Berlin Red

It was dawn. Mist blanketed the city, punctured here and there by monstrous cobras of smoke where buildings had caught fire.

Men, stripped to the waist, were washing the soot from their faces in a bucket of water. One man was busy painting another white ring around the barrel of the gun.

The radio operator beckoned him over. ‘We have a signal on one of the frequencies you gave us.’ He took off his headphones and handed them to Hunyadi.

Hunyadi pressed one of the cups to his ear and heard a series of faint beeps, divided into sets of five.

‘Definitely some kind of code,’ remarked the operator.

Hunyadi nodded in agreement.

‘The signal is strong,’ the radio man continued, ‘but I have no way to pinpoint its location.’

‘You let me worry about that,’ replied Hunyadi. ‘Just tell me if the signal cuts out.’ On the flak tower’s telephone network, he put in a call to the Plotzensee power station, which managed the western districts of the city. Earlier in the day, Hunyadi had contacted each of the four major power stations in the city, with orders to wait for his call, at which point they would cut electricity to the entire district under their control. ‘Now,’ he commanded.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ said a voice at the other end.

‘Now!’ shouted Hunyadi. Through a pair of binoculars, he watched a carriage of the city’s S-Bahn electric-railway system grumble to a halt at the edge of the western district. People came out of their houses and looked around.

‘Anything?’ he called to the radio man.

‘Still transmitting,’ came the reply.

Over the next minute, Hunyadi put in three more calls to other power stations scattered across the city. The Humboldt station, in the north of Berlin, had been hit by incendiary bombs during the raid and was already suffering a black-out. The rest, in turn, cut their power for five seconds before switching it back on again.

Such losses of electricity were not uncommon in a city constantly struggling to repair bomb damage. Some power cuts lasted for days.

It was only when the Rummelsburg station, which governed the eastern district of the city, cut its electricity that the radio man called out that the transmission had ceased abruptly.

Five seconds later, Rummelsburg switched the power on again.

‘Nothing,’ said the radio operator.

‘Wait,’ ordered Hunyadi.

Seconds passed.

Then, suddenly, the radio man called out, ‘He’s back! He’s back!’

Hunyadi walked to the eastward-facing corner of the platform and looked out towards the Friedrichshain Park, the sprawling cemetery and the Baltenplatz circle in the distance, as if to glimpse the signals, rising like soap bubbles into the morning sky.

‘Congratulations, Inspector!’ called the radio man. ‘Whoever you are looking for, he is as good as in the bag.’

But Hunyadi’s face betrayed no sign of satisfaction. As far as he was concerned, his work was only just beginning.

After travelling along the pot-holed forest trail for half an hour, the Field Police truck carrying Kirov and Pekkala emerged from the woods and pulled out on to the highway leading into Berlin. The road was wide and empty and scattered with burnt-out vehicles, which slowed their progress considerably. In the distance, they could make out several towns, their black church spires propping up the egg-shell-white sky.

By mid-morning, they finally reached the outskirts of Berlin.

Here, they saw the first signs of the Allied bombing campaign, which had reduced much of the city to ruins. They could smell it, too – a damp sourness of recently extinguished fires, mixed with the eye-stinging reek of melted rubber.

Pekkala watched crews of women and old men pulling yellowy-grey bricks out of the wreckage of destroyed houses, loading them into wheelbarrows and carting them away. The dust of these pulverised structures so coated the clothing and the faces of these clean-up crews that they seemed to be made of the same dirt as the bricks. It gave the impression of some vast, wounded creature, slowly piecing itself back together. As Pekkala looked out at the ruins, which stretched as far as he could see in all directions, such a task seemed all but impossible. The Red Army, with its terrible desire for vengeance, had not even set foot inside the city yet. And if the defenders of Berlin were anything like the boy who sat before them now, there would be nothing left at all by the time the fighting was over.

The truck turned sharply off the road, and pulled into a courtyard where several other vehicles stood parked against a high wall, on which pieces of broken glass had been embedded in a layer of cement.

‘Welcome to the Friedrichsfelde Reform School,’ said Andreas, ‘which is now the headquarters of Major Rademacher.’

They piled out into the courtyard.

Berthold and Andreas marched the two men into the building.

Major Rademacher was eating his lunch, which consisted of a pickled egg and a raw onion, sliced and mashed together upon a slice of pumpernickel bread. He washed this down with some powdered milk, which he swilled from an oval-mouthed canteen cup.

It irritated the major to eat meals so hopelessly cobbled together by his adjutant, Lieutenant Krebs, who doubled as his cook, his house cleaner and his valet. He could not blame Krebs for his choice of food. To have found an onion was a triumph, and an egg, even if it was pickled, was nothing short of miraculous.

But he was still in a bad mood about it and, when the two half-trained Field Police privates arrived with their latest set of prisoners, they were doomed to feel his wrath.

Rademacher shoved his plate of food aside, snatched the Hungarian identity books from Berthold’s outstretched hand. He glanced at them and then tossed them back on to the desk, where Andreas had carefully laid out the guns belonging to Pekkala and Kirov, like duelling pistols ready for selection. ‘What are you doing to me?’ he groaned. ‘I send you out to catch deserters and this is what you bring me? Two Hungarian shoe salesmen?’

‘The captain . . .’ Andreas began.

‘Oh, shut up!’ ordered Rademacher. ‘You always blame everything on him.’

‘But it’s his fault,’ protested Berthold. ‘He told us to bring them to you.’

‘What you have done’, explained Rademacher as if addressing children even younger than they were, ‘is provide these . . . these . . . what the hell is a rude name for Hungarians?’

‘I don’t think there is one,’ said Andreas.

‘It’s bad enough just being Hungarian,’ added Berthold.

‘Well, all you have managed to do’, continued Rademacher, ‘is provide them with a taxi service into the city, using up valuable fuel in the process.’ As he paused for breath, Rademacher’s gaze snagged upon the pistols. He snatched up the Webley and brandished it towards Kirov and Pekkala. ‘What the hell were you planning to shoot with this, anyway? Elephants?’ Disgustedly, he tossed it back on to the desk.

‘What should we do with them?’ asked Berthold.

‘How should I know?’ demanded Rademacher. ‘They’re not my problem.’

‘We could hang them,’ suggested Andreas.

‘No, you idiots!’ boomed Rademacher. ‘Just get them out of here and then get out, yourselves.’ With the movements of a magician, he waved his hands over the guns on his desk, as if to make them disappear before their eyes. ‘And take these with you!’

Kirov and Pekkala retrieved their papers, holstered their guns and then the four men shuffled quickly out into the hallway.

Rademacher pulled his plate back in front of him. For a moment, he stared at the pulp of egg and onion smeared upon the dirty-looking bread. Then, with a growl, he shoved it away once again.

‘I told you,’ Andreas said to Pekkala as they made their way back to the courtyard. ‘There’s no law but what he says there is, and what he says is different every time.’

‘You were right about the fuel, anyway,’ said Pekkala.

The two boys climbed back into the truck. Driving out of the courtyard, they slowed down as they passed Kirov and Pekkala.

Andreas leaned from the open window of the cab. ‘Next time,’ he said, and then he smiled and clamped his fingers to his neck.

Pekkala and Kirov emerged from the courtyard on to Rummelsburger Street and began walking west, towards the centre of the city.

‘Well, Inspector,’ said Kirov. ‘You have one day before the scheduled rendezvous. Surely you can see we have no chance of finding her at all, let alone within twenty-four hours.’

‘I am inspired by your faith in me,’ remarked Pekkala.

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ replied Kirov. ‘Now would you mind sharing with me exactly what the hell you plan to do?’

‘If we can’t find her,’ explained Pekkala, ‘we find the man who will.’

It took a moment for this to sink into Kirov’s brain. ‘Hunyadi?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And how do you propose to do that?’

‘I have a pretty good idea,’ replied Pekkala.

Hunyadi was in his office, staring at a map of Berlin. With a magnifying glass, he studied the layout of the streets in the eastern quadrant of the city, as if to find in it some hint as to the whereabouts of the radio transmitter.

A gentle knocking on the door made him look up. Through the blurred glass pane, Hunyadi could see that his visitor was a woman, even though he could not make out the features of her face.

‘Come in,’ he said.

The door opened, and an expensively dressed lady stepped into the room. She wore a knee-length navy-blue skirt, with a matching jacket piped in white, with large white buttons. Her hair was startlingly blonde. Freckles dappled her round face, making her look younger than she was. It was her eyes that gave her away. They looked strangely lifeless, as if they had witnessed more misery than one person should see in a lifetime.

Slowly, Hunyadi climbed to his feet. ‘I think you might have the wrong room,’ he said.

‘Inspector Hunyadi?’

‘It seems you’re in the right place, after all.’ He gestured at a chair on the other side of his desk. ‘Please,’ he said, gently.

The woman looked at the chair, but she did not sit down. ‘My name is Elsa Batz,’ she said, unbuckling her handbag to remove her government-issued identification book.

As she did so, Hunyadi caught a glance of a small pistol in her bag, jumbled in amongst a hairbrush, a tube of lipstick and several crumpled scraps of paper, which appeared to be restaurant receipts.

Elsa Batz handed him the identification.

Hunyadi opened the flimsy booklet and inspected the even flimsier pages inside. He noted that she lived on Bleibtreustrasse, not far from the notorious Salon Kitty nightclub. ‘How may I help you?’ he asked, returning the booklet to her outstretched hand.

‘I hear you have been looking for a spy,’ said Elsa Batz.

Hunyadi felt his stomach muscles clench. ‘Fraulein Batz,’ he said, ‘what gave you that idea?’

‘There is a chauffeur,’ replied Elsa Batz, letting her tongue rest upon the last word as if unable to conceal her disgust for the profession. ‘She works for Gruppenfuhrer Hermann Fegelein.’

‘And her name?’

‘Lilya,’ she replied. ‘Lilya Simonova.’ And then she added contemptuously, ‘She used to be his secretary.’

‘Simonova,’ repeated Hunyadi. He began to take notes on a piece of paper.

‘He calls her “Fraulein S”.’

‘And you suspect her of treason?’

‘I do.’

‘On what grounds?’

‘I just do.’

Hunyadi paused and glanced up from his writing. ‘That isn’t much to go on, Fraulein Batz.’

‘Sometimes a hunch is enough,’ she replied.

‘Are you, perhaps, an acquaintance of the Gruppenfuhrer?’

She nodded. ‘Which is why I know that my hunch is correct.’

We all do what we have to in order to survive, Hunyadi thought to himself, and I think I know exactly what you do. ‘Herr Fegelein has perhaps expressed his doubts to you about this Fraulein S?’ he asked.

‘No!’ spat the woman. ‘He thinks she’s wonderful. He even fired his driver so that she can drive him around the city instead.’

‘I see. And this is what makes you suspicious?’

‘Yes!’ she called out in exasperation. ‘She could be running a whole circus of spies and he wouldn’t even notice.’

‘A circus?’

‘Well, whatever you would call them, then.’

‘But you have no actual proof,’ remarked Hunyadi. ‘Only . . .’ he paused, ‘intuitions.’

‘That’s right,’ she answered defiantly, ‘and they have served me very well so far.’

‘I promise to look into it,’ said Hunyadi, rising to his feet to show that this little interview was at an end. But he wasn’t quite finished with her yet. ‘One more thing, Fraulein Batz,’ he said.

She raised her sculpted eyebrows. ‘Yes?’

‘If I could just take a look at the gun you are carrying in your handbag.’

Her cheeks turned red and she immediately became flustered, but she did as she was told, retrieving the gun from her bag and placing it upon the desk in front of him.

It was a Walther Model 5, a small 6.35 mm automatic of a type often carried by high-ranking officers for personal protection, rather than for use in combat. A tiny eagle, with a three-digit number beneath, had been stamped into the metal slide and also into the base of the magazine.

‘This is a military-issue gun,’ remarked Hunyadi.

‘I suppose it must be,’ she replied.

‘And where did you get it?’

‘From Hermann,’ she told him, and then, as if that were not formal enough, she added, ‘from Gruppenfuhrer Fegelein. He also gave me a permit.’ Rummaging in her purse, she produced a small card, which she now handed to Hunyadi.

The permit was genuine, but it had been issued by Fegelein himself, which he lacked the authority to do, no matter how high his rank.

Hunyadi glanced at Elsa Batz.

She sensed his hesitation. ‘Keep it if you need to,’ she told him. ‘I never use it anyway, and I’m tired of carrying it around.’

Fegelein had given her the gun soon after they began seeing each other. On what she recalled as their first official outing, he drove her to the ruins of a house on the outskirts of the city. The building had been destroyed earlier in the war by a stray bomb. Fegelein walked her into what had once been a neatly tended garden but was now completely overgrown. From the skeletal frame of an old greenhouse, he removed three earthenware flower pots, placed them on the garden wall, then stood back ten paces and motioned for Elsa to join him.

‘A present for you,’ said Fegelein, holding out the gun on the flat of his palm.

‘What do I need that for?’ she asked, refusing to take the weapon from his hand.

‘I won’t always be around to protect you,’ Fegelein told her, ‘and there’s no point having one of these unless you know how to use it.’

He showed her where the safety catch was, and how to aim, and how to level out her breathing just before she pulled the trigger.

Her first shot ricocheted off the wall, leaving a pink gash on the red brick. The second and third shots also missed.

‘Well, it’s a good thing I don’t have you for a bodyguard,’ laughed Fegelein.

He had a particularly annoying laugh.

Elsa was already feeling annoyed that Fegelein had brought her here, instead of to some charming restaurant, but to hear the stuttering hiss of Fegelein’s laughter so enraged her that she strode forward to the wall, set the barrel of the gun against each flower pot and blew them all to pieces one by one.

This only made him laugh more. ‘That’s one way of doing it!’ he shouted.

She wheeled about. ‘I don’t want it! Can’t you see?’

The smile had frozen on his face, and all amusement vanished from his eyes.

It was only in this moment that Elsa realised she was pointing the gun right at him. She lowered it at once, immediately terrified of what he might do to her now.

But Fegelein only sighed and told her to put it away.

Since then, she had kept the gun in her purse, letting it rattle around amongst the spare change and cosmetics.

‘Keep it,’ she repeated to Hunyadi.

‘No,’ replied the inspector, returning the weapon and her permit. ‘I’ve seen all I need to see.’ He knew that, technically, he should have confiscated the gun, but right now there were more important things to do.

After Elsa Batz had departed, leaving behind the faint odour of perfume, Hunyadi picked up the phone and called General Rattenhuber at the bunker.

Rattenhuber did not sound pleased to hear from him. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded. ‘Make it quick! I’m very busy.’

‘Is Fegelein on the premises?’

‘Probably,’ snapped Rattenhuber. ‘The midday briefing is about to start and Fegelein is scheduled to be there. Why? I thought you’d already spoken to him.’

‘I did,’ confirmed Hunyadi, ‘and now I need to speak to his secretary.’

‘What? You mean the pretty one who chauffeurs him about?’

‘That’s her.’

‘Do you want me to put her under arrest?’ asked the general.

‘No!’ Hunyadi answered quickly. ‘Just tell her to report to Pankow district police headquarters before the end of the day.’

‘Fegelein’s not going to like this,’ muttered Rattenhuber. ‘He’s very protective of her.’

‘Is that going to be a problem for you?’ asked Hunyadi.

‘Not at all, Inspector,’ replied Rattenhuber. ‘I’d be happy to make that man squirm.’

‘What do you want?’ demanded the officer on duty at the Ostkreuz district police station. The tiled walls gave off a strange glow as they reflected the dusty light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

‘I am here to see Inspector Hunyadi,’ replied Pekkala.

‘Hunyadi?’ barked the man. ‘Well, you’ve come to the wrong place! Who said you could find him here?’

‘I must be mistaken,’ said Pekkala.

‘Damned right you are mistaken! He works over at the Pankow station. Every policeman in Berlin knows that.’

‘And where might I find the Pankow station?’

‘Where else? On Flora Street!’

‘I apologise,’ Pekkala told him. ‘I am not familiar with the city.’

