The Spider of Sarajevo

by Robert Wilton

  When he came up, one side of his face was a scorched mess, the eye closed. ‘It’s a simple rule,’ he hissed. ‘You fire at the one with the weapon.’

  Ballentyne closed the door and locked it, and bent over the woman again. Her breathing was shallower, fading. He glanced up. ‘You above all should understand the idea of duty.’ He looked down at Besa again. Her eyes crept open. He smiled sadly; nodded; said a word.

  A smile flickered on her lips; he bent further, and kissed her forehead, and waited until the last breath had escaped.

  He covered her face with the headscarf, and stood.

  Banging on the door, shouts.

  ‘Send them away!’ Knox said, hard. ‘It is under control. Do it!’

  Krug was lost in the mayhem.

  ‘Do it!’

  Krug called something. A question from the other side of the door, and this time he snapped back angrily, and there was silence.

  Knox said, ‘How on earth did she get here?’

  Ballentyne shook his head. ‘I don’t… The Albanians in Belgrade? Perhaps the first time I was there, they sent word. I was there again recently. Thanks to them, she will have followed me to Sarajevo last week. Earlier, perhaps.’

  ‘And then got in this morning?’

  ‘She wasn’t interested in me. All along she hoped that I would lead her to Hildebrandt. Some time in the last few days, she found him; got work here, or replaced the usual woman. Somehow, today something changed; she was able to do what she hadn’t been able to do before: get into this part of the building.’ Knox frowned. ‘Today, she came to the end of her journey.’

  Knox turned to the man behind the desk. ‘And you,’ he said, ‘must be Mr Krug.’

  Krug nodded.

  ‘The Comptroller-General for Scrutiny and Survey sends his regards. “A greeting from Springfontein”, he called it.’ Krug’s face was bleak.

  He sat, heavily, gathered himself. ‘This little bit of chaos does not alter the failure of his operation.’

  ‘Bit of bad news for you there, old chap. I only properly understood it when you described your reaction to my activities this morning. British Intelligence has always suspected who the link-man is for the German network in Britain. But there’s been no way of identifying the members of the network. Arresting the link-man would only break the chain. Everything I did this morning – throwing the papers around, sending that nonsense message, with a few words of German codes that we’ve picked up in recent months – all built the idea that your security was compromised. It prompted the German Embassy, and through them the link-man to the network, to do what seemed like rigorous procedure but was actually exactly what we wanted.’

  Krug was white.

  ‘How will the new code be sent to the network? Some innocent-looking commercial pamphlet? It doesn’t matter; what matters is that when the link-man goes to the post office, he will be jumped on by a lot of policemen, and on the envelopes in his hand – all in one go – will be the set of names and addresses that we couldn’t have dreamed of getting had it not been for you. Special Branch’ll roll up the whole network whenever they choose.’ Grim smile. ‘Your German partners aren’t going to be impressed.’

  Krug was staring into the ruins of his Europe. He looked up, searching for defiance. ‘You could kill me, but you would not get out of the building alive.’

  ‘You could call for help, but you would die.’

  ‘You suggest that we stay here for ever, Major?’

  ‘Stalemate.’

  The telephone rang.

  It continued to ring. Knox said, ‘You’d better answer that. No tricks, no alarms.’

  Krug picked up the apparatus, and listened. He said almost nothing, but as he listened his eyes were quickly wide and he was gazing at the two Englishmen.

  Eventually he put down the telephone again. It took him a moment to gather the words.

  He looked at Knox. ‘You came over the border with a Serbian, yes? Was his name Rade Malobabić?’

  ‘I didn’t get the surname.’

  ‘He is the head of Serbia’s network of spies in Bosnia–Hercegovina – a notorious man.’ Knox was indifferent. ‘The strictest watch was being kept for him at the border, but somehow… Did he say why he was entering Bosnia?’

  ‘He said he was delivering a message.’

  Krug nodded, bleak. ‘It was a message of command: to his agents gathered here in Sarajevo. Just a few minutes ago they assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne.’ Faced with the chaos, he seemed very small. He saw farther than Knox and Ballentyne, still poised over him; but even their faces showed glimpses of what must follow. ‘The crisis that no one of the European powers could create has been created by a handful of peasants. They have brought the world to the precipice.’

