A Game of Spies (15 page)

Eva listened, nodding, still marveling at the divine distance she had achieved.

Thank goodness, she thought, that none of this was real.

9

MECKLENBURG

The bait and switch had failed.

Hobbs knew this for a fact when he came back to the tree with the two flat rocks on either side. This was the landmark he had chosen for himself: the tallest tree in the area, visible from a good distance. If his trick had worked, then there would have been only three sets of tracks around the tree, the ones he had left on his first and second passes and the ones left by his pursuers. But instead he counted four sets. So they had kept his trail, although he had given them bait clear as day—his own footprints heading off through a stretch of muddy earth—and then given them the switch.

He stared at the ground for a long moment. There seemed to be twelve men following him. That was too many by half. Six he could handle—with a good perch to fire from, if he could make certain the sun was behind him. But twelve?

He was beginning to feel quite afraid.

If the bait and switch had failed, then they had a woodsman among them. Which meant that he would need to come up with a better trick.

But he didn't have a better trick.

After staring, he started to move again.

For the first few hours of the chase, when night had still lain across the land, he had not felt especially afraid. He had been high on adrenaline, and optimistic about his chances of shaking the pursuit easily. They were townsfolk, after all, whereas he had spent countless hours in the woods around Surrey during his youth. But now his confidence was flagging. The townsfolk were better trackers than he had assumed. And the leg, which he had barely noticed during the night, had started to give him a fair bit of trouble. For the past hour, he had been using the Enfield as a cane, moving in a clumsy shuffle-step designed to keep as much weight as possible on the rifle.

Yet he still felt a flicker of optimism. This was partly due to the fact that, with the rising of the sun, he had been able to pin down his position. He had studied maps before coming to Germany and now he realized that the Kahr woman had told the truth when she had identified her hometown as Wismar. That meant that he was not so far from Gothmund—which meant that all was not yet lost.

The optimism was also partly due to the Enfield. With the Enfield, he was far from helpless. But a dozen men? Too many.

He would need to wear them down.

The damned leg,
he thought. If not for the leg, he could have left them behind by now with sheer speed. But instead he needed to use his brain, and using his brain had never been his strong suit. So what now?

Persistence, of course. During his youth, Hobbs had learned the value of persistence. People rarely had quite as much resistance as they thought they did. And the men following him had less invested in the chase than Hobbs himself.

The first bait and switch had failed. So he would try another.

He moved halfway across a clearing and then carefully retraced his steps. Once he had reached the field's edge, he struck off in a new direction.

He was not tired. He
couldn't
be tired—not yet, not until there were fewer of them. So he was not.

And his leg was not throbbing like a low bass note from a string that never stopped vibrating. He was not famished; his stomach was not trying to eat itself. He was not terrified beyond all rationality. He
couldn't
be these things, or he would have no chance. And so he was not.

Every few minutes, he doubled back. The old tricks, cominng from instinct now more than anything else. He wondered where Eva was, if she had managed to escape from Berlin. Why had they been watching her, instead of arresting her? Because they didn't want to arrest her. They wanted her free. As bait? Perhaps.

His mind was not running in a thousand directions at once. He was not on the verge of delirium. His leg was not bleeding again, no matter what his eyes told him.

He misplaced his foot and slipped down into a patch of mud.

Then came to his feet again, growling with fear and frustration. A stitch in his side welled, gave him a few moments of intense pain, and then subsided. He backtracked again. If he stayed within a few miles of town, then his pursuers' desire to give up and go home would be that much stronger. Play on their own weakness. Bait and switch.

Eva was the bait—but what was the switch?

He was coming back, once again, to the tree with the two flat rocks. Please, he thought, let them have given up. Please let there be no fresh tracks by the tree.

But there were. Fewer fresh tracks—but fresh tracks nevertheless.

As he looked at them, the last of his optimism faded. He was left feeling empty, weak, hungry, and very afraid.

Don't give up now,
he thought.

No. Because there were fewer tracks. He counted eight, although the elaborate crisscrossing made it difficult to be certain. If he could find the reserves to keep going awhile longer, long enough to find a good perch, to let the sun crest and then drop a bit lower in the sky …

Why bother? He was finished. He just hadn't admitted it to himself yet.

For several moments, he let the pessimism flood through him. Then he looked up at the sun, still climbing toward its midday apex. Finished or not, he would do his best to see this through. Because there was something else at stake, wasn't there? He couldn't quite pin it down, but there was something. Something about Eva …

A rustling sound caught his attention. In a flash, the rifle was off the ground, trained in the direction of the trees.

The deer who emerged looked at him curiously, then turned and vanished with a flick of its tail.

Hobbs planted the Enfield back on the ground and leaned his full weight on it. He considered smoking a cigarette and decided to save them. A cigarette would make a fine reward, if and when he discouraged the last of the men who had followed him from Wismar.

He struck off again, trying to ignore the fact that his leg was rapidly passing beyond the point of pain, to numbness.

BAYSWATER, LONDON

Arthur Deacon looked up from his comic strip. “Mary,” he called. “It's starting.”

Lord Haw-Haw repeated his greeting—thanks to his twang, it came out “Jarmany calling, Jarmany calling”—and then launched into a spirited condemnation of the Jewish Communists, backed, as always in his broadcasts, by shadowy Jewish international financiers. Deacon returned his attention to the
Daily Mirror
in his lap. He finished reading his comic strip, paged past an article that failed to catch his interest—deadly serious David Walker—and spent a few moments admiring a photograph of four blank-faced showgirls standing in line. Lovely young ladies, despite their vacant expressions. Ah, if he had still been a single man …

Then he realized that Mary had not yet come into the study.

“Mary,” he called again. “You're missing it.”

He set the paper down and went to check on her.

