“Hard?” Scanlon raised both hands in front of his face so Bromley could see all ten fingers. “I still have one good set left, see? Do you know why? Because Otto Dietrich left them as a message to amateurs like you. Spend them wisely, Colonel, spend them very wisely; because they’re the last ones I have left.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Moscow
It was 2:00 a.m. Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria’s long black ZIS sedan raced through the empty streets of Moscow, preceded and trailed by pairs of olive-drab motorcycles with their sirens screaming. When the small procession reached the Kremlin’s Borovitsky Gate, it tore on through without even slowing. The guards on the gate were NKVD. They worked for Beria and they knew his black ZIS as well as they knew Stalin’s. No one was about to stop that car.
Beria was a nasty piece of work. Short and plump with round cheeks, he wore a pair of tiny pince-nez eyeglasses that rode the bridge of his nose and appeared to squeeze his face. With them on, he could be mistaken for a second-rate bookkeeper or a prissy librarian, but Lavrenti Beria was none of those things. For fifteen years, he had been the chief of the NKVD, Josef Stalin’s dreaded secret police, and the second most powerful man in the country. By Russian standards, this early spring night was not terribly cold, yet Beria sat in the ZIS’s rear seat trembling. He wore a thick woolen greatcoat and had the car’s heater running on high, but a summons from Josef Stalin in the middle of the night had a chilling effect on people, even a secret policeman. As Beria knew too well, each of his predecessors had ended their days propped against a brick wall, wide-eyed, shaking, and staring into the muzzles of an NKVD firing squad. He knew that, because he was usually the man who gave the order to fire. Together, Stalin, Beria, and their all-encompassing secret police network had shot, beaten, and starved to death over 20 million of their fellow citizens, but who was counting? All it took was a glance, a hushed phone call, or the slash of a pen to make a man, a family, or a whole village simply vanish.
Absolute power could do strange things to people, as Beria knew all too well. Like his distant predecessor Ivan the Terrible, Stalin had become a paranoid hermit who rarely ventured outside the red brick walls of the Kremlin. Built to protect medieval Czars from marauding bands of Tartars and Poles, it now protected their Communist successors from potential rivals, spies, assassins, and their own people. Not that the unwashed Russian masses would ever raise a hand against him. After centuries of oppression, that simply was not in their collective genes. The only real danger Josef Stalin faced was from dark conspiracies hatched here, inside the Kremlin, within the bowels of his own party and government. That was why he was so vigilant for the slightest whiff of disloyalty or betrayal. Better to be ruthless and stomp out a hundred innocent threats than to let a real one fester. That simple philosophy had served him well for four decades and he filled the basements of the Lubyanka prison with the results.
Josef Stalin never spoke to strangers, only to a handful of terrorized subordinates who slavishly competed to prove their unquestioning loyalty to him. His only public appearances were in well-protected and carefully scripted settings, such as the top of Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square on May Day or for one of the big military parades. As the years passed, he drank more and more heavily, became nocturnal, and was now totally paranoid. One by one, he eliminated every pre-revolutionary comrade, potential rival, the entire general staff, cooks, drivers, guards, a wife, and a son. Convinced there were assassins and conspirators all around him, the truth was, there were. That was why Stalin constantly tested his underlings and challenged their loyalty in ever more bizarre ways.
One of his favorites was a gruff summons in the middle of the night. Beria was now late and that alone could prove fatal. He had been riding the back of an enthusiastic, double-jointed ballerina from the Bolshoi when the red telephone next to his bed rang, and he went limp as a dishrag. There was only one man in Moscow who dared call him on that phone at any hour, and one ring was enough to cool even Beria’s legendary ardor. Staring down at the sweating blonde, he groaned. Most of the constant stream of women who came to his bed had been terrorized by blackmail or threats to themselves or their husbands, but this beauty had come voluntarily. She wanted top billing in a new show, and performing well on Beria’s private stage was the fastest way to get it. As he rolled off her and reached for the phone, she reached back between her legs and grabbed for him, refusing to stop. He had to slap her hard across the face and knock her onto the floor to get away, but Lavrenti Beria had been summoned. Like it or not, the curtain had rung down on his prima ballerina.
