Glenn Meade (13 page)

'Monday, I visited the British
embassy for a private meeting and was back around five-thirty. Tuesday, I was
at home. Wednesday, I attended a gala function at the Turkish ambassador's
residence. I left at eight and returned at midnight. On Thursday, I remained at
the residency, working late in my study, catching up on some paperwork.

Friday, the same.'

'How many guards were on duty
Wednesday evening?'

'At least a dozen, as usual. Eight
in the residency, two on the gate lodge, and two at the entrance. They patrol
the entire residence, inside and out, at regular intervals.'

'The officer in charge of security
claims there was nothing unusual noted in the shift reports. But with your
permission, I'd like to speak to the men on duty that night.'

'Of course, but I doubt they'll
tell you any more than you already know.’

Weaver had been avoiding the
question. He said delicately, 'Would you care to tell me if there was anything
of particular importance kept in your safe at any time during the past week,
sir?'

'Top-secret documents are usually
kept at the embassy.'

'I'm aware of that, sir. But with
respect, that wasn't my question.'

Kirk didn't respond. Instead he
turned slightly red. Clayton said, 'I think you'd better tell him, Mr
Ambassador.'

Kirk cleared his throat, as if
embarrassed. 'I believe there was a classified, decoded copy of a signal I sent
to
Washington
,
left there by the First Secretary.'

Weaver said, 'Exactly what kind of
signal would that have been, sir?'

'It simply confirmed that our
preparations here are almost complete for the conference, a week from now, and
that the necessary security measures would be in place well before the arrival
of our President and the British Prime Minister.' The ambassador flushed, and
added quickly, 'However, there were absolutely no details of the nature of the
meeting, or about security itself, I assure you.'

Weaver was silent. The ambassador
looked uneasy, as if he'd been compromised.

Clayton said, 'For Christ sakes,
Harry, do you really think that a single Arab spy could really pose us a
threat? There'll be over a thousand men guarding the area, and security's going
to be tighter than a crocodile's ass. No one gets next to near the place, not
even if they've got a pass signed by God and someone to verify the signature. Besides,
the nearest German lines are over a thousand miles away.'

'I honestly don't know what to
think, sir. But I learned a long time ago to suspect coincidence. Our latest
intelligence reports from
Lisbon
and
Istanbul
indicate the
Germans are aware there's something in the air, and their agents have been
trying desperately to get information. I'd like to know what our friend with
the radio is up to. And I'd rather not find out about it the hard way.'

Clayton shot a meaningful glance
at the ambassador. Kirk pursed his lips, his face still troubled, and nodded
back with a sigh.

Clayton said to Weaver, 'OK, you'd
better find this guy. I want it cleared up before the President and Prime
Minister arrive. But we don't go sounding any unnecessary alarm bells, not
until we're pretty sure we might have trouble on our hands.

We keep it under wraps for now.'

'What about Lieutenant-Colonel
Sanson, sir?'

'I want the two of you to take
charge of this personally. I'll square it with his brigadier at GHQ - it's
their security concern as much as ours. But you'd better let Sanson take the
lead on this one. After all, this is British jurisdiction, and it's his turf
we're playing on. From what I know of Sanson, he's had a lot more experience in
these matters. And like the Mounties, a certain reputation for always getting
his man.' Clayton stood, crushed out his cigar. 'Don't fail us, Harry. That's
an order.'

The agent known as Harvey Deacon,
discussed by Schellenberg and Canaris during their talk at
Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, was a naturalized British citizen who had lived in
Egypt
for over thirty years. A businessman, he owned a
Nile
houseboat that he operated as a casino and well-known nightspot called the
Sultan Club.

Though hardly the most reputable
nightclub in
Cairo
- the converted river steamer had been decorated inside to look like a smaller,
cheaper version of the Folies-Bergere, with dim lighting and gaudy furniture -
it was definitely one of the most popular.

Not only because of the
well-stocked bar and the excellent resident band, but because some of the girls
performing the erotic floor show were usually agreeable to a little bedroom
activity if the price was right. It was a practice Harvey Deacon encouraged,
considering that it helped business no end.

He was in his office on the
houseboat that afternoon, attending to some paperwork. An imposing figure, with
greying curly hair and an impressive physique, Deacon wore a silk dressing gown
with a scarf knotted at his neck. A crooked nose added a certain rugged
grandeur. There was a knock on the door and he threw down his pen.

'Come in.’

The door opened and his Nubian
manservant appeared. 'A gentleman to see you, effendi. He didn't give his
name.'

'Don't worry, I know what it's
about. Send him in. Make sure we're not disturbed.'

Moments later Hassan entered,
wearing a djellaba. Deacon had a look of consternation on his face as he
plucked a cigar from a sandalwood humidor on his desk. 'Well? I'm waiting.'