He had expected she'd be tending to the baby; but as he stepped into the bedroom, he saw that Hugh was in his crib, sound asleep. Mary was sitting before her vanity, going through a tray of cosmetics. He went to her and put his hands on her shoulders.

“You're wound tighter than a tourniquet,” he said. “Why don't—”

“Shush,” she said crisply. “You'll wake Hugh.”

He stopped rubbing. After few moments, his hands started to move again, tentatively.

“Do you know,” he said, “I thought we could go out on the town tonight. Give your mother a bell, see if she'll come watch the old ankle-biter—”

Mary reached up and pushed his hands off her shoulders.

“I'll take that as a no,” Deacon said.

“Bright boy.”

“Good. Very good. Brilliant.”

He went back to the study, fell into his chair with a flounce, and picked up the newspaper again. He stared at it without seeing. The two rooms separating him from his wife, in reality the length of a single railroad car, felt only slightly smaller than all of King's Cross Station.

She was angry, of course. And for that he couldn't blame her.

When Mary had finally agreed to marry him—on his fourth proposal, by which time he had been desperate—her affirmative had been dependent on a number of conditions. Deacon had agreed to the bulk of them without arguing. He could go without whiskey, late nights, and tobacco, if that was what it took to win her hand. He would even have sworn off food and water, he sometimes thought, if she had insisted on it. For when he had first seen her, it had been like something out of a storybook. For the first time in his twenty-two years, life had suddenly made sense.

It had happened at the cinema. The flick had been
Captain Blood,
starring Errol Flynn. She'd been sitting two rows ahead of him, and as the lights had gone down, she had stretched: a simple stretch. Her hands had touched her hair, lifting it away for a fleeting moment from the back of her neck. And that had been the end of his life as a bachelor, in spirit if not immediately in practice.

For three months following that day, the thought of her neck—so pale and slim, so elegantly arched—had driven him mad. He had begun to haunt the theater, hoping to catch another glimpse of the beautiful girl with the slim pale neck. At that point, oddly enough, he had never even seen her face. But the neck had haunted his dreams; so vulnerable and exposed, so graceful and smooth. When she had finally come back to the theater—the picture that time had been
My Man Godfrey
—he had spent the entire film trying to get up the bollocks to approach her. And approach her he had, once the lights had come up. But he had not been able to put two words together; for she had been as gorgeous from the front as she was from the back.

Somehow, generous heart that she was, Mary had been charmed by his clumsy stammering. For some reason that he still couldn't quite fathom, she had given him his chance. But she had still required convincing. Four proposals' worth of convincing, to be precise, spread out over the course of two years. Finally, she had relented—as long as he obeyed her conditions.

Yet the one condition on which he'd fought was that he give up flying. He had held out on that one until the very day that Hugh had been born. Then a change had come, and his priorities had shifted. One moment he'd been pacing outside the delivery room, grappling with doubt about what he had gotten himself into. He was not a responsible man, after all. He could not look after an entire family. All of it had been a terrible mistake. He had thought this right up until the moment that his eyes had first fallen on Hugh's face; then it was as if a switch had been thrown inside him. He had sworn to leave the RAF and devote himself entirely to his wife and child—and he had not regretted it for a moment.

Until, that was, Oldfield had given him this chance at revenge. Then he had changed his tune. So he couldn't blame her for being angry. But she should have understood, he thought. For the sake of his parents, she should have understood.

He turned two pages, dropped the
Mirror,
and went back to the bedroom.

“Come on, Mary. Don't be that way.”

“What way?” she said innocently.

“Well, bloody buggery hell,” he said.

This time, upon returning to the study, he left the paper untouched. He went to look out the window at the street. The latest rain was evaporating, giving the air a heavy, charged feeling. Lord Haw-Haw's aristocratic affectations did little to lighten his mood. After a few seconds, he reached out and snapped off the wireless.

After another few seconds, he realized that Mary was standing in the doorway behind him. “Arthur,” she said.

“Mm.”

“He's fussing.”

“Mm.”

“He doesn't like it when we quarrel.”

He didn't answer.

“You are a very stubborn man,” she said. “Do you know that?”

“You are a very stubborn woman,” he said.

She had come up behind him; now she began to knead his shoulders. “I do enjoy a good row,” she admitted.

“You're as much of a harridan as your mother.”

“Fight fair, Arthur.”

Now she was turning him around, leaning up for a kiss.

“Go walk your son around the place,” she murmured. “See if you can get him back to sleep.”

“And if I can?”

“Let's just see what we come up with,” she said, “to while away one of our last evenings together.”

MECKLENBURG

For the third time in as many minutes, Hermann Hetzler bent to inspect the ground at his feet.

As he prodded at the vegetation, his expression turned querulous. It was a false track—the man had backed up after moving forward, setting his feet in his own prints. The heel section of the track was nearly twice as deep as the toe. But the distinction was less noticeable than it had been the last few times the man had tried the trick. He was learning.

Hetzler stood again. The muscles in the small of his back contracted sharply, making the querulous expression on his face turn pinched. His back was not pleased with all this bending and standing. But the men still with him were losing enthusiasm, so he refrained from reaching around to rub at the muscles. He tried to project strength, confidence, unquestionable assurance.

The men gathered around to hear his verdict.

“He's backtracked again,” Hetzler said.

He followed the tracks, searching for the place where the man had branched off. He found it in a shallow puddle beside a flat rock. The Britisher had used the water to cover his sidestep; it had devoured the print. Then taken a few steps across the rock, counting on the bright afternoon sun to dry the evidence. Then stepped off again—yes; there. Whatever he was using as a makeshift cane had left a string of dents in the earth, as clear as a trail of bread crumbs. Doubling around behind them, once again.