He moved away and walked slowly up and down, brandy glass in hand, behind the three men bent over the table. From time to time he glanced at one of the note-books and smiled in weary cynicism, neither the smile nor the significance of the smile going unremarked by anyone in the room except the three writing men. He stopped behind Thomas, shook his head in disbelief and said, ‘My God!’
‘Let’s finish it now!’ Rosemeyer demanded impatiently.
‘If you please, Reichsmarschall, let us play this charade out to the bitter end.’
‘You have your reasons?’
‘I most certainly have.’
Briskly, but not hurriedly, von Brauchitsch walked away from Mary’s room, his footfalls echoing crisply on the stone-flagged corridor. Once round the corner of the corridor he broke into a run.
He reached the courtyard and ran across to the helicopter. There was no one there. Quickly he ran up a few steps and peered through the Perspex cupola of the cockpit. He reached ground again and hailed the nearest guard, who came stumbling across, a leashed Dobermann trailing behind him.
‘Quickly,’ von Brauchitsch snapped. ‘Have you seen the pilot?’
‘No, Herr Major,’ the guard answered nervously. He was an elderly man, long past front-line service and held the Gestapo in great fear. ‘Not for a long time.’
‘What do you mean by a long time?’ von Brauchitsch demanded.
‘I don’t know. That’s to say,’ the guard added hastily, ‘half an hour. More. Three-quarters, I would say, Herr Major.’
‘Damnation,’ von Brauchitsch swore. ‘So long. Tell me, when the pilot is carrying out repairs is there a place near here he uses as a workshop?;
‘Yes, sir.’ The guard was eager to oblige with some positive information. That door there, sir. The old grain store.’
‘Is he in there now?’
‘I don’t know, Herr Major.’
‘You should know,’ von Brauchitsch said coldly. ‘It’s your job to keep your eyes open. Well, just don’t stand there, oaf! Go and find out!’
The elderly guard trotted away while von Brauchitsch, shaking his head angrily over his impatience with the old soldier, crossed the courtyard and questioned the guards at the gate, three tough, competent, young storm-troopers who, unlike the patrol guard, could be guaranteed not to miss anything. He received the same negative answer there.
He strode back towards the helicopter and intercepted the elderly guard running from the old grain store.
‘There’s nobody there, Herr Major.’ He was slightly out of breath and highly apprehensive at being the bearer of what might be ill news. ‘It’s empty.’
‘It would be,’ von Brauchitsch nodded. He patted the old shoulder and smiled. ‘No fault of yours, my friend. You keep a good watch.’
Unhurriedly, almost, now, he made for the main entrance door, pulling out a set of master keys as he went. He struck oil with the first door he opened. The pilot lay there, still unconscious, the smashed distributor cap lay beside him, the pair of overalls lying on top of him a mute but entirely sufficient explanation of the way in which the distributor cap had been removed without detection. Von Brauchitsch took a torch from a long rack on the wall, cut the pilot’s bonds, freed his gag and left him lying there with the door wide open. The passage outside was a heavily travelled one, and someone was bound to be along soon.
Von Brauchitsch ran up the stairs to the passage leading to the bedrooms, slowed down, walked easily, casually past Mary’s bedroom and stopped at the fifth door beyond that. He used his master keys and passed inside, switching on the light as he went in. He crossed the room, lifted the lower sash window and nodded when he saw that nearly all the snow on the sill had been brushed or rubbed away. He leaned farther out, switched on. his torch and flashed the beam downwards. The roof of the header station was fifty feet directly below and the markings and footprints in the snow told their own unmistakable story.
Von Brauchitsch straightened, looked at the odd position of the iron bedstead against the wardrobe door and tugged the bed away. He watched the wardrobe door burst open and the bound and gagged figure inside roll to the floor without as much as hoisting an eyebrow. This had been entirely predictable. From the depths of the bound man’s groans it was obvious that he was coming round. Von Brauchitsch cut him free, removed his gag and left. There were more urgent matters demanding his attention than holding the hands of young Oberleutnants as they held their heads and groaned their way back to consciousness.
