Flight of Eagles

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‘Ach, those people are totally unreliable,’ Himmler told him.

‘With respect, not all, Reichsführer. And Klein also recruited to his payrolls various neutrals – some Spanish and Portuguese diplomats.’

Himmler got up and went to the window. He stood, hands behind his back, then turned. ‘You are telling me we have, in the files, deep cover agents the Abwehr doesn’t know about?’

‘Exactly.’

Himmler nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, this is good. I want you to pursue this matter, Hartmann, in addition to your usual duties, of course. Make sure they are still in place and ready when needed. Do you understand me?’

‘At your command, Reichsführer.’

‘You may go.’

Hartmann returned to his own office, where his secretary, Trudi Braun, forty and already a war widow, looked up from her desk. She was devoted to Hartmann – such a hero, and a tragic figure besides, his wife killed in the first RAF raid on Berlin. She was unaware that Hartmann had almost heaved a sigh of relief when it happened; his wife had chased everything in trousers from the start of their marriage.

‘Trouble, Major?’ she asked.

‘You could say that, Trudi. Come in and bring coffee.’

He sat behind his desk and lit a cigarette, and she joined him two minutes later, a cup for her and a cup for him. She sat in the spare chair.

‘So?’

Hartmann took a bottle of brandy from a drawer and poured some in his coffee, mainly because his left leg hurt, another legacy of that plane crash.

‘Trudi, I know our esteemed Reichsführer believes God is on our side, but he now also believes Operation Sealion will still take place.’

‘Really, sir?’ Trudi had no opinion on such matters.

‘So, that list of Klein’s you told me about. You worked for him – give me a full rundown on it, particularly the Spanish or Portuguese that were on his payroll.’

‘They still are, Major.’

‘Well, now it’s pay-up time. Come on, Trudi.’

She said, ‘Well, one of the contacts, a Portuguese man in London named Fernando Rodrigues, has actually passed on low-grade information from time to time. He works at their London embassy.’

‘Really,’ Hartmann said. ‘And who else?’

‘Some woman called Dixon – Sarah Dixon. She’s a clerk at the War Office in London.’

Hartmann sat up straight. ‘Are you serious? We have a clerk in the War Office and she’s still in place?’

‘Well, she was never Abwehr. You see, if I may talk about how things were before your arrival, Major, only the Abwehr were supposed to run agents abroad. Major Klein’s operation for SD was really illegal. So, when the Brits penetrated the Abwehr and lifted all their agents in England, ours were left intact. They were never compromised.’

‘I see.’ Hartmann was excited. ‘Get me the files.’

Fernando Rodrigues was a commercial attaché at the Portuguese London embassy and his brother, Joel, was a commercial attaché at the Berlin embassy. Very convenient. Hartmann read the files and recognized the two of them for what they were: greedy men with their hands out. So be it. At least you knew where you were with people like that and you could always cut the hand off.

Sarah Dixon was different. She was forty-five, the widow of George Dixon, a bank clerk who’d died of war wounds from 1917. Originally Sarah Brown, she’d been born in London of an English father and Irish mother. Her grandfather, an IRA activist in the Easter Rising in Dublin against the British, had been shot.

She lived alone in Bayswater in London, had worked as a clerk at the War Office since 1938. She had originally been recruited as an IRA sympathizer by an IRA activist named Patrick Murphy in 1938 during the bombing campaign in London and Birmingham and Murphy had worked for Klein and the SD. She’d agreed to co-operate and then Murphy had been shot dead in a gun fight with Special Branch policemen.

Hartmann looked up. ‘So, she’s still waiting?’

‘So it would appear, Major.’