‘Munro, and this is my aide, Captain Jack Carter.’
‘Gentlemen, I gave my name, my rank and my number some time ago,’ Steiner said. ‘I’ve nothing to add except to say I’m surprised no one’s tried to squeeze more out of me since and I apologize for the fact that there’s only one chair here so I can’t ask you to sit down.’
His English was perfect and Munro found himself warming to him. ‘We’ll sit on the bed if we may. Jack, give the Colonel a cigarette.’
‘No, thanks,’ Steiner said. ‘A bullet in the chest was a good excuse to give up.’
They sat down. Munro said, ‘Your English is really excellent.’
‘Brigadier,’ Steiner smiled. Tm sure that you’re aware that my mother was American and that I lived in London for many years as a boy when my father was military attache at the German Embassy. I was educated at St Paul’s.’
He was twenty-seven and in good shape except for a slight hollowing in the cheeks, obviously due to his hospitalization. He was quite calm, a slight smile on his lips, a kind of self-sufficiency there that Munro had noticed in many airborne soldiers.
‘You haven’t been pressured into any further interrogation, not only because of the condition you were in for so long,’ Munro said, ‘but because we know everything there is to know about Operation Eagle.’
‘Really?’ Steiner said drily.
‘Yes. I work for Special Operations Executive, Colonel. Knowing things is our business. I’m sure you’ll be surprised to discover that the man you tried to shoot that night at Meltham House wasn’t Mr Churchill.’
Steiner looked incredulous. ‘What are you trying to tell me now? What nonsense is this?’
‘Not nonsense,’ Jack Carter said. ‘He was one George Howard Foster, known in the music halls as the Great Foster. An impressionist of some distinction.’
Steiner laughed helplessly. ‘But that’s wonderful. So bloody ironic. Don’t you see? If it had all succeeded and we’d taken him back… ? My God, a music hall artist. I’d love to have seen that bastard Himmler’s face.’ Concerned that he was going too far, he took a deep breath and pulled himself together. ‘So?’
‘Your friend, Liam Devlin, was wounded but survived,’ Carter said. ‘Walked out of a Dutch hospital and escaped to Lisbon. As far as we know, your second-in-command, Neumann, still survives and is hospitalized.’
‘As is Colonel Max Radl, your organizer/ Munro put in. ‘Had a heart attack.’
‘So, not many of us left,’ Steiner said lightly.
‘Something I’ve never understood, Colonel,’ Carter said. ‘You’re no Nazi, we know that. You ruined your career trying to help a Jewish girl in Warsaw and yet that last night in Norfolk, you still tried to get Churchill.’
‘I’m a soldier, Captain, the game was in play and it is a game, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘And in the end, the game was playing you?’ Munro said shrewdly.
‘Something like that.’
‘Nothing to do with the fact that your father, General Karl Steiner, was being held at Gestapo Headquarters at Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin for complicity in a plot against the Fuhrer?’ Carter asked.
Steiner’s face shadowed. ‘Captain Carter, Reichs-Fuhrer Himmler is noted for many things, but charity and compassion are not among them.’
‘And it was Himmler behind the whole business,’ Munro told him. ‘He pressured Max Radl into working behind Admiral Canaris’s back. Even the Fuhrer had no idea what was going on. Still hasn’t.’
‘Nothing would surprise me,’ Steiner said, stood up and paced to the wall. He turned. ‘Now, gentlemen. What is this all about?’
‘They want you back,’ Munro told him.
Steiner stared at him, incredulous. ‘You’re joking. Why would they bother?’
‘All I know is that Himmler wants you out of here.’
Steiner sat down again. ‘But this is nonsense. With all due respect to my fellow countrymen, German prisoners of war have not been noted for escaping from England, not since the First World War.’
There has been one,’ Carter told him. ‘Luftwaffe pilot, but even he had to do it from Canada into the States before they were in the war.’
‘You miss the point,’ Munro said. ‘We’re not talking of a prisoner simply making a run for it. We’re talking about a plot, if you like. A meticulously mounted operation master-minded by General Walter Schellenberg of the SD. Do you know him?’