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

crept into their hotel room from the ruined streets of Klagenfurt. Prince assumed he’d been woken by an inevitably complicated dream in which he’d been running with his son through the fields near their home in Lincoln and for some reason had hidden in a copse, ignoring Henry’s increasingly disturbed cries.

His absence from Henry was clearly on his mind, and he realised he ought to make his son his absolute priority. They’d soon be on their way home. He’d make sure they returned to Lincoln as soon as possible. No one would be able to accuse him of not having served his country.

But it soon became apparent that there was another reason why he’d woken. From the narrow landing outside their room came the creaking sound of movement on the uneven floorboards. There was only one other room on that landing, and the manager had assured them it was unoccupied. They were, he told them sadly, the only guests in his hotel.

Prince turned round to face Hanne. A tiny shaft of half-light caught her hair splayed over the pillow. He gently touched her face, and she moved as he slowly slipped his hand over her mouth and tapped her shoulder at the same time. Her eyes opened wide and he placed one finger on his lips before pointing to his ear and then to the door.

As Hanne turned over to face the door, there was the sound of a lock being turned. Both of them sat bolt upright, and as Richard rose from the bed, the door opened and a large figure squeezed into the room. He closed the door and stood with his back to it.

‘You don’t need to worry,’ he said in German.

Prince recognised the voice as the deep bass tones of Ludwig, the man he’d telephoned the previous evening in Vienna to send the message to Iosif.

‘Comrade Gurevich sent me to help you. Maybe put the small light on.’

When Prince turned on the bedside light, he recognised the heavily built man as the one he’d met in the woods when Gurevich had driven him from Vienna, who’d then taken him into Klagenfurt in his Daimler. The three of them looked at each other, Ludwig’s bloodshot eyes blinking from under his thick eyebrows.

‘You know they’re watching the hotel?’

‘Who are?’

‘Your people – the British.’ He shook his head in a derisory manner. ‘They’re not very good: two of them in a car at the front, one of them asleep. There’s a man in the alley at the back too – an amateur: all he does is smoke. He may as well be waving a torch around.’

‘How did you get in?’

‘It’s my job. In any case, your people paid the hotel owner to let them know if they heard anything or if you went anywhere. Once they do that, it’s easy: we just pay more. You’d better get ready.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Comrade Gurevich says he’s more or less sorted everything out, so you need to get back to Trieste. You’d better get a move on, or you’ll miss all the fun.’

The Allied Kommandatura met three times a day: at seven in the morning, noon and seven in the evening. The Kommandatura was the body that brought Berlin’s four governing powers together, and since July it had met at a building on Kaiserswerther Strasse in Dahlem, opposite Triestpark.

There was a certain predictability to the meetings. The Western Allies had four representatives each, the Soviet Union eight. The meetings would begin with discussions on non-controversial matters – power and water supplies, for example – although in the fetid atmosphere of December 1945 Berlin, nothing could be described as non-controversial. There had once been a lengthy and heated row over who was responsible for cleaning gutters. They would then move on to more difficult matters, and as the meeting came to an end, if any party wanted to raise a matter directly with another, they would then do so.

It was bitterly cold, with a wind building up, when they gathered for the meeting at seven o’clock that Wednesday evening. No one was in the mood for a long meeting, and in any case the evening meeting tended to be the least difficult one of the day.

As the meeting closed, one of the Soviet representatives asked to meet with an American representative about a delicate matter. The senior American officer present was a colonel, who carefully studied the Red Army officer who’d made the request. He was a one-star NKGB commissar, young for such a senior rank, and the colonel had met him before but couldn’t recall his name. The colonel nodded to one of his colleagues, an affable Italian American in civilian clothes who was responsible for what were euphemistically called ‘sensitive issues’.

The commissar was smiling and seemed relaxed. ‘I need to give you a message and I wanted to be sure you received it and understood it.’

The colonel didn’t like the way the Russian behaved, as if he were at a social event. He narrowed his eyes, resisting the urge to tell him to get on with it. The man looked like a Jew: he was amazed how many of them there were in the Red Army in Berlin. It was as if they’d come there to gloat. He nodded for him to continue.

‘I would be grateful if you could pass this message on to a Major Barrow of the Counter Intelligence Corps in Munich.’

The Italian American began to cough.

‘I am not sure if you’d wish to write this down. Major Barrow recently established a relationship with a Wolfgang Steiner. That’s W-O-L—’

‘I know how the hell to spell Wolfgang, thank you.’

‘Wolfgang Steiner would like you to know that he has reflected on his decision to work for the United States. He has decided that peace in Europe is best served by cooperating with the Soviet Union. He is now resident in the Soviet sector, where he intends to remain.’ Iosif Gurevich smiled and removed a pack of cigars from his pocket,