Going from Holtenau, Cross must have passed through the clutter of constructors’ huts, dumps of building material and half-built structures of the “island”. But why? To look at – or sabotage – the one finished building, the power station needed to shunt those great gates to and fro?
Far behind, an old car with its hood up against the sun and moving no faster than their cab, turned onto the bridge behind them. It was still behind and only reaching the crest of the bridge when they turned right into Holtenau and Ranklin told the cabbie to drive them through the village along the Canal side.
Here, the solid old houses and equally solid trees were a calm contrast to the racket and rawness of the site they had left on the other side. The old locks were busy, but nobody can rush a lock. Cargo steamers, schooners, barges and their tugs all oozed gently in and out with no more fuss than a few hoots and commands and some deft rope-handling.
“A big business,” O’Gilroy commented. “Must cost a mint.”
“They must charge tolls,” Ranklin said, “but the Canal was really built for the Navy. Probably they could shift the whole fleet from the Baltic to the North Sea in twenty-four hours. In two days, a dreadnought could go from harbour here to bombarding London – our Navy permitting.”
Abruptly, they were past the locks, through the village and with the wide inlet of Kiel harbour ahead. The land ended in a slight knoll topped by a stubby lighthouse and a statue of Wilhelm I, just as shown in the engraving on the bearer bond. Ranklin also remembered the two-storey mock-medieval building alongside, which turned out to be a cafe-restaurant. The cabbie had assumed that was where they were heading, and since it was never too early for O’Gilroy …
They ordered coffee – perhaps O’Gilroy was still recovering from last night – and sat on a sunny terrace overlooking the inlet. Around them, a small crowd of expensively dressed race-watchers stared through binoculars at the four big racing yachts, now slow-weaving white triangles on the northern horizon.
“Ye know,” O’Gilroy said softly, “if’n I was a spy, which thank God I’m not, I’d mebbe set here and watch everything that happened with the German Navy.”
He had a point: without moving more than his head, Ranklin could see every ship that came in and out of Kiel harbour and of the Canal as well – and as far as Britain was concerned, it was the Canal that mattered; a fleet ignoring the Canal and sailing out into the Baltic would only be bad news for the Russians. But you could watch the Canal itself more easily and less conspicuously from elsewhere along its 60-mile length: perhaps rent a room in Rendsburg, just a few miles inland, right on the Canal bank.
He nodded and asked: “But how would you get the information out? By letter? In wartime when it mattered?”
“The old problem,” O’Gilroy agreed.
“Of course,” Ranklin remembered, “Cross was a signals specialist in the Navy, his father said.”
O’Gilroy raised his eyebrows. “Was he, now? Wireless?”
For once, Ranklin had some technical knowledge that O’Gilroy hadn’t picked up. “Somebody told me that most ships can’t send wireless signals for more than a hundred and fifty miles. I doubt you could have secret equipment for sending over twice that range.”
“And he wouldn’t have laid a secret cablewire, neither.”
“No – but,” Ranklin remembered the cablegrams, “the public cable from Denmark would still be working in a war. From Korsor, just five or six hours by ship.”
O’Gilroy’s eyes widened, then narrowed as a wide shadow fell across the table.
“Is frei?” Gunther Arnold asked, but sat down anyway.
25
Ranklin’s heart stopped, but his mind raced frantically down a list of possible next moves. O’Gilroy’s mind chose one: in a blink of thought the terrace became fighting ground, he mapped the chairs and tables as obstacles, hunted for weapons, assessed escape routes.
Then, as Gunther’s moustache-topped smile widened, the same realisation seeped into both of them: if Gunther was here on business, they could betray him just as he could them.
“Since you do not ask, I am very well, thank you,” Gunther said, smiling. “Or not so well, thank you to Mr O’Gilroy. It was a mistake to trust so much in information from those royalist dreamers. They are not so great a loss.”
He was wearing white: flannel suit, shirt, shoes, grass homburg hat, together with lime-green spectacles. Given his size, all that whiteness brought an unreal lightness, like a huge empty egg. He turned to the hovering waiter and ordered a round of Pils.
“Are you driving an old green car?” Ranklin asked as calmly as his now over-compensating heart allowed.
“You have shaved your moustache. I prefer it. So you saw me behind you?”
“I assumed it was the police.”
Gunther winced. “To be seen following is not good, but to be mistaken for the police is an insult – No! I do not pick any more duels.”
“The police are probably following us – perhaps here already or at least going to check on who we talked to.” If they weren’t going to betray each other on purpose, Ranklin didn’t want it to happen by accident. If Gunther was known in Kiel, it wouldn’t help their own shaky pretence.
But he was unworried. “I am a simple merchant from Munich, as many there will testify. It is not my fault if I loyally come to see the All-Highest sail his magnificent yacht (probably built by funds borrowed from the Guelph treasure) to victory and happen to meet two disguised British agents.”
Odd, Ranklin thought: even among ourselves he says “agents” and not “spies”. But so had Cross. Odd. The waiter brought the beer, Ranklin lit his pipe, and O’Gilroy glowered. He was annoyed that Ranklin had spotted the car and he had not, and he liked enemies to stay enemies: the cool, confident Gunther provoked him.
Unnoticing or uncaring, Gunther swallowed half his Pils, grunted contentedly and wiped froth off his moustache. “I trust you come from the proper Bureau, and not those Naval or Military departments? Please to give my respects to your Chief. And when we have more time, you must explain to me the organisation of the Bureau, it can only be my fault it seems most muddled in my mind. And you are not offended by my unkind remarks about British agents when we met at the General’s Chateau? Good. A businessman does not speak well of his competitors; I am sure you are both most excellent agents. Now, you wish to know who killed Lieutenant Cross, and you want only the most reliable information. So, I am at your service.”
Ranklin gave him a boyish smile. The hail-spy-well-met act was, he fancied, because he was a New Boy. But it was attractive, in the way that army officers feel a kinship with their enemies who have suffered the same danger, mud and imbecile superiors.
He didn’t think Gunther knew, or cared, who had killed Cross: it was barely marketable information. But he might well be interested in what Cross had been doing to get himself killed – in effect, buying whilst pretending to be selling.
“I hear Dragan el Vipero is in town,” he said casually, and was ready to swear that Gunther hadn’t known that. “But I’m still not convinced he killed the King of Greece.”
“Do you believe it was Apis?” Gunther asked, just as casually. “Apis” – the sacred bull of ancient Egypt – was Colonel Dimitrijevic, head of Serbian Intelligence and perhaps scalier organisations.
“I believe anything of Apis,” Ranklin said, “except that he pulls the trigger himself nowadays. But Reimers …”
“Steinhauer,” Gunther corrected him gently. “Strutting about in a Kapitanleutnant’s uniform.”
“Whichever you prefer,” Ranklin said, thinking quickly. So Reimers also called himself Steinhauer. “He prefers Reimers. But whichever, he seemed worried about Dragan.”