The vast courtyard of the Kremlin was empty when Beria’s convoy rolled in. That meant Molotov, Mikoyan, Khrushchev, Malenkov, and Voroshilov were not already inside planting whispers in the old man’s ear, whispers that could get even Beria shot. How fortunate, he thought, as he leaped from the still-moving car and ran through the front door as fast as his stubby legs would carry him. He tossed his heavy greatcoat onto the vestibule floor, raced up the broad staircase, pushed past the last guards, and opened the door to the Chairman’s private office. Josef Vissarionovich Stalin was now 67 years old. He was Chairman of the Council of Ministers, General Secretary of the Communist Party, People’s Commissar, Marshal, Generalissimo, Secretary of the Politburo, Father of the Nation, the Great Architect, and dozens of other titles, but he was usually called “Boss” by his terrified inner circle or “Koba,” which was his revolutionary nom-de-guerre. The office where he spent most of his days and nights now was surprisingly small and modestly appointed. The furniture was old and the chairs almost threadbare. Thick layers of war-time blackout curtains still covered the windows and he never opened them to let in air or light. The polished marble floor from Czarist days had been covered by thick, Georgian carpets, the type you might find in a lower-middle-class house in the Caucasus. Beria thought they looked pathetic, but Stalin liked them. He said they reminded him of his childhood, decades before.
Out of breath, Beria skidded to a halt in the center of the room. Stalin lay sprawled on an old, cracked-leather couch in front of the glowing embers in the big fireplace. He wore a simple homespun tunic, baggy peasant pants, and badly scuffed, knee-high leather boots. His left arm draped across his forehead, shielding his eyes, while his right arm hung on the floor, his fingers circling the neck of a nearly empty vodka bottle. This was Stalin’s usual late-night pose. Beria also knew there would be at least one 9-millimeter Makarov pistol tucked between the cushions, within easy reach. For several long minutes, Stalin let Beria stand in front of him without even acknowledging his presence. Finally, the great man spoke, his voice thick, slurred with alcohol. “Where have you been, Beria? I thought you fell into one of those dungeons of yours and got lost.”
“My apologies, Koba, but the weather out there is abysmal,” he answered, squinting as his glasses became hopelessly fogged in the hot room.
“Weather?” Stalin shot back with a malevolent laugh. “Weather? Is that your new whore’s name? Weather? Surely you know that even the spymaster is spied upon these days. So here, drink, Lavrenti Pavlovich,” Stalin said as he raised the bottle of vodka for him to take. “You have the cold eyes of an undertaker tonight. You look like you need a stiff one.”
Beria took the bottle from Stalin’s hand and sloshed the white-hot liquid down his throat. Beria realized that Stalin had called him by his first name and his patronymic, always a good sign. He also knew that not to accept the bottle and not to drink deeply from it when proffered could also be fatal. However, he knew to be careful with the vodka. Stalin loved to get a man drunk and provoke him, or make him sing and dance to see how he would react. Those were some of his other favorite tests.
“I have a question for you, Beria.”
“Anything, Koba, anything. You need but ask.”
“Tell me why you think we won this war.”
“Won? Comrade Stalin?” Beria froze, sensing a trap. “I… I would not say that we have won… not yet anyway.”
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p; “A matter of weeks,” he dismissed the argument with a wave of his hand. “We shall be in Berlin before summer. That should be obvious even to a toad like you.”
“Yes, yes, Koba, if you think…”
“I do, Beria. I do!” Stalin’s voice thundered. “So answer my question, spy-master-in-chief. Why did we win this cursed war?”
The NKVD chief was now in a near panic. Surely, this was another well-crafted trap, because Stalin never asked for opinions. “They are like bastard orphans,” he growled many times before, “no one wants them and no one needs them.”
In desperation, Beria finally took a stab in the dark. “It is because the Fascists could not stand up to the wrath of the great Soviet people, to Vanka, our simple Russian foot soldier, and, of course, to your brilliant leadership.”
