A Spy in the Shadows (Spy Noir Series Book 1) (34 page)

Suddenly it was oddly quiet.  Salinger trembled.  Too much had happened too quickly.  The death, the destruction, the speed in which it all unfolded amazed him, and he knelt there, overwhelmed.

A movement flashed to his right.  Salinger spun around.

One of the security men stopped suddenly, his pistol falling to his side.  He knelt beside Salinger.

“Is the Prime Minister hit?”

“A near miss by inches.  The Major?”

“He’s bad,” Salinger whispered. 

Mayfield’s eyes were gray and lost.  He asked, “Salinger?  Is that you Salinger?”

“I’m here, Major.”

“I . . . I . . . I don’t understand.” 

Finally it all made sense.  “Goli was Traveler, Major.”

Mayfield’s blanched face cracked with a smile.   The security man took off his coat, rolled it up, and placed it beneath Mayfield’s head.

“She fooled us all, Salinger.”  His voice was dry like leaves.  “Goli was Traveler . . . what a brilliant woman . . . what a magnificent piece of spying . . . we must admire her for that, don’t you think?”

“Try to lay still, Major.  We have help on the way.”

Salinger walked over to where Goli lay.  Blood drained from her chest.  Her eyes, narrow and lifeless, stared.  Her black hair fanned out on the ground around her head, and she seemed so out of place.  He was discomfited that he thought even in death, how beautiful she was. 

He heard whispering and walked back to Mayfield.  His voice was low, drained.

“To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveler’s call.”

“Some sort of poem, isn’t it, sir?”  The security man asked as a Buick bounced across the sand and slid to an abrupt stop feet from them.

“Yes,” Salinger said. 
“Just a poem.”

“. . . and how the silence surged softly backward,

when the plunging hoofs were gone.”

Mayfield’s voice died away.

“We need to go.”

“The hospital?”

“Yes, the Major—”

Salinger’s eyes burned and he rubbed them with the back of his hand.  The revolver was still in his hand.

Several men were helping the Prime Minister up from the sand.  The President sat in the automobile, his face wide and confused in the window illuminated by the Buick’s headlights cutting across the sand.

Salinger’s mind flashed back, relived the images unfolding of him sprinted up to the sedans. 
Goli at the rear of the truck.  The danger so close . . . then Churchill alone, walking ahead . . . his security men had moved on . . .

Churchill exposed . . . as though a decoy.  Salinger was sure of that now. 

-Thirty-Six-

The Abwehr knew by 2 December that Operation Long Jump had failed.

Himmler, of course, had never really believed in the success of the operation, so the news didn’t particularly upset him.  He was much more interested in the political maneuvering that lay ahead for Germany.  He was increasingly certain that Hitler would be removed and the British and Americans would accept him as a negotiator for Germany.

There were some within Canaris’s sphere of influence who thought the Big Three would surely meet again, and this would present another excellent opportunity to strike.  But Canaris understood that the Fuhrer was fed up with the failure of his secret services.

For Hitler, the safe way to look at the operation was that it never happened.

----

Within the next several days, the New York Times would publish an account of the incident, which the Nazis called a ‘fantastic invention in the true Hollywood style’.

----

A forest north of Berlin.

When Richter hadn’t heard from Traveler on the second day he began to fear the worst.

He walked along the road canvassed by large pines and firs leading to the villa.  Here, he felt more complete than anywhere else, maybe because he was miles away from the political labyrinth absorbing the fatherland.  Richter could spend hours walking along the road, reflecting back on his childhood, to a time when the world was a much simpler and safer place.

But this morning disappointment weighted heavily on him.  There had been the appointment with his physician last evening before departing Berlin.  The fever had returned the evening before.  After examining him, the doctor informed him the disease was progressing rapidly; even the medicines wouldn’t fight off the fever or the increasing pain.  How long?  Richter had asked.  Perhaps three months he was told.

And now . . . he was so deeply moved with the defeat of his operation in Tehran that even approaching death had lost its sting . . . he had come so close to success . . .

He reached the main road and turned back.

Traveler?
  What had she almost uncovered?  An unanswered question that would haunt him until the end of his days, he was certain.  Still—she had come so close.  He imagined her secret would have turned the tide of the war.  Now they would never know.

Richter reached the cobbled stone driveway when the black sedan pulled up behind him.  Frick stepped out, gloved hands curled in front of his face.  Richter’s two dogs leaped out of the back seat and darted toward him.  He reached down, petted them for a moment, then they were off running in the woods.

“We just received a communiqué,” Frick said.  “The plane never left Cairo.”

Richter turned and started down the road, Frick falling in step with him. 

“Should I understand what has happened during last twenty-four hours?”  Frick asked.

Richter turned and smiled.  “I am sorry, Frick, that I didn’t trust even you.”

“Then Leni Capek wasn’t your Traveler?”

“Simply a decoy.”

“The Iranian woman—this Goli—”

“With no loyalty toward us at all, driven only by revenge for the death of her husband,” Richter told him.  “If we had ordered her husband’s assassination, then she would have been an allied spy.”

“Amazing,” Frick whispered.

“And it almost worked.”