The apology seemed to soften the policeman’s tone, although only slightly. ‘Walk out the door,’ he told Pekkala, ‘turn left and head up to the Ostkreuz tram stop. If it’s still running after last night’s air raid, take the tram to Pankow-Schonstrasse and the station is right around the corner from there.’

Pekkala bowed his head in thanks, turned and walked out of the door.

Kirov was waiting outside. He fell in step with Pekkala as they headed up the street. ‘Well?’ he hissed.

‘He works out of a police barracks in the north of the city,’ answered Pekkala. ‘That’s where we’re going now.’

‘And when we do find him?’ asked Kirov. ‘What then? Do you honestly think he’ll lift a finger to help us?’

‘He will if he thinks it’s worth his while.’

‘And how do we convince him of that?’

‘Take a look around you, Kirov, and tell me what you see.’

Without breaking his stride, Kirov glanced up and down the street. ‘What am I looking for?’

‘Just tell me what you see,’ insisted Pekkala.

‘A city which was once perhaps quite beautiful.’

‘And now?’

‘It’s a junk yard.’

‘And things will get worse, much worse, before this war is over.’

‘I won’t argue with that.’

‘And neither would Hunyadi, I expect,’ said Pekkala. ‘Any fool can see which way this war is going. There may be some who still believe a miracle can save them, but I doubt an old policeman like Hunyadi would be one of them.’

‘So we are all agreed that Germany will lose the war,’ muttered Kirov. ‘Is that enough to make him change his mind?’

‘It might be,’ answered Pekkala, ‘if we offer to take him with us back to Moscow.’

Kirov stopped in his tracks. ‘And why would he want to do that?’

‘Because there is neither a present nor a future here. In Berlin, there is only the past.’

‘And if his loyalty prevents him?’

‘Then we will have no choice but to convince him otherwise.’

‘You must not worry!’ exclaimed Hermann Fegelein, sitting beside Lilya as she pulled up in front of the police station.

‘I’m not worried,’ she answered quietly, staring straight ahead through the rain-spattered windscreen.

But Fegelein knew it was a lie, and it made Fegelein angry that a dishevelled Berlin cop would rob this woman of her peace. With his rank, and the backing of Himmler, Fegelein had no doubts that he himself was untouchable. But this poor woman was only a secretary, with no real way to defend herself against such serious allegations, especially if, as seemed to be the case, this inspector had found no one else on whom to put the blame. As far as Fegelein was concerned, the fact that Hunyadi was hauling in Fraulein S was the most obvious sign that he had reached a point of desperation.

Fegelein almost felt sorry for Hunyadi, ordered to pursue a mirage which existed only because Hitler said it did. Even if the Allies had managed to get their hands on a few juicy pieces of gossip, none of that would win or lose the war. And all the while the real danger – a million Russian soldiers massing on the banks of the River Oder, 80 kilometres to the east – continued unhindered by the Fuhrer’s dilapidated war machine.

‘This man is just doing his job,’ said Fegelein, trying to console her. ‘He interrogated me, for God’s sake, and I’m still here, aren’t I?’ Fegelein laughed and rested a hand upon her shoulder. ‘I know how these people work. Just reply to his questions. Don’t tell him anything he doesn’t ask to know. Keep your answers short and simple. You’ll be out of there again in no time!’

Lilya got out of the car, shut the door and walked up the concrete steps to the entrance of the police station.

The sergeant at the desk insisted on escorting her to Hunyadi’s office. Along the way, the sergeant mentioned that he would be off duty soon and asked if she might like to have a drink.

She glanced at him and gave a noncommittal smile. ‘I’m not sure that will be possible,’ she told the man.

Encouraged by the fact that he had not been rejected outright, the sergeant knocked upon Hunyadi’s door, opened it without waiting for an answer from inside, and held out his hand for Lilya to enter the room. ‘I know where we can get champagne!’ he whispered.

These words did not escape Hunyadi. ‘Close the door on your way out,’ he ordered.

When Lilya and Hunyadi were alone, he gestured for her to sit down. ‘Please,’ he said.

She did as she was told.

For a moment, Hunyadi said nothing, but only studied his visitor. Fegelein might be a snake, thought the inspector, but he has good taste in women. ‘How long have you worked for the Gruppenfuhrer?’ he asked.

‘Almost two years.’

‘And where were you hired?’

‘In Paris,’ she answered. ‘I was working for the occupation government, translating documents.’

‘From German into French?’

‘And the other way around. Yes.’

‘And he hired you on the spot?’

‘More or less.’

Hunyadi felt the woman’s stare burning against his face. He noticed that her right fist was tightly clenched, like someone who meant to lash out if provoked. ‘And has the Gruppenfuhrer been a suitable employer?’ he asked, saying the words with unusual emphasis, so that she might grasp their proper meaning.

‘I am his driver. Nothing more,’ she replied. ‘For anything else, there are others.’

‘Elsa Batz, for example.’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’

Hunyadi sat back in his chair and knitted his fingers together. ‘Do you know why I have called you in?’

She nodded. ‘Information has been passed to the Allies. They say there is a leak from Berlin Headquarters.’

‘Who is they?’

Lilya breathed out sharply. ‘The source of the leak may still be a secret, Inspector, but the fact that you are trying to find its source is not. Anyone who sets foot in the bunker knows exactly why you’re here.’

‘And have you set foot in the bunker?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘Never.’

‘But you must have heard things. Gossip and so on.’

‘I hear only what Gruppenfuhrer Fegelein wants me to hear, and he has the full trust of Heinrich Himmler, as well as the highest security clearance. Forgive me, Inspector, but you might as well accuse the Fuhrer himself.’

‘And if you were me, Fraulein S, whom would you accuse?’

She considered for a moment before replying. ‘Someone like me,’ she replied. ‘Someone who is an outsider. Someone who wouldn’t be missed.’

Hearing these words, a dazed look swept across Hunyadi’s face. In that moment, he was not thinking of the beautiful woman who sat before him, or of the reason she sat before him now. Hunyadi was thinking of his wife. He stood, resting his fingertips upon the desk, as if uncertain of his balance. ‘Thank you,’ he said hoarsely. ‘You can go.’

As Lilya Simonova left the building, taking the back stairs so as to avoid the duty sergeant. At the end of the staircase, the door opened out into a narrow alley, separating the police headquarters from a now-abandoned block of flats on the other side.

It was raining harder now. The air smelled of damp ashes.

For a minute, she rested with her back against the wall, feeling her heart rate slowly return to normal. Slowly, she unclenched her fist, revealing a small vial encased in a thin coating of brown rubber. The inner glass container was filled with potassium cyanide. She had been given the vial before she left England, what seemed like a lifetime ago, and had carried it with her ever since. Lilya had not known, when she walked into the police station, if she would ever walk out of there again. One question too many from the Inspector, and all she had to do was slip the vial into her mouth, bite down, and the shimmering liquid would snuff out her life before she could draw another breath. But Hunyadi had been kind to her. Too kind, perhaps. She was not out of danger yet. The time might come when she would have to put the vial to use. She slipped it into a tiny opening in the collar of her leather jacket. Then she walked out to the street, where Fegelein was waiting in the car.

‘You see?’ he asked with a smile, when she had taken her place again behind the wheel. ‘There was never anything to worry about, was there?’

‘No,’ she replied softly, as she put the car in gear. ‘It was just as you said it would be.’

‘What the hell is this about?’ demanded General Hagemann. He sat in the back of an SS staff car as it hurtled towards Himmler’s headquarters.

Three hours earlier, he had been in the middle of a dense pine forest, 20 kilometres east of Berlin, scouting new areas for deploying his mobile V-2 launch trucks. Then the staff car had appeared, slipping along a road which was little more than a horse track, its glossy black finish overpainted with sprays of khaki-coloured mud splashed up from the hundreds of puddles it had driven through to get this far.

Two men had climbed out, wearing the black uniforms of the Allgemeine-SS. Both men were clearly irritated to have left the relative comfort of their barracks. Brusquely, they ordered General Hagemann into the car.

Hagemann gave one helpless glance at the men who had been assisting him.

The look on the face of Sergeant Behr, who had stood by him since the earliest days of the V-2 project, confirmed the general’s own worst fears – that he was unlikely to survive whatever journey awaited him in the back of that SS staff car.

It would have been useless to protest. Hagemann simply ordered Sergeant Behr to take command of the mission, climbed into the back of the car and lit his pipe. As the smoke swirled around him, the general attempted to compose himself so that, at least, he might meet his end with some degree of dignity.

Hagemann realised, as the car slewed around and began making its way back in the direction from which it had come, that he might never know what he had done to deserve this punishment. There would be no trial. These days, there was no time for such elaborate productions. In all probability, the general guessed, he would simply be driven to some part of this bleak forest even more remote than the one where he had been when the men arrived to collect him. He would be walked into the woods, and forced to kneel in the dead leaves. He could almost feel the dampness in the ground against his skin as it soaked through the fabric of his trousers. And then he would be shot.

Hagemann found himself almost impatient for them to get on with their task.

But the car continued on its way.

By the time they emerged from the forest and turned on to the main east-west highway, known as Reichsstrasse I, Hagemann was beginning to wonder if he had perhaps misjudged the situation. A flicker of hope appeared in his mind. He leaned forward and cleared his throat. ‘Where did you say you were taking me?’ he asked the men.

‘We didn’t,’ replied the guard in the passenger seat.

The general’s optimism crumbled. He slumped back in his seat and folded his arms across his chest. As he did so, he felt the shape of his gun in its holster on his waist. It occurred to him that, provided he moved quickly, he might be able to draw the gun and shoot himself before the men in the front seat could stop him. That would, at least, deprive them of the twisted pleasure they were sure to take in carrying out their duties, and would bring an end to his suffering.

But he quickly set aside the idea. The truth was, he didn’t have the courage to shoot himself and he knew that he would probably only make a mess of it if he tried.

They did not travel into Berlin, but instead took a ring road, skirting around to the north.

By now, more than an hour had passed since Hagemann had climbed into the car and he had become completely confused.

Finally, Hagemann could stand it no longer. ‘What the hell is going on?’ he demanded.

‘Himmler wants to see you,’ said the driver.

‘You didn’t hear it from us,’ added the man in the passenger seat, ‘but I think he is giving you a medal.’

Hearing this, Hagemann’s whole body went numb. ‘A medal?’ he whispered. ‘From Himmler?’

He had never actually met the Reichsfuhrer before. In that, Hagemann considered himself lucky. Few people, no matter how highly they were ranked, emerged from meetings with the Lord of the SS without having been blackmailed, intimidated or otherwise brought to their knees. For a while, Hagemann had convinced himself that he might be able to avoid meeting Himmler altogether, and he would gladly have done without the medal in order to continue that streak of good fortune. But there was no way out of it now.

For the rest of the journey, Hagemann sat there in silence, slowly reassembling his self-control.

Arriving at the compound at Hohenlychen, the car pulled over in front of the red-brick building which served as Himmler’s residence.

‘In there,’ said the driver. ‘No need to knock. You are expected.’

Hagemann got out of the car and made his way into the building. Passing through the front door, he found himself in an elegantly furnished space, which had the appearance of an upscale doctor’s waiting room.

There was a door on the other side of the room but it was shut and Hagemann, being uncertain as to whether he should knock, decided to wait here instead.

He was just lowering himself down into one of the leather chairs when the door opened and Himmler appeared from the darkness on the other side. ‘Hagemann!’ he exclaimed with a smile. ‘I have looked forward to this meeting for a long time.’ He strode into the room and shook the general’s hand, as if they had always been friends.

Dazed, the general managed to nod in greeting.

‘Sit!’ commanded Himmler.

Hagemann felt his legs practically give out from under him and he subsided into one of the chairs.

‘I hear congratulations are in order,’ said Himmler, sitting down opposite him.

‘They are?’ asked Hagemann.

‘Come now,’ Himmler laughed. ‘There’s no need for false modesty here.’ He leaned forward and wagged a finger at the general. ‘I have learned that the Diamond Stream device is now fully operational. Even now, I expect, our rockets are raining down upon the enemy with pinpoint accuracy!’

Hagemann’s mouth dropped open with surprise. ‘But that’s not true!’ he gasped. ‘More tests are required. We haven’t yet . . .’

Himmler held up one hand, commanding the general to silence. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘The need for secrecy is paramount, and I’m certain you are acting on the highest authority.’

‘There is no secret!’ blurted Hagemann. ‘It’s not ready yet! It worked once. That’s all. Before we can even install the devices, they must be properly calibrated. I’m still trying to get my hands on more components.’

Himmler was staring at him. ‘Are you serious?’ he asked.

‘In your presence, Herr Reichsfuhrer, I would not dare to be anything else.’

Himmler nodded slowly. He looked like someone waking from a trance. ‘You will keep me informed,’ he said.

It appeared that the meeting was over, almost as soon as it had begun.

Once more, Hagemann shook hands with the Lord of the SS, but at the moment when he tried to release his grip, Himmler refused to let go.

‘It is important that you understand the gravity of the situation,’ said Himmler quietly. ‘I am, as you know, in overall command of Army Group Vistula; the only force that stands between the Red Army and Berlin.’

‘Yes,’ answered Hagemann, gently trying to remove himself from Himmler’s grasp. He began to overheat. Droplets of sweat prickled his forehead.

‘If you were to look at our strength on paper,’ continued Himmler, ‘you would see a formidable presence. Tanks. Guns. Tens of thousands of combat-ready troops.’

‘Yes.’ Hagemann gave up his attempt to untangle himself from Himmler’s soft, persistent grip. He surrendered his arm, as if it no longer belonged to him and, with his free hand, wiped away the sweat which had leaked into his eyes and blurred his vision, distorting Himmler’s face into an Impressionistic smudge.

Now Himmler stepped even closer, his emotionless grey eyes fixed upon Hagemann’s face. ‘But if you were to see what is actually there on the ground,’ he said, ‘you would realise how little of Army Group Vistula actually exists. It is a legion of shadows, and shadows will not stop the enemy. But your rockets can, at least long enough to allow us to forge a truce with the western Allies. The Americans, the British, the French – they all realise that we are not the true enemy. The enemy lies to the east, General, the Bolshevik hordes who will, without your help, seek to wipe us from the face of the earth. Now,’ he smiled faintly, ‘have I made myself clear?’

Hagemann, tasting the salt of perspiration in the corners of his mouth, could only nod.

At last, Himmler released him. ‘Go now,’ he said.

Hagemann staggered out to the waiting staff car. Within a few minutes, they were on their way south towards Berlin and the dreary forest track where the general had left his crew. He imagined them there still, sitting on their helmets in the rain and waiting for him to return.

‘No medal?’ asked the driver.

‘No medal,’ said Hagemann. He was staring at his hand, as if to reacquaint himself with it. The marks of Himmler’s fingers still showed upon the chapped skin of the general’s knuckles.

‘I heard there was a medal,’ the driver said to the man in the passenger seat.

‘That’s what I heard, too,’ replied his friend.

The driver glanced in the rear-view mirror, his eyes making contact with Hagemann’s. ‘Maybe next time,’ he said.

Back at his headquarters, Himmler had not yet left the room where his meeting with the general had taken place. Instead, he paced angrily back and forth upon the Persian carpet, breathing in short whistling breaths through his nose. From his pocket, Himmler removed a small, leather-bound case containing an Iron Cross, 1st Class, which he had intended to present to General Hagemann. But the general’s denial had spoiled everything.

Now he wondered if Fegelein, who had brought him news of the Diamond Stream’s operational capability directly from Hitler’s bunker, might somehow have misunderstood. Or perhaps he was being misled. Furious at the thought that someone, maybe even Hitler himself, might have lied to him, Himmler returned to his office and called the bunker.

‘Get me Fegelein!’ he ordered.

There was a long wait. At last, he heard Fegelein’s voice.

‘Herr Reichsfuhrer!’ Fegelein shouted down the line. ‘I have just come out of the midday meeting. I will have the usual report drawn up within the hour. Was there . . .’

Himmler didn’t let him finish. ‘Did you, or did you not, hear Hitler say that the Diamond Stream was working?’

