Berlin Red

‘Are you sure there’s no one on the other side who knows we’ve got hold of this?’

Rufford looked nervously at Warsop.

‘Why do you want to know that?’ demanded Warsop.

‘Because if I can build it’, answered Greenidge, ‘I might also be able to build something which could defeat its purpose. And that’s what you really want, isn’t it? The simple fact that we might be able to duplicate the technology isn’t going to prevent it from being used against us.’

For the first time, Warsop’s scowl faltered.

‘We’re as sure as we can be that the enemy has no idea where these rocket pieces went,’ explained Rufford, ‘but that’s never one hundred per cent. The men who brought us that wreckage took extraordinary risks in doing so, but who knows if someone saw them on their journey, or if the local authorities where the rocket came down have been able to figure out what was taken from the wreck. The way things are in Germany right now, they’ve got plenty of other things to worry about. Let’s hope this stays off their radar.’

‘The sooner you get me those schematics . . .’

‘People are working on that even as we speak, Professor, but as I’m sure you can imagine, it is easier said than done.’

When the two men had gone, Greenidge turned his attention once more to the piece of wreckage. With one finger, he moved aside the tangled spider’s web of multicoloured wires and was startled when something fell out of the mechanism. It tumbled to floor, metal ringing on the concrete. Greenidge bent down and picked it up, relieved to see the solid disc of brass had not been broken by the fall. There appeared to be some writing on it, half hidden by the smear of the same mud that coated the rest of the mechanism. With the side of his thumb, he wiped the dirt away and squinted at the words, struggling to make sense of them. ‘Lotti,’ he read aloud. ‘Beste Kuh.’

Message from Christophe to Major Clarke:

Diamond Stream plans acquired.Major Clarke to Christophe:

What is Diamond Stream?Christophe to Major Clarke:

Rocket assembly. Purpose unclear but high value.Major Clarke to Christophe:

Photos?Christophe to Major Clarke:

Yes. Film is safe but not developed.Major Clarke to Christophe:

We will get you out. Monitor safe house. Follow protocol.

‘Inspector?’ whispered Major Kirov.

Pekkala was sitting at his desk. With unseeing eyes, he stared at the wall, a look of fixed intensity anchored to his face. His hands lay flat among the dusty white rings of mug stains on the woodwork of the desk, like someone who has just felt the ground shake beneath his feet.

Kirov was careful not to get too close. He had seen this phenomenon before. The Inspector was not asleep. Instead, he had travelled deep inside the catacombs of his mind, leaving behind all but the shell of his body.

When these trances overcame Pekkala, it was important to wake the man gently. Kirov had learned never to jostle him out from this state of waking dreams. The first time he had tried this, the Inspector exploded into movement and Kirov found himself staring down the barrel of Pekkala’s Webley revolver. He had drawn the weapon from its holster with a speed Kirov had never seen before in the Inspector, or in anyone else, for that matter. There had been many times since, when, in the carrying-out of their duties, Kirov had watched Pekkala unholster the Webley and, although the Inspector was quick, the pace of his conscious movements was nothing like the speed with which this savagery erupted from his self-hypnotic state.

‘Inspector?’ Kirov called again. He stood well back from the desk, edged in behind the wheezy iron stove they used to heat their office on Pitnikov Street. ‘Inspector, you must wake up. We are wanted at the Kremlin.’ The call had come in only a few minutes before, ordering them to appear. Whenever Kirov had to listen to Poskrebychev, and especially over the phone, he always had the impression that he was being barked at by a small and irritating dog. Flinching involuntarily as he listened to Stalin’s secretary relay the Kremlin’s order, Kirov had glanced at the Inspector, unable to comprehend how the man could sleep through the clattering of the telephone bell, followed by the muffled ranting of Poskrebychev through the receiver.