  Author’s Note

  It’s a matter of record that on the first day of the First World War, the British authorities rounded up a string of German spies across the country. For all practical purposes, the German espionage threat in Britain ceased to exist, and it was not re-established. It was the first great coup for London’s new Intelligence arrangements (its immediate impact was to allow the British Expeditionary Force to link up with the French Army unreported and thereby help to block the German advance), and arguably their most significant contribution to the war.

  Implementation of the Third Irish Home Rule Act was postponed because of the outbreak of war, and then overtaken by the 1916 Easter Rising, by the armed resistance to British rule, and finally by civil war.

  The German scheme to exploit Muslim sentiment in the Near East was only delayed by the death of Heinz-Peter Belcredi. The story of his sponsors’ subsequent more dramatic efforts, culminating in the Battle of Erzerum in 1916, is best known in its fictionalized form as one of the great tales of British adventure, Buchan’s Greenmantle.

  Albania’s German king reigned for a total of six months, before unrest, the changing calculations of his international backers and the approach of European war made his position impossible. One hundred years later, the international community continues to meddle and manoeuvre in southeastern Europe.

  Conclusive technical explanations for the failure of Gustav Hamel’s aircraft and that of a British seaplane piloted by a German officer during the Kiel Regatta have never been advanced – or, at least, have never been made public.

  The evidence suggests that Eberhardt Krug was still alive towards the end of the First World War, living in a kind of retirement in Switzerland. The details of his activities and death are not clear from publicly available records. It’s probable that the archive of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey has more to say on this extraordinary man.

  The archive may also fill some of the gaps in the subsequent histories of those who survived the Comptroller-General’s great gambit.

  James Cade’s career seems clear enough: he was prompted to return home early in the conflict, with Constantinople increasingly uncomfortable (and, the correspondence would suggest, with his mother increasingly insistent); he fought in 1915, and was wounded; Lloyd-George’s assumption of the premiership in 1916 brought a new style to government, and Cade was given a senior administrative position making use of his organizational skills; he returned to business after the war.

  An anonymous donor (one may only guess at their gender) paid for David Duval’s discreet memorial plaque at Golders Green Crematorium, in north London; the pamphlet on the history of Golders Green, full of such anecdotes, says that once a year for ten years after his death a rose was placed next to the stone.

  Ronald Ballentyne’s activities during the war aren’t immediately evident from the regular records. The documents of the Comptrollerate-General archive may have something to say on this; the stones of an island in the middle of the Adriatic may have more. Perhaps one can only speculate whether the Countess Isabella’s home offered him a place comfortably to disappear from the world, or a base from which to engage with it.

  Academic records
and her very discreet public profile show just enough of Flora Hathaway’s activities to suggest that there’s a great deal more to be known. The archive of the Comptrollerate-General appears to be the place to find it.

  Hathaway apparently burned almost all of her papers. Among the very few mementoes that she kept and that survived her is a telegram of invitation, to the wedding in February 1915 of Major Karl Immelmann and Gerta von Waldeck. It’s highly improbable that she attended, but a pencilled tick on the telegram hints that at the very least she replied. Major Immelmann was killed in 1918; his infant son died that winter. Gerta’s subsequent career – as a civil engineer in the Middle East, and then as the author of a briefly very fashionable set of meditations on spiritualism and desert peoples – brought her some public renown.

  The military career of Valentine Knox in the first half of the war is a matter of record – and of legend; as was described in the introduction to The Emperor’s Gold (retitled Treason’s Tide in paperback), towards the end of the war Knox had become Comptroller-General. The archive that he himself began to re-gather should hopefully reveal more of his activities, and perhaps offer an explanation of his disappearance after the war.

  But the identity of the man who was Comptroller-General for Scrutiny and Survey in the period leading up to the First World War, the man who gambled with the future of British Intelligence in order to save it, remains a mystery. The archive shows the name he was using during the Boer War, and shows that it was a cypher. Speculation about who he might have been involves credible figures (Hozier, Melville) who moved in the margins of the ever shifting structures of British Intelligence; but if the archive of the Comptrollerate-General doesn’t reveal his secret, nothing will. He has drifted back into the dust of Whitehall. Indeed – for such is the nature of the dust of Whitehall – in a sense, he’s still there.