‘Yes! I did. Absolutely.’

There was a long pause.

‘Is that everything, Herr Reichsfuhrer?’ asked Fegelein.

Without replying to the question, Himmler crashed the phone down into the receiver. Then walked to the front door, opened it and pitched the medal case out into the courtyard. The case popped open and the Iron Cross, its silver edges gleaming, skittered away into the mud.

That afternoon, in the eastern district of the Berlin, not far from the Karlshorst Raceway, Inspector Hunyadi wandered slowly down the street, wearing paint-spattered blue overalls, frayed at the heels, and with a hat pulled over his eyes. He carried a metal toolkit in one hand. To people passing by, he looked like some weary electrician or plumber, walking to a job because he no longer possessed a car, or else the fuel to run it. There were many such men in Berlin, too old to be conscripted by the regular army and too young to be entirely overlooked, whose trades were valuable enough to keep them out of uniform. Most of them would have been retired by now, but there was no one else to do the work. And soon, even their trades would be abolished. In the hundreds, they were being summoned by the authorities, given armbands printed with the word ‘Volksturm’ and, after half an hour’s training in the use of a handheld anti-tank weapon known as a ‘Panzerfaust’, they were cobbled together into suicidally primitive squads whose purpose was the defence of Berlin. In the meantime, there was nothing to do but to wander the streets, drunk if at all possible, visiting old friends and taking their last tours of the city.

But if those people passing by had looked more closely, they might have noticed the way he kept raising his hand to the right side of his head, and the thin strand of wire running out of his sleeve to the small earpiece he attempted to conceal in his palm.

And they might also have noticed a delivery van, bearing the logo of a non-existent floor-tile company named Ender amp; Sohne, following slowly in Hunyadi’s path along the street. Although the van was painted to look as though its sides were made of stamped metal, the panels were, in fact, constructed out of wood. This was in order not to cause any malfunction of the radio-detection equipment contained inside it, along with two technicians, who hunched over a direction-finding apparatus known as a Nahfeldpeiler.

Ever since the radio men on top of the Zoo tower anti-aircraft station had located an Allied transmission signal in the eastern portion of the city, Hunyadi had been making his way along every street in the district, slowly closing in upon the operator.

Hunyadi had established that these transmissions were being made at regular times, either around midday or in the early evenings. He had a hunch that the operator, whoever he or she was, had been leaving their job during their lunch break in order to send messages, or else was waiting until rush hour, when the noise of buses and trams out in the street would be at their loudest, obscuring any sounds made by the transmitter.

Now it was lunch time, and the detection equipment had picked up a signal, somewhere in the area of Lehndorffstrasse. Hunyadi edged his way down dirty alleyways between the houses, searching for the fuse boxes which, for fire-safety reasons, were located outside and usually close to the ground. Among the rubbish bins, the shards of broken beer bottles and hissing, homeless cats, Hunyadi crouched down, opened the rusty metal fuse boxes and unscrewed the stubby porcelain fuses one by one.

Back in the delivery van, the technicians listened, headphones pressed against their ears, for the moment when power to the agent’s radio transmitter was suddenly cut off by the removal of the fuse. When and if that happened, they would send a signal through to Hunyadi, who carried a portable radio strapped against his chest.

Hunyadi’s bones were aching. The radio set was small but heavy and carrying the added weight upon his chest had begun to hurt his back. Besides that, many of the fuses were corroded and twisting them out of their sockets had blistered his fingertips so badly that he now wore leather gloves to protect them.

Now and then he would stop, hands pressed against the small of his back and quietly groaning with pain, and he would glance up at the windows, wondering if this plan of his would ever yield results.

After checking every house on Lehndorff, Hunyadi turned the corner and began to make his way down Heiligenbergerstrasse. It was a narrow, gloomy street filled with blocks of flats, some of which showed damage from bombs that had fallen on the nearby Karlshorst Station.

At the first house, he managed to locate the fuse box behind a crate of old milk bottles. The bottles had long since been emptied of milk but were now partially filled with dirty-looking rain water, capped with a greenish scum of algae. Holding his breath, Hunyadi lifted the crate, careful not to rattle the bottles, and placed it down beside him.

He kept drifting off in his thoughts. Sometimes he thought of his wife. He hoped they were treating her well. In other moments, he thought of his days at Flossenburg. It was strange, the way he recalled it. There was no terror in his memory, although he had often been terrified. Instead, there was a curious finality about his imprisonment, as if everything that happened before his release belonged to one life, and everything since was part of another. And, in this second life of his, each tiny detail, even those things which were unpleasant, appeared miraculous to him. How can a person know the value of his life, he thought, until he stands upon the brink of its extinction?

Hunyadi’s daydreams exploded as a high-pitched whine drilled into his skull from the radio speaker plugged into his ear.

He froze, his fingers locked upon the circular glass fuse which he had been unscrewing at that moment. The technicians in the truck were signalling to let him know that the transmission they had been monitoring had just been interrupted. Hurriedly, he screwed the fuse back in. The signal from the radio truck abruptly ceased.

Hunyadi stared at the number written in black paint above the fuse. It was flat number three. The house only had three storeys, with one main fuse per storey. Now he knew where the agent was hiding.

Peering upwards, his gaze following the metal ladder of the fire escape, he saw the flutter of a curtain in one of the windows at the top of the building.

His heart began thundering.

He heard the slam of doors as one of the two technicians left the van and ran into the alleyway. From the man’s silhouette, Hunyadi could see that he had already drawn his gun.

‘Watch the fire escape,’ whispered Hunyadi.

The man nodded.

Hunyadi pushed past him, coming around the building to the front entrance, where he found the door to the foyer unlocked.

He made his way in and began to climb the stairs. The steps were bare and rickety and there was no way to move quietly. Speed was more important now.

At the front of each landing, a window looked out on to the street and wintery grey light shone in over the worn floorboards.

By the time he reached the third floor, Hunyadi was breathing heavily.

There was only one door. Hunyadi didn’t bother to knock. Instead, he raised one booted foot and kicked the door completely off its hinges.

Although this was the first enemy agent that Hunyadi had run to ground – such tasks were normally reserved for the Secret State Police, the Gestapo – there was a cruel sameness to the manner in which this arrest took place.

Hunyadi had lost count of the number of times he had burst in upon criminals, having tracked them to their lairs in every squalid corner of the city.

Realising at once that there was no escape, these criminals reacted in a variety of ways. Some fought back, with knives or guns or whatever object they could lay their hands on. Hunyadi had once been attacked with a rolling pin and, on another occasion, had a bird cage thrown at his head, with a squawking parrot still inside. He had shot men dead, and women too, but only when it would have cost him his own life not to do so. More often, they gave up without a fight.

What Hunyadi saw when he charged into the single-room flat was a short, slightly built man with a dark moustache and a thick head of hair. He wore a grubby white undershirt and a pair of pinstripe woollen trousers, with braces pulled up over his narrow shoulders.

The man was hunched over a small fireplace, attempting to set fire to a sheaf of documents. He appeared to have been taken completely by surprise, at least until the power had gone out. There was even a cup of hot tea steaming on the mantelpiece. He was using wooden matches to set the fire, but without much success. Several of the matches had already been burned, their blackened remnants lying on the hearth beside his bare feet. There had been no time for him to pack his radio and it lay on a desk by the window, its power cord snaking up to a light socket which dangled from the middle of the ceiling. The suitcase in which he stored the radio was still lying open on his bed. Beside it, Hunyadi saw a small-calibre pistol.

The man glanced up at Hunyadi. Then he looked towards his pistol, as if to gauge whether he might reach it before the stranger killed him with the gun in his own hand. Realising it was hopeless, he fumbled with another match, still hoping to set fire to the documents.

Hunyadi strode across to the room, tilting the gun in his hand and cuffed the man across the temple with the butt.

The man collapsed, an unlit match still pinched between his fingers.

Hunyadi looked down upon the agent. In his experience, it did no good, at times like this, to scream and make a show of force. ‘Get up,’ he said quietly. ‘You need to come with me.’

The man stared at the inspector, his dark eyes gleaming with fear. The gun had cut a gash across his forehead, and blood was running down across his face.

Still holding his pistol, but no longer aiming it at the man, Hunyadi held out his free hand, in order to help the agent to his feet.

Hunyadi knew that this was a dangerous moment. If he was not careful, he could easily be pulled off balance, but it was important to offer this gesture – to force the criminal to understand that the chase was over, that he was caught, and that to offer resistance could only end in death.

The agent took hold of Hunyadi’s outstretched hand.

Hunyadi helped the man to his feet. Then he handed the agent a set of handcuffs which were attached, not by a chain but by a single, heavy swivel bolt. ‘Put them on,’ he said.

With blood trails lightning-branched across the side of his face, the agent did as he was told. From the way he handled the cuffs, it seemed to Hunyadi that this might not be the first time he had been arrested.

When the agent’s hands were firmly locked in front of him, Hunyadi placed his hand upon the man’s shoulder and marched him out through the door.

The agent did not resist. There was, Hunyadi observed, a quiet dignity in this man’s acceptance of defeat. I ought to have let him drink his tea, thought the policeman. Or fetch his coat. And maybe a pair of shoes. So docile was the prisoner as he descended the stairs, that Hunyadi felt it safe to release his grip upon the prisoner.

‘You should have used a car battery,’ remarked Hunyadi.

The agent turned and looked at him, a baffled expression upon his face.

‘To power the radio,’ continued Hunyadi. ‘That way, I wouldn’t have caught you when I pulled the fuses.’

A look of tired resignation filtered into the man’s eyes. He turned away and continued down the stairs.

By now, they had reached the second floor. Rain streaked the windows on the landing.

At that moment, the agent appeared to stumble.

Hunyadi, who was right behind him on the stairs, reached out to steady him.

The prisoner tipped forward, as if he were about to fall.

‘Careful!’ called Hunyadi, suddenly realising that if the man did not regain his balance, he would crash into the window panes.

In that same moment, Hunyadi understood what was happening.

But it was too late.

The agent dived head first through the window.

The crash was almost deafening.

Hunyadi saw the man, his eyes closed, the terrible whiteness of torn flesh mixing with the jagged hail of glass shards. He saw the agent’s bare feet, the soles dirty from walking on the old floorboards. And then there was nothing but the gaping hole where the window had been.

He heard the sound of the body hitting the street.

Hunyadi rushed to the window opening.

The man lay twisted on the ground.

He had gone head first into the pavement. His skull was shattered, and the torn scalp with its long, dark hair lay draped over the dead man’s face.

The technician who had been guarding the fire escape came running from the alleyway. He skidded around the corner, and barely missed colliding with the body. For a moment, he just stared at the corpse. Then he slowly raised his head and looked up at the window.

Through the daggers of the broken window panes, Hunyadi felt the cold rain touch his cheeks. ‘Now there will be hell to pay,’ he thought.

Later that day, Hunyadi sat at his desk, staring at a pile of unopened mail, all of which had arrived at his flat while he’d been away at Flossenburg. Bills. Subscriptions. Reminders about doctor and dentist appointments. He had brought them with him to the office on the first day, intending to sort through it all. But there had been no time. Even now, he made no move to open the dozens of envelopes.

All Hunyadi could think about now was who he could turn to for help.

Immediately following the death of the radio operator, who had quickly been identified as a low-level employee at the now-defunct Hungarian Embassy, a search of the room had revealed a handful of coded messages. These messages had been transcribed on ricepaper, which could have been eaten by the radio man if he had been able to get to them in time.

As he held the messages in his hand, a taste of marzipan had flooded into Hunyadi’s brain. He had been reminded of the almond pastries he had enjoyed as a boy, which had been baked on sheets of ricepaper. He remembered peeling off the delicate strips of paper and eating them first.

He could make no sense at all of the code, and he knew better even than to try. Officially, the only people in Berlin who might assist him in such matters were the SS Intelligence Service, but Hunyadi had serious misgivings about bringing them into the picture.

The reason for Hunyadi’s reluctance to hand over the codes to the SS was that he now felt convinced that someone in their ranks was behind it. These coded messages, if they could only be deciphered, might provide all the evidence he needed, but only if the SS was prepared to confirm their own involvement in the breach. And that, Hunyadi wagered to himself, was very unlikely to happen.

As the minutes passed, Hunyadi reluctantly arrived at the conclusion that he would have to call upon Fegelein. However much Hunyadi disliked the man, Fegelein was the only person within reach who might have access to someone with code-breaking skills. Although Fegelein was a high-ranking member of the SS, Hunyadi’s recent conversation with Rattenhuber, Head of Security in the bunker, and everything else he had heard about the man, pointed to the fact that Fegelein had fallen out with his masters. Fegelein’s assistance in finding the source of the leak might just be enough to tip the balance back into his favour. From that point of view, Fegelein needed Hunyadi even more than Hunyadi needed him.

Hunyadi reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and removed the calling card on which Fegelein had written his phone number.

With his hand hovering over the telephone, Hunyadi paused, knowing that this call, whatever its results, would set into motion events he would no longer be able to control.

He picked up the receiver.

The station operator clicked on to the line.

‘Call this number,’ said Hunyadi.

When the telephone rang, Fegelein was standing on the little balcony of Elsa Batz’s apartment on Bleibtreustrasse. He was smoking a cigarette and gazing down at the street below, where the caretaker of his building, an old man named Herr Kappler, was sweeping the pavement with a twig broom that looked as if it should be ridden by a witch. The soothing rhythm of the twigs against the concrete was shattered by the ringing of the telephone.

‘It’s for you,’ Elsa called from the living room.

‘Who is it?’ he asked without turning around.

‘Inspector Hunyadi,’ she replied.

Fegelein flicked his half-finished cigarette down into the street, narrowly missing Herr Kappler, and walked back inside the apartment.

He took the receiver from her hand. ‘Hunyadi?’

‘Yes. I’m calling to see if that offer of help is still on the table.’

‘Of course,’ answered Fegelein. Then, seeing that Elsa was lingering in the room and doing her best to eavesdrop on the conversation, he frowned and shooed her away.

She turned up her nose and wandered off into the kitchen.

‘What kind of help do you need?’ asked Fegelein.

‘I would rather talk about it in person, if you don’t mind.’

‘When? Now?’

‘Yes. As soon as possible.’

Fegelein glanced at his watch. ‘Do you know Harting’s restaurant?’

‘Yes. On Muhlerstrasse. It’s practically across the road from me.’

‘Can you meet me there in half an hour?’

‘I can,’ confirmed Hunyadi.

‘I’m on my way,’ said Fegelein. ‘If you get there before me, just tell the manager you are my guest.’

The door to Harting’s restaurant swung open, and Leopold Hunyadi stepped in out of the rain.

The head waiter approached him, a menu clutched against his chest. ‘Do you have a reservation, sir?’

‘I am a guest of Gruppenfuhrer Fegelein,’ answered Hunyadi.

The man cocked an eyebrow. ‘One moment, please,’ he said. Then he spun on his heel and vanished back into the kitchen.

While he waited, Hunyadi looked around at the dark wood tables, slotted into booths separated by screens of frosted glass into which elaborate floral designs had been carved. Except for the fact that the windows facing the street had been spider-webbed with tape to prevent them shattering from the concussion of falling bombs, the restaurant showed no sign of having prepared itself for the Armageddon that was coming. He wondered what would be left of the place by the time the Red Army had finished with Berlin.

Now Herr Waldenbuch, the manager, appeared, sweeping wide the leather-padded double doors which led into the kitchen. He was a man of medium height, with a bristly moustache, small, darting eyes and a round belly precariously contained within a linen waistcoat. Before he spoke, he paused to wipe the perspiration from his face with a dark blue handkerchief. Then he stuffed the handkerchief into his waistcoat pocket and offered his sweat-moistened hand for the detective to shake. ‘A friend of Hermann Fegelein, you say?’

‘A guest,’ Hunyadi corrected him.

‘Follow me, if you please,’ Waldenbuch said quietly and escorted the detective through the kitchen where, Hunyadi could not help but notice, he was studiously ignored by the staff, and brought him to one of several locked doors at the back of the restaurant. From a bundle of little brass keys, Waldenbuch selected the one he needed, opened the room and gestured for Hunyadi to enter.

