‘We had plans to install a lift before the war,’ he said. ‘If you’ve nothing else against your Leader, you might blame him for that.’
He showed Stefan into a bedroom. Everything was pink. Another apology.
‘My youngest used to have this room. Girls love pink. Something else I’ve never got round to sorting out. At least you’re spared the rocking horse and her army of bloody golliwogs.’
Stefan looked round. The Direktor clearly had children, and presumably a wife. He was tempted to enquire further but decided against it. After his week in the freezing cold at the Centre, the room felt warm and homely. Sunshine was streaming in through the window and when he stepped across to check the view he found himself looking down into a small garden. Directly below him was a woman sitting on a wooden bench, deep in a book. She was wearing a hat against the sun and, as he watched, she turned the page. Nice legs, he thought.
‘Here. I had them typed up this morning.’
Stefan glanced round to find the Direktor offering him an envelope. Inside, he said, were the notes he’d made during their conversation in the small hours.
‘Conversation? I thought I did all the talking?’
‘You did but this is my version. I’d be obliged if you could check it for accuracy. Anything I’ve got wrong, please leave an indication in the margin.’
Stefan nodded. Of course, he said. My pleasure.
The Direktor offered a courtly little smile of thanks and said he’d be back later. To Stefan’s surprise, he didn’t lock the door. Stefan settled into an armchair at the foot of the bed. Opening the envelope, he shook the contents on to his lap. There were nine double-spaced sheets, immaculately typed, each page numbered.
The account was written in the first person, as if Stefan himself had dictated it, and as he began to read he could hear the sound of his own voice, hesitant at first, mumbling an apology for a misplaced fact or some other failure of memory, but then gaining in strength and confidence until he was in full flow, glad at last that it was so easy to get every detail exactly right.
He’d held nothing back. Eva. Agustín. The morning the villagers had buried his crew. The night the Guardia had come for him. Coruña. Otto. Erwin. And perhaps most important of all, the older man who’d also flown in from Berlin. At the Direktor’s prompting, Stefan had described him in great detail: the way he wore his hair, the fleshiness of his lips, how educated he’d seemed, and what a contrast he’d been to all the other SS people Stefan had ever met.
The Direktor had been delighted. Stefan might have been describing a close personal friend.
‘That’s Walter,’ he’d said. ‘Walter Schellenberg. You liked him?’
‘I thought he was clever, And I suppose I must have trusted him.’
‘Very wise. He’s the best you’ve got.’
‘Really? So why hasn’t it worked?’
‘Because we’re better. And so, in some respects, are you.’
In the small hours, shivering under his blankets, Stefan hadn’t known quite what to make of this remark, and reading through the transcription he could find no trace of it. Should he make a note, suggest a minor addition, or had this aside been something more personal, even intimate?
He read on, following his own journey south to Lisbon where Erwin had left him on the waterfront with nothing but a ten-minute limp between himself and the enemy’s neat little embassy.
Enemy? He’d never used the term last night and it certainly didn’t appear in the transcript but that, of course, was the way his generation had been schooled. War, they’d been taught, was unforgiving, pitiless, a struggle to the death. In war, you killed or you perished. There was nothing else on offer, no other means of securing your own survival. Either you released your torpedo, or pulled your trigger, or dropped your bomb, or the enemy would take that decision out of your hands. Totaler Krieg. Total war. It was the logic of the charnel house. It had led to countless deaths, untold disasters, but in some unfathomably obscene way it seemed to be necessary, even honourable. Your Führer expected no less. Kill for the Reich. And probably die in the process.
Nonsense.
Stefan took the Direktor’s pen and went through the account a second time, initialling each page. It felt like signing a contract and in a way he supposed it was. For nine pages of the truth, the Direktor had pledged to set him free. And here they were: checked, initialled and back in the envelope. Good, he thought. Sanity. At last.
Stefan got up and moved the chair closer to the window. Then he sat down again, his head tipped back, the sun full on his face. He was glad it was over. He closed his eyes. Within seconds, like a baby in this pinkest of rooms, he was asleep.
Later, he’d no idea when, he heard a soft tap at the door. The Direktor, he thought, as courteous as ever.
‘Kommen Sie,’ Stefan said.
The door opened. Still facing the window, Stefan’s hand felt for the envelope.
‘You got it right,’ he said. ‘Every last detail.’
‘I did?’ A woman’s voice. Heavily accented.
Stefan froze, wondering whether this was some dream, whether he was still asleep, then he forced himself to look round. She had the hat in one hand, the book in the other, and she was smiling.
‘Eva?’ he said, lost again.
*
Gómez left the Hill without a backward glance. He’d said his goodbyes to the handful of people who’d ever mattered to him. Marta gave him a hug and wrote down the address of her friends in Chicago. She’d be staying with them for a while. If he found himself back home, he was always welcome to drop by. Merricks, for his part, slipped Gómez five dollars and told him to buy something cute for the kids when they happened along. Gómez hadn’t once thought of having children but pocketed the bill just in case. For now, he told himself, Yolanda was plenty enough but real life could always take a man by surprise.
Arthur Whyte had been replaced by his sidekick, a thin, sardonic major with a nice line in wetback jokes. Gómez knew a little about his investigative record and had some respect for the man. In a final interview, just hours before Merricks was due to run him up to Albuquerque for the plane to DC, the major made Gómez sign a series of release forms that pledged him never to divulge a word about life on the Hill. Gómez’s resignation had come as no surprise to G-2’s new boss.
‘Once a Fed, always a Fed. Am I right?’
Gómez hadn’t answered but the ghost of a smile told the major he was on the money.
‘You gonna step straight back into that old life? Same office? Same suit? Same fucking overtime?’
‘No way.’
