A Traitor's Loyalty: A Novel (26 page)

They got off the autobahn just before returning to Eferding and turned in the direction of Linz, following a narrow, single-lane roadway that had probably been in use since the Middle Ages as it wound its way through the forested slopes of the alpine foothills. Quinn was thankful that they encountered no traffic coming the other way, because there was simply no way two cars would have been able to pass each other on this road without one of them knocking the other off the track and down the side of the mountain.

Barnes’s estimate of how long it would take to reach Linz on the side roads turned out to be very accurate, and it was almost nine o’clock when they rounded a bend in the road and found the city spread before them.

Barnes changed gear and cautiously slowed down as the road turned into a sharp, downward slope toward Linz. “Into the belly of the whale,” Quinn heard him murmur.

OF ALL the German cities the Führer had rebuilt since the war, Linz had been his most personal project. It had been his cherished dream to turn this, his home city, into the cultural center of all Europe and to supplant Vienna and Budapest as the greatest city on the Danube. He filled it with massive, monumental architecture—the art gallery, the weapons museum, the communal hall, the Party and government centers; all carefully planned and arranged by the Führer personally to fit seamlessly into his vision of a city that rose along the banks of the Danube as if that were exactly what God had intended to be there.

From their vantage, elevated slightly above the city as they descended toward it from the hills, they could see the countless white stone monuments and galleries rising beyond the residential suburbs that ringed the city. Quinn picked out the spires of the Party headquarters, the bell tower whose base contained the Führer’s parents’ mausoleum, and the towering stories of the famous Strength through Joy Hotel. The entire effect, however, was spoiled by the cloud of grey industrial smog that lay over the whole city, rising from the Hermann Göring Works steel plant on the river’s far side, which the Führer had insisted on placing there over the objections of his architectural planners and the Linz city officials.

They entered the city to find it predictably bustling. The streets teemed with pedestrians and parked cars lined every curb, while large notices proclaimed the boundaries of the large central section of the city that had closed to car traffic as of sunset yesterday evening. They busied themselves trying to find a parking space, which quickly proved none too easy a task.

Finally Quinn pointed to the open mouth of a narrow alley. “Just park in there,” he said. “I rather doubt we’re going to be needing the car again, anyway.”

Barnes nodded and pulled into the alley. He cut the engine off, then, while the other three got out, opened the glove compartment and pulled out the car’s registration papers. He tore the papers up thoroughly as he got out the car and slipped their remains into a dustbin sitting against the alley wall.

Gunning still looked slightly pale, and sweat was beading on his forehead. “Are you all right?” Barnes asked, but the sergeant just nodded.

“I’ll be fine, sir,” he insisted.

Barnes regarded him reluctantly for a moment, then turned to Quinn. “Well then. Which way?”

“For the removal of the will?” At Barnes’s confirmatory nod, Quinn said, “It’s being held at the
Führerhaus
. It’s—I think it’s towards the city’s outskirts.” He had never been to Linz before. He addressed Ellie. “Do you know the city?”

She nodded. “I’ve been here several times. With school, and with my family.”

“The Führer’s palace. Which way?”

She looked about at the street off which the alley opened to get her bearings, then nodded toward one end. “This way, I think. Yes, this way. Come on.” Without waiting, she set off. They followed.

She led the way through the crowded streets, but soon they all knew where they were going due to the ubiquitous signs pointing the way to the city’s major monuments. The four of them received a number of curious glances from other pedestrians, especially Gunning and Quinn with his jackboots, but they were fine so long as they were careful to escape the notice of the Waffen-SS patrolmen on most street corners.

The Führer’s palace stood on a hill overlooking the river and the city center, situated so that the Führer could have a sweeping view of the monument to himself that he had built out of the city of Linz. He had always claimed to friends and subordinates that, when his work was done and he had secured Germany’s destiny, he would lay down the burdens of office and retire here to spend his twilight years tending to his
“garden”—the unparalleled collection of art housed in the art gallery he had built here—but that had never come to pass. Now, his will was held here under the strongest security in the Reich, and, after his funeral at the city’s communal hall at noon, the Führer himself would be interred in a mausoleum beneath this, his favorite palace in his favorite city.

