The Tristan Betrayal

by Robert Ludlum

  In front of the huge stone fireplace, seated on chairs upholstered in red morocco leather, were four men, two on one side of the Führer, one on the other. They were clearly engaged in an animated, quite intense, discussion.

  One man was the Commander in Chief of the German Army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch. The other was von Brauchitsch’s chief of staff, General Franz Halder. Both were, Canaris knew, reasonable men; neither was a fanatic. They were not at the very top of the military leadership chain, but they were men Hitler trusted to discuss one of his most secret plans, a course of action opposed by many of his generals and about which he had been wavering for more than a year: the invasion of Russia. They were the first men whom Hitler had asked to draw up preliminary plans for the attack, the moment the French had surrendered, and they were men whose opinion the Führer trusted.

  To Hitler’s right sat a man of lesser rank but perhaps greater power. He was Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, and he was Hitler’s chief adjutant for the Wehrmacht.

  The men nodded at Canaris as he took a seat on the long and uncomfortably low sofa, which was the only place left to sit. Canaris listened to the argument, for that was what it truly was. One could never argue with Hitler, but one could make an argument for Hitler or argue in front of Hitler.

  Schmundt, whom Canaris thought of as Hitler’s alter ego, was speaking with banked fury. “Churchill has rejected our peace offers,” he spat out, “and Stalin is now moving into the Balkans brazenly. Clearly, Churchill is pinning all his hopes on America and Russia entering the war.”

  “Correct,” interjected von Brauchitsch.

  “Therefore we must crush the Soviet Union by force,” Schmundt continued, “and therefore eliminate the hope of Russia joining the war on behalf of England. And thus establish Germany as the master of Europe. The quicker we smash Russia, the better.”

  “You can’t be serious,” von Brauchitsch objected. “When was the last time you read your history? Do you want us to repeat Napoleon’s mistakes and lose the war on the frozen steppes of Russia? Napoleon, too, failed to invade the British Isles. We will be destroyed if we attack Russia!”

  “Have you forgotten that we defeated czarist Russia in the last war?” Schmundt shot back.

  For the first time Hitler spoke up, in a low, almost inaudible voice. He had been listening, considering. The other men leaned forward to hear him. “And then we shipped Lenin to Russia in a sealed train, like a plague bacillus.”

  The other men chuckled politely. “That it was,” said Hitler’s adjutant. “But let the plague not spread. We cannot allow the Balkan peninsula to be Bolshevized. We cannot allow the Soviets to seize our oil fields in Romania—”

  “What you’re proposing is madness,” von Brauchitsch interrupted. “It would mean war on two fronts, which must be avoided at all costs. None of us wants that. We should be isolating Britain. This requires cooperation with the Soviet Union.”

  “It is a one-front war! Britain is no threat—it’s merely an annoyance,” said Schmundt. “Britain is already defeated—we must make her admit it. Crush Russia, and England will give up—count on it!”

  “You say ‘Crush Russia’ as if it is a child’s game,” said Halder, “when the truth is that the Red Army is a colossus.”

  “The Russian ‘colossus,’ ” replied Schmundt scornfully, “is a pig’s bladder—prick it and it will burst.”

  “To attack Russia would be the sheerest lunacy,” said Halder. “It would be suicide. We have no choice but to maintain the so-called friendship pact.”

  Canaris cleared his throat. “May I offer some pertinent information?”

  There was silence, so he continued. “The Abwehr has received some valuable intelligence from Moscow.” With a dramatic flourish, he produced from his briefcase a folder thick with typewritten documents, which he handed around, beginning with the Führer.

  Hitler took out his reading glasses. The men were rapt in concentration.

  After a moment, the Führer looked up. “This is genuine?” he exclaimed.

  “My document experts confirm it, based on the paper, the ink, the stamps, the signatures, and so forth,” replied Canaris.

  “Mein Gott in Himmel!” said Schmundt. “The Red Army is a house of cards!”

  “What is the source?” asked von Brauchitsch suspiciously. “One of your agents in Moscow?”

