ANGEL OF VENGEANCE
Christopher Nicole
© Christopher Nicole 2007
Christopher Nicole has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2007 by Severn House Publishers.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
Chapter One – The Final Solution
Chapter Two – The Abwehr
Chapter Three – Going West
Chapter Four – Lovers
Chapter Five – NKVD
Chapter Six – Paradise
Chapter Seven – The Mission
Chapter Eight – Plots
Chapter Nine – Counter-plots
Chapter Ten – Death in the Morning
EPILOGUE
This is a novel. Except where they can be historically identified, the characters are invented and are not intended to depict real persons, living or dead.
Vengeance, deep brooding o’er the slain,
Had locked the source of softer woe;
And burning pride and high disdain
Forbade the rising tear to flow.
Sir Walter Scott
PROLOGUE
Sitting beside Anna Fehrbach on her naya, looking down into the Jalon Valley six hundred feet below us, always had my pulse racing. I suspect it would have had the same effect on most men. The view was of course breathtaking, but irrelevant. What tingled the blood was the awareness, the very thought, that one was sharing a certain mental intimacy with a woman who had been the most beautiful – as well as the most deadly – female of her time. That had been long ago, but it was still an ever-present fact of life, even after sixty years. And Anna Fehrbach had moved through those years, to some an utterly sinister figure, to others – a privileged few – a dream they would never forget. Did I dare count myself amongst those few?
I had tracked her for some thirty years, whenever I had been able to spare the time from earning a living, ever since I had first come across her name when researching a novel set during the Second World War. No one had seemed quite certain as to who or what she had been, or indeed, what had become of her. But every reference had mentioned her beauty and her cold-blooded ruthlessness. And every reference to this woman, who had been at the heart of some of the most dramatic events of the Hitler War, and afterwards who had rubbed shoulders – and more than that if the stories were to be believed – with the great and the grotesque, the heroic and the hellish, had made her the more fascinating. The fact that, when she had decided that her career was over, she had disappeared almost without a trace, had turned her into my life’s obsession.
And so I had traced her. I remembered our first meeting, here on this very naya, when I had felt as if I were stepping into a cage with a lioness, not knowing if I might be spending my last moments on earth. I knew that she was well into her eighties, but after only a few seconds in her company I had been left in no doubt that the reports of her beauty as a young woman had not been exaggerated, just as to look into her deep blue eyes had convinced me that, while perhaps she would no longer be able to destroy me with her bare hands – I am a large man – she would have no hesitation in using the pistol she kept concealed on her person at all times, should she consider it necessary.
But she had been charming. My appearance had of course been fortuitous. Having turned her back upon assassination and espionage so many years ago, Anna Fehrbach, so-called Countess von Widerstand (which loosely translates as Countess of Resistance), had had to devote a great deal of time to disappearing. Too many of the people she had been required to seduce and then destroy had relatives or comrades who had also survived, and who would dearly have liked to lay hands on her. She had accomplished her Houdini act successfully, until my appearance. But by the time this happened, she had grown weary of anonymity, of being forgotten where once she had been feared, and she had realized that her enemies could no longer harm her, as she would soon be dead in any event. She wanted to go out in a blaze of glory – one of the only two human weaknesses she had ever truly revealed – and I, as a writer, was a means to that end. It was a tantalizing thought that, had I come upon her even forty years earlier, she might have seduced me as well. But then, she would surely have disposed of me afterwards, as she had always disposed of any man or woman who came too close to the true Anna Fehrbach, Countess von Widerstand, the Honourable Mrs Ballantine Bordman.
So instead of being her lover, I had become her confidant. This was perhaps even more compelling, as she was allowing me to look into the soul of the most remarkable woman I had ever met, and perhaps had ever existed. And was I also her friend? I dearly wanted to feel that I was, and bathed in her smile as she handed me a glass of champagne from the bottle waiting in its ice bucket on the table beside her, placed there by her ever-attentive Spanish maid, Incarna, a woman who almost equally fascinated me, not because she was the least attractive when compared with her mistress, but because I had to wonder just how much she knew about that mistress.
‘It is good to see you again,’ Anna said, speaking English with the still discernible brogue she had inherited from her Irish mother. Her voice was low and husky; I could not imagine it ever rising in anger or fear or pain, although from what she already had told me I knew it must have done so, for each reason, often enough in the past. This aspect of her was no less fascinating than everything else about her. She was a tall woman, only an inch under six feet in height, and remained slender. I had never seen her legs, as nowadays she always wore trousers, but they were obviously long, and from the bare ankles and feet thrust into her sandals I could not doubt that they were as perfectly formed as the rest of her, while the gentle swell of her shirt was sufficient to remind one of the formidable sexual weapons she had once possessed, and used to such dramatic effect. And yet all was secondary to her face, exposed as her once waist-length golden hair was now quite white and short. But the flawless bone structure, slightly aquiline in shape, remained unchanged, even if the skin was perhaps drawing a little tight. Her jewellery, which she had not changed since our first meeting, fitted perfectly into the aura she created. Her earrings were tiny gold bars dangling from gold clips; the gold crucifix resting on her bodice was a reminder of her Roman Catholic youth, the huge ruby solitaire on the first finger of her left hand an indication of her wealth, and the man’s gold Rolex on her left wrist a warning not necessarily to expect any feminine weaknesses: she had told me that the secret of her success, her survival, had been the ability to think, and act, more quickly than the average person. This jewellery was the other discernible weakness in her character. It had never actually been legally hers, but had been given to her by her Nazi masters, more than sixty years ago, to enhance the image they wanted her to project – that of a fabulously wealthy aristocrat. I think she took great pleasure in the knowledge that the Nazis had disappeared, while she was still around – and still had the jewellery!