‘I have not seen you here before,’ remarked Herr Waldenbuch.

You might have done, thought Hunyadi, if one meal here didn’t cost a man like me his salary for the week. But he kept that to himself and only nodded.

‘The Gruppenfuhrer is often late,’ confided Herr Waldenbuch.

‘In that case,’ replied the detective, ‘and since he will be picking up the tab, you might as well bring me some lunch.’

‘What would you like?’ asked the manager.

Hunyadi shrugged. ‘After where I’ve been, Herr Waldenbuch, anything at all would suit me fine.’

Waldenbuch bowed his head sharply and left.

Alone now in this airless little room, it occurred to Hunyadi that this could all be a part of a trap. Fegelein’s attempt to re-ingratiate himself with Hitler’s entourage might have nothing to do with helping this investigation and everything to do with getting him arrested on charges of conspiracy. If that is the case, thought Hunyadi, I’ll be on my way back to Flossenburg before this meal is even on the table.

To take his mind off these grim thoughts, Hunyadi studied the pictures hanging on the walls. They showed the restaurant in earlier days – men in high-collared shirts and women with complicated hats staring with bleached-looking faces through the persimmon-coloured light of old sepia prints.

He wondered if these pictures would survive the coming fight. Lately, Hunyadi had become morbidly obsessed with trying to guess whether the objects that passed through his life were doomed to perish in the flames which would engulf this city, or whether they would be carted back to Russia as souvenirs, or if perhaps they would remain here, untouched, to decorate the walls of whatever city rose up from the ashes of this war.

At that moment, Fegelein arrived. He wore a brown leather greatcoat over his uniform, the hide darkened across his shoulders by the rain that was falling outside. ‘Welcome to my private dining room,’ said Fegelein as he shrugged off the coat and draped it over an unused chair.

‘Yours?’ asked Hunyadi.

‘There are three things a gentleman needs in life,’ said Fegelein. ‘A good barber, a good tailor and a table at his favourite restaurant. I went one further, and made sure it came with a room.’ He settled himself into a chair opposite Hunyadi. ‘Now then, Inspector, what is it I can do for you?’

Both men fell silent as Herr Waldenbuch entered with bowls of carrot and fennel soup, the deep orange colour seeming to radiate its own light in the confines of that windowless room. He placed them down before the men, bowed his head, and left.

Hunyadi wondered where on earth such food could still be found in this beleaguered city.

As soon as they were alone again, Hunyadi reached into his pocket, withdrew a crumpled sheet of paper on which the agent’s coded message had been written and slid it across the table to Fegelein. ‘I was hoping you might be able to make sense of this.’

Fegelein picked up the document and stared at it. ‘This is some kind of military code.’

‘That much I’ve already guessed,’ said Hunyadi.

‘And did you also guess that it isn’t one of ours?’

‘More or less.’

Fegelein laughed quietly. ‘And you think I know how to read it?’

‘Probably not,’ answered Hunyadi, ‘but I imagine you know someone who does.’

‘It has to do with your investigation?’

‘It does.’

‘Where did it come from?’

Hunyadi paused to clear his throat. ‘For now, Herr Gruppenfuhrer, the help I’m asking for will have to be a one-way street.’

Neatly, Fegelein folded the page and tucked it away in his pocket. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

From the distance came a wail of air-raid sirens, the sound muffled by the thick walls of the restaurant. Instinctively, both men stood up to leave, each one calculating the distance to the nearest of the city’s many bomb shelters, the locations of which had long ago been branded on their minds.

As they made their way out, they found that the main dining room was already empty. Food lay uneaten on plates. Mozart played softly on the gramophone.

The men stepped out into the street. It was almost dark now and the sirens were much louder here, the rising, falling moan shuddering into their bones. People hurried past them, clutching cardboard suitcases already packed for the hours they knew they would spend below ground.

Now they could hear the heavy drone of bombers in the distance, and the dull thump of anti-aircraft fire from the outskirts of the city.

‘It must be done quickly,’ urged Hunyadi. ‘I don’t think there’s much time. And the discretion you promised . . .’

Fegelein patted the pocket where he had stashed the message. ‘It goes without saying, Inspector.’

Arriving at the Pankow district police station, Pekkala went in to find Hunyadi, while Kirov remained out of sight in an alleyway across the road.

The rising, falling wail of the air-raid sirens filled the streets.

The duty officer at the front desk sent Pekkala up to the receptionist on the next floor, where Hunyadi’s office was located.

‘You’d best be quick,’ said the duty officer. ‘You’ve only got about ten minutes before the bombs start falling.’

The receptionist was an elderly woman named Frau Greipel. She had worked on that floor of the police department for many years and considered it her personal domain. The men who worked here, aware of just how miserable she could make their lives if she wanted, knew better than to question her authority.

As a rule, Frau Greipel did not take kindly to strangers, and most of them were sent packing down the stairs much faster than they had come up, especially if air-raid sirens had already begun to sound.

But she did not chase away Pekkala. There was something in the bearing of the man which was both familiar and strangely comforting to her, as if he knew his way around the place, even though she was certain he had never been there before.

Frau Greipel escorted Pekkala to Hunyadi’s office, knocked on the door, opened it and found the room empty. ‘He must have gone to the shelter already,’ she said. ‘Would you like to leave a message?’

‘Yes,’ replied Pekkala. ‘Please tell him I have come about the Diamond Stream.’

Back at her desk, Frau Greipel made him repeat the words as she wrote them down. ‘Are you sure he will know what that means?’

‘I believe so,’ said Pekkala.

‘And your name?’

‘Pekkala.’

She made him spell it out.

‘And what kind of name is that?’ she asked. ‘Where does it come from?’

Receiving no answer to her question, Frau Greipel looked up and realised that the man had already gone.

As she had done many times before, Frau Greipel locked her desk drawer, put the key in her pocket and after making sure that she was the last one on the floor, she turned out the lights and made her way downstairs, heading for the shelter across the road.

In the gloom of the darkened police station, Pekkala appeared from a storage closet and made his way to the office of Inspector Hunyadi. Once inside, he turned on the desk lamp and began searching for anything which might reveal the man’s home address. It did not take more than a moment to locate the pile of unopened mail, addressed to Hunyadi’s flat in Pradelstrasse.

Tucking one of the envelopes into his coat pocket, Pekkala left the room.

Out in the street, Kirov was waiting. ‘Did you find him?’

‘Not yet, but I know where he is.’

‘Where to?’ asked Kirov.

Before Pekkala could answer, the deep thud of anti-aircraft guns sounded from the west. Layered beneath that sound was the rumble of aircraft engines – hundreds of them by the sound of it.

‘For now, we follow them,’ answered Pekkala, nodding towards the stream of people heading down into a concrete staircase, above which, in large white letters, they could read the word ‘Luftschutzraum’.

After leaving Harting’s restaurant, Hunyadi made his way down the stairs of the public air-raid shelter on the corner of Kopenicker and Manteufelstrasse.

He had been here many times before, since the shelter was the closest to his office. Each shelter had its own character. Some always seemed to be filled with crying babies. Others featured music played on violins and accordions. A few served food. This shelter was a relatively quiet place, perhaps due to the fact that it absorbed the entire population of the police station every time there was a raid. Hunyadi had come to recognise many of the regular inhabitants, some of whom he never saw except down in the shelter. Berlin had become a place where each person had two neighbourhoods; one above ground and one below.

Now, as Hunyadi plodded down the steps among dozens of others seeking refuge from the approaching raid, he noticed two men in front of him, neither of whom he had ever seen before. One was tall and broad-shouldered and wore a heavy, hip-length coat. The other was thin, with narrow shoulders and rosy cheeks. Neither man spoke to the other, although it seemed clear to Hunyadi from that they were travelling together. The other thing he noticed, from the particular rumple of their coats beneath the arms, was that both men appeared to be armed. Men that age who weren’t in military uniform, and carrying guns to boot, could only mean one thing, thought Hunyadi. Secret State Police. Gestapo. He wondered whether they had come to make an arrest or had been on their way somewhere else and got caught in this part of town when the sirens went off. Whatever the answer, Hunyadi knew better than to ask.

Fegelein did not go to a shelter.

As the first bombs began to fall out on the western edges of the city, he made his way to the Salon Kitty club. The place had only just opened its doors for the evening when the sirens sent both dancing girls and their clientele of high-ranking officers scuttling for the shelter, except for Fegelein and one solitary figure sitting at the bar and drinking a glass of beer.

The stranger’s name was Thomas Hauer and he was a former agent of the German Spy Agency known as the Abwehr. His former boss, Admiral Canaris, who had once controlled this powerful branch of German Military Intelligence, was at that moment a prisoner in the same cell at Flossenburg prison that Hunyadi himself had occupied only a few days before.

The path which had led Canaris to Flossenburg was not nearly as direct as Hunyadi’s.

The German Intelligence apparatus had once comprised two branches, one being the Abwehr, managed by Admiral Canaris, the other a rival service known as the Sicherheitsdienst, run by Heinrich Himmler’s SS.

As these competing services vied with each other for control, Himmler personally set out to destroy the Abwehr. By 1944, Himmler had finally succeeded.

On a freezing February afternoon, both Field Marshal Keitel and General Jodl arrived at Abwehr Headquarters in Security Zone II of the Zossen military complex outside Berlin. The two high-ranking officers made their way to a camouflaged bunker set among a stand of tall pine trees. There, they informed Canaris of Hitler’s decision to merge the Abwehr and the Sicherheitsdienst. In the meantime, Canaris was to ‘hold himself in readiness’ at the remote castle known as Burg Lauenstein in a mountainous region of southern Germany known as the Frankenwald.

In spite of the veiled language, Canaris had no illusions about the fact that he was, in reality, being placed under house arrest. The charges against Canaris stemmed from his suspected contacts with British agents, as well as providing information to Vatican officials, but the real reason for his removal had more to do with the scheming of Heinrich Himmler.

Within hours, Canaris had vacated his office and departed south, in a Mercedes staff car driven by his faithful chauffeur, Ludecke.

In the coming weeks, Canaris was left to stroll about the grounds of the castle in the company of his two dachshunds. He received almost no information about what was going on in the outside world and was simply left to contemplate his doom.

In late June of that year, to Canaris’s surprise, he was abruptly released and allowed to return to his home at 14 Betazeile in Berlin, where he soon realised just how busy his adversaries had been during his stay at Burg Lauenstein. By the time Canaris emerged from his gentle incarceration, the network he had so painstakingly assembled had been effectively dismantled. All Abwehr departments had been absorbed by their counterparts in the SS and Abwehr field agents were recalled, reassigned or dismissed according to their relevance in Himmler’s future undertakings.

The final blow for Canaris came several months later, when a safe was discovered at the Zossen complex which contained irrefutable evidence that Canaris had been aware of a plot to assassinate Hitler in July of 1944. The attempt had ended in failure and resulted in the executions of numerous high-ranking German officers.

Convicted of treason, Canaris had been sent to prison to await his execution. Unlike Hunyadi, he would never leave Flossenburg alive.

Back while Canaris was still wandering the ground of Lauenberg Castle, Himmler had given Fegelein the task of reassigning all remaining Abwehr agents to posts in the newly formed Reich Intelligence Service.

During the course of this task, while rummaging through the admiral’s private papers in the hopes of finding something he might be able to use as blackmail against some high-ranking official, Fegelein discovered a list containing the names of a dozen agents whom Canaris had never registered with the Abwehr. These young men and women, who had been trained by Canaris himself, were kept in reserve for missions which, for one reason or another, it was better to keep off the books.

Rather than simply hand the list over to Himmler, Fegelein sought out these agents on his own, sensing an opportunity more lucrative than the half-hearted thanks of his employer. Of the dozen agents, some were known to be dead, others had never returned from missions and were presumed lost and two committed suicide when they learned that Fegelein was on their trail. Only one man, Thomas Hauer, had proved practical enough to stay alive. And Fegelein assured him he could stay that way, and even prosper by it, provided he could prove his worth. In the short time they had known each other, Hauer had done this many times over.

Now the former agent glanced across as Fegelein entered the room. ‘Nice of them to give us the place to ourselves,’ he said. ‘Anyone would think you planned the air raid.’

‘I didn’t have to,’ answered Fegelein, as he walked behind the bar, searched through the bottles until he found the one he wanted. ‘The Royal Air Force have been hitting us almost every night for a month and they are admirably punctual.’ With that, he poured himself a glass of Pernod. ‘I acquired a taste for this in Paris,’ he said, holding up the honey-coloured drink as if to gauge its clarity. Then he added a splash of water from a pitcher on the counter and the Pernod turned a cloudy yellow colour.

‘It smells like liquorice,’ remarked Hauer.

‘A distant relative of absinthe,’ said Fegelein. ‘They say that it opens the mind.’ He took a drink.

‘Is that what it’s doing to you?’

‘Unfortunately, not enough to help me translate this.’ Fegelein tossed the page of code on to the counter.

Ignoring the shudder of bombs, which had now begun exploding in the centre of Berlin, Hauer took the page and spread it out before him, pinning it to the table at each corner with his thumbs and index fingers. ‘Why come to me with this?’ he asked, studying the page as he spoke. ‘Why not bring it to the Reich Intelligence Service?’

‘Because I have a nasty suspicion that they might already know what it says.’

‘Then this is an internal investigation.’

‘That’s a good way to describe it.’

‘Well,’ said Hauer, ‘at first glance I would say this is a Goliath cipher.’

‘Goliath?’

Hauer sat back on his stool, releasing the pressure of his fingertips from the page. As he did so, the paper seemed to flinch as if it was in pain. ‘How much do you know about cryptography?’

‘Enough to know when I need help from you.’

‘The Goliath cipher is one of several codes used by the Allies,’ explained Hauer. ‘It was developed by the British in the first years of the war. Nowadays it is considered somewhat antiquated, although it’s still reliable and often used by agents who have been in the field a long time. Each message possesses its own branch code, without which it is virtually impossible to unravel the message.’

‘Well, where do they keep the branch code?’ asked Fegelein.

‘On a piece of silk,’ replied Hauer. ‘It’s about the size of a handkerchief and can be folded or crumpled into something the size of your little finger. Printed on the silk are dozens of little squares, each one containing the numbers for a separate branch code. As each one is used, the radio operator simply cuts it out of the handkerchief and destroys it with a match. Or else the whole patch of silk can simply be dissolved in a combination of vinegar and hot water.’

‘So,’ Fegelein muttered with a sigh, ‘without the silk, there is nothing to be done.’

A bomb exploded two blocks away. The lights flickered.

‘Not necessarily,’ answered Hauer.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Over the course of the war, the Abwehr amassed quite a collection of these silk sheets, either captured from agents who didn’t have time to destroy them before they were arrested or else from supply canisters dropped by the Allies over our territory, which we got to before the agents did. What we discovered was that some of these branch codes repeat and, by experimenting with various algorithms, we have been able to apply a variety of branch codes to messages we’ve intercepted. It doesn’t always work, but we have met with some success.’

‘And do you have those algorithms? Are you able to decipher this?’

‘The answer to both questions is maybe.’

‘You do have them, don’t you?’

‘Let’s put it this way, Herr Gruppenfuhrer. Admiral Canaris was not so naive as to think that even though his headquarters might be safe from enemy air raids, it was proof against the scheming of the SS.’

‘You mean that there are still Abwehr files out there some place?’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Hauer, ‘although you’ll never find them, and if you want my help with this you won’t even bother looking.’

‘Fine!’ Fegelein exclaimed irritably. ‘I don’t have time for that now, anyway.’ He reached across and tapped his finger against the page. ‘Decoding this is all that matters, and it’s got to be done now. Tonight.’

Hauer took one of the cardboard beer mats scattered across the counter, flipped it over and copied out the message with the stub of a pencil that he fished out of his pocket.

‘Why are you doing that?’ asked Fegelein.

‘It’s a standard precaution,’ replied Hauer. ‘If something happens to me, then you won’t lose the message, just the messenger.’

