End of Spies by Alex Gerlis (popular ebook readers .txt) 📕

the hero of the Battle for Berlin nodded as he entered the room and said the operation to lure Wolfgang Steiner to Berlin had been most clever.

‘May I ask about Martin Bormann, sir?’

‘What about him, Gurevich?’

‘There seems to be some unresolved questions as to his fate. The other man they found in Trieste – the one dressed as a priest – wasn’t Bormann, so I understand.’

‘No, he wouldn’t have been. Bormann is almost certainly dead. If the Americans and the British want to believe he’s still alive, then that is fine with us – we can use the prospect as a way to confuse them for many years.’

‘But the information we got from Willi Kühn suggested he could be alive?’

Zhukov stared at Gurevich, letting him know he was deciding whether to share a confidence with him. ‘Bormann escaped from the bunker on the first of May and reached Friedrichstrasse station, and was then seen on the railway line near Weidendammer Bridge, so if people want to believe he’s alive they have that to cling on to. But there was a very heavy artillery attack on the area where he was last seen, and we have good reason to believe he was killed there. We don’t have the body as such; you know how it is after an artillery attack…’

Gurevich nodded.

‘It serves the interests of the Soviet Union to leave a question mark hanging over his fate.’ Zhukov clapped his hands to signal there was to be no more talk of Bormann. ‘And Wolfgang Steiner… his interrogation was a serious disappointment. Did you carry it out yourself?’

‘Kapitan Fyodorov was the main interrogator, sir, but of course I supervised it and take full responsibility for it. I have to admit that once he’d recovered from the shock of being captured by us, he proved to be remarkably resilient, which was quite unexpected. Fyodorov is an experienced interrogator, but it took him a long time to break Steiner.’

‘And that information he eventually divulged – about the films and notebooks he’d hidden in a farm in Bavaria – he held out for how long until he gave us that?’

‘Five days, I’m afraid, sir. I think he was hoping to keep it to negotiate for his life, but even when Fyodorov resorted to more physical methods of persuasion, he still gave us very little. But once we told him his son had been killed in Maribor, he appeared to give up; he seemed like a broken man. After that, he was quite forthcoming.’

Marshal Zhukov nodded and looked carefully at Gurevich, clearly not quite satisfied. ‘By which time it was too late.’

‘I’m afraid so, sir. We managed to get a special unit to the farm, which was no mean feat given that it’s in the American zone, but there was nothing there.’

‘The incompetence!’ Zhukov slammed his fist on the desk and was now shouting, his face red.

Kommissar Gurevich said he could quite understand how the marshal felt; indeed, he shared his anger, his frustration…

‘It’s more than anger and frustration, Gurevich. We’ve been made to look like bloody fools, and by the British of all people. What was it that woman on the farm said?’

‘That only two days before we got there, some British troops had arrived at the farm and searched it. Apparently they went straight to the cellar and removed some suitcases. They turned the farmhouse upside down but didn’t take anything else. They knew precisely what they were coming for.’

‘She’s sure they were British, not Americans?’

‘She’s certain, sir.’

‘So it would appear that English friend of yours, Prince—’

‘He’s hardly a friend, sir.’

‘It would appear he beat you to it. From what Steiner told us about the content of the films and notebooks, this is a disaster for us and a major intelligence coup for them!’

Zhukov shook his head and looked up at the ceiling. Gurevich could hear the marshal’s boots tapping loudly on the floor.

‘Sir, I propose we put Steiner before a war crimes tribunal – it needn’t last more than an hour at the most – and then execute him.’

Zhukov sat very still and said nothing for a while, then shook his head again. ‘He’ll go to Moscow. He can be dealt with there: he may provide more intelligence under interrogation, and then he can be disposed of.’

Iosif Gurevich said he understood, and when Zhukov stood up, he did too, realising their meeting was now over. He was unsettled by how it had gone and was relieved it had ended. There was no doubt he’d made an error in underestimating Steiner.

He was in the doorway when Zhukov called him back.

‘Oh, and Gurevich – you’ll return to Moscow with Steiner.’

Kommissar Iosif Gurevich left in a daze, and as he walked down the corridor; he realised he now had an escort. It wasn’t a total surprise, but it had still come as a most dreadful shock, like when he’d heard of the murder of his family in Minsk.

Zhukov had made it sound like a routine matter, but to Gurevich it was a death sentence.

‘I have to admit that I was ready to give both of you a very hard time. A severe reprimand would have been considered lenient in the circumstances.’ Tom Gilbey was looking at Prince and Hanne, who were sitting opposite him, innocence personified. He’d hoped to sound as severe as possible, but feared he’d not managed to do so. It was very rare for him to be outmanoeuvred, but when it had happened in recent years, Richard Prince was usually to blame, as was the case on this bitterly cold afternoon close to Christmas, where a few limp decorations in the corridor outside his office in St James’s were the only hint of approaching festivities.

‘Disobeying orders, collaborating with the Soviets – and the Slovenians – and going off on your own freelance operations… that’s not how we work, is it?’

Neither Prince nor Hanne replied. Gilbey thought he detected a hint of a smile on Prince’s face.

‘So I was going to throw the