Now she smiled. ‘Have you formed a judgement about me yet?’
I drank champagne. ‘I do not know enough about you to arrive at a judgement.’
She made an entrancing moue. ‘I thought I had told you everything you wished to know.’
‘You have told me of the beginning. But you were just twenty-one when you left Moscow and returned to Germany,’ I reminded her. ‘And the previous three years had been a little crowded.’
‘That is one way of putting it.’
‘Well, let’s see. Your entire family was arrested in Vienna in March
1938 because your father was an anti-Nazi newspaper editor. You all should have gone to a concentration camp, but the arresting officer realized that he had got hold of something special in you, not only because of your looks but because you had an IQ of 173, were head girl of your convent, and a top athlete.’
‘His name was Hallbrun,’ Anna reminisced. ‘And he recognized nothing, save that I was a beautiful seventeen-year-old virgin, waiting to be deflowered. He offered me to his boss, Glauber, as a mistress. It was Glauber who saw the potential and sent me to the SS training school.’
‘And it was Glauber who told you that if you worked for the Reich your parents and sister would be kept in safe but not harsh custody, but if you did not . . .’
‘They would be sent to a concentration camp, yes.’
‘What were your feelings about that?’
‘I hated him. I hated the entire Reich.’
‘But you worked for them, with brilliant success.’
‘Christopher, I was eighteen years old when I graduated from that SS school. I did not see that I had a choice.’
‘I understand. And so Glauber passed you on to the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, and to Heydrich.’
‘Yes.’ She spoke as quietly as ever, but with enormous passion.
‘And on their instructions you seduced and then married the Honourable Ballantine Bordman, son of Lord Bordman, and a diplomat at the Foreign Office, and became the darling of London society. It was during this period that you became a double agent. But that happened in Berlin, didn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Anna said, her voice brittle. ‘It wasn’t something I had planned. Oh, I hated the Nazis and everything they stood for, especially for what they had done to me and my family, but I knew there was nothing I could do about it – nothing I could think of, anyway. But when I returned to Berlin in the spring of 1939 for a visit, I was accused of breaking the rules by carrying secret documents in my handbag instead of sending them through the designated channel, so Heydrich decided I should be disciplined.’ She paused to drink some champagne, her fingers so tight on the glass I expected the stem to snap; I had heard enough about the strength of those fingers. ‘Do you know what they did to me?’
She had told me, at one of our earlier meetings, but I could tell she wanted to recall that dreadful day, so I said nothing.
‘They stripped me naked,’ she said, every word a drop of vitriol from her lips, ‘and strapped me over a bar while they caned me, as if I were a delinquent schoolgirl.’ Her lip curled. ‘I suppose I was, to them. Then they strapped me to a table and put electrodes into my anus and my vagina and turned on the current. Have you ever had anything like that happen to you?’
‘Ah . . . no.’
‘I felt that I was being split in two. And yet, you know, the humiliation was worse than the pain. And they were just trying to discipline me, not destroy me.’
‘And you were . . .’
‘I was coming up to my nineteenth birthday.’
‘Many a girl of eighteen would have been destroyed by such an experience.’
Anna Fehrbach put down her glass to gaze at me, and I felt a sudden chill as I recalled that on her record, even at eighteen she had outclassed most girls her age. ‘So you determined to destroy them.’
‘How simple you make it sound, in retrospect. No, Christopher, as I have said, in March 1939 I was not yet nineteen years old. I was a physical wreck after that session in the SD torture chamber. I spent three days in bed. Then I went out for a walk, and encountered Clive Bartley.’
‘Who you already knew.’
‘Yes. The previous year he had been Ballantine’s minder in Berlin, when Ballantine had been there setting up the visit of Neville Chamberlain that resulted in the Munich Agreement. That was my first real assignment, to seduce Ballantine and find out just what the British were about. That was the way the Nazi mind worked; they could not believe a prime minister would go to see Hitler merely to agree to every German demand. They thought he might be coming with an ultimatum. Not one of them, not even I, realized just how good I was at my job. I seduced Bally so successfully that in addition to reassuring me that Chamberlain had no intention of going to war with anyone over anything, he fell in love with me and asked me to marry him. Of course he did not know that I was a middle-class Irish-Austrian schoolgirl called Annaliese Fehrbach. He accepted entirely the form in which I was presented to him by the Nazis: Anna, Countess von Widerstand, heiress to a fortune.’
