A Spy in the Shadows (Spy Noir Series Book 1) (5 page)

Leni sat in the chair by the window, lighting a cigarette.  For the longest time she studied the items, certain she was close to something very important or Benjamin Fields wouldn’t have been involved.  If she had learned nothing else about the major during their brief tryst it was that he was an essential member of the British Intelligence organization.  She snuffed the cigarette out in a cut glass ashtray on the side table.  Certainly the British authorities would be looking for whoever now possessed his papers, which would make her time in Tehran limited.

She replaced the items in the box and returned it to its place on upper shelf of the closet.  In the bathroom she undressed, showered, and shortly came out wearing her favorite bathrobe. 

The bedroom was stuffy, so Leni opened a window letting in the dry morning wind.  She hesitated in front of her dressing mirror staring at a face that surprised her.  Her auburn hair needed brushing and the beauty, her ultimate weapon, was hidden within a deep weariness.

Leni lay across the bed, her arms crossed over her chest.  She would give herself a moment to rest; she had slept very little last night because of her excitement.  Hesitating she knew if she dozed, the dream of when it all began would come to her.  She always dreamed after killing.

Despite the warm room, and the dry wind through the window, Leni found herself trembling.

----

Her real name was Catherine Doehla, born into a middle-class neighborhood in Berlin.  After graduating from high school, she became a schoolteacher because her mother was a teacher.

Her father, a mapmaker and the dedicated socialist, was a happy man, fun loving, she and her brothers riding his knee as Momma cooked dinner in the pleasingly small kitchen.  On Sunday morning’s father acted out the comics, his strong arms hanging at awkward angles as he mimicked cartoon characters.

In 1939 she met a college student, Ewald, an impressionable, radical Nazi whose political passion burned even hotter than her father’s.  He convinced her, even when her father couldn’t, that she should join the German war effort and that she should also become his wife.  Shortly after they married. 

Because of the languages she spoke, the Abwehr quickly recruited her and Ewald.  She was trained at A-
Schule West, Agent School West, located between The Hague and Scheveningen on an estate called Park Zorgvliet.  After a brief six months of training at the Military Command School, Catherine and her husband were sent east, their purpose to go behind Russian lines and gather information on troop movements and strengths.  

For eight months they accomplished their mission.  Then one morning her world abruptly changed.  Beautifully talented Ewald was lost forever.  And with his death, Catherine lost her innocence, and any dream of a normal life. 

It was 29 June 1941.  Dawn.  Thick clouds pushed down on the gray streets as the first light slipped through the windows.  The Germans were sweeping forward with merciless precision, unstoppable it seemed, occupying Russian territory in huge sections.  Catherine and Ewald were in
Borisov eighty miles southwest of Smolensk, behind enemy lines and operating a radio communication near an abandoned college at the edge of town.  Their mission was to study train movements and forward the information on because within days the German Army was planning a major push eastward.

Ewald had set up his wireless on a small table in the living room of the apartment overlooking an arched courtyard.  They had been in operation for two days when the Russians came.

Catherine distinctively remembered their faces, the four members of Soviet Intelligence Service barging through the door, their intrusion covered by the rumbling of a nearby train.  Ewald sat at the small table tapping out wireless messages—troop movements, supply train schedules—until a rifle butt slammed against his head as the other two pushed Catherine roughly to the floor as she ran for a window.

They were led into the kitchen where they faced a grim-looking Russian officer sitting at the table where the tools of their trade were laid out, a simple sending unit, an assortment of inks, and three sets of forged identity papers.  Convincing pieces of evidence betraying their purpose.  

The officer questioned them harshly for over an hour, banging his fist on the table, shouting profanities.  Then he would calm down, light a cigarette and drink tea, discussing their grave situation as though he were a country gentleman.