  Canaris shook his head. “Getting intelligence in Moscow is fiendishly difficult. It is easier for an Arab in a flowing burnoose to walk unnoticed through Berlin than for a foreign agent to pass through Russia. No, the source is a general officer high in the Commissariat of Defense Ministry.”

  “A turncoat?” Halder said. “A traitor?”

  “On the contrary,” Canaris replied. “A loyal general who remains loyal. We have a source who is, shall we say, close to the general.”

  “This source is reliable?”

  “The source,” Canaris said, “is of the sort who’s the most reliable of all. Not a professional, but a civilian. A simple person with no knowledge of intelligence games.”

  “A secretary, then,” Halder put in.

  “In fact, it is his daughter.”

  Schmundt looked up from the document. “The Bolshevik military is in ruins since the purges,” he said. “But they are rearming—and quickly.”

  “In two years,” said Canaris, “they will be powerful again.”

  “How soon can we attack?” Hitler asked of Schmundt.

  His adjutant allowed himself a victorious smile. “After the winter. Early spring of next year. Certainly by June we will be ready.”

  Hitler stood up, and the others quickly followed. “Fate itself has presented us with an opportunity,” he proclaimed, “but we must move quickly. I have not created this magnificent army only to have it rot. The war will not end on its own. I want preliminary plans for a blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union drawn up at once.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Moscow, November 1940

  The dead drop location made Metcalfe uneasy. It was too exposed, too much out in the open; there was only one way to get to it and probably no alternative egress. He would not have chosen this location, but he had no choice; Amos Hilliard was the control in this instance, and he had selected it.

  There was one advantage to the drop site, though, and that was that it was easy to stake out. Metcalfe was able to observe pedestrian traffic patterns, watch those who entered and left the women’s shoe store and the meat shop on Pushkin Street as well as the building in between, see anyone who seemed to loiter for too long in the area. Dressed in his peasant outfit, his telogreika and a large backpack filled with various tools, he passed easily for a laborer; he attracted no attention.

  For a long while he watched intently, allowing his mind to stray to thoughts of Lana. So far things had gone according to plan, and her initial fear seemed to have dissipated. She had given von Schüssler the first load of documents, telling him that she had selected them at random from her father’s briefcase and his study at home. They meant nothing to her, she’d said; they were all numbers, incomprehensible, and terribly dull. But he had not found them dull at all, Lana said. He had been most excited, more excited than she’d ever seen him before.

  Von Schüssler had explained to her the procedure, for after all, he believed that he was running this operation. He would take the papers to the German embassy, where a Photostat would be made of each sheet, and then he would immediately return the originals to her. It was important, he insisted, that her father never notice any of the papers missing, so she would have to follow a very strict procedure. She would take the papers only at night, when her father had retired, and call von Schüssler to let him know she had them. Then she would meet him at the apartment, give him the documents, and he would immediately bring them to the embassy to have them photocopied. He would return to the apartment right away and give her the originals back, and she would return to her father’s apartment and replace them before he awok
e in the morning. Obviously there were many factors that might alter the plan. Most nights Svetlana had to perform at the Bolshoi and thus couldn’t steal any documents. But on her off nights, it was most important that she stay at her father’s apartment to see whether he had brought any new documents home.

  Von Schüssler also sought to reassure Lana that what she was doing was a good thing. Lana had recalled his reassurances with a grim humor. “The more our two countries know about one another,” he’d said, “the longer this peace between us will last. You are doing a wonderful thing, not only for my country but for yours as well.”

  After an hour of watching and contemplating, Metcalfe was as certain as he could be that there was no surveillance. He strode quickly up to the unguarded entrance of the modest apartment building between the two shops. The small lobby was dark and empty, the green-painted radiator fastened to the wall on the right just as Hilliard had described. He reached behind it—it was cold, as Hilliard had promised—and his fingers touched something. He pulled it out: it was a thick green envelope, its color a perfect camouflage.

