A Traitor's Loyalty: A Novel (8 page)

He came running toward Barnes, his eyes flicking between the captain, Quinn, and the woman. Quinn caught sight of the rank emblem on his greatcoat’s lapel:
SS-Sturmbannführer
, a major. Barnes’s emblem was that of an
SS-Hauptsturmführer
, a captain. The other officer outranked him.

“What are you doing back here?” the sturmbannführer demanded. “We’re supposed to be the only ones back here. Who are these prisoners?”

Barnes opened his mouth, obviously searching for something to stay. Quinn stepped forward, reaching into his inside pocket. The sturmbannführer stepped back quickly, raising his automatic pistol, but hesitated when he realized that Barnes’s storm troopers were not doing anything to restrain their supposed prisoner.

“These men are under my command,” Quinn said as he pulled his ID from his pocket and flipped it open. “Herr Sturmbannführer,” he added significantly.

The officer snapped to attention when he saw the lieutenant colonel’s badge on Quinn’s ID and hastily holstered his pistol. “Yes, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” he said. He hesitated, then pressed on, “But if I may say, sir, there is still supposed to be no one else back here. I am under orders.”

Quinn waved his ID dismissively, then slid it back into his pocket. “The incompetence of the other branches of the RSHA does not concern me, Herr Sturmbannführer—at least, not today.” The sturmbannführer blanched; clearly he had also seen the ID’s Amt III badge. Quinn gestured toward Fraulein Voss. “This woman is the true target of this operation. Your raid has been ordered as a cover to ensure that my men were able to get her into custody safely and with a minimum of commotion. To be quite frank, I couldn’t care less whether your superiors notified you of this. Now you will stand aside and allow me to continue with my duty.”

The sturmbannführer was clearly unsure, but after only a beat his natural German fear of authority won out. He clicked his heels together and snapped off a crisp Nazi salute, right arm extended straight forward, fingers extended and palm down. Quinn returned the salute with an air of practiced superiority; Barnes saluted also—though slightly awkwardly, Quinn noticed—then turned and nodded to his men.

The first two “storm troopers” climbed into the back of the van, the woman between them. Quinn and Barnes followed. Then came the rest of the troopers. When the last two had slammed the van doors shut behind them and everyone was seated on one of the two benches that ran down either side of the van’s length, Barnes turned and called to the storm trooper who had been waiting for them in the driver’s seat, “All aboard, Gunning.”

“Right, sir,” the trooper responded. He flicked the headlights on and put the van into gear.

Barnes turned back to Quinn, sitting opposite him, as the van started to move. The Royal Marines captain smiled affably. “Thank you, Mr. Quinn,” he said. “Might have been a bit of a sticky situation you got us out of back there.”

Quinn nodded to acknowledge the thanks. “I think, Captain,” he responded, “not so sticky as the one out of which you just got me.”

Barnes touched the brim of his cap with two fingers of his right hand in desultory salute. Quinn smiled at the gesture—the salute had been Western, not German. “Not quite comfortable with the German salute, are you, Captain?” he asked.

Barnes shrugged and returned the smile, a touch ruefully. “We try to discourage saluting except where absolutely necessary when we’re out like this,” he said. “Never know when one of the lads might forget himself and snap off a good British salute without thinking about it.”

“Or a German salute by accident when he’s in a British uniform,” Quinn added.

Barnes looked genuinely horrified. “Oh no, Mr. Quinn,” he said. “Not one of our lads. Never.”

Quinn chuckled and leaned back against the van wall, expelling a great breath of air. It was only now that he was becoming aware of just how fast his heart was pounding.

Fraulein Voss was seated next to him, staring straight ahead at the opposite wall. “Are you all right?” he asked her.

She didn’t respond, so he touched her forearm. She jerked it away and shot him a venomous glance. “You’re a spy,” she hissed.

He nodded. “I am.”

She made a curt gesture around the van. “These men are all American spies.”

“British, actually,” he said.

She looked at his hand, which he had not moved since she pulled away from it. “Do not touch me,” she said.

Quinn shrugged to show acceptance. They lapsed into silence.