‘Abwehr logic,’ muttered Fegelein.

Hauer paused. ‘If you don’t like it, then you can find somebody else.’

‘No,’ said Fegelein, ‘you can do this however you want. Just get it done.’

‘I didn’t say for certain I could do it.’

‘I have great confidence that you will,’ said Fegelein, ‘because you know that I will pay you generously, and not in German currency which is about to become worthless.’

Now that Hauer had copied out the message, Fegelein took the original, folded it up and tucked into his chest pocket.

‘I know you’ll pay me,’ Hauer replied calmly, ‘right up until the day that you don’t need me any more. And then I will be dead.’

Fegelein raised his Pernod and clinked Hauer’s glass. ‘We’re both going to hell, my old friend,’ he said. ‘It’s only a question of when.’

When the raid was over, Hunyadi returned to the station and was pleased to find it still intact, although the concussion had blown in several windows. Men were sweeping up the jagged shards and Hunyadi sidestepped their brooms as he walked past.

Just outside his office, Frau Greipel was sitting at her desk, exactly as she had been before he left to meet Fegelein. Hunyadi wondered if she had even left the building during the raid.

‘You had a visitor,’ she said to the detective.

‘I think we all had visitors,’ replied Hunyadi, ‘although whether it was the Royal Air Force or the Americans I didn’t stop to find out.’

‘No, Inspector,’ said Frau Greipel. ‘I mean someone was here to see you, a man in an old-fashioned coat, just before the sirens went.’

‘What did he want?’

‘I wrote it down,’ she muttered, looking at the note pad on her desk. ‘He said it had something to do with a stream of diamonds, or a diamond stream. I’m not sure which, or even what he meant.’

For a moment, Hunyadi stopped breathing. ‘Who was he?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘I’d never seen him before. He had a foreign accent. I didn’t recognise it.’

‘Did he identify himself?’ asked Hunyadi, his voice growing increasingly urgent.

‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘He said his name was Pekkala.’

Hunyadi’s eyes narrowed as he searched his mind for anyone he might have known by that name. There was only one man he had ever heard of named Pekkala, but Hunyadi seemed to recall that he had died years ago, swallowed up in the bloodbath of the Revolution. ‘What was he like?’ asked Hunyadi.

Frau Greipel described him as well as she could. She wanted to tell Hunyadi about the strange feeling she had experienced when the man had been standing in front of her, right where Hunyadi stood now. But she could not find the words to express herself, and anyway, it all seemed vague to her now, as if it had been part of a dream. Frau Greipel had worked with Inspector Hunyadi for many years and she knew he was not the kind of man who dealt in vagaries and dreams. What pleased Hunyadi were specifics, and of those she had nothing to offer, beyond the few details of Pekkala’s physical presence.

‘Did he say where I could contact him?’

To this, Frau Greipel only shook her head.

‘And when he left,’ asked Hunyadi, ‘did you see where he went? Please, Frau Greipel, this could be extremely important.’

‘The sirens were going. Everyone was heading to the shelters. I should think he went there, too.’

Hunyadi tried not to vent his frustration. Instead, he took a deep breath and rubbed his hands against his face, feeling the stubble on his cheeks. ‘Frau Greipel,’ he said, ‘I think we have both done enough for today.’

‘Yes, Inspector Hunyadi,’ she replied. ‘I do believe you’re right.’

After an early dinner, Fegelein and Elsa Batz had just dozed off when the telephone rang beside their bed.

Elsa sat up, immediately awake. Nobody ever calls with good news after suppertime, she thought. She looked across at Fegelein, who lay sleeping beside her, a pillow over his face as if he were trying to smother himself.

The phone rang again.

‘Hey,’ said Elsa, nudging Fegelein with her foot.

He grunted and rolled over on to his side.

‘It’s probably for you,’ she told him, raising her voice.

Fegelein turned on to his back again, tossing the pillow aside. ‘Then pick it up!’ he told her sharply. ‘The phone’s on your side of the bed.’

Cursing under her breath, she picked up the receiver and handed it to him. ‘I suppose you don’t want me around for this call, either,’ she snapped.

‘How the hell should I know?’ he replied. ‘I don’t even know who is calling.’

Elsa pushed aside the black cord that attached the receiver to the telephone and slipped out of the bed. Then she retreated to the kitchen, shutting the door behind her.

It was Hauer on the phone. ‘I’ve had some success,’ he told Fegelein.

‘Some?’ barked Fegelein, still half asleep. ‘What do you mean “some”?’

‘Using one of the branch codes from the Abwehr files, I was able to obtain a partial translation of the document, which amounted to about a fifth of the words. The branch code was not exactly the same, but it appears to overlap in some places.’

‘What did it say?’ demanded Fegelein.

‘I managed to translate the words “arrival”, “location”, “Christophe” and “diamond” in that order.’

‘Diamond?’

‘Correct,’ replied Hauer. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

‘Yes. Maybe. Never mind. But what the hell is Christophe?’

‘You’re paying me to decode the message,’ answered Hauer, ‘not to interpret what it means.’

‘Are you sure that’s what it said?’

‘If the coding sequence hadn’t worked,’ explained Hauer, ‘it wouldn’t have said anything at all.’

‘Fine.’ Fegelein slammed down the phone.

The kitchen door opened and Elsa stuck her head out. ‘Do you want tea?’

‘No!’ he shouted, and followed that up with a string of obscenities.

‘You’re insane,’ Elsa told him. Then she slammed the door shut.

Fegelein sat on the bed, trying to encompass what he had just been told. The words which Hauer had untangled from the coded message appeared to confirm that the leak from the bunker was real, and not, as he had suspected, simply the result of Hitler’s increasingly paranoid frame of mind. But the more Fegelein thought about it, the less sure he became that this was the same leak.

The information that Hitler had pointed to as having been smuggled from the bunker was all just gossip. There was nothing of any military value. All that the Allies could do with these scraps of chat was to serve them back to the place where they had come from, with no more purpose than simply to embarrass those who heard it. If the Allies could only know how well this little game had played out, Fegelein told himself, they would be more than satisfied.

But the message hidden in this Goliath cipher was different. The Diamond Stream programme was a high-value military secret.

In that moment, Fegelein reached a conclusion which was so simple and, now that he had thought of it, so obvious, that he immediately accepted it as the truth. This secret, thought Fegelein, had nothing to do with the rumours mongered by Der Chef on Allied radio. In his search for the leak, Hunyadi had stumbled upon a completely separate operation.

There were only three people, aside from himself, who had studied the blueprints of the Diamond Stream device that Hagemann had brought to the bunker.

One was Hitler, the other was his own boss, Heinrich Himmler, and the last person was the man who drew them in the first place – General Hagemann.

He could safely rule out anyone else. An assortment of high-ranking officials had seen Professor Hagemann lay out those plans on Hitler’s briefing table, but none of them would have been able to decipher what they meant well enough to relay the information to the Allies. And none of them had even touched the plans, let alone had time to draw or photograph them.

Fegelein could rule out Hitler and Himmler right away. That left only Hagemann.

It seemed so perfectly clear to Fegelein that he wondered why he had not suspected it from the start, even without the decoded message.

Believing that the war was lost, Professor Hagemann was attempting to ingratiate himself with the enemy, in order to secure better treatment when the last shots had been fired, but also to be able to continue his work. Hagemann was a scientist, after all. Those people had no moral direction. To them, their work was everything. They didn’t care who they were working for, as long as they were left alone to pursue their calculations.

Fegelein decided that he must speak to Hitler directly. He would tell the Fuhrer everything he knew, before Inspector Hunyadi figured it out for himself. Breaking the news, and maybe even preventing Hagemann from carrying out this act of treachery, would raise Fegelein to the stature he had always craved among the rulers of this country. All previous sins would be forgiven.

Fegelein picked up the phone, ready to call the bunker switchboard. But then he paused, as the idea, which had seemed so brilliant only a moment before, now began to unravel.

How would he explain the manner by which he had decoded the message? No one would believe him if he said that he’d done it himself. Then it would only be a matter of time before it emerged that he had failed to turn over the list of reserve Abwehr agents to the proper authorities. It wouldn’t take the SS long to track down Hauer, and Fegelein had no doubt that the bastard would tell them whatever they wanted to hear if it meant saving his own skin.

Even if the SS did arrest General Hagemann, they would hang Fegelein from the same noose.

Fegelein returned the phone receiver to its cradle. Only one course of action remained and that was to tell Hunyadi nothing. At best, that would buy him some time before Hunyadi found the source of the leak on his own and Hitler’s vengeance took its course. Fegelein had seen with his own eyes what became of the conspirators in the attempt to assassinate Hitler in July of the previous year. Films had been made of men slowly hanging to death from meat hooks. For a while, it had seemed as if the butchery would never end. Fegelein knew that, eventually, he would be implicated, whether he was guilty or not. His offer to help the inspector would be more than enough to seal his fate.

For Fegelein, the time had come to put in motion a plan on which he had been working for months. In the apartment of his mistress, he had hidden two forged Swiss passports – one made out to himself and the other in the name of Lilya Simonova – along with travel permits to Geneva and enough cash and jewellery to make a new start with Lilya.

The idea of escaping with his wife had never entered Fegelein’s mind. And as for Elsa, he felt sure that she would understand. She had accepted her role as his mistress for precisely what it was and no more – a business transaction. Fegelein did not love Elsa and, as far as he knew, she had never expected him to.

But Fegelein had fallen deeply and permanently in love with Lilya Simonova. He had never told her this, not in so many words, because he was afraid that she would misunderstand his true feelings, and would think that he was simply trying to add her to what was, under the circumstances, an embarrassingly long list of conquests.

In addition to not confessing his love, Fegelein had also neglected to tell Lilya that he planned to run away with her to Switzerland. Fegelein had kept quiet about this because he knew that if he did not pick precisely the right moment, she would refuse on principle to come along. But now circumstances had changed and Lilya would be forced to realise that if he was arrested on charges of treason, then she would almost certainly be next.

From this point on, every minute counted.

Fegelein stood up and buttoned his tunic. ‘I’m going out!’ he shouted at the kitchen door, behind which Elsa Batz had taken refuge.

There was no reply.

Two minutes later, Fegelein was striding down the middle of the empty street, which was still littered with chunks of plaster and broken masonry from the most recent air raid, on his way to make his feelings known to Lilya Simonova.

When the droning all-clear sirens reached them in the bowels of the shelter, Kirov and Pekkala had shuffled up the stairs along with all the others, emerging into a night in which the air was filled with dust and a smell like burned electrical wiring from the super-ionised air caused by the detonation of high explosives.

No street lamps had been lit and people made their way about with torches, hands shielding the beams so that their fingers glowed like embers.

Bomb damage to roads along the way, some of which had been cordoned off by civilian air-raid volunteers, forced them to detour several times before they arrived at their destination.

Hunyadi’s three-storey building had sustained some damage, caused by what appeared to be one huge bomb, which had landed in the next street over, leaving a crater some 20 feet deep in the road. The houses on either side had tumbled back into themselves, exposing rooms where beds perched precariously at the edge of splintered floorboard cliffs and clocks still hung upon the walls.

Hunyadi’s apartment building appeared structurally sound, although some of the upper windows were broken, and the main doors had been wrenched off their hinges.

Pekkala looked at the little array of mail boxes located just outside the door until he found Hunyadi’s name and flat number. As he and Kirov made their way inside, they received suspicious glances from some of the inhabitants, but nobody spoke to them. Like Hunyadi at the entrance to the air-raid shelter, the tenants had quickly reached the conclusion that two men in plain clothes wandering the halls of their building could only be members of the secret police.

Hunyadi’s room was at the end of the corridor on the second floor.

Pekkala knocked quietly on the door, but there was no answer.

After waiting until the hallway was empty, Kirov forced the lock and the two men drew their guns as they entered the flat.

The room was clean but the furnishings had all seen better days. In the tiny kitchen, a pot of cold ersatz coffee, black as tar and smelling of chicory root, lay on the single gas ring on the stove. One cream-coloured enamel cup and a matching bowl, its blue rim chipped around the edges, lay in a wooden drying rack beside the sink. With the exception of a few pictures he saw hanging on the wall, which showed Hunyadi at various police gatherings, each one with a date ranging from the 1920s to the late 1930s, Pekkala realised that the flat was almost as spartanly furnished as his own place back in Moscow.

Kirov was thinking the same thing. ‘At least it looks like he sleeps in the bed,’ he remarked, ‘instead of lying on the floor.’

Pekkala glanced at the bed. Made for one person, it was barely wider than an army cot and, like an army cot, it had been properly made, the corners tucked in hospital-style and the undersheet folded over the top of the blanket at precisely the width of a hand.

Then Pekkala noticed a small framed black-and-white photograph on the bedside table. It was the only picture in the room where Hunyadi did not appear in uniform. Standing beside him was a woman with a narrow face and long dark hair. Hunyadi had his hand around her waist. They were standing on a balcony overlooking the ocean. The shape of an archway in the corner of the photo looked Mediterranean – Greek, Italian, he couldn’t quite be sure. In the background, Pekkala could just make out a sailing boat at anchor on the dull grey carpet of the water, and he wished he could have seen how blue it really was.

The picture caught him by surprise. It seemed so out-of-step with everything else in the room. Hunyadi lived by himself. That much was perfectly clear. So was this woman just a current girlfriend? Given that the photograph appeared to have been taken some time ago – the whole of the Mediterranean coastline had been a war zone for the past five years – and since there was no other trace of her in the flat, this seemed unlikely. Was it a relative? Pekkala discounted that, too, based on the lack of physical resemblance and the way couple were standing, hip to hip, his arm around her waist. A former wife? That seemed the least likely of all, not only because of the existence of the photo but also where he had placed it. Or was she dead? The tumblers in Pekkala’s mind clicked into place. That had to be the answer.

Pekkala felt a sudden and involuntary compassion for Hunyadi. He tried to shake it from his thoughts, but the idea would not budge. Before he even walked into this room, Pekkala had already taken stock of the similarities between his own life and Hunyadi’s. Both were involved in the same kind of work. Both were in the service of men who would answer for their deeds for all eternity. Both men walked the razor-thin line between trying to do good in a land which was governed by evil, and in becoming that evil themselves.

Seeing the trappings of Hunyadi’s life had only added to Pekkala’s empathy. For those who did not know better, a life pared down to such a threadbare minimum might have seemed like a negation of its own existence. But that was only an illusion. The contents of this room belonged to a man who knew that, between one day and the next, he might lose everything. And the only way to carry on was not to care too much. During his years in Siberia, Pekkala had learned that the more tightly you cling to everything you value in the world, the less precious it actually becomes. Somewhere along the way, thought Pekkala, Hunyadi had formed the same equation in his mind.

But this photo had struck Pekkala most powerfully of all. If he failed to locate Lilya and to bring her safely from the cauldron of Berlin, she stood almost no chance of survival. And then that crumpled photo he had kept for all these years would transform into a symbol of remembrance, and not one of hope, as it was now.

Pekkala began to steel himself for what he might soon have to do.

If Hunyadi refused to help, they would have no choice except to abandon the search and get out of Berlin as fast as possible. They would also have to kill Hunyadi. Simply tying him up and leaving him here in his flat, to be discovered in a matter of hours by the inquisitive tenants of this building, would not buy enough time to escape. And it was not simply a matter of getting out of Berlin. They had to retrace their steps all the way to the Russian lines, through a countryside crawling with execution squads.

Just then, they heard the rattle of a key in the door.

When Fegelein arrived at the boarding house on Eckertstrasse, where Lilya Simonova rented a room, he found the night watchman asleep, head resting on his folded arms.

It was a dingy place, its walls badly in need of repainting, and the floorboards scuffed to splinters.

Without waking the old man at the front desk, Fegelein made his way up to the third floor. Although he had never actually set foot inside the building before, he knew exactly where she lived. He even knew which room was hers by looking from the street. Many times, he had driven past this boarding house, sometimes with Elsa in the car, and glanced up at Lilya’s window, hoping to catch a glimpse of her.