They had walked another twenty meters when a hint of regret ticked at Richter’s mind.  He allowed himself one more memory of Leni.  She had been simply brave and beautiful, but only a pawn.  Goli on the other hand, was special.  She was not expendable—an agent deeply buried within Soviet intelligence at the most opportune time—and now she was lost. 

When they reached the sedan, Frick opened the door.  Richter waved him away.  The soft golden light glowing from the villa’s interior through the thick windows beckoned him into the warm fireplace.  But right now he wanted to be cold.  “Let’s walk on, if you don’t mind.”  Frick fell in again with him as they left the sedan.  The dogs broke out of the birch trees, racing toward him.

It had begun to snow as they headed toward the villa.  Perhaps the last snow of the year.

In the spring his nieces would take the elektrische Zug out to the country and visit.  The two girls loved to take the twenty-mile ride on the electric train out to see their uncle.  It was the only two weeks of the year in which he truly allowed himself to rest when enemies became but shadows.  In the spring the apples, the blackcurrant, and the gooseberries would be growing again, and the girls would certainly want to sail toy boats on the lake across the way.  It would all mean a sign of new things to come. 
Rebirth.  If the physician’s timetable was correct, it would also mean the end.  Perhaps Richter should make certain he enjoyed the last spring with his nieces, because if the disease didn’t kill him, then there would be the Gestapo.

By now they had reached the glazed veranda.

“What do we do now?”  Frick asked.

Something deeply sacred had died in the German spymaster over the recent hours, a fire, a passion that would never be replaced.  But for the moment, he couldn’t help himself.  He was still a soldier.  “We find another Goli,” he said lowly.  “And we begin again to fight.”

-Thirty-Seven-

Cairo.

Mayfield died shortly before dawn.  Salinger was there, standing back in the shadows of the narrow hospital room as the old soldier took his last breath.   Churchill sent a courier with his condolences . . . something about ‘gallant men acting bravely in desperate times’.

Later, Salinger walked out into the street where the air was dry.  Tehran and Julia were but a distant dream . . . and it felt good for the moment they were so far away.

----

At midmorning Salinger was driven out to the airport where a British official and an Egyptian security guard escorted him to a hanger at the far end of the tarmac.  When they slid back the two large hanger doors, the Weaver supply plane sat like a ghost in the cool interior of the vast building.  The two officials waited at the door as Salinger went in.  He climbed up and opened the airplane door.  Behind the seat, he found the valise.

----

Salinger knew he wouldn’t go back to Tehran, at least not right away.  Instead, the next morning he checked into a room at the Shepheard Hotel.  He phoned Julia and told her that Mayfield was dead, and he had several matters to deal with before returning to the city.  Then he would like to come see her. 

After an awkward silence, she told him she’d be waiting for him.

That night Salinger went down to the hotel bar.  He sat at a table with a group of soldiers who had fought in Italy.  They laughed and drank until one soldier began to tell about the hell they had lived through on a mountain when the Germans counterattacked with their best troops and captured the ridge.  He told about how their friends had died in the mud fighting and how they finally retook the hill one day when the Germans simply walked away.

Then the bar fell silent, and something left all of them.

----

The second day Salinger stopped drinking, showered and went downstairs.  He took a long walk in the Cairo streets beneath a hot sun and that somehow reconnected him with the world.  When he came back to the hotel, he realized he was hungry, had dinner alone and at nine o’clock went up to his room.

Taking a chair by the window, Salinger sat in the dark.  Below, he heard laughter from the streets as people walked by.  When their voices had drifted away, he allowed himself to think about how closely Goli had come to succeeding.

-Thirty-Eight-

Tehran.  Three days later.

When Salinger arrived back in the city Julia met him at the airport and had cried when they hugged.  He had wanted to tell her everything right there, but Julia had insisted he wait.  Instead, at her house, they sat silently in the room for a long time before he told her everything he knew.   When he began to speak it come out as a flowing of words that he couldn’t stop.  Goli.  Traveler.  Leni, the committed spy.  Mayfield.  Salinger told Julia how he was convinced on the last night when Goli’s attack played out before the Sphinx that Churchill had set himself up as a decoy.

‘What could have been as important as that?” she had asked.

But Salinger knew he couldn’t tell her.  Ever.

When he told Julia how tired he was she insisted he go upstairs take a nap and shower and she would wait for him.

----

Later Salinger awoke and felt refreshed.  He showered and dressed in slacks and a cotton shirt and went downstairs finding the light dwindling, and a chill had fallen over the room because there was no fire.  There was the strong aroma of furniture polish.  At first Salinger thought she’d gone, but then he heard her in the kitchen.  He sat and waited.  The pleasant clatter of dishes, the gradual growing whistle of the teapot came to him. 
The gentle opening and closing of cabinet door.  All of which were small things, but the rhythm of someone doing something for him was calming.

Julia walked back into the room sitting at the far end of the couch, her hands in her lap like a schoolgirl.  “I’ve been thinking about poor Mayfield,” she whispered, “and how he was obsessed with his spy—Traveler.”

“In the end it obscured his judgment, and one can’t allow that in our business,” Salinger said.  “I would have never thought he would have allowed that.”

“He had no idea Goli was the German spy?”