A Traitor's Loyalty: A Novel (20 page)

Maurice smiled sadly and shook his head. “But then I met Karl, when he was at the German embassy in Paris. And he—he understood, you bastard. He knew what I went through. He went through it too. And for a time—for the only time in my life—I was happy. And then you found us, and used it against us, and turned us into spies. We were just doing our national service. Three years and we were done, and we could try and find a way out of this hellish world the Nazis have created. But
you
made us stay. You made me stay with the foreign service, and you made Karl stay with the SS, and you used what we had together against us. So when the Germans said they could remove you from our lives and let us be together—damn you, you fucking bastard, of
course
I worked with them.”

He collapsed into sobs and buried his face in his hands. After a few minutes he was quiet, and he sat up again, lowering his hands. “If I’d known what would happen to Karl,” he said, “I wouldn’t have cooperated. I would still have talked, of course. Eventually everyone talks when the Gestapo ask the questions. But by the time I finally did, I wouldn’t have been human anymore. They would have turned me into a sniveling, broken lump of flesh with their ‘questions,’ and soon after that they would have killed me. And I wouldn’t have to live like I do now. Without him. You bastard. You fucking,
fucking
bastard.”

Another long silence. Quinn regarded him in the still morning air.

Suddenly Maurice said, “You have a gun, I assume?”

Quinn hesitated, then nodded. “I do.”

“Shoot me.”

“What?”

“Shoot me, you bastard. Right between the eyes. Put me out of this godless misery you created of my life.”

Quinn said nothing. Maurice got hesitantly to his feet, then stood there uncertainly, unwilling to take a step forward without his spectacles. Quinn scrambled up to help him. The motion caught Maurice’s eye, and the Frenchman stepped forward, arms outstretched. His fingers brushed against Quinn’s sleeve and he grabbed hold, collapsing against Quinn pathetically. He fumbled around in his pocket and pulled out a penknife. His breathing was heavy in Quinn’s ear. He flicked the knife open and pressed the blade against Quinn’s throat.

“Shoot me in the head, you bastard, or I swear I’ll slit your miserable fucking throat.”

For a moment Quinn did nothing. Then he reached slowly up and closed his hand around the blade. He felt it bite painfully into his palm, and a thin rivulet of blood escaped from his fist and ran over the back of his thumb. He tugged the knife gently from Maurice’s grasp, flicked it closed and tossed it aside. He lifted Maurice off of him and took a step backward.

“I’m sorry, Maurice,” he said.

He turned and walked away, leaving the Frenchman standing in the cold.

HE REGRETTED taking the U-Bahn to see Maurice rather than driving there, as it meant he had to return to Ellie’s building to retrieve his car, but on this day of the Führer’s funeral procession he would never have been able to get near the Grand Avenue if he had gone in the car.

As he approached where the car sat parked along the curb, he reflexively glanced up at the concrete face of Ellie’s building. Her flat was round the far corner, so there was no possibility of seeing her watching for him from her window. The notion of her standing by the car, waiting for him, had flitted vaguely round the back of his mind, though, and he felt a mild pang when he saw that she was not there.

He hesitated as he approached, debating whether he should get in the car and drive off, or go upstairs instead. After only a brief moment he decided on the car. He stepped over to the door, unlocked it, opened it—and froze.

Both front seats had been slid back as far as they could go, so that someone could see if there was anything on the floor underneath them. The glove compartment door was hanging open, and the forged registrations from inside it were strewn on the front passenger seat.

The driver’s door had definitely been locked. Quinn glanced at the other three locks: both backseat doors were locked, but the front passenger door was not. He closed the driver’s door and went round to the other side of the car. The door was unlocked, but it had not been forced.

Someone had been in his car, and had had a key. It could only be MI6.

He locked both front doors and headed into Ellie’s building, taking the stairs three at a time as he sprinted up to her flat. He slowed as he neared her floor’s landing and drew his pistol.

Someone had forced her lock, and the door was hanging slightly ajar. He approached cautiously. It seemed quiet, and he could not see anyone in the slice of her living room visible through the half-open door. The place looked a mess, though.