After a few more attempts at trying to wake the Inspector with only the murmuring of his voice, Kirov removed an onion from a basket where he kept whatever food they had on hand. Removing a knife from his desk drawer, he sliced up the onion and placed it in an iron frying pan, along with a splat of butter, which he stored, wrapped in a handkerchief, on the sill outside the window, where the Russian winter kept it frozen solid.

Resting the pan on the flat surface of the stove, which had almost consumed its daily ration of wood, it was not long before the onions began to sizzle and the room soon filled with their aroma.

Almost imperceptibly, one of Pekkala’s hands twitched. Then his fingers began to move, as if, in his unconscious state, the Inspector was playing out a tune upon some ghostly piano.

Sharply, Pekkala breathed in a breath. He blinked rapidly, as the focus returned to his eyes.

‘Where were you?’ Kirov asked.

Pekkala shook his head, as if he could no longer recall, but the truth was he remembered perfectly. It was simply too complicated to explain.

He had been in St Petersburg, strolling with Lilya along the Morskaya and Nevsky Prospekts. They had stopped to buy chocolate at Conradi’s, before going to see a play at the Theatre Michel. And afterwards, they went for a drink at the Hotel d’Europe, where the bartender was a man from Kentucky.

These things had never happened. They belonged to a parallel world in which he had never been separated from her, and there had never been a Revolution, and a bank robber named Joseph Dzhugashvili had not murdered his way to the Kremlin, from which he ruled under the name he gave himself – Stalin – Man of Steel.

Only in moments of great stillness, such as that quiet afternoon on Pitnikov Street, could Pekkala glimpse that other life he might have lived.

Sometimes, in that trance of overwhelming memory, he would reach out, as if to pull himself into that second world, only to watch that fragile loophole disappear when sounds or smells or the touch of his well-meaning assistant intruded, and he would find himself once more a prisoner of flesh and bone.

But this time it was different. Although Pekkala had long since resigned himself to the fact that those two paths – the one he had taken and the one he might have done – were never going to converge, still they both had a role to play, in this world if not in the other.

At the outset of her days in exile, Lilya Simonova had clung to every detail of the time she had spent with Pekkala.

But the more time that went by, the more difficult it became. The memories began, very slowly, to fracture. It was as if she had found herself in a room full of broken mirrors and even if she could have glued every shard back into its place, the image could never be properly restored.

Eventually, instead of trying to remember, she did all she could to forget. It was either that, or lose her sanity completely.

But some of them refused to fade away, especially in those moments just before she fell asleep at night, when no amount of concentration could force the memories back into the darkness. The most vivid and tenacious of these were the legends he had told her of the place where he came from.

Pekkala had grown up in the lake region of eastern Finland, not far from the town of Lappeenranta. His father had been born there, and knew the waterways and forest trails as well as if they’d been the creases on his palm. But Pekkala’s mother was a Sami, from the northernmost reaches of Lapland. It was from her that Pekkala had learned the stories which he then passed on to Lilya, as they walked the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo in those first weeks of their acquaintance.

He would meet her at the stone wall after she had locked up the schoolhouse for the day. Then they would walk to the yellow stone house known as the Bath Pavilion, or else they would make their way to the Lyceum garden, where the statue of Pushkin cast his brooding shadow on the ground.

But under the spell of Pekkala’s stories, Lilya barely noticed her surroundings.

He told her of the time when, as a child, he had gone to visit his mother’s family in the north and, after a three-day journey, arrived to find the men of the village on the point of setting out to hunt a bear. The beast had only recently emerged from hibernation and had already killed three calves from the reindeer herd on which the village relied, not only for food but for clothing.

So sacred was the bear that no one dared to speak its name. Instead, they just called him by a word which meant ‘the Walker in the Woods’.

The animal was tracked to its lair and brought down with spears tipped with bone from the reindeer it had killed. Then its corpse was tied to a V-shaped trellis made from birch trees and dragged back to the village. That night, meat from the bear was cooked over a fire made from the same trellis used to haul him in.

