The Unlikely Spy(17)
"He deals in information."
He comes back to the bed. Their conversation has aroused him. His cock is hard and he wants her again right away. He is pushing her legs apart and trying to find his way inside her. She takes him in her hands to help him, then digs her nails into him.
"Ahhhh! Anna, my God! Not so hard!"
"Tell me his name."
"It's against the rules-I can't!"
"Tell me," she says, and squeezes him harder.
"Vogel," he mutters. "His name is Kurt Vogel. Jesus Christ."
BERLIN: JANUARY 1944
The Abwehr had two primary kinds of spies operating against Britain. The S-Chain consisted of agents who entered the country, settled under assumed identities, and engaged in espionage. R-Chain agents were mainly third-country nationals who periodically entered Britain legally, collected intelligence, and reported back to their masters in Berlin. There was a third, a smaller and highly secretive network of spies, referred to as the V-Chain--a handful of exceptionally trained sleeper agents who burrowed deeply into English society and waited, sometimes for years, to be activated. It was named for its creator and single control officer, Kurt Vogel.
Vogel's modest empire consisted of two rooms on the fourth floor of Abwehr headquarters, located in a pair of dour gray stone town houses at 74-76 Tirpitz Ufer. The windows overlooked the Tiergarten, the 630-acre park in the heart of Berlin. Once it had been a spectacular view, but months of Allied bombing had left panzer-sized craters in the bridle paths and reduced most of the chestnut and lime trees to blackened stumps. Much of Vogel's office was consumed by a row of locked steel cabinets and a heavy safe. He suspected the clerks in the Abwehr's central registry had been turned by the Gestapo and he refused to keep files there. His only assistant--a decorated Wehrmacht lieutenant named Werner Ulbricht who was maimed fighting the Russians--worked in the anteroom. He kept a pair of Lugers in the top drawer of his desk and had been instructed by Vogel to shoot anyone who entered without permission. Ulbricht had nightmares about mistakenly killing Wilhelm Canaris.
Vogel officially held the rank of captain in the Kriegsmarine, but it was only a formality designed to give him the rank necessary to operate in certain quarters. Like his mentor Canaris, he rarely wore a uniform. His wardrobe varied little: an undertaker's charcoal suit, a white shirt, a dark tie. He had iron-gray hair that looked as though he had cut it himself and the intense gaze of a coffeehouse revolutionary. His voice was like a rusty hinge; after nearly a decade of clandestine conversations in cafes, hotel rooms, and bugged offices, it rarely rose above a chapel murmur. Ulbricht, deaf in one ear, constantly struggled to hear him.
Vogel's passion for anonymity ran to the absurd. His office contained only one personal item, a portrait of his wife, Gertrude, and his twin girls. He banished them to Gertrude's mother's home in Bavaria when the bombing started and saw them infrequently. Whenever he left the office, even for a few moments, he removed the portrait from the desktop and locked it away in a drawer. Even his identification badge was a riddle. It contained no picture--he had refused to be photographed for years--and the name was false. He kept a small flat near the office, reached by a pleasant walk along the leafy banks of the Landwehr Canal, for those rare nights when he permitted himself to escape. His landlady believed he was a college professor with a lot of girlfriends.
Even inside the Abwehr little else was known of him.
Kurt Vogel was born in Dusseldorf. His father was the principal of a local school, his mother a part-time music teacher who gave up a promising career as a concert pianist to marry and raise a family. Vogel earned a doctorate of law from Leipzig University, where he studied civil and political law under two of the greatest legal minds in Germany, Herman Heller and Leo Rosenberg. He was a brilliant student--the top of his class--and his professors quietly predicted Vogel would one day sit on the Reichsgericht, Germany's supreme court.
Hitler changed all that. Hitler believed in the rule of men, not the rule of law. Within months of taking power he turned Germany's entire judicial system upside down. Fuhrergewalt--Fuhrer power--became the absolute law of the land, and Hitler's every maniacal whim was immediately translated into codes and regulations. Vogel remembered some of the ridiculous maxims coined by the architects of Hitler's legal overhaul of Germany: Law is what is useful to the German people! Law must be interpreted through healthy folk emotions! When the normal judiciary stood in their way the Nazis established their own courts--Volksgerichtshof, the People's Courts. In Vogel's opinion the darkest day in the history of German jurisprudence came in October 1933, when ten thousand lawyers stood on the steps of the Reichsgericht in Leipzig, arms raised in a Nazi salute, and swore to "follow the course of the Fuhrer to the end of our days." Vogel had been among them. That night he went home to the small flat he shared with Gertrude, burned his law books in the stove, and drank himself sick.
Several months later, in the winter of 1934, he was approached by a small dour man with a pair of dachshunds--Wilhelm Canaris, the new head of the Abwehr. Canaris asked Vogel if he would be willing to go to work for him. Vogel accepted on one condition--that he not be forced to join the Nazi party--and the following week he vanished into the world of German military intelligence. Officially, he served as Canaris's in-house legal counsel. Unofficially, he was given the task of preparing for the war with Britain that Canaris thought was inevitable.