‘I’ll check myself. I don’t want the police involved — at least, not at this stage.’
There was a pause, broken only by the wheeze of Mac’s pipe. ‘Tommy, you’re groping in the dark. You’ve already tangled with Shanklin, and he’s not a man who fools around. On the other hand he put you on to this chappie, French. Now that’s a mite odd of him, if he’s got something to hide. You might almost say that Shanklin was trying to help you.’
‘Well, that’s his business. As for French, the clue seems to lie somewhere with that man Rice. Do you know anything about him?’
‘Not much more than you do, laddie. He disappeared from Central America at the end of the war, when the War Crimes Tribunal got on to him in Germany in 1945. As you know, he was a top scientist, as well as a double-agent. But I do have one name that might help you. A certain Hans Dieter Mönch — Herr Doktor, of course. An important administrator in the Ministry of War Production, working on the petro-chemical side. Synthetic fuels. He was a full Party member and the Yanks got him on a number of technical charges. He served altogether two years, then went down to live in Spain. As far as I know he’s still living there.’
He poured more whisky. ‘But there were one or two wee mysteries about Doktor Mönch that were near cleared up. We were getting all kinds of informants and turncoats coming to us at that time with the wildest tales. One was that Mönch had been working for a secret project — so secret that it was kept well away from Nazi top-brass, and that Mönch was answerable only to Himmler direct. The suspicion at the time was that it concerned one of those fancy rocket projects, which would have tied in with Rice. Another was that it was part of the German A-Bomb. The trouble was, we never discovered one damn document relating to Mönch’s activities. Now that was a wee bit bizarre, because the Germans hoard documents like squirrels. Half their war criminals went to the gallows because of the evidence they left behind them. And Mönch was born a professional bureaucrat.’
‘Meaning that Mönch hid these documents?’
‘Mönch, or Rice, perhaps. Rice had disappeared, remember. If you could find Rice, you might get yourself a nice little story.’
‘Do you know where Mönch is supposed to be in Spain?’
‘Last known to be running a little farm in a town called Soria, between Pamplona and Madrid. He’s an old man now — he’s paid for his sins. He might help you. You could but try. But I’m leading you on, laddie. And it’s all speculation. I’d hate to be wasting your time.’
‘Those three cars that followed me here weren’t speculation, Mac. Nor is that missing file at the PRO. And the fact that Shanklin and Frisby were in both Istanbul and Vera Cruz is something I don’t accept as a coincidence. Supposing we assume that those two ports might have been used for clandestine oil shipments from the West to Germany? What do you know about Istanbul in the war, Mac?’
‘Och, I didna’ have the luck to be there during the war — and being a young man brought up in the kirk, maybe it’s as well I wasn’t!’ He advanced on Hawn with the rapidly emptying bottle; Hawn held up his hand. ‘What’s happened to ye, laddie? You used to be quite a promising drinker.’
‘Not when I’m working. We were talking about Istanbul, Mac — during the war.’
‘Bright and dirty, and full of sin. The Turks were sitting on the fence, being wooed by both sides. In the Great War they’d opted for the Germans and paid heavily for it. We were desperate to get them in. So desperate, I even heard a wee tale about Sir Winston wanting to bribe them with gold from our reserves. But the Treasury boys put a quick end to that, so I’m told.’
‘Come to the point, Mac. Did you have any dealing with Turkey during the war — with Istanbul in particular?’
‘Only from a desk in Whitehall. No sin there, laddie. Not even a sniff of it.’
‘I gather the British were pretty thick on the ground in Turkey — as well as the Germans? And a lot of double-dealing went on, just like it did in Lisbon and the Caribbean?’
‘Stands to reason. So you take money from one side and sell to the other. What’s the worst that can happen to you? Maybe one side gets sore enough to put a knife in your back one dark night, but usually it’s up to the Turkish authorities. And what do they care — as long as the nightclubs are full and everyone’s paying in hard cash? I used to hear that information was almost as cheap as the lassies.’
‘Who ran the Turkish operation — from our end?’
‘Cairo, officially, through POE — Political Operations Executive. But of course, they were answerable to London.’
‘Mac, if stuff had been getting to the Germans illegally through Istanbul — say, the odd tanker across to the Danube — would you, in MI14, have heard about it?’
The old man jiggled his pipe and rubbed his knees and stared at the ceiling. ‘Long, long ago I signed a piece of bumf called the Official Secrets Act, and they still haven’t torn it up. But I’m an old man now. I’m not even burdened with the awful responsibility of Fleet Street, and carrying the Gospel every morning to every breakfast table in the land. Yes, Tommy. Stuff got through. Tankers from the Gulf, switching cargoes, false Bills of Lading, putting in for phoney refits before going down to Alex or up to Naples when the “Hanging Garden” fell.’ He grinned: ‘That was the
