The Cairo Code (17 page)

“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 pete's 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 bark on a tree. No one gets 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-Bergère, 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 women 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 to no end.

He was in his office on the houseboat that afternoon, attending to some paperwork. An imposing figure with graying 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 stupid bloody 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. “One street urchin looks like another. 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 I 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 Deacon 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 trash 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 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 nonexistent, 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.