Sleeper Agent (6 page)

“Heil Hitler! Here is Brigadeführer Arnold. Put me through.” He listened for a moment, his face clouding in anger. “No!” he snapped. “I must speak with him
personally!”
Again he listened, scowling. “I am not interested in listening to excuses!” His voice became ominously calm and flat. “Your name and rank, please?”

He wrote quickly in his notebook.

“I trust,
Colonel
Lutze, that you realize that the responsibility for
any
consequence, however grave, will rest with you alone if I do not get to speak with the Reichsleiter within the next sixty seconds!” He listened, a thin, malicious smile on his lips. “I shall wait.” He waited. Impatiently he drummed his fingers on the tabletop.

The commandant watched him in silence. He started to look toward the wall clock—but remembered. Instead he glanced at his watch.

Less than forty seconds had gone by when Arnold spoke into the phone: “Herr Reichsleiter? Heil Hitler! . . . It is in order. We have found the perfect subject. He will report to you in Berlin on April the twentieth.

Heil Hitler!”

He hung up. He turned to the commandant. “You will see that Kessler reports for his briefing at the Führer-bunker in Berlin at the specified time. Without fail!”

“Yes, Herr Brigadeführer.”

“You will proceed at once with the final dissolution of the Sleeper Agent project and the closing down and evacuation of Schloss Ehrenstein.”

“It will be done.”

The civilian nodded. “You are to be congratulated, Colonel. You have turned out an excellent man for a mission of vital importance for the survival of the Third Reich.”

“Thank you, Herr Brigadeführer. May I ask, to whom shall Kessler report in Berlin?”

‘To the Reichsleiter personally. Reichsleiter Martin Bormann.”

The colonel pulled the dossier to him. He opened it. For a moment he contemplated it Then, in a meticulous hand, under the code name Rudi A-27, he wrote:

KOKON

PART 2

21-29 APRIL 1945

1

Her eyes hated him.

She was a pretty girl. Perhaps twenty-six. Her blond hair, drawn back tightly, was gathered by a thin blue ribbon at the nape of her neck and allowed to hang loosely down her back. Her tanned face was fresh and soft, but her troubled eyes were dark with hate. More than hate. Suspicion. Uncertainty. And fear.

Thomas Jaeger knew the look. Knew it well. He had seen it cloud the bleak faces of countless suspects, male and female, young and old, military and civilian, from the shores of Omaha Beach through Normandy and Luxembourg, across the Rhine and through the heartland of Germany to this little Bavarian town of Grafenwöhr nestled in the forest clad mountains twenty-five miles southeast of Bayreuth. Here his Counter Intelligence team, one of the six teams of CIC Detachment 212, had set up shop only the day before, even as the place was being secured by elements of the 1lth Armored Division.

Grafenwöhr was a town like so many others in Bavaria. Picturesque, colorful, distinguished only by the presence of a huge German Chemical Warfare Service dump concealed in the woods surrounding it. Stacks and stacks of incendiary bombs and poison gas projectiles. The Ordnance boys had estimated over three million of them. Enough to wipe out all of Europe.

The girl had wandered into town—she, her girl friend and her little boy, who was four years old, healthy, cute—and obviously pure Aryan.

Their clothes, though of good quality, were dirty and bedraggled. They said they came from the Czech town of Pilsen, some seventy-five miles to the east, and had been on the road for days, carrying their scant belongings with them, in an effort to reach their home town of Bayreuth before being cut off and trapped by the rapidly advancing Russian troops.

He believed them.

But it was CIC routine to screen everyone who crossed the line from enemy-held territory, military or civilian. And there were literally thousands of them.

The front was beginning to break up. Hitler’s thousand-year Third Reich lay gutted, cut in half like a chicken carcass on a butcher’s block.

The situation was unpredictable from hour to hour, from village to village. Fierce resistance and heavy fire-fighting, especially where Waffen SS troops were in command, were still the order of the day. And yet in some sectors the hordes of surrendering German troops were so great it became impossible to handle them. As in Grafenwöhr.

Columns of Nazi troops, crowded onto their own vehicles, fully armed and under the command of their own officers, rumbled through on their way to the rear and captivity—with a single GI as both guide and guard; German staff cars, trucks and Volkswagens rubbed fenders with American half-tracks, 2½-ton trucks and jeeps on the narrow roads Ramrod German officers with white armbands reading
LIAISON OFFICER WITH U.S. ARMY
shared the streets with American MP’s, and field orders were issued in both English and German by American and German commanding officers. Tom had seen one entire battalion of Nazi troops marching smartly through town, unguarded, carrying a white sign before them as if it were a conquered enemy standard:
THESE ARE PW’S. DIRECT TO NEAREST CAGE.
So many individual soldiers were trying to give themselves up that nobody could find time to bother with them—even when they anxiously accosted the GI’s, holding out their paybooks and literally begging to be taken prisoner. The Americans would just point to the rear and order them to march.

