Istanbul (30 page)

‘They are our allies.’

‘Allies? Stalin does as he pleases.’

‘I will do everything I can, believe me.’

‘I hope so.’

‘Tell your government they still have friends in Bucharest.’

‘You’ll always have an ear to London through me,’ Nick said.

‘I am delighted to know this. Now, let us talk about our common ground and how we might save Romania from this disaster. You never know, we may need each other one day.’

Nick smiled politely. He could see that one day Stanciu might well need him, but he did not see how it could ever be the other way.

CHAPTER 71

Music drifted from the hotels around Taksim Square. Nick walked arm in arm with Daniela through the Saturday night crowds. There were rumours of peace and laughter spilling from the sidewalk coffee houses of Istiklal Boulevard.

They had dinner at the Taksim casino and afterwards they watched the floor show, a Hungarian girl singing slow, Romanic ballads. She was a refugee, like so many in the wartime city, and luckier than most, for she was tall and blonde and had great legs. She drew an appreciative crowd of admirers, Americans mostly. Even the ambassador came to see her when he was in town. They said he was having an affair with her.

Nick ordered champagne. Daniela’s mood troubled him. She gripped the edge of the table, white knuckled, her foot tapping without rhythm on the floor.

He tried to make desultory conversation, without success. What was going on? She had walked away from him on the Galata Bridge and he thought he would never see her again; then tonight she had telephoned and asked to meet him.

She had hardly spoken a word all night.

‘I’m not very good company tonight,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we should go home.’

‘Why did you call me, then?’

‘Please,’ she said. ‘I can’t do this now.’

He shrugged, then called for the bill and they went to get their coats from the cloakroom. He was tired of it all, he just wanted to be free of her now, he knew he should accept his own foolishness and leave her behind. I’m addicted, he thought. Like Omar.

She did not wait for him, went ahead into the street.

He got their coats and walked across the lobby to the doors. He heard a commotion outside. A black Mercedes saloon pulled up in front of the casino and two men bundled a dark haired woman into the back seat. The doorman ran down the steps to help her, but another man in a dark suit appeared from nowhere and hit him with his closed fist, knocking him down, with the casual ease of a professional.

His assailant jumped into the back of the saloon. The driver gunned the engine and drove off, tyres slewing on the cobblestones, the back door still swinging open.

‘Daniela!’

The saloon bounced on its suspension as if there was a violent struggle taking place in the back seat. Nick saw the brake lights blink on and off several times as it veered through the traffic.

The Opel he had signed out of the car pool earlier that evening was parked fifty yards away up the street. He pulled the driver out from behind the wheel – he was asleep with his head over the back of the seat, snoring – and jumped in. He started the engine and crunched the gears into drive. The car fishtailed as it took off, leaving the driver standing in the middle of the street, still half asleep.

He swerved through the traffic, chasing up through the gears.

He desperately punched the horn, trying to force his way through the pedestrians, trams and buses in Taksim Square. He plunged down the cobbled streets of Cumhurriyet Caddesi, hurtling past banks and offices and warehouses, then chased the Mercedes into the suburbs, past locked-down shops and garages lit by kerosene lamps. Soon he left the lights of Beyoglu behind.

The road got narrower and darker.

He leaned across the front seat and found the Webley revolver in the glove compartment. He laid it on the seat beside him.

He swore at the car each time it hit a pothole, he swore at himself for being so careless. He followed the Mercedes into the rolling hill country of Thrace, driving too fast, narrowly missed an old farmer on a donkey who appeared suddenly in the glare of the headlights. It was a bad road, a boneshaker.

Who had done this? Where were they taking her? And why?

He kept the accelerator pedal pressed hard on the floor. The engine was at a constant, high-pitched scream.

The headlights bounced on the scarred hills. He had lost sight of the Mercedes now but dust hung on the bends, so he knew he was close, and every few minutes he caught a brief glimpse of red tail lights.

Why Daniela?

A crest in the road. Blackness ahead, then a sudden blaze of headlights, blinding him.

He swerved instinctively, pulled the wheel hard to the right as his foot slammed on the brake. The car spun around, the wheels losing traction. He fought the wheel. The Opel slid sideways into a ditch, throwing him across the front seats, and he blacked out.

When he regained consciousness, the car was facing towards the road, headlights skewed upwards at the sky by the slope of the bank. He remembered his revolver and scrambled desperately for it on the seat and the floor well, but it was gone.

CHAPTER 72

The car door flew open. He realised with sickening clarity that it was him they had been after, not Daniela.

They hauled him out of the car, beat him until they tired of it and then pulled his arms behind his back. He felt the sharp bite of rope on his wrists.

They dragged him away from the car. Even half conscious, a part of his brain was still calculating. By now his driver would have reported to Abrams, and Abrams would have made a call to the Emniyet. But it would still be morning before anyone found the wreck of the Opel. By then it would be much too late.

They dumped him in the back of the Mercedes. He raised his head to look for Daniela. What had the bastards done to her? A boot slammed down on his neck, pinning his head to the floor. The door slammed shut and they bumped away again over the potholes.

He could not see his captors’ faces in the darkness and no-one in the car spoke a word.

Daniela! Jesus. What a mess.