He stopped outside Mary’s room, put his ear to the door and listened. No sound. He put his eye to the keyhole and peered. No light. He knocked. No reply. He used his master keys and passed inside. No Mary.
‘Well, well, well,’ von Brauchitsch murmured. ‘Very interesting indeed.’
‘Finished?’ Smith asked.
Thomas nodded. Christiansen and Carraciola glowered. But all three were sitting back and it was obvious that all three were, in fact, finished. Smith walked along behind them, reaching over their shoulders for the note-books. He took them across the room and laid them on the little table by Kramer’s chair.
“The moment of truth,’ Smith said quietly. ‘One book should be enough.’
Kramer, reluctantly almost, picked up the top book and began to read. Slowly he began to leaf his way through the pages. Smith drained his glass and sauntered unconcernedly across the room to the decanter on the sideboard. He poured some brandy, carefully recapped the bottle, walked a few aimless steps and halted. He was within two feet of the guard with the carbine.
He sipped his brandy and said to Kramer: ‘Enough?’
Kramer nodded.
‘Then compare it with my original.’
Kramer nodded. ‘As you say, the moment of truth.”
He picked up the note-book, slid off the rubber band and opened the cover. The first page was blank. So was the next. And the next… Frowning, baffled, Kramer lifted his eyes to look across the room to Smith.
Smith’s brandy glass was falling to the ground as Smith himself, with a whiplash violent movement of his body brought the side of his right hand chopping down on the guard’s neck. The guard toppled as if a bridge had fallen on him. Glasses on the sideboard tinkled in the vibration of his fall.
Kramer’s moment of utter incomprehension vanished. The bitter chagrin of total understanding flooded his face. His hand stretched out towards the alarm button.
‘Uh-uh! Not the buzzer, Mac!’ The blow that had struck down the guard had held no more whiplash than the biting urgency in Schaffer’s voice. He was stretched his length on the floor where he’d dived to retrieve the Schmeisser now trained, rock steady, on Kramer’s heart. For the second time that night, Kramer’s hand withdrew from the alarm button.
Smith picked up the guard’s carbine, walked across the room and changed it for his silenced Luger. Schaffer, his gun still trained on Kramer, picked himself up from the floor and glared at Smith.
‘A second-rate punk,” he said indignantly. ‘A simple-minded American. That’s what you said. Don’t know what goddamned day of the week it is, do I?’
‘All I could think of on the spur of the moment,’ Smith said apologetically.
‘That makes it even worse,’ Schaffer complained. ‘And did you have to clobber me so goddamned realistically?’
‘Local colour. What are you complaining about? It worked.” He walked across to Kramer’s table, picked up the three notebooks and buttoned them securely inside his tunic. He said to Schaffer: ‘Between them, they shouldn’t have missed anything… “Well, time to be gone. Ready, Mr. Jones?’
‘And hurry about it,’ Schaffer added. ‘We have a streetcar to catch. Well, anyhow, a cable-car.’
‘It’s a chicken farm in the boondocks for me.’ Jones looked completely dazed and he sounded exactly the same way. ‘Acting? My God, I don’t know anything about it.’
‘This is all you want?’ Kramer was completely under control again, calm, quiet, the total professional. ‘Those books? just those books?’
‘Well, just about. Lots of nice names and addresses. A bedtime story for M.I.6.’
‘I see.’ Kramer nodded his understanding. “Then those men are, of course, what they claim to be?’
‘They’ve been under suspicion for weeks. Classified information of an invaluable nature was going out and false — and totally valueless — information was coming in. It took two months’ work to pin-point the leakage’s and channels of false information to one or more of the departments controlled by those men. But we knew we could never prove it on them — we weren’t even sure if there was more than one traitor and had no idea who that one might be — and, in any event, proving it without finding out their contacts at home and abroad would have been useless. So we — um — thought this one up.’