“No, no, no,” Stalin cut him off with a disgusted wave of his hand. “Oh, we threw poor Vanka at the Germans, well enough. We threw Vanka at them by the tens of millions. Then we retreated, giving them so much land that they choked on it until the early snows came and saved us. There was no brilliant strategy in that. Vanka, land, and old General Winter were indeed our best weapons, but the real reason we won was time, time, Beria. We traded land for time over and over again, until we eventually turned the tables on the Fascists. Even you can see the simple truth in that.”
Beria stared at him, speechless, not knowing whether he should agree or disagree.
“Well, we will not be that lucky next time,” Stalin warned. “Wars will be fought between machines, not men. They will start after breakfast and be over before lunch, with the battles fought up there in the skies,” he pointed his finger toward the ceiling. “It will be with rockets and jet airplanes, and neither Vanka nor General Winter will be able to save us then. That is why we shall lose. Mark my words, Beria, there will be a next time, Churchill will see to it, and we will lose.”
“Those damned British, they are always hatching plots.”
The hard expression on Stalin’s face silenced the sycophant and Beria began to sweat once again. “That is why we must have the Germans who built those things, Beria. We must have the engineers and scientists who designed their airplanes, their rockets, and all the rest of it. The Germans are decades ahead of us,” Stalin reminded him. “Decades, and the Americans and the British are not far behind. We can never catch up without them.”
“I will put my best agents on it, Comrade Stalin, whole networks of them. Crack agents, bloodhounds. It will be their top priority, and they shall not fail you!”
“Good, because it is our only chance to survive,” Stalin said as he slowly raised his head and locked his eyes on Beria’s. “You do understand survival, don’t you, spymaster?”
“Yes! Oh yes, Koba, I…”
Stalin tossed the empty vodka bottle into the fireplace with a loud ’Smash!’ and Beria nearly jumped out of his skin. “Bring me those German scientists, Beria, not another load of your mealy-mouthed excuses. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, yes,” Beria babbled as he shuffled backward toward the door, not daring to turn away or break eye contact.
“I can feel Churchill plotting against me already,” Stalin’s voice followed the NKVD chief as he slipped out the door. “I can feel him, Beria. That old bastard will snatch those Germans from under your nose and have them marching down Whitehall, before you even know he was there.”
“I won’t let that happen, Comrade, never, never, I swear.”
“Then you had better hurry, Beria; you had better run like hell!”
Beria needed no further coaxing or motivating. His short, fat legs propelled him out the door, down the hall, down the broad staircase, and out the front door into the empty Kremlin courtyard. He forgot his greatcoat, leaving it lying on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, but he did not care. He also forgot about the delicious blonde waiting back at his apartment. All he could think about now was staring down the rifle barrels of an NKVD firing squad, because he had just told a gaping, bold-faced lie to Josef Stalin.
Crack agents inside Germany? Bloodhounds? Whole networks of them? Beria’s spy network in Germany had been in shambles for months. Most had been broken up by the Gestapo, and the only agents still left inside Germany who might be able to help at all were a smattering in Berlin, Essen, Hamburg, and the remnant of an old cell in Leipzig — mostly old men, if any of them were still alive. To make matters worse, it was a young woman who commanded that cell, and a Jew on top of that.
Beria leaped inside his car as an icy shiver ran down his spine. “Go, go!” he screamed to the driver. “To the office!” He did not have the slightest idea how they could deliver what Stalin wanted, but if they did not, Beria knew he was doomed.
CHAPTER SIX
Scanlon had come to hate Colonel George Bromley. He closed his eyes and imagined wrapping his fingers around the bastard’s bony neck and squeezing it like a chicken’s. That pleasant thought provided some consolation, but not much; because, when he opened his eyes again, Bromley was still sitting there, and he would not leave him alone.
The Colonel leaned forward over the desk, his eyes boring into Scanlon’s like twin drill bits, hot and painful. “Tell me, my boy,” he asked. “Can you really see yourself at the bar of some provincial country club in Connecticut, or wherever, with nothing to fill the long hours but large portions of whiskey and self-pity, telling war stories to your politely embarrassed golf companions, people who could never in a million years understand the war or what you have suffered?”