‘What was your reaction?’
‘I thought it was a joke. But Heydrich jumped at it. He could immediately see the possible rewards. But I was horrified. I mean, Bally was twice my age and not the least bit physically attractive. But I had to do what they wished.’
‘And Clive Bartley?’
‘He was even more horrified, from the opposite point of view. He was an MI6 agent, trained to be suspicious, and he later told me that he was certain that I was Gestapo from the moment he met me, at an SS ball; he had no idea that I actually worked for the SD. He even tried to stop the marriage, but Bally was determined. So when I took up residence in London he kept me under surveillance.’
‘But could never pin anything on you until that day in Berlin.’
‘Not even then. He was in Berlin on another matter, and he assumed I was still in London. Our meeting was a complete accident. And you must remember that I was still in a very mixed-up state. I was angry and humiliated. I wanted to hit back at them, and I didn’t know how. And then suddenly, there it was. They had taught me how to seduce men, manipulate them to order. Why should I not seduce a man to my requirements, and even manipulate him? That I knew he was an MI6 agent just made the idea more attractive.’
‘So you invited him to bed. But it didn’t work out the way you had intended.’ As always, when discussing her many sexual adventures, I found myself imagining the young, vibrant, beautiful Anna of the long golden hair and the all-consuming body, naked in bed with a man, and wondered if I was turning green.
‘I don’t know how it might have worked out,’ Anna said thoughtfully. ‘We were interrupted, in bed, by Elsa Mayers.’
‘Your minder.’
‘My SD controller. She was Heydrich’s creature, and I knew she would report what she had seen to Heydrich. In fact, she told me she was going to do that. You see, she also knew that Clive was a British Secret Service agent.’
‘So you killed her, with a single blow to the neck.’
‘Well,’ Anna said modestly. ‘They had taught me how to do that, too.’
‘What was Clive’s reaction to all this?’
‘He was . . . what is the word they use nowadays? Gob-smacked. I don’t think he had ever known a woman who could kill with a single blow.’
‘So, after some more . . . discussion, you agreed to work for MI6, while still working for the SD. You surely knew that was going to be incredibly dangerous.’
‘Perhaps I did not realize just how dangerous. But I never regretted the decision.’
‘How did you explain Frau Mayers’ death to Heydrich?’
‘As soon as Clive had left, I telephoned the SD headquarters and told them what had happened, without mentioning him, of course. I reminded them that Mayers was a lesbian, as they well knew, and told them that when I had rejected her advances she had attempted to rape me, and I had hit her too hard. In self-defence. Heydrich accepted my story.’
‘And for over a year you fed them whatever information MI6 told you to. But they got to you in the end.’
‘No, they didn’t. Not the SD in Berlin, or I wouldn’t be sitting here now. The Gestapo spy ring in London, who had been receiving information from me for transmission back to Germany, began to suspect me, and tried to take me out. Fortunately, they did not report their suspicions to Berlin, but decided to act on their own. They sent three agents to arrest me.’
‘But they didn’t succeed.’
‘I shot them all,’ Anna said.
My turn to drink some champagne. She
spoke in such a calm, matter-of-fact tone. And she had been just twenty years old!
‘But it was clearly becoming too dangerous,’ Anna continued. ‘On every front. Ballantine had insisted I become a British citizen, and the Special Branch were also becoming interested; Britain and Germany had then been at war for six months, and were I to be arrested as a spy, I would have had to confess all, break with Germany, and remain in England. But I couldn’t do that.’
‘Because Heydrich still held your family hostage.’
‘Yes. So MI6 rigged up an elaborate scam, got me out of England, and broke the story of how the glamorous Honourable Mrs Ballantine Bordman had turned out to be a Nazi spy who had unfortunately managed to flee the country before she could be arrested. Heydrich was delighted with the publicity. And with my escape.’
‘So much so that he made you his mistress.’
Anna’s mouth twisted. ‘I was his possession. He regarded me as his creation.’
‘And Bordman?’
‘Oh, he promptly sued for divorce.’
‘Did you love him? Had you ever loved him?’
Anna had been looking out over the valley. Now she turned her head to look at me. ‘One does not share a man’s bed for a year without sharing other things as well. But love? No. Besides, I had known from the beginning that I was betraying him. I believe he had a nervous breakdown when he discovered what he was told was the truth. I mean, that I had always been a German spy. I am sorry about that. I can only say that when I was acting as his wife, I gave him everything he wanted, sexually. He enjoyed that.’
‘And so you returned to Germany, and the SD, only now you were working for MI6.’
‘I had been created in Hell,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘And I returned to Hell. But even Hell can be bearable, as long as there is hope. Clive, MI6, gave me that hope.’
‘But they could not save you from being sent to Moscow, and the Lubianka.’
Angel of Vengeance_The thrilling sequel to Angel in Red Page 1
