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

about to be transferred to another block, but that was still being sorted and he should be patient.

He’d begun to doubt it would ever happen, but then at eight o’clock that night, the cell door opened and Kiselyov told him to get a move on. He was handcuffed and shackled and led through Block D, by which time of course the other prisoners had been locked down and the lights in the corridors and halls dimmed. When they came to the entrance to the block, he was told to wait and a hood was placed over his head; he was convinced this meant they were about to shoot him, or worse still, hang him, which he considered a far worse fate. As he was hurried across a courtyard and along a rough path and then into another block, he wondered why they needed to go to all this trouble if they were going to kill him.

The cell they took him into was the least unpleasant of the half-dozen or so he’d been in at Hohenschönhausen. It was quite large, with a toilet and a sink in one corner, which made a welcome change from the bucket and bowl he’d been used to. It also contained two beds, and to his surprise, a man in prison uniform was sitting on one of them.

‘Reinhard Möller.’ The other man had waited until the guards had locked the door and turned off the light before getting up and shaking Schweitzer’s hand in a friendly manner. He apologised for not being very talkative but said he was tired. ‘I’ll introduce myself properly in the morning.’

Three days earlier – on the Saturday morning – back at RAF Gatow in the south-west of Berlin, an irritated Bemrose was waiting outside in the Humber Snipe, muttering that he still resented being treated as a chauffeur but that when he’d complained to Mr Gilbey, he’d been told how important this job was.

In the arrivals area, Hanne and Prince watched as the RAF Dakota landed somewhat awkwardly, bouncing on the runway as it was buffeted by a cross-wind and then taxiing towards the apron.

The two men they were waiting for greeted them warmly. Tom Gilbey said he couldn’t believe the destruction he’d seen as the plane descended over Berlin. The other man said he could. ‘It’s far worse on the ground, I can tell you – remember, I was only here five months ago. I lived through the Battle for Berlin!’

The conversation in the car from the airport to the safe house Bemrose had organised in Wilmersdorf was restricted to the weather and the areas they were driving through. The German who’d arrived with Gilbey apologised. ‘I could give you a guided tour, but it’s so hard to recognise places.’

Hanne watched the man carefully. Prince had told her all about him. Franz Rauter was a former Abwehr spy master who’d run a successful spy ring in London. When Prince had found him in Berlin at the end of the war, Rauter had undertaken to cooperate in return for a promise that he not be treated as a prisoner. It was agreed that after he’d helped the British, he’d be allowed to return to Germany. Prince had told her it hadn’t been a difficult promise to keep. Rauter was pleasant man, a professional intelligence officer and certainly not a Nazi; it had even been suggested to Tom Gilbey that he might be able to use him as a British agent once he was back in Germany.

Rauter himself was keen on this: he was clearly an Anglophile, and the promise of a new identity appealed to him. Although he’d worked in Berlin for a number of years, he was originally from Hamburg. Somewhere nice in the British zone of western Germany would suit him fine.

Neither he nor Gilbey had imagined his return to Germany would happen quite so soon. Gilbey had received an urgent phone call from Prince on the Thursday evening.

‘We’ve found Alphonse Schweitzer.’

‘Good.’

‘The Russians don’t think he’ll cooperate.’

‘I’m sure he will in time, Prince.’

‘We don’t have time, sir.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘He’s due to be executed first thing Monday morning.’

That was when Prince explained the plan he, Hanne and Gurevich had come up with. Alphonse Schweitzer would be told about a stay of execution and moved to a cell in another block while his sentence was allegedly reviewed by no less a person than Marshal Zhukov. He would share the cell with a stooge who’d hopefully get the information from him.

‘And Schweitzer’s bought all this?’

‘He doesn’t know about the stooge, sir.’

‘Obviously, Prince, don’t treat me like a fool. I meant about his case being reviewed at the last minute by Zhukov?’

‘Apparently he was so relieved he’ll believe anything.’ It was then that Prince had suggested they use Franz Rauter as the stooge. He expected Gilbey to find a good reason why not and was ready to make the case: they needed a German, someone who understood the Gestapo, who was credible and who they could trust. But Gilbey was surprisingly amenable to the idea. So much so that he said he’d bring him over himself.

‘As soon as possible, please, sir.’

They spent the weekend and all day Monday in the safe house in Wilmersdorf briefing Rauter: Schweitzer is the only person we’re aware of who knows the true identity of the Ferret, and we’d like you to get him to tell you.

They came up with a plausible cover story, and by the Monday afternoon Rauter was ready.

Reinhard Möller was about to become an inmate of Hohenschönhausen.

Alphonse Schweitzer was so relieved at his stay of execution that he was more than happy to chat with the man he shared his cell with, especially someone as like-minded and sympathetic as Reinhard Möller – that was, as the man insisted on pointing out, Möller with an ‘ö’ rather than Müller with a ‘ü’.

On the first day, Möller allowed Schweitzer to tell his own story, a typically self-serving account of a fanatical and committed Nazi