Catherine was so proud of how her husband stood up to the brutal interrogation that morning.  But the facts were they were German spies and that meant that they would die.  They were offered a final chance to confess, to tell them exactly what this was all about.  The officer hinted that at the least he could make their death painless and that was the best he could offer.  Ewald would have none of it, and he only asked for mercy toward his wife.  The Russians laughed at his request, as two of them dragged him downstairs and out into the courtyard.  Catherine was forced to watch in horror from an upstairs window as they forced her husband to his knees in the mud of the narrow courtyard.  Her heart froze as the revolver was placed at the back of his skull.  Ewald looked up and their eyes met at that chilling moment just before death.  Catherine turned away, hiding her face in her hands an instant before the shot echoed across the courtyard.  Just that quickly her life and hopes were gone. 

Later that night she would appreciate the swiftness of her husband’s death.

The Russians tied her up and left her in the bedroom to ponder her fate for several hours.  She could hear their voices grow louder and braver, and knew that they were drinking.

Aroused from a fitful sleep hours later, they roughly dragged Catherine to her feet and into the other room.  They quickly untied her, undressed her, and then tied her up again.  The Russians yelled like schoolboys on a soccer field as the first one had his way with her.  Then the second had her.  Then, the third.  Her mind skipped in and out of consciousness.  These animals were beyond considering what she knew.  Information no longer mattered because they had become something else—ruthless, filthy animals, violating her because they could.  How long this went on, Leni had lost all sense of time, her mind refusing the consistency of time or space or surroundings.

The fourth one, the officer, had other ideas when it came his turn.  He yelled at the others, and they untied her from the chair and she was forced to kneel.  He grabbed her hair and forced her to look up at him.  His face was shined with sweat, his eyes drunk and wild.

The door flew open with a loud report.  Shots were fired.

Catherine’s mind tried desperately to understand what was going on around her.  The officer’s grip relaxed and she bolted upright with all her strength, driving her knee into his groin.  He fell back with a painful yelp.

When it was over three Russians were dead.  The room smelled of burning cordite.  Her rescuers placed a blanket around her and took her into the kitchen, built a fire for her in the narrow fireplace, and gave her warm tea.  It was then that she told them they would find her husband’s body in the courtyard.

A small-framed man dressed in a raincoat with a serious face came through the door.  Catherine, teacup clasped in her hands, watched as he walked from room to room, stopping to whisper with several of the men.  Then he came to her, removed his overcoat and stood in front of the fire.

“Are you feeling better?”

He was gaunt, middle aged, and even in the weak light Catherine could see his face was colorless and terribly thin.  She didn’t answer.  Instead she took another gulp of tea.

“Would you like a cigarette?” He asked.

“Yes, please,” she said.

He sat beside her.  “My name is Theodor Richter.  I’m terribly sorry we didn’t arrive sooner to disrupt this sorry affair.  But, you are safe now and will be sent to Berlin tonight.”

Shortly after that the Russian officer was brought from the bedroom.  His face was swollen and
red, and now full of fear.  Richter reached in his coat pocket and produced a pistol.  He laid it in her lap and nodded toward the Russian.  “As soon as you have finished your business here.”

Then they left her alone with the officer.

For two months she was given time to recuperate at a personal home in Berlin.  There she regained her health, though she still had awful nightmares about Ewald.   

Late one afternoon a week later, Theodor Richter came and took her for a walk in the park.  She remembered walking along the tunneled allees, their footsteps muted on the damp, matted floor of copper leaves blanketing the sidewalk.  In the distance, a woman’s call for her children echoed in the falling dusk.  They walked until they came to several benches and took a seat beneath thick-canvassed yellow trees.

It was then that Richter told her of his plan for her to be a deep-cover agent.  When she seemed surprised, the German spymaster smiled slightly, and told her, “Why, Catherine, it’s obvious.  Being so beautiful allows you to be a spy.”

That was when she told him that she was pregnant.

----

Three months after her son Georgi was born, Catherine was sent to Innsbruck to eliminate an agent suspected of turning over information to the American OSS station in Switzerland. 

Catherine had waited two days without any word from Richter.  Though she knew it was impossible, she sometimes wondered if he had forgotten her. Her thoughts of poor Georgi constantly weighed on her. 