They could hear the low murmur of the crowd before they turned the corner into one of the streets leading up to the
Führerhaus
plaza and saw it: a tightly packed mass of people spilling out of the plaza and into the street ahead of them, thousands in number, assembled for the removal of the will.

The four of them drew up when they saw the crowd. “Bloody hell,” said Gunning. “How are we supposed to get through
that
?”

They walked forward to the edge of the crowd and stopped again. Quinn craned his neck, peering over the tops of heads into the plaza beyond. It formed a broad upward slope leading to the Führer’s palace at the top, and right now it was filled with a seething mass of people pressed tight against each other.

“There must be fifteen thousand people here,” he said.

“We need to get up there?” Gunning asked dispiritedly, nodding at the palace at the slope’s summit.

Barnes nodded. “Yes.”

Ellie gave Quinn’s elbow a gentle tug. “What’s going on?” she asked.

He glanced down at her. “We need to get to the palace,” he said.

“Why?”

“To reach Heydrich. He’ll be there for the removal of the Führer’s will in—” he checked his watch “—twenty minutes. We have to let him know about the Columbia-Haus treaty.”

Quinn went back to staring bleakly at the crowd with Barnes and Gunning. Ellie’s eyes flicked between the backs of the people in front of them, whom she was not tall enough to see over, and her three companions, each of whom was much larger than she.

“I can do it,” she said at last.

It took a few moments for the statement to register with the others. Quinn and Barnes turned and looked at her.

“Pardon?” Barnes said.

“I can get to Heydrich,” she said. “I can get through the crowd and past the guards in twenty minutes.”

“No,” Quinn said. “I don’t want you doing that.”

Barnes held up a mitigating hand. “You’re sure you can get there quickly enough? This is our only shot.”

Ellie looked at the crowd, then back to the two men and nodded. “Can you think of anything better?” she asked.

“She can’t go off on her own like this,” Quinn objected. “It’s too dangerous.”

“I don’t see what choice we have,” Barnes said. He turned to Ellie and nodded. “All right.”

“Does anyone have a piece of a paper?” she asked.

Quinn went to pat his pockets, but before he could, Barnes pulled out a small notebook and proffered it to Ellie. She took it and waited expectantly for a moment before prodding, “And a pen?”

“Ah. Yes,” Barnes said. He produced a pencil and held it out to her. “Pencil all right?”

“Thank you,” she said, taking the pencil from him. She scribbled a quick note, tore the page from the notebook and slipped it into her pocket, then handed the notebook and pencil back to Barnes. She brushed her hand lightly against Quinn’s. “I’ll be back,” she said.

“Be careful,” he responded.

She nodded, took a deep breath and plunged into the crowd.

Ellie was a small-framed woman and found it easy—much easier than any of the others would have—to slip through small spaces in the crowd and make her way across the plaza. Every once in a while someone would bridle when she accidentally gave him a slight shove as she tried to slip by, but she would quickly apologize and smile the same smile, widening her eyes ever so subtly. That always worked such wonders on her father or—when there was absolutely no other course open to her—on the Gestapo investigators at the
office. At such times the affronted man would either frown gruffly or smile indulgently, but he would always give way.

As she made her slow way toward the
Führerhaus
, she could hear around her accents from every province of the Reich—Prussia, Westphalia, Bavaria, Austria, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Poland—all had representatives in the crowd. It had been a cornerstone of National Socialist policy ever since the Party had assumed power in 1933 that the happiness of the German people and the ascendancy of the Aryan Race could both be achieved through travel. The National Socialist government had worked hard to ensure that every family could afford its own Volkswagen, had built the
autobahnen
to facilitate easy movement across the country, and had required that every father received enough holiday time to spend a few weeks each year touring the great sites of the Reich with his family.

