Kate smiled, her face crinkling up with laughter… and then there was a knock at the door. Her face went pale instantly; it wasn’t a hesitant knock, or a friendly knock, it was the knock of someone standing there with the full weight of authority behind him. Davall knew, instantly, who it was and, composing himself as best as he could, went to the door. Three Germans stood there; an officer and two subordinates, all wearing SS uniforms.
The leader stepped forward. “Mr Gregory Davall?”
“Yes,” Davall said, carefully. “That’s me.”
“We have instructions from the Reichgovernor of this town to take Mrs Kate Davall into custody,” the leader said. Davall didn’t hear his words for a long moment. “You will present her to us at once.”
“No,” Davall said, desperately. He wanted to shout at Kate, ordering her to run and hide, but it was already too late. “You can’t have her…”
The leader swung a punch into Davall’s chest and he folded up, gasping with pain. One of the soldiers stayed and watched him, assault rifle pointed directly at his head, as the other two walked into the house as if they owned the place. He heard, through the pain and the roaring in his ears, Kate’s sudden scream and a cry of pain from James; a moment later, Kate was being hustled back out of the house, her hands cuffed behind her back and tears running down her face. Davall tried to stand up, wanting to kill all the Germans with his bare hands, only to discover a rifle pointed directly into his eyes.
“You will remain in your home until the ban on moving outside your home is lifted,” the German leader said flatly. Davall concentrated on trying to memorise the German’s face, noting the dark eyes and the beetle-brow, promising himself that he would kill him, whatever it took. “Unless the people responsible for the attack on Brigadefuhrer Deininger surrender themselves, the hostages will suffer their punishment.”
“But… that’s not fair,” Davall protested hopelessly. He tried to keep the cold knowledge of what he could offer to save her life from showing on his face. “She doesn’t know anything that you can use!”
“She is a citizen of the Greater German Reich,” the German said flatly. “The lives of everyone in the Reich are dedicated to maintaining the Reich, but someone within this town, someone who has sworn loyalty to the Reich, has decided instead to turn on the Reich. If that person does not surrender, the hostages, including your wife, will carry out their duty to the Reich and die in their place.”
“That’s madness,” Davall said. He was ashamed of his own weakness, his own inability to protect his wife, his own fear for the future. “You can’t…”
“We can, and we will,” the German said. He snapped to attention, arm outstretched in the classic German manner. “Heil Hitler!”
They marched off, leaving Davall alone.
Chapter Forty-Five
London, England
Roger Hollis was dead.
Kim Philby hadn’t known him very well on a personal level, but he had known what Hollis was. He had been the brightest star in the Soviet intelligence network within Britain. Hollis, a young recruit to MI5 who had risen rapidly in the ranks, had been tasked with covering the handful of highly-placed Soviet agents in the British Government. He had no obvious links to Hollis — although Hollis had called him in to give ‘advice’ on the Soviet Union — but his death came as a terrible blow. It was all he could do to get through the day and then return to his apartment, grimly aware that Otto Skorzeny would want all the details.
Philby wondered about it all through the day. Hollis had been bright and very dedicated, determined to do the right thing for communism and the global revolution, and he hadn’t been deterred by the fall of the Soviet Union. That made it fairly certain that Hollis, like Philby, had been tricked into supplying information to Berlin, information from the heart of MI5. Philby had heard about the unusual streak of luck that the Germans had in clearing out British spies and guessed, now, that that had been something to do with Hollis. If Hollis had realised that they had all been tricked into working for the class enemy…
Well, he couldn’t have gone to the government, any more than Philby himself could. They would both have faced a certain death penalty for their actions. He’d chosen to kill himself instead, which struck Philby as a little ironic, but maybe he had known that Berlin wouldn’t have allowed him to just leave his post. He’d had years in him yet, maybe even a position at the very top, and there was no way that Berlin would have permitted him to leave. If he had, there would have been a quiet disclosure and Hollis would have been dragged to a very quiet prison in chains. He’d chosen a way out that Philby frankly envied. It was tempting to take the same way out himself. Only a reluctance to die and a desperate hope that somehow Berlin would be somewhere new for him to live kept him from complete despair. He had nothing to live for, any longer, but the hope of escape.
He’d used the small café before, a French Restaurant in the heart of London, run by a pair of Frenchwomen who had escaped Occupied France. Their husbands had been in the Free French before that outfit had been disarmed and almost surrendered to the Vichy French by Atlee’s Government. Only hasty action had allowed them to escape to somewhere much safer for them. The Free French were a joke these days, Philby knew, and yet… they clearly had some uses.
The Frenchwomen were his direct link to Moscow, or what he’d thought was Moscow, long ago. Their communist ties were a secret. If that had been known when they had come to Britain, they would likely have been sent back to Vichy France’s tender mercies. Admiral Darlen would not have been pleased to see them.
“My usual, Simone,” he said as the woman approached him. He came in every second week for a drink and a cake. He’d picked up the habit of French Cakes from his time in France, just before German armoured columns had punched through the lines. It still gave him a moment of grim amusement that he had understood what was happening before the French Army. “A cake and a cup of tea.”
The cake was perfection. The tea surprisingly good for such a small place. Philby knew that while the common folk of the country were on rations, those with money could eat anywhere they liked, devouring massive meals that seemed to have no end. He’d taken it as proof that the British system was doomed to fall, but now, with Otto Skorzeny in his living room, he no longer had any grounds for complaint. It no longer seemed important that the Royal Family supplemented their merger rations with grouse shot on their estates or that the aristocracy sent their children to safety in America. He’d been a fool and more than a fool. They would be making up new words for what he had done to the country.
“Thank you,” he said finally. He took the slip of paper placed next to the cake and pocketed it, accepting a kiss from her before slipping back out of the door and into the streets. The air raid sirens howled in the distance, but he ignored them. If there truly was a God, and Kim Philby had long since abandoned any form of religion, he would die tonight, and that would be the end of it. There were no German bombers coming any closer than the docks, where they were dropping mines into the water; they never bombed the city itself. These days, people still ducked into the nearest air raid shelter, but many of them were already emerging, laughing at themselves for getting into such a state.
Philby felt envy for them as he climbed aboard a bus for the ride home. He’d chosen the apartment carefully as somewhere where he could escape quickly if his cover were blown, but he hadn’t realised who he was really working for, or why. If he ran now, his handler back in Berlin would burn him and the British would come for him, hunting him down until he was caught and hung. His mind refused to leave the image of him slowly choking on a noose, hung just perfectly to ensure a long and painful departure, and he felt sick. Berlin was his only hope.