Mixed in with the hectic military traffic came German civilians fleeing Czechoslovakia before the Russian onslaught; petty Nazi officials, who only weeks before had been the haughty masters of Sudetenland; dependents of the occupation forces; and others who thought it best to seek safety from the “savage Slavs.”

On foot, crammed into all kinds of vehicles, pushing carts or bicycles, they streamed into the little Bavarian town. They were ordered to stay off the main roads so as not to impede military traffic, but this rule was constantly violated. It was the duty of the CIC to screen this flood of people before allowing them to proceed farther into Germany—behind the American lines.

The girl sitting so tensely before Tom and his partner, CIC agent Larry Scott, was one of these fugitives.

They had interrogated her companion first. Her name was Liselotte Greiner. She had answered their routine questions satisfactorily. Her papers were as valid as any, and her story had been plausible. She was obviously intelligent, but her handsome face had seemed hard. Perhaps it was only a resentful animosity she could not conceal. But she had been in complete control of herself, even a little haughty.

They had not liked her. But it was not their job to like or dislike their subjects. Only to screen them. They had been all set to send the two girls on their way after the usual cursory examination which under the circumstances constituted a screening.

But Tom had felt uneasy when they started questioning the second girl. Her name was Maria Bauer. Where her companion had been composed, she was nervous. Where they had seen only hostility and venom in the eyes of her friend, here there was also fear. Where the other’s face had been only hard and resentful, hers was also vulnerable and fearful.

Tom recognized his nagging feeling of uneasiness. He knew what it meant. A hunch. A hunch that all was not as it seemed. A hunch that his subject was concealing something. A hunch that could not be explained logically but which was a familiar sensation to every seasoned interrogator. Seldom wrong, it had to be followed up.

He glanced at Larry. His partner met his glance and nodded imperceptibly. He, too, felt it, Tom realized.

Many subjects were nervous and ill at ease under interrogation. It was normal. But this girl had something to hide. Something she was in deadly fear they would discover.

Tom once more studied the little gray
Kennkarte
in his hand. It was the standard German identification card. It seemed in order, crisp and clean. He looked at the date of

issue: 17 September 1943. He frowned. “When was your
Kennkarte
issued to you?” he asked. His German was perfect.

The tip of the girl’s tongue flitted between her dry lips in a darting motion. “On September seventeenth, 1943.”

Perhaps that was it, he thought. Perhaps that was what had alerted him, nudged his subconscious into kindling his hunch. The girl had fished out her identification card from a large purse she nervously clutched to her. It was in too good a condition to have been treated like that for more than a year and a half.

“You’ve had this card since then?”

“Yes.”

Slowly he turned the card over in his hand. Thoughtfully he examined it “It’s in pretty good shape for being that old, isn’t it?”

Again the tip of her tongue darted swiftly between her bloodless lips. “I . . . I didn’t carry it with me for a long time after I got it,” she whispered. “I . . . I left it at the house.”

Tom looked questioningly at her. “In Pilsen? In a strange town? You
do
come from
Bayreuth,
don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t think it necessary to carry your German identification card with you—in
Czechoslovakia?
” His tone of voice eloquently conveyed his incredulity.

“No.” It was barely a whisper.

“What would you have done if you’d been picked up?” Larry asked suddenly. “Or had an accident?”

The girl looked quickly toward the source of this new thrust. “I . . . I don’t know,” she whispered. “I . . . never thought . . .”

Tom frowned at the
Kennkarte.
There was . . . something. But, dammit, it would take the whole bag of tricks, no doubt, to get at the truth. Time. And time they did not have. There were hundreds of others still to be screened. Hell, he thought, what kind of Mata Hari could this frightened kid be, anyway? There might be another way to get to her. A quicker way.

He smiled at her. His voice was friendly and relaxed. “Very well, Frau Bauer. Your papers seem to be in order.” He gave the
Kennkarte
back to her. He watched her closely.

The reaction he expected did not come. The tenseness in the girl’s face did not change. The fear in her eyes did not diminish.

He was puzzled. He had been sure she would relax once her identification had been accepted. He watched her. Watched her slender hands unconsciously twisting and untwisting the heavy shoulder strap on the bag she clutched to her.

Something else?

“Frau Bauer!” His voice was suddenly sharp. “Give me your bag!”

There was a barely perceptible gasp from the girl. The blood drained from her face, leaving her tanned cheeks a sickly gray.

Something else . . .

Without a word she handed him the bag.