The Mercedes lurched to a stop. The door was thrown open and Nick heard the gentle rolling of the sea. They dragged him out of the car and dumped him on the ground. He heard Daniela screaming and he called out to her, and one of his captors kicked him in the ribs for his trouble.

He rolled onto his back and lashed out with his foot, and the toecap of his shoe caught his tormentor in the groin. The man screamed and doubled over. Nick did not have time to enjoy his small victory. He did not feel the answering blow to the back of his head, but it was professionally delivered, with a minimum of fuss, and it was the last thing he remembered for hours.

He came round with the stink of diesel in his nostrils. He vomited.

He started to gather his senses. He was on a boat, battling heavy seas. His hands and feet were tied and he was trussed in the hold, rust-coloured bilge lapping around his feet. Fuel cans, rope, and a spare anchor lay around him.

The stink of fish made him vomit again. He rolled away from the bilge, still gagging. Through the open hatch-way above he saw a grey, cold sky, streaked with the fading rose of dawn. He heard guttural German voices from the wheelhouse.

He tried to move but it only brought on another wave of nausea. He called out for Daniela. There was no answer.

He guessed they were somewhere on the Black Sea heading north. Fishing boats migrated up and down the coast all the time, despite the war, evading the patrol boats. He used such boats himself to smuggle agents in and out of Greece and Romania.

The boat rolled again in the swell and it brought on another wave of nausea. He closed his eyes, tried to control it. He wondered how long this torture would continue and when the real torture would commence.

They said the waiting was the worst.

CHAPTER 73

He guessed it was early afternoon when the hum of the engines changed pitch. They entered calmer waters. He heard shouts as the skipper manoeuvred through shallow waters and the boat jarred against the pilings of a jetty.

Three men came down the ladder, picked him up and dragged him towards the companionway. It was bitterly cold on the deck under a lowering sky. They hauled him down a gangway and for a moment he saw the fishing boat that had brought him there, glimpsed a paint-blistered wheelhouse with rust leaking down the hull. He saw a handful of fishermen’s shacks and a knot of soldiers in grey uniforms, watching his arrival with casual contempt.

They threw him in the back of a van.

He guessed he was inside Romania. As he lay on the cold metal floor, his hands numb from the ropes on his wrists, he expected the doors to open again, for Daniela to be thrown in beside him. But then someone started the van and they bumped away, over rough ground.

Where was she? What had they done to her?

He lay on his side with the cold metal floor pressed against his cheek. His arms had been tied behind his back all night, and his shoulder and elbow joints felt as if they were on fire.

Just twelve hours ago he had been sitting in the Taksim casino with a glass of champagne and a beautiful woman; his best charcoal double-breasted suit was not smeared with unidentifiable filth from the hold of a fishing boat and he did not have dried blood crusted onto his face. It seemed surreal.

The van stopped and the doors were thrown open. He saw a quadrangle, surrounded by two-storey brick barracks. Several dull grey army trucks were parked around the perimeter. A Romanian flag hung limp on a flagpole in the centre of the parade ground.

Two men hauled him out of the back of the van, and dragged him across the frozen ground towards a low brick building. He twisted his head around, looking for Daniela.

But he was alone.

Three guards in the uniform of the Romanian military watched from the entrance. Besides them was another man in a knee-length black leather coat, wearing the insignia of an officer in the SD.

His throat was so dry, he couldn’t swallow. He tried to stand but his knees buckled underneath him.

He knew what was coming.

CHAPTER 74

He was in his late fifties, with short greying hair. His English was cultured, with an Oxbridge accent, a man of education and refinement. He sat on the other side of a wooden trestle table, two Romanian soldiers guarding the door behind him. Apart from the table, the room was bare. There was a high barred window and bare brick walls.

He said his name was Overath, and that he was a major in the Sicherheitdienst. He had the manner of a doctor with a patient whose condition was delicate and possibly terminal, and it had fallen on him to break the bad news to the family.

Nick thought about Jennifer and the boys, how he yet wanted to make them proud of him. He thought about Daniela, and tried to persuade himself that she was somehow still alive.

They had untied his wrists but his hands lay useless in his lap and raising them was like lifting sandbags. Both wrists were swollen and bloody from where the ropes had cut into the flesh.

‘I imagine you know why you are here,’ Overath said.

‘I am assistant military attaché to the British Consulate in Istanbul and you have violated the terms of the diplomatic code.’

‘You are a major in British Intelligence, and you control a number of agents who spy on the Abwehr and friends and allies of the Reich.’

Nick wondered if he knew Daniela was one of their agents. Did they mean to interrogate her as well, find out how much she had told them about Maier?

The SD would not have gone to this trouble, of course, if they were not certain about their information. He knew he had to limit what he eventually told them, give them false information, play the game as long as he could.

‘What happened to my friend?’

Overath smiled and did not answer. Instead he pushed a piece of paper across the desk. ‘Write down the names of your agents in Istanbul, please.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You will not co-operate?’

‘I mean I can’t pick up the pen. Your assistants were a little too enthusiastic.’ He showed him his wrists.

‘Then you can tell me the names,’ Overath said, ‘and I’ll write them down.’ He pulled the pen and the piece of paper towards him.