The taste of it, Pekkala told her, was rank and sour and, when no one was looking, he spat it back into the fire, where the fat burned with a flame like polished brass.

The next morning, the bear was buried in a hole as deep as the bear had been tall and even though the animal had been cut to pieces for the feast, his bones were now arranged in exactly the way he had carried them in life.

The place where they buried the bear was at the edge of a grove of trees where the People of the Twilight lived. But there were no houses to mark their property or any sign at all that they were there. The name of this tribe was the Sajvva, and they lived in a parallel world, making themselves known only when they had to. They were said to be tall and beautiful, and their skin appeared to radiate a glow like that of polished wood. The Sajvva lived much as Pekkala’s people did, catching their own fish from the lakes and tending their own herds of reindeer. These animals they did not share. Only the bear lived in both of their worlds; serving as an emissary between the Twilight World and that of men. They buried his bones with respect, not only for the animal itself but for the Sajvva who considered him a friend.

In time, when he was ready, the Walker would rise up from his grave and piece his body back together, bone by bone, until he was himself again, so he could carry on his ceaseless wandering between the worlds of gods and men.

He had told her that story one evening as they stood at the edge of the Facade Pond, with the Alexander Palace at their backs. The palace had been lit up and the moon had just risen above the trees, casting its mercury light across the still water.

‘What strange names they have for things up there,’ Lilya had remarked.

‘They would have a name for you as well,’ Pekkala told her.

She turned to him, smiling. ‘Oh, really?’ she asked. ‘And what name would that be?’

‘They would call you,’ he began, and then he paused.

‘Yes?’

‘Your name’, said Pekkala, ‘would be “She Whose Hair Glows Softly in the Moonlight”.’

Even though the words had just rolled off his tongue, there was something both ancient and haunting about them, as if the name had been waiting for her much longer than she’d waited for the name.

The last thing she heard of Pekkala, after the Revolution drove them apart, was that he had been sent to the labour camp of Borodok, in the valley of Krasnagolyana. As years passed, and only silence reached her from the forests of Siberia, she began to wonder if Pekkala was still alive.

At times like that, she would return to the stories he had told her, until it seemed to her that Pekkala had transformed into the Walker in the Woods, striding through the veil between the worlds of gods and men with no more effort than a sigh.

And then she would not worry any more.

While he waited for Pekkala to arrive, Professor Swift sat in a chair across from Stalin’s desk, nervously fingering his gold Dunhill lighter. In the other hand, he held an unlit cigarette, which he was desperate to smoke but did not dare to do in Stalin’s presence. Although Swift was well aware of Stalin’s tobacco habit, he had been warned by his station commander not to light up before the Boss himself saw fit to fill the room with smoke.

Stalin seemed to know this. Balanced between his yellowed fingertips was one of the many Markov cigarettes he puffed away each morning, often switching to a pipe come afternoon. He tapped the stubby white stick upon the leather blotter of his desk, letting it slide up between his fingers before turning it around and tapping it back down the other way.

‘Pekkala appears to be late,’ remarked Swift.

Stalin responded with a grunt.

Another minute passed.

Swift could feel perspiration sticking the shirt to his back. ‘Perhaps I should come back later,’ he suggested.

Stalin fixed him with emotionless yellow-green eyes.

‘Perhaps not,’ Swift corrected himself.

From the outer office an irregular clatter of typewriter keys, which seemed to pause now and then, as if the typist – that little bald man with a shifty expression – were listening for any words that passed between them.

Just when Swift was about to flee from the premises, he heard voices in the outer office. ‘Thank God,’ he muttered.

The doors to Stalin’s study opened.

Poskrebychev swung into the room, his hands touching both door knobs, which caused his arms to spread as if he were some large featherless bird in the moment before it took flight.

Pekkala and Kirov followed on his heels.