In sharp contrast to the luxurious surroundings of Elsa’s apartment on Bleibtreustrasse, he found the hallway cluttered with pieces of broken furniture and there were brown stains on the ceiling where water had seeped through from leaking pipes. It smelled of sour milk and cigarettes.

Fegelein felt a sudden stab of guilt that Lilya had been forced to live this way. Of course, she would not have been able to afford anything better on her salary, but he could easily have requisitioned her a better place. To do so, however, would have sent her the wrong message. He did not want to simply buy her off. Nor did he want her for his mistress. He already had one of those and one was quite enough. What he had wanted for a long time now, as much as could ever be possible, was to know her on equal terms.

And now he would, if only he could persuade her to come with him.

With one knuckle jutting from his fist, Fegelein rapped softly on the door. He waited, and then he knocked again.

A light came on, splashing its glow like a liquid underneath the door and out on to the landing, just touching the tips of his boots.

‘Who is it?’ Lilya asked, her voice gritty with sleep.

‘It’s Hermann,’ he said quietly. It was the first time he had ever used his Christian name with her.

A deadbolt lock clunked back and Lilya opened the door. She wore a blue wool dressing gown, held against her body by her folded arms. Blonde hair straggled down in front of her face. Her bare feet were cold upon the floor and she stood with the toes of one foot balanced upon the arch of the other, like a long-legged water bird.

To Fegelein, she had never looked more beautiful.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘May I come in?’ he asked, suddenly nervous in a way he’d never felt in front of her.

‘What’s going on?’ she persisted.

‘I’ll tell you everything,’ said Fegelein, ‘but I don’t want to do it out here.’

She stood back to let him pass. ‘I’m sorry about the mess,’ she said.

But there was no mess, at least as far as he could tell. A few books lay scattered on a coffee table and two mismatched chairs flanked a little fireplace which did not look as if it had been used in quite some time.

Lilya gestured at one of the chairs and sat down in the other.

Fegelein took his seat. ‘I am sorry to come to you in the middle of the night,’ he said, ‘but there is something I have to tell you. Something which cannot wait.’

Still hugging her arms against her chest, Lilya waited for him to explain.

‘The war is almost over,’ said Fegelein, ‘and you and I both know how it will end.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ she asked.

‘Because the time has come when we must begin fending for ourselves. We must look to the future. Whatever loyalties we’ve had until now belong to the past. Do you understand what I am saying, Lilya?’

‘I think so,’ she replied cautiously.

Fegelein rubbed his hand across his forehead. This was already more difficult than he had been expecting. ‘We need to leave,’ he said.

‘We?’

Now he looked her in the eye. ‘Yes. We.’

‘But what about . . . ?’

He held his hand up sharply, commanding her to silence, as if he could not bear to hear her speak the names of those other women. ‘I have made my choice,’ he said, ‘and it is you.’

‘But leave for where?’ she asked.

‘Switzerland,’ he told her, ‘at least to begin with. After that, maybe South America. But none of this can happen if we just sit back and wait for events to unfold. Any delay, and it might be too late. Then all the plans I’ve made . . .’

Now it was she who cut him off. ‘What plans?’ she asked.

‘Passports. Transit papers. Money. You must not worry. I have thought of everything.’ Tentatively, Fegelein reached out to take her hands in his.

But her arms remained folded.

‘I have great affection for you, Lilya,’ Fegelein began, but he could scarcely draw the breath into his lungs to go on speaking. ‘Surely you must know that by now,’ he gasped. ‘I am trying to save you.’

‘And why do I need saving?’ she demanded.

‘If you stay here in this city,’ he replied, ‘you’ll almost certainly be killed, by the Russians when they get here and if not by them, then by our own secret police.’

‘The secret police?’ she asked. ‘What would they want with me?

‘It won’t be long before they are looking for anyone who has had dealings with me.’

‘But why?’

‘Because of the things that I have done,’ he said flatly, ‘and what they are it’s better you don’t know for now. I’ll be happy to discuss all this with you as soon as we are safely in Geneva, but right now you need to realise that I’m the only chance you’ve got.’

‘When are you planning to go?’ she asked.

At least, thought Fegelein, she isn’t trying to talk me out of leaving. He grasped at this as a sign that she might actually go with him. ‘First thing in the morning,’ he told her. ‘We will travel by car to the Charlottenburg Station. Then we board a train, whatever one is there, just as long as it’s leaving Berlin. One way or another, we will make our way to Switzerland. I have money. More than enough. And I have documents which will guarantee we are not stopped.’

She opened her mouth to speak.

But Fegelein couldn’t wait. ‘For the love of God, say yes!’ he blurted out.

‘I’ll need to pack a few things,’ Lilya told him.

‘Of course!’ exclaimed Fegelein, overwhelmed that she had finally agreed. ‘One suitcase, though. That’s all. You understand?’

She nodded.

They walked to the door.

‘I’ll be back for you at 9 a.m.,’ said Fegelein. ‘You must be ready.’

Her lips twitched, in what Fegelein took for a smile.

He leaned across, gently taking hold of her shoulders, and kissed her on the cheek. ‘I’ll see you very soon,’ he said.

As soon as Fegelein was gone, Lilya unfolded her arms, which were now so cramped that at first she could barely move them. Tucked up the sleeve of her dressing gown was the stiletto knife she always carried with her and which she had almost used on Fegelein in the moment she saw him at the door.

Now Lilya put on her clothes and hurriedly began to pack a suitcase. She threw in an assortment of undergarments, a pair of shoes, a hairbrush, and a clunky dynamo torch made by a company called Electro-Automate, which she had brought with her from Paris. The dynamo operated by repeatedly squeezing a lever attached to the side of the torch, removing the need for expensive and increasingly hard-to-find batteries. The wheezy grinding of these dynamos was a common sound as people made their way about in the dark. Almost everyone carried torches of one kind or another, since no street lights were illuminated in the city at night in case they could be seen by bombers overhead.

Of all the things she crammed into the case, only the torch was important, but this had nothing to do with the light it cast upon the cracked paving stones of Berlin.

The torch housed a roll of film, containing images of the Diamond Stream schematics. Lilya had photographed the blueprints on the same day Fegelein had borrowed them from General Hagemann, having left them in the car while he paid a visit to his mistress.

To hold the film, the dynamo contained within the torch had been replaced by technicians at Beaulieu House, where Lilya had undergone her training in England. The new dynamo was only half the size of the original, allowing the film to be stored in the remaining space.

She had carried the Electro-Automate with her when she returned to France, back in the summer of 1940. Although her bags had been searched many times since then, in France as well as in Germany, the fact that the torch still worked had always been enough to satisfy the inspectors.

By the time Lilya had finished, a little over six hours remained before Fegelein was due to return. By then, she knew that she would have to be long gone from here. Although Lilya was not scheduled to arrive until noon at the safe house where she would rendezvous with Allied agents sent to evacuate her from Berlin, she had no choice but to make her way there now and hope that her contacts would be there.

Slowly, Hunyadi opened his eyes.

A deep, numbing pain pulsed rhythmically against his right temple.

Struggling to focus, he realised he was in his flat and that a handkerchief had been stuffed in his mouth.

Hunyadi went to remove it, but his hands had been tied with the laces of his own shoes to the arms of the chair in which he sat. His trouser belt had also been used to bind his legs together at the ankles.

The last thing he recalled was opening the door to his apartment.

Everything between that moment and this was a blank.

And now a man appeared in front of him. His hair was greying at the temples and old scars creased his weathered skin. From Frau Greipel’s description, Hunyadi realised that this must be the man who had come looking for him at the station.

Although he was helpless, Hunyadi was not terrified. If this stranger had intended to kill him, he would certainly have done so by now.

‘Are you going to be quiet?’ asked the man.

Hunyadi nodded slowly.

The handkerchief was removed from his mouth.

‘You are Pekkala,’ said Hunyadi.

‘That’s right,’ replied the man.

Hunyadi listened to the stranger’s voice, trying to place his accent. Although he spoke German well, this man was not a native speaker. His first guess was Russian, but the accent was layered with something else, clipped and sharp, which he could not immediately place. ‘Frau Greipel said you wanted to talk to me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you must understand that there are easier ways than this.’

‘Under the circumstances,’ replied Pekkala, ‘I am inclined to disagree.’

Who are you? thought Hunyadi. Why would you take the risk of coming here? But he kept his questions to himself.

‘You are searching for someone,’ said Pekkala.

‘Yes,’ confirmed Hunyadi. ‘That’s how I make my living, more or less.’

‘And have you found who you are looking for?’

‘Not yet,’ admitted Hunyadi.

‘But close, perhaps.’

‘If you will walk with me back to the Pankow station, I would be happy to share with you the results of my investigation.’

‘I told you this wasn’t going to work,’ said a voice standing directly behind him.

Hunyadi was startled, not only to discover that there was another person in the room but to hear the man speaking in Russian. Until this moment, Hunyadi had remained relatively calm, but now his pulse began thumping in his neck.

The Russian stepped around from behind Hunyadi. He was holding a Hungarian-made pistol and staring intently at Hunyadi. ‘You understood me, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ answered Hunyadi. There was no point in denying it.

Kirov bent down, so that the two men were looking each other directly in the eye. ‘Listen,’ he said, quietly. ‘This person you are looking for, we are looking for them, too, and we think you might know where they are.’

‘What gives you that idea?’ replied Hunyadi, speaking in the stranger’s tongue, although it had been many years since he’d been able to practise his Russian.

Now it was Pekkala who spoke. ‘Because you are Leopold Hunyadi, and you would not have been chosen for this work if you weren’t the best man for the job.’

‘I am sorry to disappoint you,’ said Hunyadi, ‘but I have not found them yet. And even if I had, what on earth makes you think that I would help you?’

‘Because it might save your life,’ answered Kirov, ‘and not helping us certainly won’t.’

Hunyadi coughed out a laugh. ‘I don’t think you understand the situation,’ he told the two men. ‘Hitler himself assigned me to this case. If I don’t solve it, he’ll do worse than anything you boys can throw at me. So go ahead and shoot, you Bolshevik gangster.’

Kirov glanced at Pekkala. ‘We’re just wasting our time here, Inspector.’ He set the gun against the base of Hunyadi’s skull.

‘Inspector?’ said Hunyadi.

‘That’s right,’ said Pekkala, raising his hand to show Kirov he should wait before pulling the trigger. ‘I am Inspector Pekkala, of the Bureau of Special Operations in Moscow. The man with the gun against your head is Major Kirov.’

‘By any chance are you related to the man they called the Emerald Eye?’ asked Hunyadi.

‘Related?’ Now it was Kirov’s turn to laugh. ‘He is the Emerald Eye!’

Hunyadi blinked in confusion. ‘But I heard that he was dead.’

‘I heard those same rumours,’ said Pekkala, ‘and there were times when they almost came true.’ Now he turned up the collar of his coat, revealing the badge the Tsar had given him long ago.

Astonished, Hunyadi stared at the emerald. As it caught the light, the jewel appeared to flicker, as if to mirror the blinking of his eyes.

‘We did not come here to end your life,’ Pekkala told him. ‘We came here to save someone else’s. If what you know and what we know could be combined, such a thing might still be possible. And in exchange, I offer you a guarantee of help in escaping the battleground this city is about to become.’

‘This city is my home,’ replied Hunyadi, ‘and there’s no point asking me to leave it, even if that means my dying here.’

‘I understand that you might not value your existence enough to tell us anything at all,’ continued Pekkala, ‘and as for why you would assist in saving someone who has conspired against your master, I cannot even conjure up a reason.’ Now Pekkala pointed at the picture of Hunyadi and the woman. ‘But what about her life?’ he asked. ‘Have you considered what might happen to her when the Red Army arrives?’

‘Of course I have considered it!’ shouted Hunyadi. ‘You think I’m doing this for Hitler? He sentenced me to death at Flossenburg for marrying the woman in that picture.’

‘Then why are you still alive?’ asked Kirov.

‘So that I can find the source of the leak of information from headquarters,’ answered Hunyadi. ‘There is no other reason.’

‘Where is your wife now?’ asked Pekkala.

‘In Spain,’ replied Hunyadi, ‘where I was foolish enough to think she would be safe. But even as we speak, she is being held as ransom, to make sure I do as Hitler has commanded.’

‘And when you appear before him empty-handed, what then?’ demanded Pekkala.

‘I may yet succeed.’

‘You might,’ agreed Pekkala, ‘but is that still a chance you are prepared to take?’

‘I have no choice.’

‘You do now,’ Pekkala told him. ‘We, too, have people in Spain and I can see to it that both of you are saved.’

‘Even if that’s true,’ said Hunyadi, ‘why should I trust you any more than I trust him?’

‘Because I am also being held to ransom,’ replied Pekkala. ‘I did not come to Berlin out of loyalty to any cause, any more than you are here because of one.’ Reaching into his coat pocket, he removed the crumpled photo of himself with Lilya and held it out for Hunyadi to see. ‘The woman in that picture is the one I’m trying to save, and she means every bit as much to me as your wife does to you.’

‘Now will you help us or not?’ demanded Kirov.

For a while, Hunyadi said nothing. He just stared at the floor, breathing slowly in and out. Finally, he spoke. ‘Untie me,’ he said quietly.

‘Do as he says,’ ordered Pekkala.

‘Inspector,’ Kirov muttered nervously.

‘Now.’

Kirov sighed. Then he holstered the pistol and loosed Hunyadi from his bindings.

Slowly, Hunyadi rose to his feet. ‘Two days ago,’ he told them, ‘I located a transmitter at the house of a Hungarian diplomat. I think it has something to do with the leak of information from the bunker.’

‘A Hungarian, you say?’ asked Kirov.

‘That’s right,’ said Hunyadi. ‘He was just about to transmit a message when I burst into the room.’

‘And you recovered this message?’

‘I did, but it was encrypted.’

‘Where is it now?’

‘I gave it to someone who offered to help me decode it without letting the authorities know. You see, this leak could be coming from anywhere, and I don’t know who to trust.’

‘But you trust this person?’

‘Not at all,’ replied Hunyadi, ‘but I had no one else to turn to.’

‘And has it been done?’

‘Not yet. Not as far as I know. The man said he would contact me as soon as he had anything, but I haven’t heard from him.’

‘And the Hungarian?’ asked Pekkala. ‘Where is he?’

‘In the morgue at the Kopenick police barracks,’ answered Hunyadi. ‘He killed himself before I had a chance to question him.’

‘And who is at the Hungarian’s place now?’

‘Nobody. It’s empty.’

‘Can you take us there?’

Hunyadi looked around the room. He seemed to be making an inventory in his head of all of his meagre possessions. Then he stepped over to the bedside table and picked up the cheap wooden frame which held the photograph of his wife. Grasping the flap which helped it stand upon the table, he tore away the cardboard backing of the frame. Then he removed the photo and tucked it into the inside pocket of his coat. At last, he turned to Kirov and Pekkala. ‘Follow me,’ he said.

When Fegelein returned to the apartment on Bleibtreustrasse, he found Elsa fast asleep and sprawled across the mattress, still wearing her transparent nightgown.

Rather than make room for himself on the bed, which would almost certainly have woken her again, Fegelein sat down to rest in the yellow chair by the phone stand.

He told himself he would not sleep, but he dozed off anyway, his chin sunk down on to his chest.

Four hours later, he woke to the sound of the caretaker, sweeping the pavement with his witch’s broom.

At first, Fegelein was startled to find himself in the chair and it took him a moment to recall why he was there. He glanced at his watch, gasping when he saw the time. It was 9.30. He should have been at Lilya’s half an hour ago.

Elsa was still asleep, which did not surprise Fegelein. She regularly stayed in bed until noon.

As quietly as he could, Fegelein got out of the chair and made his way to a bookshelf built into the wall on the other side of the room. Behind the collected works of Goethe, which he had never actually read, was a panel that operated on a spring-loaded latch, opening when it was pushed. With gritted teeth, he set his hand upon the panel and applied pressure until the panel clicked open. He looked back to see if Elsa had been woken by the noise.

She had not moved. Her breathing was slow and deep.