  This contained, he knew, the second set of documents, prepared by Corcoran’s documents experts and dispatched via the diplomatic pouch. He stuffed it inside his peasant telogreika and walked out as quickly as he could without attracting suspicion. Just a few blocks away was the signal site, where he would indicate with a red pencil that he had successfully unloaded the drop.

  But as he emerged from the building, an abrupt movement from across the street attracted his eyes. Metcalfe turned to look and saw a familiar face. He did a double take.

  It was the pale-eyed, blond NKVD man, and he was coming at him at a quick stride, not even bothering to keep his normal discreet distance. It was as if the agent knew Metcalfe had just serviced a dead drop, knew he had incriminating documents on his person!

  He could not be caught now. He could not be apprehended, not with the documents on him. They would be cause for immediate imprisonment followed by execution, without even the pretext of a trial. The operation would be unmasked, and the subsequent investigation would lead to Svetlana; she, too, would be executed.

  Metcalfe’s heart raced, and he broke into a sweat. The consequences would be inconceivable! He spun to his left, raced down Pushkin Street, and saw in the reflection of a store window that the blond man was running after him. Metcalfe stopped abruptly, reversed direction, lurched off to his left again, zigzagging crazily through the square. The blond man followed, mirroring Metcalfe’s jerky movements, equally heedless of the pedestrians in his way.

  The NKVD man was coming after him. This was no longer a matter of surveillance; he had shifted to a brazen attempt to grab Metcalfe.

  Good Christ, no! This couldn’t be allowed to happen.

  Spinning once again, Metcalfe vaulted into a narrow alley between two ancient-looking ramshackle brick buildings, and he ran at top speed.

  The blond man had not been tricked; he followed Metcalfe into the alley, but his pace, oddly, had slowed. Was the NKVD man tired already? How could it be? Metcalfe glanced back over his shoulder, saw a broad gray-toothed smile on the blond man’s face. Why?

  Immediately up ahead, the alley took a jog to the right; Metcalfe sped up, practically jumping around the corner, and then he understood the reason for his pursuer’s smile.

  It was a dead end.

  The J-shaped alley did not go through to the next block. It ended right here.

  He was trapped.

  He froze, turned back, saw the blond man advancing on him slowly, his pistol drawn.

  “Stoi!” the man shouted, his deep voice echoing: Stop!

  “Hands up, please.” The blond man had switched to English.

  He was several hundred feet away, too far to fire accurately—and would he fire? It seemed unlikely. You did not stalk your prey for so long in order to kill it. He wanted to ask questions, wanted a full interrogation, Metcalfe was sure.

  In one sweeping motion Metcalfe pulled out the weapon Hilliard had given him and pointed it at the NKVD man, who smiled. “Not a good idea, Comrade Metcalfe. There is no sense to run.”

  “Oh, is that right?”

  “This is not your city. I know these streets much better than you. It is important always to know what you do not know.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “This will be much easier if you cooperate. We will talk.”

  “What are you going to arrest me for?” Metcalfe said. “The crime of being a foreigner in Moscow?”

  “We know much more about you than you think,” the man replied.

  Metcalfe looked desperately around at the crumbling brick walls of the building that bounded the courtyard into which the alley had dead-ended. There was no fire escape. Neither were there any footholds on the building’s facade, any ledges to grab hold of, as he might have done in Paris.

  Yet to be trapped with the forged documents was unfathomable.

  He would have to toss them, but where? There was no place, damn it, no place where the blond man couldn’t retrieve them.

  There was an old copper drainpipe that ran down the length of the ancient stone building. It did not look sturdy, but it was all there was.

  “All right,” Metcalfe said, still pointing his weapon. “You stop right there, and maybe we can make an arrangement.”

  The man stopped advancing, but he kept his gun extended in a two-handed firing grip. He nodded.

  Suddenly Metcalfe fired, just over the Russian’s shoulder. The agent ducked out of the way, firing back instinctually, but missing Metcalfe by a dozen feet. Deliberately missing him.