Swift was struck by the air of lethal efficiency these two men seemed to exude. He, himself, felt clumsily unprepared. The pretence of his job as sub-director of the Royal Agricultural Trade Commission was, by now, nothing more than an afterthought. The Soviets seemed to have known exactly who he was before he even arrived in the country and the charade that SOE’s concern for agent Christophe was purely humanitarian had also crumbled to dust. He felt like a man in a poker game who had bet everything on a bluff, only to realise that he’d been showing his cards all along.

On seeing Pekkala walk into the room, Stalin’s whole demeanour seemed to change. He smiled. The stiffness went out of his shoulders. He wedged the cigarette between his lips and lit it with a wooden match which he struck against a heavy brass ashtray already crowded with that morning’s crumpled stubs. ‘You are going to Berlin!’ he announced. ‘I hear it’s very nice this time of year.’

‘And me?’ asked Kirov.

‘You as well,’ confirmed Stalin, ‘along with a guide who will lead you to a safe house in the city. There, you will meet agent Christophe and bring her back across the Russian lines to safety.’

‘Who runs the safe house?’ asked Pekkala.

‘We do,’ answered Swift. Before continuing, he paused to light a cigarette, flooding his lungs with smoke. ‘It belongs to one of our contact agents, who is employed at the Hungarian Embassy.’

‘You will be provided with papers’, explained Stalin, ‘indicating that you are Hungarian businessmen who have been stranded in the city by the bombing and are staying with a member of the embassy until you are able to leave Berlin.’

‘Neither of us speaks Hungarian,’ said Kirov.

‘And nor, in all likelihood, will any policeman who stops and asks for your papers,’ answered Swift. ‘The contact has been told to expect you. If the police check with him, he will verify your story. There is one other thing.’

‘And what is that?’ asked Pekkala.

‘We have just learned from an informant in the German Security Service that Hitler has assigned a detective, a former member of the Berlin police, to root out a spy whom Hitler is convinced is operating from within his own headquarters. It’s possible that they are closing in on Christophe, so the sooner you can get her out of there, the better.’

‘A detective?’ asked Pekkala. ‘But surely they have a Security Service protecting the headquarters?’

‘Indeed they do,’ confirmed Swift. ‘It is headed up by a former Munich policeman named Rattenhuber.’

‘Why not use him?’ asked Kirov.

‘Hitler no longer knows whom to trust,’ Swift explained. ‘That’s why he chose someone from the outside: an old comrade of his from the Great War.’

‘Who is this man?’ asked Stalin.

‘His name is Leopold Hunyadi.’

‘Hunyadi!’ muttered Pekkala.

‘You know him?’ asked Swift.

‘By reputation, yes. Hunyadi is the best criminal investigator in Germany. When did Hitler assign him to the task?’ asked Pekkala.

Swift shook his head. ‘We’re not sure,’ he confessed. ‘It must be at least a few days.’

‘Then we are already behind schedule,’ said Pekkala. Turning to Stalin, he asked, ‘How soon can you get us to Berlin?’

‘If all goes well,’ he replied, ‘I’ll have you walking the streets of that city by the day after tomorrow.’

The ash on Swift’s cigarette was now precariously long and he began looking about for somewhere to tap it out. Stalin made no move to offer up his own ashtray and so, with gritted teeth, Swift tapped out the hot ash into his palm.

‘I’ll get a message through to agent Christophe,’ said Swift. ‘She will be waiting for you at the safe house upon your arrival in Berlin.’ He made his exit, still carrying the ash on his palm.

The men who remained waited until they heard the clunk of the outer door closing before they resumed their conversation.

‘There’s something he just told us which doesn’t make sense,’ remarked Stalin.

‘And what is that?’ asked Pekkala.

‘One of our sources in the Berlin Justice Department informed us that Leopold Hunyadi was condemned to death more than a month ago.’

‘What did he do to deserve that?’ asked Kirov.

‘It’s not clear,’ answered Stalin. ‘All we know is that Hunyadi was sent to the prison camp at Flossenburg to await execution.’