After a few moments, Quinn spoke to Barnes. “How did you know where I was?” he asked. “How did you know there’d be trouble?”

“Your chaps got word through one of their usual sources that a raid was planned,” Barnes said. That would be MI6. “So the embassy sent us out to look after you.” Before Quinn could press him further, he said, “We’ll be headed back there now, Mr. Quinn. To the British embassy. Where would you like us to drop you off?”

“Where would you like to be dropped off?” Quinn asked Fraulein Voss in German.

“Any U-Bahn station will be fine,” she said. “Preferably on the southern line.”

“Are you sure?” Quinn said. “They can get you closer to home than that.”

“The U-Bahn will be more than sufficient, thank you,” she said tartly.

Barnes called to the driver, “Gunning, how close are we to a subway station on the southern line?”

“Um—I think there should be one just over the Stalingrad Bridge, sir. Another five minutes or so.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence. It was actually closer to ten minutes when the van eventually pulled up to the curb and stopped. Barnes nodded to the two troopers at the end of either bench, and they swung the back doors open. Quinn went first, followed by Fraulein Voss. Again she ignored his proffered hand and climbed down herself.

Quinn nodded to Barnes. “My thanks, Captain.”

Barnes smiled. “Just doing my duty, Mr. Quinn.” He nodded to the troopers and obediently they pulled the doors shut. A moment later the van pulled away from the curb and back into the evening traffic.

They were next to the entrance to a U-Bahn station, but Fraulein Voss had not yet descended the steps. She was watching him.

After a few moments of this, Quinn extended his arm toward the U-Bahn entrance. “Aren’t you going to go?” he asked.

“I’m waiting to see which way you go first,” she said. He arched his eyebrows, and she added, “I want to make sure you don’t have any ideas about accompanying me.”

He smiled and made a gesture of concession. “That was indeed my intent, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t bother,” she said. “I’ll be fine on my own.”

“I’d rather satisfy myself of that,” he said. “But that’s not why I was going to follow you. I still need to speak with you about Richard Garner.”

She looked at him with disgust. “I have nothing to say to a spy,” she said and brushed past him, descending the steps.

“I thought we were supposed to be on the same side,” he called after her. “You
are
in the Resistance, are you not?”

She paused, turned back and looked up at him. “I do what I do for Germany,” she said. “I want what I believe is best for Germany, and that is not the National Socialist Regime. But I am not a spy. I am not a traitor. I would never betray Germany.”

“The men you work for at Prinz Albrechtstrasse would take a different view of your activities.”

“The men I work for at Prinz Albrechtstrasse are the evil from which I wish to save Germany,” she said. “But I wish to remove them and the regime they support for Germany’s good. I do not wish to betray Germany altogether. I am a member of the
Weisse Rose
, not an American or an
English
spy.”

“But you work with an English spy,” Quinn countered. “Richard Garner works with the
Weisse Rose
. Isn’t that treachery to Germany?”

She let out a frustrated sigh. “I will not stand here in the cold playing word games with you. Yes, Richard Garner has attended meetings of our cell. Yes, there may be times when we in the Resistance can sometimes help Germany by working with a foreign power. But Richard Garner has never incited me or anyone else that I
know of to treachery against the Fatherland, and if he did I would refuse. I would not betray Germany for him or anyone else.” She stared pointedly at Quinn, then started to turn away again.

“Spy or no,” he called after her, “I am trying to help Germany now.” She paused but did not turn toward him. “Richard Garner has disappeared, mein Fraulein. We think he may have gone over to the Ger— to the National Socialists. I want to find him and find out if that is true, before events spiral out of control and damage is done, to both sides, that cannot be undone.” He looked up, scanned the shop fronts on the other side of the street. “There’s a café over there that’s still open. Let me buy you a cup of coffee, and you can hear me out. Then you can decide if you wish to help me, mein Fraulein. And if you do not, I shall leave you alone. I give you my word.”

