The Unlikely Spy(69)

"Please send my love to Harry," Becker finally said.

"I will."

"He's a good man--a bit on the dogged side, like all policemen. But he's not a bad sort."

"I'd be lost without him."

"And how's brother Boothby?"

Vicary let out a long breath. "As ever."

"We all have our Nazis, Alfred."

"We're thinking of sending him over to the other side."

Becker, laughing, used the stub of his cigarette to light another. "I see you've brought my radio," he said. "What heroic deed have I done for the Third Reich now?"

"You've broken into Number Ten and stolen all the prime minister's private papers."

Becker threw his head back and emitted a short, brutal burst of laughter. "I hope I'm demanding more money from those cheap bastards! And not the counterfeit that got me into trouble last time."

"Of course."

Becker looked at the radio, then at Vicary. "In the good old days you would have left a revolver on the table and let me do the deed myself. Now you bring a radio made by some fine, upstanding German company and let me kill myself a dot and a dash at a time."

"It is a terrible world in which we live, Karl. But no one forced you to become a spy."

"Better than the Wehrmacht," Becker said. "I'm an old man, like you, Alfred. I would be conscripted and sent off to the East to fight the f*cking Ivans. No, thank you. I'll wait out the war right here in my pleasant little English sanitarium."

Vicary glanced at his watch--ten minutes until Becker was scheduled to go on the air. He reached inside his pocket and withdrew the coded message Becker was to send. Then he took out the photograph taken from the passport of the Dutch woman named Christa Kunst. A look of distant recollection flashed across Becker's face, then dissipated.

"You know who she is, don't you, Karl?"

"You've found Anna," he said, smiling. "Well done, Alfred. Well done indeed. Bravo!"





Vicary sat like a man straining to hear distant music, hands folded on the table, making no notes. He knew it was best to ask as few questions as possible, best to allow Becker to lead him where he wanted. Like a deer stalker, Vicary made no movements, stayed downwind. His cigarette, untouched, burned to gray dust in the metal ashtray at his elbow. Through the arrow-slit window he could hear an evening rainstorm smacking on the exercise yard. As always Becker started the story somewhere in the middle and with himself. He held his body with a regimental stillness for a time, but as the story built he began waving his arms and using his precise little fingers to weave a tapestry before Vicary's eyes. Like all Becker monologues there were blind alleys and detours for accounts of bravery, moneymaking, and sexual conquest. At times he would lapse into a long speculative silence; at other times he would tell it so quickly he would be overcome with a fit of coughing. "It's the goddamned damp in my cell," he said by way of explanation. "That's one thing you English do very well.

"People like me, they get almost no training," he said. "Oh, sure, a few lectures by some idiots in Berlin who've never seen England except on a map. This is how you estimate the size of an army, they tell you. This is how you use your radio. This is how you bite into your suicide capsule in the highly unlikely event that MI-Five kicks down your door. Then they send you off to England in a boat or a plane to win the war for the Fuhrer."

He paused to light another cigarette and open the box of chocolates. "I was lucky. I was posing as a legal. I came by plane with a Swiss passport. You know what they did to another fellow? Put him ashore in Sussex in a rubber raft. But the U-boat left France without special unmarked Abwehr rafts. They had to use one of the U-boat's life rafts with a Kriegsmarine insignia on it. Can you believe such a thing?"

Vicary could believe it; the Abwehr was horrendously slipshod with the way it prepared and inserted its agents into England. He remembered the boy he pulled off the Cornish beach in September 1940. The Special Branch men who searched him found in his pocket a packet of matches from a popular Berlin nightclub. Then there was the case of Gosta Caroli, a Swedish citizen who parachuted into Northamptonshire near the village of Denton. He was discovered by an Irish farmhand named Paddy Daly, sleeping beneath a hedge. He wore a decent suit of gray flannel and a tie knotted continental style. Caroli admitted he had parachuted into England and handed over his automatic pistol and three hundred pounds in cash. The local authorities passed him on to MI5 and he was promptly taken to Camp 020.

Becker popped one of the chocolates into his mouth and held the box out to Vicary. "You British took the espionage business more seriously than we Germans. You had to because you were weak. You had to use deception and trickery to mask your frailty. But now you've got the Abwehr by the balls."

"But there were others they took more care with," Vicary said.

"Yes, there were others."

"Different kinds of agents."

"Absolutely," Becker said as he dug out another chocolate. "These are delicious, Alfred. Are you sure you won't have one?"





Becker was a surprisingly precise keyer--precise and very fast. Vicary attributed this to the fact that he was a classically trained violinist before his life took whatever unfortunate turn it was that landed him where he was now. Vicary listened on a spare pair of headphones as Becker identified himself and waited for the confirmation signal from the operator in Hamburg. As always it gave Vicary a brief chill. He took enormous pleasure from the fact that he was deceiving the enemy--lying to him so skillfully. He enjoyed the intimate contact: being able to hear the enemy's voice, even if it was just an electronic bleep amid a vapor of atmospheric hiss. Vicary imagined how appalled he would feel if he were the one being deceived. For some reason he found himself thinking of Helen.