He took it. He turned it upside down. Its contents spilled out upon the table. The girl watched, mesmerized. He moved the objects about. A large comb. A purse with a little money. A purple hair ribbon. A lipstick. Handkerchief. A small pocket knife. A piece of paper with several safety pins attached. A child’s toy whistle. A fountain pen. And . . . ah! There it was.

He picked it up. A solid gold medal, twice the size of a silver dollar and many times as heavy, with a bas-relief religious motif embossed on both sides.

He had found the “something else.”

The medal must represent a fortune to her, he thought. Her only means of starting a new life for herself and her boy, once back in Bayreuth, the only concrete hope in her nightmare world.

It explained her extreme nervousness. She was simply afraid he’d liberate the only thing of value she possessed. He felt sorry for her. His guilt feelings began to stir again. Angrily he suppressed them. He knew damned well how irrational they were.

He handed the heavy gold piece back to the girl. “Here,” he said, his voice reassuring. “You’d better hold on to this.”

She took the coin. Her fingers touched his. They were cold.

So certain had he been that he’d found the reason for her uneasiness that he almost missed her reaction. Or rather,
lack
of reaction. The girl did not relax. She showed no relief as she held the gold medal tightly clenched in her fist.

Tom shot a glance at Larry, but his partner’s attention was on the release report he’d already begun to fill out.

Tom felt his pulse quicken. He had misread the girl completely. He suddenly knew he had to follow through. He scooped up the rest of the girl’s belongings and dumped them into her handbag. He gave it to her.

She seemed to relax. She clutched the bag to her. She even looked a little smug as Tom unhurriedly reached over and picked up the release form filled out by Larry. He appeared to study it, but his thoughts were racing.

It was not the medal, not the gold value of it that concerned the girl. He was sure of it. It was easy to verify.

He looked up at her. He smiled. “That’s a very interesting medal you have there,” he commented. “Let me see it again.” He held out his hand.

At once the girl dug into her bag and came up with the gold medal. She handed it to Tom. “
Bitte,
” she said.

She watched him as he looked the coin over. But there was no anxiety in her large eyes. Rather a certain . . . expectation, a seeming eagerness to please her interrogator. Deliberately Tom put the coin in his pocket.

The girl sighed. It was more a sigh of relief than of concern. The gold medal meant nothing to her. He was certain of it now. It had to be something else.

The bag itself!

He suddenly reached over and grabbed the bag from the startled girl. He spilled its familiar contents out onto the table. Quickly he examined the empty bag. He tested, the seams, felt the lining and ripped it open. Hidden beneath it was a folded piece of paper. He slipped it out.

The girl had uttered not a word. Ashen-faced, she sat in her chair, an unnatural rigidity stiffening her young body, her eyes dark with fear and shock.

Tom unfolded the paper. It was a letter-sized document. Official. It was headed,
GEHEIME STAATSPOLIZEI GEHEIME KOMMANDOSACHE—GESTAPO
.
TOP SECRET
!

It was a routine document. Tom read it quickly. It dealt with the transfer of a certain SS Standartenführer, Gestapo Colonel Wolfgang Steinmetz, from Prague to Pilsen on special assignment. It was dated two weeks before.

Tom was puzzled. It made no sense. Why would she be wcarrying a document like that? Hidden in the lining of her purse? He passed the document to Larry. He picked up the completed release form and slowly tore it in half. His eyes bored into hers. “Who is this Colonel Steinmetz?” he demanded. “Why are
you
carrying his transfer orders?”

The girl’s lips trembled, but she remained silent.

Larry pushed the Mandatory Arrest and War Criminals Wanted List across the table to Tom. His finger stabbed a name:
STEINMETZ, WOLFGANG
(39) ss
STANDARTENFüHRER.
The colonel was a wanted man. A very much wanted man!

Tom picked up the field telephone. He cranked the handle. “This is Agent Jaeger,” he said into the mouthpiece. “CIC Detachment 212. Get me Captain Elliott, Sixteenth Field Hospital. They’re in Kemnath.”

He waited. The girl was staring at him. She did not understand his words, but she knew it was her fate being decided.

“Ell?” Tom spoke with sober quiet. “I need to borrow one of your nurses. . . . No, no. A body search. We’ve got a subject here, a girl. She has to be searched. Thoroughly.” He listened for a moment. He frowned. “Oh, come on, Ell. You can shake one of them loose for a few hours. I’ll send a jeep for her.”

Again he listened, his face grim. “Okay, Ell. I got you. Thanks.” He hung up and turned to Larry. “No go.”

“Dammit!” Larry sounded thoroughly disgusted.

“The Twenty-sixth ran into a pocket of SS. Beat the hell out of their forward units. They can’t even spare an aspirin.” He looked at the girl sitting tensely before him. He stood up. “Let’s get on with it,” he said.