Codes? They didn’t share codes. We have ours and they have theirs. Never the twain…
Ruthven-Greene took a small leather-bound diary from his inside pocket. A sheet of white paper larger than the book itself was sticking out. He extracted it and handed it to Cal.
‘I’m sure you’re familiar with this,’ he said.
Cal took one look at it and hoped he had not turned white-or worse, blushed red. The note was preceded by several lines of numerical gobbledegook, but in the centre of the page, in capital letters, it read ‘TIN MAN DEAD’.
‘You’ve broken our code?’
‘Well. Yes and no.’
‘What’s the yes?’
‘We broke it last year. Best part of twelve months ago, in fact. We regularly monitor all your embassy transmissions from the Cape to Cairo, from Timbuktu to Tokyo. Sorry. But there you are. We’re not allies. Well, not yet at any rate.’
‘And the no?’
‘It isn’t taken from any communiqué of yours. We got it from a German radio transmission. We’ve cracked your code. And I’m lather afraid the Germans have too.’
‘Again?’ Cal thought, but said nothing. It was only a year since MI5 had caught a cypher clerk at the US Embassy in London passing the code to the Germans. The British had tried him in camera-they weren’t going to make the Americans look like fools-locked him up and thrown away the key, for the duration at least. It was beyond embarrassment. There was scarcely a word strong enough to describe it. As a result the Americans had tightened up their security, changed all the codes-which, it now seemed, the British had cracked immediately-and suffered an on/off, hot/cold relationship with their MI5 counterparts on the sharing of information. Sometimes it seemed they told you everything, at others as though they trusted you about as far as you could chuck a buffalo-and always they asked for more. Since the war began, and increasingly since Winston Churchill took over, the British had become a nation of Oliver Twists. There was nothing they wouldn’t ask for, whilst guarding and rationing anything you might reasonably expect from them. It was, he thought, a bit like being importuned by a beggar in top hat and tails. And-worse yet-it was only four months since an American magazine had printed the design specifications of the next generation of British warplanes, for no better reason than that it had not occurred to the War Department in Washington that they might be secret. Cal could readily see why the British might be touchy on the matter of secrets-and it required but a short leap of imagination to realise that of course they’d spy on the Americans. Why wouldn’t they? And if they spied upon the Germans as they in turn were spying upon the Americans to retrieve information third hand via two separate codes-well, scratch it if you can.
Ruthven-Greene indulged himself in one of his teeth-sucking, airy pauses. ‘Now-about your man Stahl. They’re onto this bloke, I should think that’s pretty obvious by now. We must have him. Really we must. Sorry to insist and all that, but we really must.’
Cal was startled, not by the juxtaposition of the names-if they knew his codename why would they not know his real name? But two and two were not making four.
‘Reggie-I think you’ve just crossed a wire. Stahl is the Tin Man. Stahl is dead. He’s dead, goddammit. They buried him ten days ago. Full military honours. Hitler was there. Heydrich was there. Half the papers in Germany carried the story on their front pages!’
‘No. That’s just my point. He isn’t dead.’
It was not in Cal’s nature to seek confrontation-he did not enjoy confrontation-but it seemed inevitable that there would be one. Perhaps the best thing was to get it over with as soon as possible.
‘Reggie-are you going to talk in riddles all afternoon?’
Ruthven-Greene dug around in his pockets as though searching for the last stick of gum or a book of matches. He handed Cal a typed sheet folded over several times. It was tight and grubby as though it had sat in his jacket pocket forgotten for days and could not possibly be of any importance. But, he knew, with the British that was often the way, the trivial stood on, perched upon with full blasting dignity, the world-shattering passed across as though it were an afterthought. Cal unwrapped the sheet of paper.
‘It’s a de-crypt of a message we received about a week after Stahl is supposed to have died. Very hush-hush,’ Ruthven-Greene explained.
Cal read it-curiouser and curiouser.
‘This guy says he saw Stahl alive after the air raid. I don’t get it.’
‘He’s our man in Berlin. Well placed. Corporal in the Abwehr, as a matter of fact. If he says he saw Stahl alive after the air raid, then he did. You’ll note that he confirms from a source in Heydrich’s own office that Stahl didn’t die on the seventeenth. No two ways about it. I gather your sources, like ours initially, reported him as having died in the raid.’
Cal let the paper fall. A web of loyalties and assumed alliances tearing themselves up and reforming in his mind even as he spoke.
‘Yes,’ he said softly.
‘Then I think we’ve reached the same point. Two questions. Why would Heydrich go to all this trouble to convince the Boche he’s dead?’
‘Perhaps because he thinks he is dead?’
‘Good Lord, no. Stahl was his deputy, well, one of his deputies, for seven years. I’d say he’s the one man Stahl could not fool. Whoever they buried, and I rather think they needed a body for that, it wasn’t Stahl; and, if there was a body, Heydrich would have torn it to pieces, and I do not mean that as a figure of speech, to be certain of his identity.’
Cal looked around the room, as though seeking reassurance in the solidity of the furniture.
‘Two questions, you said. What’s the other?’
‘Much the same as the first really. Why would your Tin Man go to all this trouble to convince the Boche he’s dead?’
‘Reggie-I’ve been told to co-operate with you. Don’t play games with me. You haven’t come all the way to Zurich to have me tell you Stahl spied for us. You know that already or you wouldn’t be here.’
‘Quite. I saw General Gelbroaster the day I set off. He gave me the bare facts. Sort of wanted you to fill me in with the detail.’
‘Sort of?’
‘You know, first hand. Yon knew the blighter after all.’
‘Is this room secure?’
‘Secure?’
‘I mean,’ said Cal, ‘can we talk?’
‘My dear fellow, we are talking.’
Reggie tucked into a sandwich. Cal found his appetite had vanished. He’d dreaded this moment ever since he got Gelbroaster’s ‘Tell RG everything.’
‘Stahl is Austrian. I’ve never been certain of his age but I’d think he was in his early thirties, say thirty-two or -three. He joined the Nazi Party in 1929, and a couple of months later he contacted the Polish Secret Service and offered to spy for them. You’ll recall, the Poles looked like bigger players in Europe at that time than they’ve done at any time since. It wasn’t such an odd move. They checked him out, and took the risk. They trained him. He’s not the kind of man you’d ever want to go up against without a tommy-gun in your hand. Stahl then joined the SS-must have been one of the pioneers, certainly in the first five hundred-and then moved sideways into the SD. Early on he met Heydrich and at some point in the mid-thirties Heydrich took him up, became, I guess, his patron in the party. At which point the quality of Stahl’s information became almost priceless. At least it would have been if there’d been the political will to evaluate it. He supplied the Poles with infrequent but accurate high-level information right up to the invasion of Poland.
‘About a year before this some bright spark in Polish Intelligence foresaw the outcome pretty clearly and offered Stahl to the British. If you’ve been honestly briefed by your own people, Reggie, you’ll know that your own side turned him down. There were plenty of people about that time, in the summer of thirty-eight, in any country you care to name, telling themselves the war was not going to happen. So the Poles offered him to us. We took Stahl. They flew me out about the time of the fall of Warsaw to run him from here. It’s pretty much what I’ve done ever since.