‘You got something else in mind?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Care to tell me what?’
‘No.’
They’d shaken hands and the major had accompanied Gómez to the door.
‘Merricks tells me you’re getting hitched.’
‘Merricks is right.’
‘Good lucky, buddy. Long life and happiness, yeah?’ He’d nodded at the view from the nearby window. ‘Let’s hope the rest of this shit works out.’
Gómez had an hour to wait at the airport for the plane to DC. It was a military flight, booked solid, and he had the major to thank for his seat. The plane took off in the early afternoon, routed through Kansas City, and was easing on to the runway at National in the last glimmers of dusk.
A cab took Gómez to the hospital. Yolanda had phoned again with the details. Fourth floor. Big room at the end of the corridor. Gómez took it easy on the stairs. There were moments in life that deserved a little time, a little preparation, and this was one of them.
The ward took him by surprise. It was full of blacks, most of them old. Yolanda was sitting beside a bed at the far end. Gómez made his way across. She saw him in time to get to her feet and put her arms around him.
Gómez kissed her, told her everything was gonna be just fine. He couldn’t see Beaman’s face for bandages. Gómez settled on the side of the bed, reac
hed for his hand, gave it a squeeze. Beaman had recognised his voice.
‘Sonofabitch,’ he whispered. ‘You made it.’
‘I did.’
‘So what do you think?’ One bony hand gestured at the wreckage of his face. ‘You gonna take the job now? You gonna see I come to no more harm?’
Gómez stared at him for a long moment. He could feel the warmth of Yolanda’s body beside him. Then he reached for Beaman’s skinny hand and gave it a squeeze.
‘You bet,’ he said.
AFTERWARDS
General Leslie Groves sent a special mission into Europe in the wake of the advancing Allied armies. Code-named Alsos (alsos is the Greek for ‘grove’) it was tasked with finding out whether or not the Nazis had a viable atomic programme. In November 1944, weeks after Stefan Portisch’s confession, it arrived in Strasbourg where detailed investigations convinced Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash, the mission’s leader, that ‘Germany had no atomic bomb and was not likely to have one in any reasonable form’.
On 16 July 1945, scientists from the Manhattan Project tested the world’s first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The bomb was an implosion-detonated device with a plutonium core, the design on which Sol Fiedler had worked. The resulting explosion had a force of 20,000 tons of TNT and melted the desert sand. Within three weeks, two atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing nearly a quarter of a million people. Japan surrendered on 2 September 1945.
After the war, General Groves was appointed Chief of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, charged with controlling military aspects of America’s nuclear programme. He left the Army in 1948 and died in 1970.
The war over, Robert Oppenheimer became a Chief Adviser to the US Atomic Energy Commission and lobbied vigorously to avert nuclear proliferation and an arms race with the Soviet Union. He died in 1967.
Edgar Hoover survived in office until he died of a heart attack in 1972. By then, as Director of the FBI, he’d served no fewer than eight US Presidents. Richard Nixon called Hoover ‘one of the giants of American life’.
Walter Schellenberg acted as a covert envoy during the closing months of the war, trying to broker a peace between the Western powers and Germany. After the German surrender, he stood trial at Nuremberg and was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. After his release he moved to Switzerland before settling in Italy. He died penniless in Turin. Coco Chanel paid for the cost of his funeral.
Guy Liddell, in charge of counter-espionage at MI5, left the agency under a cloud in 1953 following the defection to the Soviet Union of his close friend Guy Burgess and went to work as a security adviser to the Atomic Energy Authority. He died of heart failure in 1958.
Hector Gómez married Yolanda in November 1944. They settled in Chicago where they looked after Agard Beaman and helped mastermind his successful campaign to become the representative for the city’s First Congressional District. Despite his blindness, Beaman’s was a leading voice in the struggle that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which transformed race relations in the US. Gómez died of a heart attack in 1968. Yolanda, childless, never remarried.
Stefan Portisch and Eva Gironda returned to Spain in July 1945. Eva had inherited a half-share in her father’s house after his death and they lived there until a third child necessitated a move to a larger property on the outskirts of the village. Eva died in 1963 after a long battle with ovarian cancer. Stefan was lost at sea while fishing offshore the following month. His body was never recovered.
We hope you enjoyed this book.
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Also by Graham Hurley
An Invitation from the Publisher
About Graham Hurley
GRAHAM HURLEY is the author of the acclaimed Faraday and Winter crime novels. Two of the critically lauded series have been shortlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Award for Best Crime Novel. His French TV series, based on the Faraday and Winter novels, has won huge audiences. An award-winning TV documentary maker, Graham now writes full time. He lives with his wife, Lin, in Exmouth.
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Also by Graham Hurley
FICTION
Rules of Engagement
Reaper
The Devil’s Breath
Thunder in the Blood
Sabbathman
The Perfect Soldier
Heaven’s Light
Nocturne
Permissible Limits
The Chop
The Ghosts of 2012
Strictly No Flowers
DI Joe Faraday Investigations
Turnstone
The Take
Angels Passing
Deadlight
Cut to Black
Blood and Honey
One Under
The Price of Darkness
No Lovelier Death
Beyond Reach
Borrowed Light
Happy Days
DS Jimmy Suttle Investigations
Western Approaches
Touching Distance
Sins of the Father
The Order of Things
NON-FICTION
Lucky Break
Airshow
Estuary
Backstory
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First published in the UK in 2016 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Graham Hurley, 2016
The moral right of Graham Hurley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB) 9781784977818
ISBN (XTPB) 9781784977825
ISBN (E) 9781784977801
Cover images: German Captain © Stephen Mulcahey / Arcangel; U-boat © Shutterstock.com
Author photo: Laura Muños
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