‘Maybe they got the name wrong,’ suggested Kirov.

Stalin slowly opened his hands and then set them together again, to show that it was anybody’s guess.

‘If Swift is right, however,’ said Pekkala, ‘then it will not be long before Hunyadi tracks her down. Lilya’s only chance is for us get there first.’

‘You depart tonight,’ said Stalin. ‘The appropriate weapons have been set aside for you at NKVD Headquarters, as well as those false identification papers provided by the British. All you have to do is pick them up and be ready to go by six o’clock this evening.’

As both men turned to leave, Stalin loudly cleared his throat to show he wasn’t finished with them yet.

Both men froze in their tracks.

‘A word with you in private, Inspector,’ said Stalin. ‘Major, you can wait in the hall.’

At that same moment, in the Flossenburg Concentration Camp in southern Germany, Leopold Hunyadi was preparing to meet his maker.

He was of medium height, with thinning blonde hair and a round and cheerful face. Hunyadi was in the habit of tilting his head back when he spoke to people, at the same time narrowing his eyes, as if to hide whatever emotions they might disclose. He was not a man who had ever been prone to physical exertion and now, as a result, possessed a belly that sagged over the old army belt he still wore, whose buckle was emblazoned with the words ‘In Treue Fest’, from his time in the Great War, when he had served as a sergeant in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment.

In 1917, in a battle near the town of Zillebeke in Flanders, he had saved the life of another German soldier who had become entangled in barbed wire while attempting to deliver a message from the trenches to a battery of artillery located just behind the lines. Due to a miscommunication, the battery had opened fire on German trenches, instead of the English lines. In the course of this bombardment, several soldiers were killed and the radio lines had been cut. In desperation, an officer scribbled out a message ordering the artillery to cease fire, handed it to a nearby corporal and told him to deliver it as quickly as humanly possible.

The name of this corporal was Adolf Hitler. Shortly after leaving the trenches, he was blown off his feet by an incoming shell and, although unwounded, became stuck in a nest of barbed wire.

At that same moment, Sergeant Hunyadi emerged from the bunker where he had been seeking shelter from the guns. Seeing the corporal tangled like an insect in a spider’s web, and hearing the man’s cries for help, he used a pair of pliers to cut the soldier loose from the snare of rusty talons.

When the war was over, Hunyadi went on to become one of the most successful detectives in the history of the Berlin police force.

Even though he had refused to join Hitler’s newly founded National Socialist Party, an act which would normally have guaranteed the swift termination of his career, Hitler never forgot the debt he owed Hunyadi and refused to have him dismissed.

Although frustrated by Hunyadi’s stubbornness, Hitler allowed the detective to continue his work unhindered by any lack of political affiliation.

But Hitler’s patience with his old friend came to an end in 1938, when he was informed by his intelligence service that Hunyadi’s wife, Franziska, a woman of legendary beauty in Berlin, had been born into a family of Sephardic Jews, who had emigrated from Spain generations before.

Hunyadi was summoned to the Berlin Headquarters of the Security Service. There he was informed that he should immediately begin divorce proceedings against his wife. An excuse would be provided by the courts. The paperwork would be expedited. The whole thing would be finalised within a week, after which his wife would receive permission to leave the country.

When Hunyadi protested, saying that he would rather leave the country with his wife than divorce her and remain in Germany, he was told that this was not an option. His services were required in Berlin. Any failure to carry out Hitler’s wishes would result in the arrest of his wife and the certainty of transport to the women’s concentration camp at Belsen.

Faced with this ultimatum, Hunyadi had no choice but to agree. The divorce papers were drawn up, Hunyadi signed them, and Franziska departed for Spain, where she was taken in by distant relatives.