He nudged the door open with his toe, just wide enough to let him slip through. It creaked, and he cringed, but no reaction came from inside. He took a few slow, catlike steps inside, pistol ready, being careful to check behind the front door as well.

The flat seemed deserted, but it was a tip. The intruders had pulled closets and drawers open, and their contents lay strewn across the floor in careless piles. They had overturned the furniture to check its undersides. The settee cushions had been slit open, their white, fibrous industrial stuffing lying in clumps on the floor.

He could hear the hiss of running water emanating from the bedroom. Slowly he picked his way across the living room to the bedroom doorway. The bedroom had received the same treatment: clothing from the closet and drawers scattered across the floor, the chest of drawers pulled away from the wall and lying on its face, the mattress and pillows torn open. But this room, too, was empty.

The water was coming from the bathroom, which opened off of the bedroom. The shower was running. He ran his hand under it: the water was ice cold, though the hot water was turned on. It must have been running for some time. He turned it off. The plastic shower curtain had been ripped from its rings. They had arrived and taken her while she had been in the shower. They had searched the medicine cabinet and the cupboard under the sink as thoroughly and as lovingly as the other rooms; pills from opened bottles lay scattered across the counter and the sink.

The phone started to ring, shrilly piercing the sudden silence in the wake of the shower being turned off. He put his gun away—clearly the place was empty—and hurried through the bedroom and living room to the kitchen. His hand hesitated over the phone, then he picked up.

“Hello?” he said.

“
Tegel, half an hour
,” the familiar voice said with its curious, almost imperceptibly faint hint of an unplaceable accent. Talleyrand. “
South airstrip. The girl for Garner’s document. Agreed?
”

“If you lay a fin—”

The line went dead with a click. He listened to the silence momentarily, then hung up.

He stepped back into the living room and walked over to the window. He stared out, wondering from where they were watching him. He could see no one lurking across the street. Perhaps they were watching him through one of the windows of the building on the far side.

Abruptly he turned and walked quickly out of the flat, pulling the front door shut behind him but leaving it unlocked. On his way down the stairs he checked his watch to get a bearing on how long he had.

The roads were busier than they had been the past two days, but he found that, if he avoided routes leading away from the Grand Avenue and the city center, he made good time. While he sat waiting at a traffic light, he removed the two copies of the Columbia-Haus treaty and Garner’s letter from his inside coat pocket. He set aside the German copy of the treaty and placed it in the glove compartment, then replaced the English copy and the letter in his coat.

He still had over five minutes to go when he pulled through the open south gate at the abandoned Tegel airfield. It had served as a military and experimental aerodrome for four decades, until the opening in the 1950s of the new, expansive Hanna Reitsch Airport just outside the city, named for the Reich’s leading aviatrix, a Luftwaffe test pilot during the war who was the only woman ever to win the Iron Cross. Both Tegel and Berlin’s old civil airport, Tempelhof, had shut down a few years later.

There were no signs of life outside the dilapidated terminal, but a grey Daimler was parked outside the entrance. Quinn pulled up next to it and turned off his car. The Daimler was empty. He got out and walked slowly in a semi-circle around it, examining it.

“Don’t move. Hands on the car.” The male voice came from the entrance to the terminal, to which he had his back.

Obediently he raised his hands and slowly placed them on top of the car. He heard the approaching footsteps, then felt a single hand patting him down. His pistol was found and removed from its shoulder holster.

He heard a step back, then the voice spoke again. “All right. Turn round.”

Quinn turned slowly, holding his hands at shoulder height. Captain Barnes stood before him, automatic pistol leveled coolly at his head. The captain’s manner had changed completely from when he rescued Quinn and Ellie from the SS raid two nights ago. His hazel eyes stared coldly down the gun barrel, devoid of any of the warmth or easy affability they had carried before. In place of his Gestapo uniform, he was dressed in a nondescript dark jacket and trousers; the wind blew furrows in his neatly brushed fair hair. Barnes glanced down the dirt airstrip that ran past the terminal and waved an all clear.