Ellie stopped when she found a portable metal railing barring her way. With another railing about six meters beyond it, it formed a narrow corridor of empty space, the crowd pressing in against it on both sides. She looked to left and right. Twin chains of portable railings created a clear passageway through the plaza, with Waffen-SS troopers spaced every few dozen paces to guard it, starting at the entrance to the palace and disappearing down the main road leading to the city center; no doubt this was the route the Führer’s will was about to take to the communal hall, and the route the Führer’s body itself would take when it was brought here from the hall to be interred following the ceremony.

She made her way along the cordon toward the palace, trailing her palm along the top railing to guide herself on her route. This made her going quicker: now she was able to maintain a straight route toward her destination, and people seemed a little more willing to give way to her as she made her way along the edge of the crowd than they had been when she had been trying to force her way through the middle.

She was about ten meters from where the cordon widened outside the palace’s main entrance when the sound of sirens approaching behind her made her stop and turn. A Waffen-SS trooper on a motorcycle sped past her toward the palace, followed by a municipal
Orpo
patrol car, a sleek black Mercedes with tiny swastika flags flying from its front, and an armored Gestapo car. The whole convoy pulled up before the palace, with the Mercedes coming to a halt at the foot of the broad flight of steps leading to the building’s main entrance. A Waffen-SS trooper got out the Mercedes’s passenger door and opened the back door, and two men in National Socialist Party uniforms got out. The first looked to be in his sixties, though he was too far away for Ellie to tell if she recognized him; the second was younger. The two men headed up the steps into the building.

Ellie turned to the group of people next to her: a family of seven, with the five children—two boys and three girls—ranging in age from fifteen years to about eighteen months. All were dressed in their finest clothes, all had swastika armbands on their right upper arms and all—except the youngest child—were craning to catch a better view of the men entering the
Führerhaus
. The mother had her Bronze Honor Cross of the German Mother, recognizing that she had given the Fatherland more than four children, draped proudly at her throat.

“What’s going on?” Ellie asked.

The father glanced at her, then took a slightly longer look before returning his attention to the palace. “Dignitaries arriving for the ceremony,” he explained. “Top Party officials. Ministers. We saw the Reichsführer-SS go in a few minutes ago.”

“He was
old,”
contributed one of the girls, who looked about five. Her mother quickly shushed her.

“What about Reinhard Heydrich? The Reich Commissar-General?” Ellie asked. “Have you seen him?”

The man shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so.” Ellie murmured her thanks and continued making her way forward as the small convoy sped away from the palace and back down the plaza. In a few minutes she reached the front of the crowd, pressing against the barricade where it widened before the palace’s main entrance to create space for the convoys to drop off their passengers. She found herself a space in the front rank where two of the portable metal barricades stood end to end.

“Who was that who just went inside?” she asked the man next to her.

“Reichsminister
Speer,” he said.

“Have there been many others to arrive?” she asked.

“Oh yes, lots,” said the man importantly, pleased to be in the know for a pretty girl. “Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, President von Thadden from the Reichstag, Count Ciano the Italian, a couple of generals, an admiral, a Waffen-SS general. They’re all here.”

“What about Reinhard Heydrich?” she asked.

The man frowned momentarily, then shook his head. “No. No, haven’t seen him yet.” Then he added hurriedly, “But I’m sure he’ll be coming, mein Fraulein.”

As if on cue, the sound of sirens began to grow behind them, coming rapidly up the plaza. In unison the crowd turned to try and see the newcomers. Ellie strained her neck but was too short to see anything over the heads of those in front of her.

“There, this is probably Heydrich now,” said her companion, who was taller than she was. “See, he’s being escorted by the Army, not the SS.”

Indeed, Ellie saw as the convoy pulled into the front area, the two motorcyclists leading the way wore Wehrmacht field grey rather than SS black. They were followed by an
Orpo
car and no less than three black Mercedes, all with windows that were tinted and, Ellie would imagine, bulletproof. An armored car bearing the red and black eagle logo of the Wehrmacht’s Eastern Command, the forces under Heydrich’s command, brought up the rear.