The Arab flopped into one of the
cane chairs opposite. His jaw and lip looked badly bruised and swollen despite
the beard, his right eye was blackened, and he'd lost a couple of bottom teeth.

He grimaced in pain when he spoke.
'The boy was Evir's son. I knew I'd seen him somewhere before. He was hanging
around the railway station one night when I met his father. He told the boy to
go home, but he must have followed us to the flat.'

Deacon erupted, flung down his
unlit cigar. 'Of all the fucking things to happen. You should have been more
careful.'

Hassan sat back moodily in his
chair, and held Deacon's stare in a kind of challenge. '

And remember, it was you who told
me to take Evir to the flat in the first place, to show him how to use the
camera. If I hadn't gone back when I did and seen the staff car outside, the
military would have been watching the building, waiting for us.'

The Arab was right on that count,
Deacon knew, and had risked his life retrieving the spare radio, but he was
still fuming that the man's cover had been blown and the safe house discovered.
'They still got the camera and saw the radio, didn't they? They'll know there's
a German agent at work in the city.

And you probably killed one of
their men. It's a bloody disaster.

You'd better lie low for a couple
more days. The police and military will be looking for you.'

'Let them look,' Hassan said
defiantly. 'They'll never find me. Not in a crowded city like
Cairo
. All they saw was just another bearded
Egyptian wearing a djellaba. And they can't know that Evir broke into the
residence. They have no evidence - all he took was photographs.'

Deacon reckoned there was probably
some truth in what Hassan said, but it didn't alter his mood. 'It still smells
of trouble and 1 don't like it. The Allies are not fools - they'll know they're
on to something. The officer you cut, you said his name was Weaver?'

Hassan put a hand to his jaw. 'An
American. And next time I see him, I kill him.'

'There'll be no next time, not if
you've any ruddy sense. Keep well away from this Weaver and his like, or you're
likely to lose more than a couple of teeth. What did you do with the
motorcycle?'

'I left it at the villa.'

'You'll need somewhere safe to kip
down. Not the villa-I don't want to risk you being seen there.' Deacon thought
for a moment.

'The hotel in Ezbekiya, the
Imperial, seems the best bet. You should be out of harm's way there. I'll call
you when I need you.'

'What for?'

'There's a reply due from
Berlin
tonight. And
after the package we sent them, I've a feeling they might be up to something.'
Deacon opened a desk drawer and tossed a handful of notes across. 'Here, make
sure you can't be recognized again.

Shave off that beard, get a
haircut, and buy yourself a suit. And be careful from now on, understand? Stay
in the hotel until I call you. Just because you think you're bloody invincible
doesn't mean you have to put us both in danger.'

Hassan took the money sullenly and
left without replying.

Deacon crossed to the mirror near
the porthole window and sighed in despair. The Arab had worked for the Germans
in
Tripoli
until nine months ago, when
Berlin
suggested he
might find a use for him. With Rommel close to taking
Alexandria
, Deacon had had a frantic amount
of work on his hands, and there was no question he had needed help. Hassan
certainly had his uses, but he was far too cocky in his opinion, and the last
thing he needed at a time like this was arrogance and carelessness, or they'd
both wind up hanging from the end of a rope.

Deacon glanced at himself in the
mirror, shaking his head at his reflection before he went to get dressed. 'The
crap you have to put up with,
Harvey
.
It'll be the ruddy death of you.’

Harvey Deacon had been born
Harvald Frederick Mandle in December 1894, in
Hamburg
. His father, Klaus, had emigrated to
the Transvaal with his only son, hoping to start a new life in
South Africa
after his wife had died in the
devastating flu epidemic that had raged through
Germany
the previous year.

But an uneasy truce had long
existed between the British and the Boer settlers of Dutch and German stock,
and no one was really surprised when the South African war started in earnest
in 1899. When the Boer forces were almost decimated by the British infantry at
Bloemfontein
a year
later, they began a bitter guerrilla war, mounting commando raids to harry
British bases, a campaign that brought swift and brutal retaliation. Settler
families were rounded up, their farms and property burned, and their livestock
confiscated. Klaus Mandle and his six-year old son were sent to a camp where
thousands of Boer families had been imprisoned, in what became the first of the
concentration camps.

Conditions there were wretched,
disease and malnutrition rampant - more to do with bad administration and lack
of proper hygiene than any deliberate British ill-intent - but over twenty
thousand men, women and children perished as a result.

When his father contracted TB and
died eight months later, young Harvald Mandle stopped eating his meager rations
and withdrew into himself, until finally the camp doctor intervened and found a
childless middle-aged British couple willing to adopt the orphan.