She was silent awhile, considering. At last, she turned and walked back up the steps. She stopped in front of him and stared up at him, absently brushing a strand of golden hair from her face. “I will listen to what you have to say,” she said, still no friendliness in her crystal blue eyes. “But only,” she held up a cautionary finger, “so long as I believe you are not asking me to betray Germany.” The street was empty; she looked around, saw the café he was indicating and headed across to it. He stood at the U-Bahn entrance and stared after her retreating figure.

WHEN MI6 had first recruited him out of Army Intelligence in 1956, Quinn and a half dozen other recruits had been transported by plane during the night to an RAF base whose location they were not told—Quinn suspected it was in Gibraltar—there to undergo their training program’s first phase, the primary purpose of which was to disabuse them thoroughly of any notions they might possess about glamor and adventure in Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. The program had begun with a lecture from a grizzled veteran who had lost an eye, two fingers, and several teeth to SS questioning when he had been captured in the Channel Isles during the war.

“After all the millions and millions of bombs dropped in Europe and the Pacific over six years,”
he had said with his odd Guernsey accent,
“it took only three to change the world. The Americans dropped two, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Jerries dropped one in reply, on London. With those three bombs we stepped into a new age. For now, if we continue to allow ourselves free rein in our warfare, to give vent to our hatreds with all the weapons at our disposal, we could very easily blow the entire human race into extinction. We now have to limit ourselves in how we fight each other, to move our warfare into different spheres
.

“The threat of the atomic bomb has forced us to limit our wars waged with traditional methods—in Siberia and Algeria, and now our conflict with Egypt and Italy over the Suez Canal—to small-scale sideshows. Now, men like us fight the battles that truly determine the fate of humanity. We wage wars of secrets, silence, and deception
.

“Never delude yourselves into thinking that our ultimate goal is the demise of Nazi Germany and her European satellites. That’s what the men in London, in Washington and Berlin, tell their peoples, and probably even what they believe themselves. But they’re wrong. Quite the contrary, victory in this ‘cold’ war—for either side—is exactly what we want to avoid. The fall of one side will mean massive upheaval, and with such upheaval our enemies, and even our friends, become scared and unpredictable. Our goal is the prevention of atomic war, and we can only achieve this through the preservation of stability. Today you take the first step into a world where deception marks every aspect of your life, and this is the first deception you must learn. Pray learn it well.”

Quinn had taken easily to a life of casual deception, as deception had been a part of his life since the day he ran away from home to join the Army. Now, as he sat down in the iron chair and slid the girl’s coffee across the table to her, he considered how much of what he might be about to tell her would be truth, and how much deception. It would not
all
be a lie, of that he could already be certain—that was the mistake of the amateur. No, the truth was always mixed in to a degree. When done correctly, it should no longer be possible to tell where the truth ended and the deception began.

For a while they sat in silence. Quinn checked his watch: a quarter past nine. His eye wandered along the shop fronts he could see over the Fraulein’s shoulder: a bookshop and a travel agent’s. The bookshop had replaced whatever bestsellers it might have been displaying in its window with stacks of
Mein Kampf
, the Führer’s National Socialist manifesto written in the 1920s, and its sequel
Mein Sieg
, his memoir of the National Socialist triumph, published in the 1960s. The travel agent’s had hung black draperies in its window, but not so as to obscure its large color photographs of a Norwegian fjord at high summer or a smiling German family assembled in front of the Eiffel Tower, a swastika flag visible, flapping from its peak.

“So,” he said at last, “what do you want to know?”

She set her coffee down and pursed her lips. “Who are you? You work for the English government?”

Quinn nodded. “As long as I’m in Germany. My association with the British government ends when I leave the Reich.” Truth.

“And you’re not a German? You’re an Englishman?”

After a pause he said, “I’m a British subject, yes.” True enough, though he deliberately sidestepped the question.

She leaned forward. “What’s your name?”

“Matthias Kaufholz. Have I earned a question of my own?”

“No. What’s your real name?”

“Simon Quinn.” Deception. Before she could ask anything further he pushed on, “But it seems to me only fair, Fraulein Voss, that now that you have my name, I have yours in return.”

She sat back, crossing her arms across her chest and studying him. “Elspeth,” she said at last. “I prefer Ellie.”