Behind the panel was a small briefcase, containing the jewellery and travel documents he and Lilya would need for their escape. The briefcase had been a present from his wife, who had ordered it to be embossed with his full initials and last name – H. G. O. H. Fegelein, and suggested that he use it for his daily meetings with the High Command. However, on the first day he brought it in, Hitler had remarked that the golden initials looked ‘flashy’. This meant, of course, that Fegelein could never use the briefcase for its intended purpose, but he had discovered that it was just the right size for stashing the jewellery and passports. After removing the briefcase from its hiding place, Fegelein was about to press the panel back in place when he paused. The first click had not woken Elsa, but the second one probably would. So he only pushed the panel part way closed and then carefully replaced the books. Standing back, he surveyed his work to see if it would pass inspection. It was barely noticeable, and Fegelein doubted whether Elsa even looked at the bookcase.

There was no time to pack a bag. He simply lifted his leather greatcoat from the hook in the entrance way, opened the door as quietly as he could and stepped out into the hall.

Before he closed the door behind him, Fegelein glanced back at Elsa. He had known long ago that this day would come. In fact, he had rehearsed it so many times in his head that he had managed to convince himself he would feel nothing when the moment finally arrived. But now that he was actually leaving, without a word of goodbye, he still felt sick about it.

He closed the door and made his way down the stairs, keeping to the outer edge of the steps so as not to make them creak. By the time he reached the street, Fegelein was no longer preoccupied with leaving Elsa behind. Instead, his thoughts turned to the future and the wonderful life he would have in the arms of Lilya Simonova.

Just as Lilya Simonova was reaching for the handle, the door seemed to open by itself.

The safe house on Heiligenbergerstrasse had not been difficult to find and she encountered no one as she climbed the stairs. Pausing to examine a newly replaced window on the second floor, she looked out into the street to make sure she hadn’t been followed.

Although Lilya had never actually met the agent with whom she was to rendezvous that day, she did know him by sight, since they had crossed each other’s path more than once in the Hasenheide park where messages were left in the hollowed-out leg of a bench. The first time had been just as she was leaving the park, having timed her exit perfectly to coincide with the arrival of a tram at the Garde-Pioneer station, on which she would begin her journey home.

The thickly moustached man was short and frail, with rumpled clothes that looked as if they needed cleaning. He looked lonely, sad and preoccupied. The man had caught her attention because of the way he glanced at her as she walked by. It was not the casual wolf-like stare she often received from men when she was out walking on her own. This glance was furtive and suspicious, like that of someone who knew more than he could say.

Afraid that he might have been sent to follow her, Lilya Simonova boarded the tram and then immediately exited through the door on the other side. She doubled back on her tracks, following the man across the park.

He sat down on the bench, fetched a newspaper from his coat pocket and began to read. It was only after several minutes that he reached down, retrieved the message Lilya had placed there and made his way out of the park.

This time, she did not follow him.

Whenever they crossed paths again, although she felt his stare upon her like the heat from a lamp held too close, Lilya never looked him in the eye.

Now she wondered what she would say to him.

But the man who stood before her in the doorway was not the same person she had encountered in the Hasenheide park.

It took her a moment to realise she knew who he was.

Her heart slammed into her chest so hard it was as if she had been thrown against a wall.

But his presence here was so unexpected, so impossible it seemed, that she forced herself to think she was mistaken.

He spoke her name, so quietly she barely heard him.

In the instant that she heard Pekkala’s voice, Lilya found herself back on the crowded railway platform of the Nikolaevsky station in Petrograd, just about to board the train, the last time she had held him in her arms.

Then all the years between that day and this receded into darkness, like a butterfly folding its wings.

Pekkala reached out to take her hand. ‘Come inside,’ he said, ‘and I will tell you everything.’

He led her into the flat, and gently closed the door.

Two other men were waiting, one of whom she recognised as the policeman who had questioned her two days before. This man looked as astonished to see her standing there, as she was surprised to see him.

With shock still crackling like sparks along the branches of her nerves, she sat down on the bed.

Pekkala knelt before her and explained the situation they were in. But he paused before he had finished, unsure whether she had heard a single word he’d said. ‘Lilya?’ he asked.

‘Don’t ever leave me again,’ she told him.

He breathed in sharply, as if dust had been thrown in his face. ‘I swear that all the days which we have left I’ll spend with you,’ he said, ‘but what we must do now is leave this place. All hell is about to break loose.’

Hunyadi had been sitting in a chair by the empty fireplace, just staring at Lilya Simonova. ‘But you were never in the bunker!’ he blurted out suddenly, as if a conversation had been playing in his head this whole time and had just now transformed into words.

Lilya glanced at Hunyadi, then turned again to face Pekkala, a questioning look on her face.

‘It’s all right,’ Pekkala told her. ‘It doesn’t matter now. You can tell him, if there’s anything to tell.’

‘Everything I learned, I learned from Fegelein,’ she said.

‘He was the leak, and he had no idea,’ muttered Hunyadi. ‘The poor fool has been hunting himself!’

Kirov rested a hand upon Hunyadi’s shoulder. ‘It’s time to go,’ he said.

Hunyadi rose stiffly to his feet. ‘I thank you, gentlemen,’ he told them, ‘but after what I have just heard, I believe I’ve found a way to solve this case without ever mentioning the name of Lilya Simonova. Hitler will be satisfied, and he will never even know that you were here.’

‘The choice is yours,’ said Pekkala, ‘but what about your wife in Spain? What will become of her?’

‘She’ll be released,’ answered Hunyadi. ‘And as for me, although I’ve always wanted to see Moscow, I believe I’ll take my chances in Berlin.’

‘Fegelein?’ Hitler’s voice sounded hoarse and faint. His laboured breathing slid in and out of the static on the telephone line. ‘Fegelein is the leak?’

‘That’s right,’ answered Hunyadi. By agreement with Pekkala, he had waited several hours before telephoning the bunker. By the time Hunyadi placed the call, the others would already have escaped the city.

‘And can you prove this?’ demanded Hitler.

‘You should be able to correlate every piece of information broadcast on the Allied radio network with times when Fegelein was present in the bunker.’

‘I may require more proof that that, Hunyadi. He is Himmler’s liaison, after all.’

‘If you detain Fegelein and no more leaks emerge, then you’ll know that you have the right person.’

There was a long silence. ‘Very well,’ Hitler said at last. ‘I’ll send Rattenhuber to pick him up.’

‘I suspect that he will be at the house of his mistress, Elsa Batz.’

‘His mistress?’ Hitler’s voice rose suddenly in anger. ‘That man has a mistress?’

‘Yes, I thought you knew.’

‘Of course I didn’t know!’ shouted Hitler. ‘The bastard is married to Gretl Braun! Between you and me, Hunyadi, there’s a good chance he might soon be my brother-in-law!’ By now his voice had risen to a roar. ‘How the hell am I going to explain that to Eva? What’s this woman’s name again?’

‘Elsa Batz,’ repeated Hunyadi. ‘She lives at number seventeen Bleibtreustrasse.’

‘I’ll send Rattenhuber over right away. And thank you, Hunyadi, for everything you’ve done.’

‘My wife,’ said Hunyadi.

‘She will be released within the hour, and you are free to join her, my old friend.’

When Fegelein arrived at Lilya’s flat, he found the door unlocked and the room empty.

She must have panicked, thought Fegelein. I’m almost an hour late, after all. But where could she have gone?

The only place that made any sense to him at that moment was Elsa’s. Lilya must have been on her way there at the same time as I was coming here. With no other way of accounting for her absence, Fegelein hurried back to the apartment on Bleibtreustrasse. Inside the building, he stashed the briefcase in the little closet under the main stairs, where the caretaker, Herr Kappler, stored the witch’s broom which he used for sweeping the pavement.

Fegelein entered the apartment just as Elsa was getting out of bed. As always, the first thing she did was to go to her handbag on the side table and retrieve her lipstick. Then, looking in the little mirror which hung by the door, she daubed her lips a poppy red.

Fegelein never understood why she did this. The lipstick was made by the French company Guerlain and was from the last remaining stock in Berlin, making it ridiculously expensive. Most of it ended up on the rim of her coffee cup, requiring her to apply it again as soon as she had finished eating. But there was no time to think of that now.

‘Where did you go?’ she asked, still looking at her own reflection in the mirror.

Normally, Fegelein could have spat out a lie as quickly as speaking the truth, but he was so distressed at not finding Lilya that his mind had just gone blank. ‘I was taking a walk,’ he muttered.

She laughed quietly. ‘That’s a first.’

He didn’t care whether she believed him or not. ‘Has anyone been here since I left?’ he demanded.

She turned. ‘Why would anyone come here at this hour of the morning?’

Fegelein just shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, heading for the kitchen. He hadn’t had any breakfast and his stomach was painfully empty.

‘What’s wrong with you today?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ he snapped. ‘Leave me alone.’

Just then, there was a knocking on the door.

Fegelein’s stomach flipped over. Lilya is here, he thought. But now he had no idea how to explain what she would be doing at the apartment. Although Lilya often stopped here to pick him up in the car, she always called up from Herr Kappler’s phone at the front desk. He was afraid of the scene Elsa would make in front of Lilya, when she realised he was leaving her behind.

I’ll say there is an important meeting at the Reichschancellery bunker, Fegelein thought to himself. I’ll say the phone downstairs is out of order. That’s why she had to climb the stairs. If Lilya will just play along with me for a couple of minutes, we can leave this place without Elsa causing a commotion. Of course, she will figure it out soon enough, but by then Lilya and I will already be gone.

The knocking came again.

‘I’ll get it!’ said Fegelein, striding across the room towards the door.

But Elsa was standing right there and before Fegelein could do anything about it, she had already opened the door.

Fegelein stopped in his tracks.

It was not Lilya.

Instead, Herr Kappler had come to the door, stooped and smiling and holding out Fegelein’s briefcase. The gilded letters of Fegelein’s name glinted in the morning light. ‘Found this under the stairs,’ he announced. ‘Thought Herr Fegelein might want it back.’ Kappler handed the briefcase to Elsa, bowed his head in a quick bobbing motion and headed back downstairs.

When they were alone again, Elsa turned to Fegelein. ‘What is this?’ she asked, holding out the briefcase. ‘What have you got in here?’

‘Nothing!’ Fegelein blurted out.

‘It doesn’t feel like nothing.’ She placed it on the table by the door and flipped the latch.

‘Don’t open it!’ he commanded.

But it was too late. She flipped up the lid of the briefcase and stared at the tangle of gold chains, diamond rings and jewel-studded brooches. She reached into the hoard and picked out the two Swiss passports, which were held together by a rubber band.

‘Please,’ said Fegelein.

But she didn’t seem to hear him.

She slipped off the rubber band and opened each passport in turn. Then she dropped them back into the briefcase. ‘You were going away with her,’ she whispered.

‘Yes,’ admitted Fegelein. There was no point in lying any more.

‘And you were leaving me here.’ It wasn’t a question. She already knew the answer.

‘Elsa,’ he began, but then his voice died away.

As Fegelein stumbled about in his mind, trying to think of what to say next, Elsa Batz reached into her open bag and withdrew the Walther automatic which Fegelein had given her. She raised the gun and aimed across the room. That day of their first outing flooded back into her brain. The flower pots set up along the wall. The first shot gashing off the wall and the others which peeled away into space. She heard again the clench-jawed hissing of his laughter.

The first shot caught Fegelein in the throat. He dropped to his knees just as the second shot hit him in the chest. By the time the third shot tore off his right ear, Fegelein was already dead.

He tipped face down upon the floor.

She thought how strange the gun smoke smelled as it mixed with the scent of her perfume.

Two minutes later, General Rattenhuber walked into the room, followed by a guard from the Chancellery, who was carrying a sub-machine gun.

Elsa barely glanced up as they entered. She had sat down in the yellow chair and was still holding the Walther automatic.

Rattenhuber recognised the woman from her days as a dancer at the Salon Kitty club. ‘You are Fegelein’s mistress,’ he said.

She nodded wearily.

‘And do you plan on using that again?’ asked Rattenhuber, nodding at the pistol in her hand.

Elsa shook her head.

‘Then kindly drop it to the floor,’ said the general.

She let the gun slip from her grasp.

Rattenhuber walked over to Fegelein, stuck the toe of his boot under the dead man’s chest and rolled him over. ‘I see you left nothing to chance,’ he remarked to Elsa Batz.

At that moment, Rattenhuber’s guard called out to him. ‘You need to see this,’ he said, pointing at the open briefcase on the table by the door.

Rattenhuber made his way over to the table, lifted up a handful of the jewellery and let it sift back through his fingers again. Then he examined the Swiss passports. At the sight of Fegelein’s name, he let out a small choking noise. ‘And who is this?’ he demanded, holding up the other passport.

‘His secretary,’ answered Elsa. ‘Lilya Simonova.’

‘And where is she now?’

‘God knows,’ said Elsa Batz.

Rattenhuber turned to the guard. ‘Search the body,’ he commanded.

The guard placed his sub-machine gun on the bed, knelt down and began going through Fegelein’s pockets. He soon discovered a crumpled sheet of paper, bearing a cryptic series of numbers set into sequences of five.

‘Let me see that,’ said Rattenhuber.

The guard held up the paper and the general snatched it from his hand. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he muttered.

‘What is it?’ asked the guard.

‘A code used by the Allies, called Goliath.’

‘What will happen to me now?’ asked Elsa Batz. She spoke in a half-drugged voice, the way people talk in their sleep.

‘Now you will come with us,’ replied the general.

‘If you’re going to shoot me,’ said Elsa, ‘I’d rather you just did it here.’

‘Shoot you?’ snorted Rattenhuber. ‘The way I see it, Fraulein Batz, you just prevented a traitor from fleeing the course of justice. I think it is more likely that Hitler himself will pin a medal on your chest.’

Heinrich Himmler sat in his office at Hohenlychen, a telephone receiver pressed against his ear. ‘Are you certain, Rattenhuber?’ he asked. ‘Are you absolutely sure that it was Fegelein who leaked the information from the bunker?’

‘I don’t see how it could be otherwise,’ replied Rattenhuber. ‘We found a message in his pocket which was written in a code used by the Allies.’

‘And have you managed to translate it?’

‘Some of it,’ confirmed Rattenhuber.

‘What did it say?’ demanded Himmler.

‘It mentioned the Diamond Stream project.’

There was long silence at the other end.

‘Herr Reichsfuhrer?’ asked Rattenhuber, wondering if the line had been cut.

‘Yes,’ Himmler said at last. ‘This coded message, do you know if it has been sent? Or was it intercepted in time?’

‘That is impossible to say,’ answered Rattenhuber, ‘but I must ask you whether Fegelein was ever in possession of the Diamond Stream schematics.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Himmler.

‘And how did this come about?’

‘I asked him to borrow the plans from Professor Hagemann so that I could look at them myself.’

‘Then we must assume the worst,’ said Rattenhuber.

‘And Hitler knows about all this?’

‘He does.’

‘My God,’ whispered Himmler.

‘A word of advice, Herr Reichsfuhrer.’

‘Yes? Yes? What is it?’ Himmler demanded anxiously.

‘You must distance yourself immediately from Fegelein, as well as anything to do with the Diamond Stream project. Remove any trace of your involvement. Do you understand what I am saying?’

‘I do,’ replied Himmler, ‘and will see to it at once, Rattenhuber.’

Professor Hagemann was sitting in the basement of a ruined house, in a forest west of Berlin. His faithful sergeant, Behr, had just delivered to him a mess tin full of greasy-looking stew. Outside, technicians were assembling a mobile launch pad for one of the few remaining V-2s in the German rocket arsenal.

The planned construction of the hundreds of V-2s demanded by Hitler at the last meeting had never materialised. The factory that manufactured engine parts, located in the mountains of Austria, had just been overrun by the American Army. Newly made dies for the Diamond Stream guidance components, which were to have been installed in the new missiles, had never been put into use. In addition to this, a train carrying the last reserves of rocket fuel, bound for a different assembly area near the old Peenemunde research facility, had been destroyed by British Mosquito fighter bombers before it ever reached its destination.

