The only side Vargas is on is the one with the biggest bank book, sir. Works through his cousin at the Spanish Embassy in Berlin.’
‘Excellent.’ Munro was smiling now. ‘Tell him to pass the word to Berlin that we have Kurt Steiner. Tell him to say in the Tower of London. Sounds very dramatic. Most important, he makes sure that both Canaris and Himmler get the information. That should get them stirred up.’
‘What on earth are you playing at, sir?’ Carter asked.
‘War, Jack, war. Now have another drink, then get yourself off home to bed. You’re going to have a full day tomorrow.’
Near Paderborn in Westphalia in the small town of Wewelsburg was the castle of that name which Heinrich Himmler had taken over from the local council in 1934. His original intention had been to convert it into a school for Reich SS leaders, but by the time the architects and builders had finished and many millions of marks had been spent, he had created a Gothic monstrosity worthy of stage six at MGM, a vast film set of the kind Hollywood was fond of when historical pictures were the vogue. The castle had three wings, towers, a moat and in the southern wing the Reichsfiihrer had his own apartments and his especial pride, the enormous dining hall where selected members of the SS would meet in a kind of Court of Honour. The whole thing had been influenced by Himmler’s obsession with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, with a liberal dose of occultism thrown in.
Ten miles away on that December evening, Walter Schellenberg lit a cigarette in the back of the Mercedes which was speeding him towards the castle. He’d received the order to meet the Reichsfiihrer in Berlin that afternoon. The reason had not been specified. He certainly didn’t take it as any evidence of preferment.
He’d been to Wewelsburg on several occasions, had even inspected the castle’s plans at SD headquarters, so knew it well. He also knew that the only men to sit round that table with the Reichsfiihrer were cranks like Himmler himself who believed all the dark-age twaddle about Saxon superiority, or time-servers who had their own chairs with names inscribed on a silver plate. The fact that King Arthur had been Romano-British and engaged in a struggle against Saxon invaders made the whole thing even more nonsensical, but Schellenberg had long since ceased to be amused by the excesses of the Third Reich.
In deference to the demands of Wewelsburg, he wore the black dress uniform of the SS, the Iron Cross First Class pinned to the left side of his tunic.
‘What a world we live in,’ he said softly as the car took the road up to the castle, snow falling gently. ‘I sometimes really do wonder who is running the lunatic asylum.’
He smiled as he sat back, looking suddenly quite charming although the duelling scar on one cheek hinted at a more ruthless side to his nature. It was a relic of student days at the University of Bonn. In spite of a gift for languages, he’d started in the Faculty of Medicine, had then switched to law. But in Germany in 1933 times were hard, even for well-qualified young men just out of university.
The SS were recruiting gifted young scholars for their upper echelons. Like many others, Schellenberg had seen it as employment, not as a political ideal, and his rise had been astonishing. Because of his language ability, Heydrich himself had pulled him into the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS security service, known as the SD. His main responsibility had always been intelligence work abroad, often a conflict with the Abwehr, although his personal relationship with Canaris was excellent. A series of brilliant intelligence coups had pushed him up the ladder rapidly. By the age of thirty, he was an SS Brigadefuhrer and Major General of Police.
The really astonishing thing was that Walter Schellenberg didn’t consider himself a Nazi, looked on the Third Reich as a sorry charade, its main protagonists actors of a very low order indeed. There were Jews who owed their survival to him, intended victims of the concentration camps re-routed to Sweden and safety. A dangerous game, a sop to his conscience, he told himself, and he had his enemies. He had survived for one reason only. Himmler needed his brains and his considerable talents and that was enough.