Quinn followed his look. A hundred meters away, three figures had emerged from the first of a row of five airplane hangars: Talleyrand, Ellie, and another man. Ellie wore her raincoat and had her arms wrapped protectively around herself. The other man had a firm hold on her upper arm.

Talleyrand waved in response. Barnes turned back to Quinn and jerked his head in the direction of the hangars. “Get moving.”

“You first.”

“I’m sorry. Do
you
have a gun?”

“I don’t want you waiting here when she comes running over. I’ll keep my end, but you’re going to keep yours. You first.”

For several seconds the two men held each other’s gazes evenly, then with a grunt of disgust, Barnes lowered his pistol and started walking along the derelict cracked tarmac of the runway. Quinn followed four or five meters behind.

To his credit, Barnes did not glance over his shoulder every few moments to check either that Quinn was
following or that he was keeping a safe distance.

“Did you kill Richard Garner?” Quinn asked.

“Shut up,” Barnes tossed back over his shoulder.

“I saw it all,” Quinn said. “Through his hotel room window. I was standing in the rain across the street, watching you murder him.”

Abruptly Barnes spun on his heel to face him, raised his gun and pointed it at Quinn’s head. “They don’t tell me what’s going on,” he said, “because I don’t need to know.” He lowered his aim. “But somehow I don’t think there’ll quite be hell to pay if I put a bullet through your foot while we’re out here.”

Quinn raised his hands non-threateningly in a gesture of capitulation. Barnes turned back around and started walking again. Quinn followed.

As they approached, Ellie broke away from her captor and came running toward him. She stepped gingerly, and he saw that her feet were bare. With a pang he thought of her terror as Barnes and two or three of his goons burst in on her while she was in the shower. She came running up and he caught her, wrapping his arms protectively around her. She buried her face against his chest.

After a few moments he put his hands on her shoulders and gently guided her a step back. She looked up at him. Her eyes were red, and her cheeks were stained with tears. She brushed away a strand of blonde hair that the slight breeze had blown into her eyes, and she was the prettiest woman he had ever seen.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded. She looked terrified. He glanced back at where the two cars stood and nodded in their direction. “Get in the car,” he said. “Wait for me.”

She followed his gaze, then looked back up at him, obviously not wanting to leave him, but nodded in acquiescence. “All right.”

He watched her go, picking her way carefully along the dirt track with her small, unshod feet, then turned back to the three men. Talleyrand had taken a few steps toward him; Barnes and the other stood a few feet behind him, expressionless.

“I’ve returned something of yours, Simon,” the old man said. “I think now you have something of mine.”

Quinn shook his head. “No.”

For a long moment the old man stared at him, his face unreadable. Then, without glancing back at them, he indicated with a curt gesture of his hand that Barnes and his fellow should stay where they stood, and began walking slowly back up the airstrip. Quinn fell into step behind him.

“I had not thought you a stupid man,” Talleyrand said, all trace of affability gone from his voice.

Quinn let out a brittle laugh. “I’d like to think I’m not. That’s why you’re not getting the treaty.”

“So you opened it. You know what it contains.”

“Of course I opened it. You knew I’d opened it when you discovered I’d slipped your leash.”

“Indeed.” He paused, then said, “What do you think you can accomplish here, Simon? Hand over the document. You know what I’ll have to do otherwise. To you, and—” he nodded in the direction of Quinn’s car, “—to that lovely young woman over there.”

“Oh, I think quite the opposite,” Quinn said. “She and I will only survive so long as you
don’t
get your hands on that treaty.”

Talleyrand stopped and turned to look into his eyes. The two of them had by now reached the halfway point, between the parked cars and where Barnes and the other man waited. Quinn removed the English copy of the treaty and handed it to the old man.

“That’s one of Richard Garner’s copies,” he said. “He had two. The other one is in a safe place. And it will stay safe, so long as
Fraulein
Voss is permitted to return to her flat and resume her life, unmolested by you or your German allies. And so long as I’m on the next flight out of Berlin, back to Greece.”