Only six V-2 launch teams remained in operation, of which General Hagemann’s was one. They were scattered at various sites within a 10-kilometre radius. Within twenty-four hours, the last of the operational rockets would have been fired, at which point Hagemann had instructed the launch team commanders to return to Berlin. There, these highly trained technicians would be armed with whatever antiquated weapons were available and incorporated into makeshift squads tasked with defending the city against the vast firepower of the Red Army.

By Hagemann’s own estimation, their chances of survival were zero.

In the meantime, Hagemann and his crew continued to carry out their duties, but in the trance-like state of those who could no longer find a reason to go on, but went on anyway.

Now the professor pulled a battered aluminium spoon from his boot and stirred it in the contents of the mess kit. He ladled up some of the oily mixture, which bristled with fish bones, as well as some pine needles that had fallen into the cooking pot. He was just about to take a mouthful when Behr appeared at the top of the basement stairs.

‘There’s a call for you on the field radio,’ he said. ‘It’s from Hohenlychen.’

‘Himmler?’

Behr nodded grimly.

Hagemann dropped the spoon back into his soup. ‘What the hell does he want now?’

‘He didn’t say,’ replied Behr. ‘He just told me it was urgent.’

With a sigh, Hagemann put his mess kit down upon the floor, trudged up the stairs and out to the radio truck, one of which accompanied each V-2 launch team.

‘Hagemann!’ Himmler’s voice burst through the sandpapering noise of radio static. ‘I have been looking forward to speaking with you!’

‘How may I be of service, Herr Reichsfuhrer?’ he asked.

‘I want you to come up to my headquarters.’

‘When?’

‘At once! We have much to discuss.’

‘We do?’ asked Hagemann.

‘Yes,’ said Himmler. ‘I want you to meet some friends of mine, so that we can talk about your future.’

In that moment, Hagemann tumbled back in time to the day he had arrived in Berlin, summoned by Hitler to explain the disappearance of the V-2 test rocket. And afterwards, when Fegelein had followed him out of the bunker, what was it exactly that he said? That in dealing with Himmler, there was nothing for Hagemann to be nervous about, unless Himmler asked him to meet with his friends. When Hagemann had asked what would be wrong with that, Fegelein had said – because the Reichsfuhrer has no friends.

At the time, Hagemann had not grasped the meaning of Fegelein’s remark. But now he understood. If Hagemann went to this meeting, it would be the last thing he ever did. Those so-called friends would put a bullet in his head.

‘I would be happy to meet with you!’ lied Hagemann. ‘I will leave at once for Hohenlychen. There’s no need to send a car.’

‘My friends and I will be expecting you,’ replied Himmler and then, as usual, he rung off without saying goodbye.

Hagemann turned to his men. ‘All further launches have been cancelled,’ he said.

‘What?’ Behr asked in disbelief. ‘But what should we do with the rockets?’

‘Destroy them,’ said Hagemann.

‘And what then?’

‘Then you will need to trust me, Sergeant Behr,’ said Hagemann, ‘if you want to get out of this alive.’

A Sherman tank attached to the armoured section of the US 44th Infantry Division made its way slowly along a muddy road north of Reutte in the Austrian Alps.

The tank was called the Glory B, a name coined by its commander, twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Silas Hood from Jamestown, Rhode Island.

Hood had been ordered to patrol the roads north of Reutte. For this, he had requested infantry support but none was available so the tank set out by itself along the forest roads.

German resistance had all but disintegrated in this area, but men continued to be killed by mines, some of which had been planted in the ground months ago.

Standing in the turret, Hood watched the road ahead of him through a pair of binoculars, searching for any tell-tale changes in the earth that might signal the presence of a mine. There were several different kinds of mine used by the Germans. The first was an anti-personnel device known as a Schu-mine. When stepped on, a small canister the size of a coffee can would spring into the air and explode, spraying the area with ball-bearings. The second kind was a glass mine, which had no metal parts that could be picked up by a metal detector. They would tear out of the ground in a shower of jagged shards, causing terrible injuries to anyone standing nearby, but of no real concern to the crew inside a tank. The third sort was known as a Teller mine. It was a large, round disc, about as thick as a man’s outstretched hand, containing a shaped charge of 1 kilogram of ammonite explosives, which could blow the track off a Sherman tank, shattering the wheel bogies and leaving the vehicle helpless. With bad luck, the charge could penetrate the underside, in which case the crew would be cut to pieces by ricocheting chunks of metal.

‘Slowly,’ Hood called down to the driver. He focused his binoculars on the road fifty feet ahead of the tank. ‘Slowly,’ he called down again. A fine rain had begun to fall and Hood pulled out a handkerchief to wipe the moisture off the binocular lenses.

Then the tank came to a sudden halt.

‘Not that slow!’ barked Hood.

‘Lieutenant,’ called a voice from down below. It was the driver, Elmer Hoyt. ‘There’s a guy standing in the road.’

Hood raised his binoculars again and a German officer suddenly leaped into view. He was a tall, dignified looking older man, wearing a long greenish-grey coat with red facing on the lapels. The braid on his peaked cap was gold. In one hand, he clutched a white pillowcase. In his other hand he held a leather tube about the length and thickness of his arm. The man looked tired, as if he had been waiting a long time for someone to come along. But he did not look afraid.

‘Son of a bitch,’ said Hood. ‘I think that is a general.’

‘What the hell is he doing?’ asked Hoyt.

‘He’s trying to surrender, I guess.’ Hood waved at the man to come forward.

The general set off unhurriedly towards the tank, his arms held out to the sides and the white pillow case hanging limply in the damp air. A few paces short of the iron monster, he stopped. ‘My name is General Hagemann,’ he said, ‘and I wish to surrender with my men.’

Inside the tank, Hoyt laughed. ‘Looks like his men made up their own minds what to do.’

‘What’s that you’re carrying?’ asked Hood, nodding towards the leather tube. ‘Is that some kind of weapon?’

‘Documents,’ answered Hagemann, ‘which I believe will be of interest to your superiors.’

‘And what about these men of yours?’

‘With your permission,’ said Hagemann. Then he turned and nodded towards the forest. ‘Come out!’

The woods began to stir, as if the trees were tearing themselves free of their roots. A moment later, the first of Hagemann’s technicians appeared out of the shadows, hands raised. Then came another and another and soon there were almost fifty men, standing with their hands raised on the road.

Hood watched this in amazement. It was not lost on him how differently his day might have turned out if these soldiers had chosen to fight. ‘Turn us around,’ he called to Hoyt.

As slowly as before, the Glory B returned to Reutte, with General Hagemann and his exhausted comrades shuffling behind.

Kirov woke that morning to the rumble of thunder.

At least, that’s what he thought it was.

Since leaving Berlin two days before, they had kept to the back roads, avoiding the highway and veering to the north, where the landscape was forested and offered them greater protection.

Throughout that time, the air had been filled with the distant booming of artillery. But this was different. As sleep peeled away from his bones, Kirov realised that it was not thunder, after all, but rather the noise of machines. Tanks. Hundreds of them, by the sound of it. He could feel the vibration of their engines through the ground on which he lay.

Kirov raised himself up on one elbow and looked around the clearing. The small fire they had lit the night before had burned down to a nest of powdery grey ash.

Pekkala and Lilya were gone. Except for Lilya’s suitcase, which remained where she had left it, and marks on the ground where they had each settled down by the fire, there was no sign of them at all.

Kirov didn’t think much of it, assuming they had simply woken before him and now, perhaps, were gathering sticks to rekindle the campfire, over which they might cook breakfast from their meagre stores of food.

As Kirov rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, he recalled a moment from the night before, when he had been woken by the crackle of a burning twig.

By the coppery light of the flames, he saw that his companions had not yet gone to bed. They sat cross-legged on the ground, their faces almost touching as they spoke in voices too faint for Kirov to hear.

Pekkala must have sensed that he was being watched. Suddenly, he turned and stared at Kirov, so quickly that there was no time to look away.

Ashamed to have been eavesdropping, Kirov opened his mouth, ready to apologise.

But Pekkala smiled at him, to show that there was nothing to forgive.

For a second longer the two men watched each other, coils of smoke rising lazily between them.

Then Kirov closed his eyes and slept again.

Now he climbed to his feet and hauled on the crumpled coat which had served him as a groundsheet in the night. The rumble of the tanks became a constant in his ears. They appeared to be coming from the east and heading for Berlin, but they could just as easily have been retreating German forces as advance units of the Red Army, so he decided to stay where he was, hidden from the road, until he knew one way or the other.

Hoping to track down Pekkala, Kirov ventured away from the stone ring of the campfire and began to wander through the woods. Morning sunlight, flickering down through the first leaves of the spring, dappled the earth on which he trod. As he clambered across the trackless ground, Kirov thought back to the day in Siberia he had parked his car at the end of a dirt logging road and went to find the legendary Inspector in order to tell him he was needed once again. It seemed so distant now, like memories stolen from a man who had lived long before him.

Eventually, Kirov arrived back the campfire, hoping they might have returned. But except for the suitcase, there was still no sign of the Inspector, or of Lilya.

A great uneasiness began to spread across his mind.

The sound of the tanks was louder now. Kirov could make out the rumble of individual engines and the monstrous squeaking clatter of tracks.

Perhaps they are out on the road, thought Kirov, and he looked down at the suitcase, thinking he should pick it up and join them. He took hold of the case, lifted it up and was startled by the fact that it felt empty except for a single object rattling about inside. Kirov dropped to one knee and opened the case. It contained only a clunky dynamo torch, engraved with the words ‘Electro-Automate’.

Now his gaze was drawn to the fire, where something lay among the ashes. Reaching into the grey dust, he picked it out and saw that it was the remains of Lilya’s hairbrush. The varnish on the brush had all been burned away and only neat lines of holes remained of where the bristles had been anchored. But that wasn’t the only thing. Now that he looked, he could see the frail teeth of a zip, twisted by the flames, and glass buttons melted into shapes like tiny ears. He realised that it all belonged to clothes that she had been carrying with her in the suitcase.

‘Why would she do such a thing?’ Kirov wondered aloud, still staring at the campfire, as if the carbonised remains of all these things might somehow call out to him in reply.

Tucking the torch into his pocket, Kirov made his way out to the road, hoping to find their tracks in the dirt before the fast-approaching tanks obliterated every trace of movement in their path. But there was nothing to tell him which way they might have gone.

Struggling to gather his thoughts, Kirov pressed his hands against his face. As he did so, his fingers brushed against some unexpected object, pinned beneath the collar of his coat. Fumbling, he undid the clasp and removed what had been fastened there.

It was the emerald eye.

‘Mother of God,’ whispered Kirov, as he finally grasped what his fears had been whispering to him.

Overwhelmed, he did not even dive for cover when the first tank rumbled into view.

It was a Soviet T-34. Red Army soldiers clung to the distinctive sloping armour, their faces, guns and uniforms all swathed in a coating of dirt. The men stared at Kirov as the tanks rolled by. One of them split his earth-caked face, revealing a set of broken teeth.

More tanks followed, raising the dust until Kirov could barely see the iron monsters, even though he could almost reach out and touch them.

When the column had finally passed, he walked out into the middle of the road.

‘Pekkala!’ Kirov called into the forest.

Then he waited, counting the seconds, but no sound returned to him except the rustle of wind through the leaves.

Finally, he turned towards the east and started walking.

One week later, Kirov stood before his master at the Kremlin.

On Stalin’s desk lay the dynamo torch that Lilya had left in the suitcase. The day before, as soon as he arrived in the city, Kirov had handed it over to the Lubyanka armoury, along with the Hungarian pistol he’d been issued.

‘What is that doing here?’ asked Kirov.

‘We found a roll of film inside.’

Kirov thought of the number of times he had almost thrown it away on his journey back to Moscow. Although it barely worked, he had kept it because it was better than nothing, and because regulations required him not to abandon any useful equipment acquired while in enemy territory.

Now Stalin shoved across the desk a stack of newly printed photographs. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Look.’

Kirov leafed through the images before him, but all he could make out was a tangle of lines, forming shapes which made no sense, and German words, all of which appeared to be abbreviated, whose meanings were all lost to him.

‘What you see there,’ Stalin explained, ‘are details of a missile guidance system which might have won Germany the war if they had managed to build it in time. If only it could have been ours.’

‘But surely now it is,’ said Kirov.

‘Yes and no,’ replied Stalin.

‘What do you mean, Comrade Stalin? Are the details incomplete?’

‘Oh, no, Major Kirov. It’s all there. Unfortunately, we have just learned that a certain General Hagemann was recently captured by American forces in Austria and he was carrying an identical set of plans, which he promptly handed over to his captors. Since our marriage of convenience with the Allies will soon be coming to an end, the fact that we both now possess the same technology more or less cancels things out. Nevertheless, you are to be congratulated for returning with such valuable information,’ and then he added, ‘even if it was by accident.’

Kirov felt his heart sink.

‘Along the way, however, you appear to have lost something of great value to me.’

There was no need for Stalin to elaborate.

Kirov wanted to explain how Pekkala and Lilya had simply disappeared while he was sleeping, and even though that might have been the truth, it would never have passed for an excuse. ‘I could try to find him,’ he suggested faintly. ‘If you give me some time, Comrade Stalin . . .’

Stalin laughed. ‘Do you know how many lifetimes that would take? If we ever see Pekkala again, it will be at the time and place of his own choosing and not ours.’

Kirov bowed his head, knowing that Stalin was right. He guessed how things would play out now. The drive to Lubyanka in the back of a windowless lorry. The walk to the cellar down the winding stone staircase towards the dome-shaped cells, which he would never reach, because the guard escorting him would put a bullet in the back of his head just as he reached the bottom of the stairs. Kirov bowed his head and waited for sentence to be passed.

Just then, he heard a rustling sound.

Glancing up, Kirov saw that Stalin was holding out to him a single sheet of paper. It was old, discoloured and dog-eared at the corners, as if it had passed through many hands before arriving on the master’s desk.

In the upper left-hand corner, neatly printed in blue ink, was the hammer and sickle seal of the Soviet Union, surrounded by two sheaves of wheat, like hands at prayer. The document, dating back to June of 1929, had been issued by the Central Committee of Prison Labour for the Region of Eastern Siberia. It stated that Prisoner 4745, a tree-marker in the valley of Krasnagolyana, was assumed to have perished of natural causes in the winter of 1928. His body had not been recovered. It was signed by someone named Klenovkin, commandant of the camp at Borodok.

‘Do you know the identity of prisoner 4745?’ asked Stalin.

Kirov shook his head.

‘It was Pekkala.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ said Kirov. ‘This says he died seventeen years ago!’

‘That document was prepared as part of my agreement with the Inspector, back when he first agreed to work with me. The deal I made was not simply to release him, once he had solved his first case, but to wipe him from the memory of this country, as if he had never been here. So you see, Major Kirov, I can hardly punish you for failing to return to Moscow with a man you never met.’

Kirov opened his mouth but no sound came out.

‘Consider yourself lucky,’ said Stalin, ‘and I suggest that, first thing in the morning, you return to work before this streak of good fortune runs out.’

Dazed, Kirov turned to go.

But Stalin wasn’t finished yet. ‘Will you ever forgive him for leaving?’ he asked.

‘There is nothing to forgive,’ replied Kirov.

When Stalin was alone again, he got up from his desk and walked over to the window. Standing to one side, so that he could not be seen by anyone looking from below, he gazed out over the rooftops of the city. The sun had set, and dusty purple twilight fanned across the sky. For a long time, he stood there, as if waiting for something to appear. Then he reached out with both arms and drew the blood-red curtains shut.

Emerging from the Kremlin, Kirov set out through the darkening streets, bound for the tiny flat where he knew his wife would be waiting. As Kirov strode along, he reached into his pocket and closed his hand around the oval disc of gold, feeling the emerald press against the centre of his palm. Kirov did not know how long he’d have to wait before its true owner returned, but he swore a quiet oath to keep it safe, until that day finally came.

At that same moment, far to the north in the wilderness of Finland, the Walker in the Woods lay down to sleep. Beside him lay his wife, her hair glowing softly in the moonlight.