To pass the time Leni played a simple game. 

She was supposed to be a tourist, so she became one, taking morning walks along the Maria-
Theresia Strasse into old Innsbruck where she found cafes with bread and coffee for breakfast.  Each morning she strolled through the Alpenzoo.  After lunch it was either a tour of churches, such as the St. Theodor Cathedral.  Or castles, like the Schlass Ambras Castle.  She liked the Anatomical Museum so much that she visited it twice.  She strolled through numerous botanical gardens, all the time wondering what the future held for someone like herself who had chosen such an occupation.

On the third morning, Catherine sensed that the time was near.

That evening when she arrived back at the hotel there was a telegram waiting for her.  She sat in the luxurious lobby and read the message.  Her target had arrived in the city.

----

The next afternoon, Catherine killed the traitor with a knife to the heart while they sat together—strangers in conversation—on a loading station bench.

That night she dreamed of Ewald.

The next morning, restless, she took an early stroll through Rathaus Park and wandered through the grounds of the University of Vienna.  There, she found a lover, a young art student from Prague, who interested her for the night.  But the next morning as they awakened among tossed, sunlight-drenched sheets, she broke his heart and dismissed him.

----

Berlin.  Six months later.

Beneath bright noonday skies the Mercedes drove through grounds shaded with silver birches and oak trees in the affluent suburb located in the western part of the city.  Then the staff car pulled off the main road taking Catherine through the entrance of
Kaiserin Auguste Victoria Haus.  Richter had personally seen that Georgi was treated at VAVH, founded in 1909 by the German Empress, and considered one of the best children’s medical facilities in Nazi Germany.               

Dr. Rudolf Hoffman, chief of Pediatric Care, waited for her at the front entrance.  He was a large man, six foot four at least, with shoulders that drooped forward.  Thinned, ash-colored hair was combed straight back on his head.  He led her to lift at the end of the narrow hallway where they got off on the second floor as nurses bustled about, and then went across a wide room.  Dr. Hoffman, hands jammed deeply into the pockets of his white jacket, led her to a glass partition.  A thick, green curtain behind the glass shrouded Catherine’s view into the room.

“He’s receiving the best care, I can assure you,” he said.  “But let me warn you, this will appear a lot worse than it is.  He is isolated for his protection.”

Her heart sank. 

“We have reached the prognosis Georgi is sick from a disease of the lungs.  He possesses a weak immune system to begin with.  Possibly inherited,” he said.  “That sort of disability allows his lungs to become congested and thus the infection set in.”

“I want to see him.”

“Certainly.”  Hoffman pecked on the glass with a long finger, and the curtain parted slowly.

Catherine stepped to the window and peered in.  A male nurse draped in a surgical gown and heavy gloves opened the curtains.

Numerous mechanical apparatus, contraptions of all descriptions, crowded the room.  Breathing bellows and glass drip bottles.  The lights were soft; a small square window above a single bed was closed creating half shadows.  Beside the bed was a metal table cluttered with various bottles and metal trays.  Catherine sucked in a sharp breath.  There among the clean, white sheets, finally she saw her son’s terribly blanched face.  “What are the odds that he’ll survive?”

“We don’t know yet.”

----

1:20 p.m. 

Catherine watched through the rain-specked window at the familiar streets of Berlin, a town she fondly remembered as a child as the Mercedes sedan sped along the Tauenzienstrasse, the wide expanse, then turned off onto a side street from Wittenberg Platz.  Before the war, she considered this place a paradise, an incredible wonderland for a small girl.  She remembered an old aunt, and a vast, ancient house that always smelled of bread.  Gardens along the Isar River where she sailed toy boats in mirrored lakes.  Another glance out the window and she recognized that they were along the Marienplatz, an expanse of open cafes, then down a side street, and Rosen-str, a tangle of narrow streets and lanes.  The Mercedes stopped in front of an open café shaded with large chestnut trees.  Catherine stepped out and was immediately greeted by a tall, well-suited man with penetrating eyes.