly busy on Remington typewriters, sending out an endless stream of memos dictated by their invisible master. Known interchangeably as Miss Taylor and Miss Jones, they sat straight-backed behind matching desks, facing each other across a thin strip of blue carpet that ended at a big oak door. Above the lintel, a green light and a red light had been installed so that visitors would know when it was permitted to enter C’s presence, but as far as Thorn was aware, the lights had never worked. The secretaries were much more effective gatekeepers. Known universally as the twins, they ran C’s diary and fielded his telephone calls. All communication with the head of MI6 passed through them.
Unlike their employer, the twins never smiled and they had no small talk whatsoever. They had come with C from the Admiralty when he succeeded Albert Morrison as director of MI6, and popular opinion in HQ was that they had been born as they were now, hatched in some secret government factory as fully fledged septuagenarian spinsters with steely eyes and bony, typing fingers. Their hard, unforgiving faces certainly indicated another side to C’s character that he usually kept under wraps, concealed behind his normal hail-fellow-well-met, debonair exterior. Thorn was a veteran of the corridors of power, and he knew full well that a man didn’t rise to C’s position without being ruthless where necessary along the way. He sometimes wondered whether it was the lack of a hard edge that had held his own career back and had earned C the nod over him when it came to choosing Albert’s replacement three years earlier, but he had always dismissed the thought. Drive and determination had never been his problem, and he knew himself well enough to realize that it was a fundamental lack of charm that had ruined his chances of promotion. Clubbable — that was the word for it. C was clubbable and he was not. It was as simple as that. All his life he had set people on edge rather than at their ease. And it was far too late to change now.
It wasn’t that he was disqualified from further advancement by any accident of birth. Quite the opposite, in fact. Thorn was the youngest son of a baronet, a fully paid-up member of the English aristocracy. He’d grown up in a damp, cold manor house on the Welsh borders with a choleric father and a pair of handsome, daredevil brothers who hunted foxes in tight red coats at the weekend and believed that history had reached its apogee with the founding of the British Empire. Thorn didn’t disagree with them. He shared their values, but he’d always felt separated from them in some profound way. As a child, he’d sometimes caught his father looking at him in an odd way. He knew why now: he was the runt of the litter. He read too many books, he didn’t know one end of a horse from another, and — worst of all — he was a natural pessimist.
The family didn’t fare well in the First World War. One brother was blown to bits at Neuve-Chapelle in 1915; another — the heir to the title — lost his right leg on the Somme. But Thorn missed it all. He was taken prisoner during a night patrol towards the end of his second week at the front and spent the remainder of the war eating cold potatoes in a POW camp north of Munich. The experience left him fluent in German but obscurely ashamed of himself, and his career since had been in large part an attempt to repay his country for a failure that wasn’t his fault.
And now, as the bombs fell on London and the Nazi net was drawn ever tighter around the kingdom, Thorn felt that his world and his class were disappearing, sinking like a holed ocean liner, swallowed up in a tidal wave of total war. The future, if there was one, belonged to unprincipled arrivistes like Seaforth, and he felt there was nothing he could do to stop its relentless advance. Except that he had to try. Because Seaforth was a traitor and a
