more than he had suspected. Miller raised his eyes from his brother to Kristin’s face and stared at her. At last, he seemed to come to a decision.
‘Napoleon wasn’t on board the plane,’ he said in the same quiet voice. Kristin could not hide her excitement.
‘Where was he then?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Miller said, his eyes returning to his brother. ‘And I don’t know where he is now. I’m not sure anyone does any longer.’
He fell silent and Kristin waited.
‘You have to understand that only a tightly controlled number of people within the army knew about Operation Napoleon,’ Miller continued at last. ‘Even I never knew exactly what it entailed, what the documents contained. I only knew the contents by hearsay. I was nothing but a pawn, an errand boy, assigned to solve a specific problem. My brother too.’
He trailed off again.
‘I believe it was conceived and planned by a handful of generals based in Europe – American generals, that is. I don’t know where the idea came from or who took the initiative, but however it came about, talks were entered into with the Germans. Ever since it had become clear that the Germans were going to lose the war there had been discussions about how Europe would be split into Allied- and Russian-occupied territories. By the time the end was approaching and the Russians were pouring into Eastern Europe, people were beginning to talk in earnest about whether we should invade Russia and finish off what the Germans had failed to do; arrange an armistice with the Germans, prior to tackling the Red Army. The only person to float the idea openly was General Patton but no one took him seriously. People were tired of war. They wanted peace. Understandably.’
‘But what’s the point of all this?’ Kristin asked impatiently. ‘This is all common knowledge. Even I’ve heard of it. There was an article in the British papers recently saying that Churchill had drawn up plans to invade Russia as soon as Germany had surrendered.’
‘Operation Unthinkable was its name,’ Miller replied.
‘Exactly. That can hardly be the secret your people are prepared to torture and kill for. It’s old news.’
‘As a matter of fact, it’s quite a big question, in the light of history,’ Miller said. ‘The division of Europe. The Cold War. The nuclear threat. The Vietnam War. Could we have avoided all that? We defeated the Japanese and today they’re an economic superpower. Might the same have happened in Russia?’
Now he’s just wasting time, Kristin thought. Can’t he see that we have no time? I have to have answers now.
Vytautas Carr was sitting in the flight cabin. Since he could no longer hear Ratoff’s screams above the noise of the engines, he concluded that he must have given in. They all did in the end, even the Ratoffs of this world. It was merely a question of when. He did not know what they had done to him, did not want to know; the sordid details were irrelevant. They were short of time and Ratoff had been shown no mercy. It was futile to withstand the pincer movement of drugs and physical horrors; and no one understood that better than Ratoff himself.
Carr looked out into the night. He would retire when all this was over. It was his last assignment and he felt as if he had spent his whole life waiting to be able to close this chapter. To be able to draw a line under this little footnote left over from the war years, one which the world had forgotten and no one cared about any more.
One of Carr’s men materialised beside him and bent to his ear.
‘We have it, sir.’
‘Is he still alive?’ Carr asked.
‘Just about, sir,’ the man answered.
‘Have you made arrangements to retrieve the documents?’
‘It won’t be a problem, sir. They’re on their way to the base at Keflavik. We’ve arranged to have the convoy intercepted and the documents destroyed. As you asked.’
‘Right.’
‘What should we do with Ratoff, sir?’
‘We have no further need of him. Just do whatever’s necessary. And don’t tell me about it.’
‘Understood. There’s nothing further, sir.’
‘One thing – the bags. Have you checked the body-bags since we took off?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It’s probably unnecessary. The temperature back there should be low enough to preserve the bodies. Not that it matters. Except perhaps to Miller.’
Carr paused.
‘Where is Miller?’ he asked.
‘No idea, sir. I thought he was with you.’
‘He was here not long ago. Find him and bring him back.’
‘Yes, sir. By the way, I checked on the bags when the two halves of the plane were loaded and all seven were present.’
Carr was silent. He looked again through the cockpit window at the blackness beyond. The man was turning away.
‘Seven? You mean six,’ Carr corrected him.
‘No, sir. There are seven bags.’
‘No, there were only six bodies on the glacier. There should have been seven but one of them was missing. There are six bags.’
‘There are seven bags, sir.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Why seven? That can’t be right.’
‘Sir, I couldn’t say. But I definitely counted seven bags.’
‘It was the second round of talks with the Nazis,’ Miller went on, his eyes on his brother’s face. ‘We were testing the flight route and the plane, at the same time as transporting the gold and some of the Nazis in the negotiating committee. These two crates were meant as an appetiser. They still had to agree on a final destination in Argentina.’
‘Who?’
‘The Nazis.’
‘Were they escaping?’
‘Of course. They all wanted to escape. Cowardly assholes, the whole damn lot of them.’
‘Lots of them escaped to South America,’ Kristin said, willing him to continue. Since the old man appeared to offer no threat to her, she had temporarily forgotten the danger she was in. At the forefront of her mind was the insistent conviction that she had to fish for more information, that any scrap she could glean might prove crucial. She was in the endgame now, and though she dimly expected some final confrontation, she knew that she would need to gather everything she had if she was to evade the trap which was closing around her. ‘Adolf Eichmann,’ she added. ‘He was caught in Argentina.’
‘I believe we let them have Eichmann,’ Miller replied.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We led them to Eichmann.’
‘You did what?’
‘Besides being ruthless, Mossad are tireless. Like bloodhounds. You can’t keep anything hidden from them indefinitely. When the Israelis had sniffed out too much, we arranged things to look as if the trail led to Eichmann. They were satisfied and took the bait. But they would never have found him without our intelligence.’
Kristin had the sensation of being in freefall. Her mind was at once quite empty and yet overwhelmed with trying to take in the implications of Miller’s revelation. The individual words were barely registering as sounds but the sense of what he was saying seemed to penetrate her mind obscurely. Her face betrayed no emotion, no great astonishment as Miller went on. She had, it might have looked to Miller, entered a state of suspended animation.
‘The Germans were in no position to lay down conditions for a ceasefire. They were defeated; it was only a question of time before the war ended. They were so terrified the Reds would reach Berlin first that many of them were prepared to join us in the final months if we could be trusted to turn on the Russians.’
‘The trail to Eichmann?’ Kristin said, as if to herself. ‘Whose trail were they on then?’