  A split second later, taking advantage of the momentary chaos, Metcalfe shoved the weapon into the waistband of his trousers and then leaped toward the drainpipe, grabbing hold with both hands, scaling it quickly. “If you know anything about me,” he shouted, “you know I’m not going to get caught!” The copper pipe was indeed rickety, and as he pulled at it, it came away from the brick wall. But still it remained attached at the top and in several places along the brick face of the building. Shoving with his feet against the brick, he pulled himself up the length of the pipe until he was three-quarters of the way up the tall two-story building.

  Bullets pitted the brick on either side of him as the NKVD man fired warning shots. “There’s no place to go!” the Russian shouted. “The next shot will be a disabling shot. It will strike you, if you don’t stop and climb down!”

  Metcalfe continued climbing, but there came a pause in the firing; he heard the Russian eject an empty cartridge, the metal clattering to the ground, and then reload. Metcalfe reached the top of the building, grabbed at the cornice, but it came away in his hands, the old plaster crumbling like piecrust. He reached for the copper gutter, which seemed more secure, and used it to pull himself up onto the flat roof, just as another round of gunfire exploded against the parapet. The Russian was now firing at him! These were not warning shots any longer.

  The building was perhaps twenty feet wide, a mess of tar and rubble, vent pipes sticking up irregularly here and there. He ran to the opposite edge, losing his footing on the icy surface, slipping just feet from the drop-off. Below was a narrow street crisscrossed with tram tracks; a fire escape on this side was a welcome sight. From behind he could hear the NKVD man’s retreating, echoing footsteps. The Russian had obviously deduced Metcalfe’s only escape route and was running down the alley, out onto Pushkin Street, and then around the building to the avenue that intersected it. But why was the agent operating alone? These men inevitably operated in teams, and certainly a team would have made all the difference right now; with a team in place, they could easily have trapped Metcalfe! He was grateful but puzzled all the same that this particular NKVD man, by far the most skilled of all those assigned to him, was a lone wolf. No, he realized: the NKVD man was no lone operator. He was simply ahead of his team. Others would join him.

  Metcalfe leaped to the top of the rusted iron fire escape and desce
nded it by rappelling along its grating; in a few seconds, he reached the street and raced along the tram tracks. In a few hundred feet, the narrow street joined a broader avenue. He looked wildly from side to side for the best route just as he heard running footsteps from behind.

  Just up ahead was the entrance to an underground passageway. He ran toward it. It was a pedestrian pathway beneath the street, a recent appearance in Moscow with the advent of the automobile. He took the steps two at a time, propelling himself through the crowd, then spotted the entrance to the Metro.

  He had never taken the Metro—it was another thing that hadn’t been here on his last visit—but he knew that if it at all resembled the one in Paris, the Metro would provide a profusion of branching tunnels that would enable him to lose his pursuer. It was a risk, but everything was a risk now, and nothing compared to the danger of being apprehended with the forged documents on him. As he raced through the ornate marble-walled entrance toward the turnstiles, he searched for trash cans where he could toss the packet of documents; none was in sight.

  There was a long line waiting at a booth by the row of turnstiles; another line, moving more rapidly, of people waiting to pass through the turnstiles. Were they buying tokens? He had no idea whether entrance required tokens or coins or what, and he had no time to find out. Looking from side to side, he saw two uniformed officers, both of them women, and he decided to chance it. Racing past the lines, he leaped over the turnstile; behind him came shouts, the shrill blowing of a whistle. He had no doubt that the NKVD man was close behind as well, but he couldn’t take the time to look back.

  He raced past marble columns, mosaic walls, crystal chandeliers: the beauty staggering, wholly unexpected. The People’s Palaces, Stalin had called the Metro, and Metcalfe could see why. He entered an archway from which a crowd was surging. It was an escalator that was moving up; he forced his way onto it, going the wrong way, ignoring their angry protests, muscling his way down the astonishingly steep, fast-moving steel steps. It was choked with people, hard to maneuver, but he could hardly turn around and head back the way he came—not with the NKVD agent so close behind. He vaulted ahead, colliding with the onrushing masses, trying to force his way down the escalator. It was slow, too slow!