Frank Deacon and his wife had
emigrated from
Birmingham
to
Johannesburg
, where he managed a clothing
factory. Delighted though they were with the opportunity to provide a decent
home for the boy, the arrangement soon turned out to be a disaster. Their new
son was moody and rebellious in the extreme, prone to aggressive behavior, and
unable to form any real bond with the couple.

That same year Frank Deacon
accepted a posting to
Cairo
to manage one of the
company's cotton factories, with a generous salary and an option to purchase a
handsome
Nile
villa for a nominal sum after
his first year of contract.

'It'll be good for the lad, Vera,'
Deacon told his wife, still feeling pity for the boy. 'It'll change him, help
him get over his trauma.'

Within five years he had made a
great success of the
Cairo
factory. He was given a directorship, making him a reasonably wealthy man, but
the change of scenery did nothing to alter their adopted son's behavior. All Harvey
Deacon saw in Egypt was the same colonial arrogance he had witnessed in South
Africa, and he showed nothing but contempt for his parents' new-found
acquaintances and friends, most of whom were British upper-middle-class
expatriates, until little by little the Deacons realized that their son had a
loathing of everything British which was irreparable, almost beyond reason in
its intensity.

When they died tragically in an
automobile accident while returning from a New Year's ball at the Mena hotel,
Harvey Deacon was twenty-six and didn't shed a tear. Left two thousand pounds
in their will, and their
Nile
villa, the first
thing he decided to do with his windfall was to go into business.

The Sultan Club was a shabby
Cairo
nightspot owned by the son of a wealthy Italian wine
importer from
Alexandria
,
who had only invested in the nightclub business as an easy way to meet girls.
It was going downhill fast when Deacon bought himself in as an equal partner,
but things began to thrive when he hired a dozen French and Italian hostesses
and an American jazz band, and soon it had a reputation as one of the liveliest
places in town.

Commerce had seemed to come easy
to him, and he enjoyed the role of playboy he began to cultivate, indulging
himself with a wide variety of women. Any connection to the country of his
birth was by now non-existent, but by 1936 the Nazis were in power, and no one
was more surprised than Deacon when he got a phone call one afternoon from a
woman who called herself Christina Eckart. She claimed to be his cousin, in
Egypt
with a
German trade delegation, and working as a deputy minister's secretary. Could
she invite him to dinner?

The last Deacon remembered of
Christina Eckart was the image of an unattractive, plump little girl of four,
standing on the Hamburg docks with a clutch of relatives, bored while she waved
him and his father off as they departed for Cape Town.

He decided to meet her out of
curiosity.

This time, when he saw Christina
Eckart, he was stunned.

The years had turned her into a
desirable, ravishing woman. Slim and pretty, with bobbed blond hair and long
legs, she also turned out to be quick-witted and excellent company. She was
also surprisingly unmarried, and after they had chatted and drunk champagne all
evening, she suggested they might take a walk in private to get some air.

'So, your Nazi employers seem to
be doing something right,'

Deacon remarked as they strolled
along the
Nile
promenade.

'From what I hear things are
booming in
Germany
.'

It was merely something to say,
for the truth was Christina Eckart was driving him crazy with distraction, and
he knew he had fallen in love with her. All night he had sensed a strong sexual
chemistry between them, and had she not been his cousin, he would definitely
have taken it further.

'And it's only going to get
better,' Christina said with a smile.

'The Fiihrer has tremendous
plans.'

'Something surprises me. You're an
intelligent, seductive woman, but you're not married. Why?'

Christina laughed. 'I think I'm
what you might call a committed mistress.'

'To whom?'

'The Nazi Party.'

'That surprises me too. Why would
a deputy minister take his female secretary on a trip like this? Unless he's
sleeping with her?'

She laughed again. 'Hardly. My
boss's tendencies lean the other way. But let's just say I'm something more
than a secretary.'

There was mystery in her reply,
and before Deacon could enquire further, Christina looked towards the
Kasr-el-Nil army barracks as a squad of grenadiers went marching smartly
through the gates. 'Look at that, not a step out of line. They're damned good
soldiers, the British, I'll give them that.’

Deacon shivered, bile in his
reply. 'They act like they're fucking God's gift to the world.'

'You still hate them for what they
did to your father?'

'They're arrogant bastards. Always
have been, always will be.'

Christina stopped walking, put a
hand on his arm and said casually, 'How would you like to work for your
Fatherland,
Harvey
?
There's going to be a war, and this time
Germany
can't make the mistake of
losing. We need to plant the seeds of success, have people in place for when
the time comes. Sympathisers in every part of the globe who can help our
cause.' She looked directly at him. '
Britain
's
going to be our enemy again, and
Egypt
's her colony, so she's not
going to be left out of the conflict.'