Scanlon broke into a cold sweat. He wanted ever so desperately to make Bromley stop his damned inquisition.
“No, I didn’t think so. Believe it or not, I know what you are going through. Truly, I do,” the Colonel’s voice softened. “I saw this same deadly cancer take hold in many a good man after the last war. You could see them wasting away on every park bench and pub in England — thin, pale, broken men. No one deserves that fate, Scanlon, not even you.”
“Colonel, I can’t do it anymore,” Scanlon finally admitted. After four months inside Germany where they measure the life span of an agent in hours and days, Ed Scanlon had given everything he had to give and he had nothing left. In the end, the Gestapo broke him; Chief Inspector Otto Dietrich broke him; and he talked. That was the worst thing an agent could do. It was as simple as that. He talked and he told the bastard all about the network, all about Will Kenyon, and all about Hanni Steiner. Kenyon was soon dead in the shootout at Gestapo Headquarters, and by now, he was certain the others were dead too, including Hanni. It wasn’t that the Gestapo would not have eventually rolled up the network and caught them all anyway. With all the manpower and equipment the Germans had at their command, it was inevitable. Still, it was Scanlon who talked, and that left him a shattered emotional wreck.
Bromley could tell that the sale was not working and he was losing his grip on the young American. That was when he dropped his bomb and watched it explode in Scanlon’s lap. “Oh, by the way, old chap,” the Colonel said in his smoothest, most syrupy voice. “It seems your old friend Hanni Steiner is alive after all.” A contented smile spread across Bromley’s face as he saw the pain he was inflicting on the stunned American. “Imagine that.”
Scanlon sat bolt upright, stunned. “If this is more of your crap, Colonel…” he said, as his eyes flared, hot and angry.
“Oh, she’s alive all right,” Bromley cut him off. “The boys over at MI-6 bought themselves a pair of ears in the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow. Their man tips the vodka now and then with some staffers from the NKVD — on our tab, of course,” he added gratuitously, letting the story trickle out as Scanlon hung in agony on every word. “Anyway, according to them, your young fraulein is alive and well in Leipzig. Apparently, she went back into the family business and has been in regular contact with her handlers back in Moscow Center, if you can believe the nerve of the woman.”
Oh yes, Scanlon could believe it. Hanni alive? Now, nothing could keep him from going back.
“Beria,” Scanlon answered quietly. “She always reported directly to Beria.”
“So it would appear.” Bromley paused, studying Scanlon like a fisherman gauging the thickness of the ice on a crisp winter morning. Would the woman be bait enough to reel him in? “If she is operating again, it would appear Fraulein Steiner managed to avoid Herr Dietrich’s clutches without your help — a bloody miracle, if you ask me.” Scanlon said nothing, still stunned by the news. “So the real question isn’t if your blonde Brunnhilde is alive, but how, and why. Would you not agree?”
“I’ll be sure to ask her when I see her,” Scanlon answered as his steel-gray eyes narrowed into two angry slits.
“Good! I assume that means you have changed your mind and that you will now grace this operation with your presence, Captain. Best for all concerned, I have to agree. However, I must burst your pretty red balloon on one small point. Hanni Steiner is not the reason we are sending you back to Germany. Our business with the Goering’s airplane designers takes precedence, and that must be attended to first. It is a damned sight more important than your sordid little affair with the lovely red tart.”
“Really? How are you going to stop me, Colonel?”
“Ah, an excellent point, and I am pleased you asked. In truth, we probably can’t. However, we have a proposal to offer you, Captain — a very good one, actually — and one which you would be a damned fool not to take. Once you have attended to our business and those Germans are safely through Allied lines, all your debts will be cancelled. You will be given a discharge, full pay, medals, a hero’s welcome, and you may bring anyone back to the States with you that you wish, with an American passport and a free ticket to New York for her. All you need do is stay away from Leipzig and away from her until our business with the airplane designers is finished. Do we have your agreement on that one small point, Captain? You want to get her out. Well, here is your gold-plated opportunity.”
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