With Hitler’s blessing, and under his personal protection, Hunyadi continued his work as an investigator, adding to his earlier reputation with a string of successful cases. Hitler himself called upon Hunyadi to undertake a number of investigations, including one in which a British major with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist had washed up on the coast of Spain. It appeared that the dead man, whose name was William Martin, had been killed in a plane crash off the Spanish coast. Although Martin had managed to make his way into a damaged life raft, he succumbed to injuries and drowned before reaching the shore, where he was found by fishermen as they prepared to set out their nets. Spanish authorities, being sympathetic to the German cause, had allowed German intelligence to open and photograph the contents of the briefcase before turning the body over to the British Embassy. The documents turned out to be a complete work-up of a planned invasion of Sardinia, signed by several members of the Allied High Command. In spite of the fact that Martin had been carrying tickets to a London theatre production, as well as a letter from his fiancee – details which did as much to convince the German High Command as the contents of the briefcase itself – Hunyadi’s recommendation was to treat the whole thing as a trick.

Disregarding the detective’s warning, Hitler ordered more than 20,000 combat troops to Sardinia, where they prepared for the imminent arrival of the Allies. By the time they figured out that Major Martin and his battle plans had indeed been a decoy all along, the invasion of Normandy had already begun.

Even before Hunyadi had returned from Spain, it came to Hitler’s attention through an informant in the Spanish government that the detective had secretly met with Franziska and, in a private ceremony, married her a second time.

Seeing this as a personal betrayal of the trust he had placed in Hunyadi, Hitler ordered the detective to be arrested, stripped of his membership in the Berlin Police Department and sent to Flossenburg. There, he was to await a trial whose outcome was a foregone conclusion.

In November of 1944, Leopold Hunyadi was dragged from his cell, and hauled before a magistrate in an improvised courtroom at the Flossenburg mess hall, where he received the news that he had been sentenced to death by hanging.

From that day to this, Hunyadi had lived in a kind of suspended animation, never knowing which day was to be his last. In the beginning, each time he heard footsteps in the hall outside his cell, his heart would clench like a fist at the thought that they were coming for him now. This happened so many hundreds of times that he grew numb to it, as if a part of him had already departed from his body and was waiting, somewhere beyond the concrete wall, for the rest to follow.

Although the tiny window in his cell was too high up for him to have a view, he could sometimes hear the wooden trapdoor of the gallows clunking open in the courtyard just outside his room. Rather than terrifying Hunyadi, the sound gave him comfort, because it meant that the Flossenburg gallows was operating on a drop system, which would kill its victims quickly, rather than a different method, also in use, by which men would be hoisted up a pole and left to dangle while they slowly choked to death.

To pass the time, Hunyadi made contact with the men on either side of him. He could not see or speak to them, so he employed a system known as the Polybius Square, which separated the alphabet into five rows of five letters, each letter in its own box, and with C and K in the same box. By tapping a heating pipe that ran through the rooms, the first set of taps indicating the horizontal position and the second set showing the vertical position within the box, it was possible to spell out letters.

Hunyadi had learned the system early in his career and had often eavesdropped on conversations between prisoners when carrying out investigations, sometimes even using the system to communicate with prisoners he had arrested, who mistook him for another prisoner and often divulged information that they would never have told the police.

Men came and went; all of them high-ranking officers, government officials or political prisoners. From this, Hunyadi came to understand that this particular prison block at Flossenburg had been selected as the final destination for those whose exits from this world had been decreed by the Fuhrer himself.

From newcomers, Hunyadi learned about the advance of the Allied armies, and he guessed that it would not be long before either the Russians or the Americans overran the camp. While his fellow prisoners tapped out their messages of hope that the Allies would save them, Hunyadi realised that the approach of these armies would only hasten their deaths.

The sun had just set that day when the door swung open and a guard named Krol walked in.

Hunyadi had been lying on his bunk. Now he sat up in confusion. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘Get undressed,’ ordered the guard.

Hunyadi, who had been asleep when Krol opened the door, was at first so confused by this command that he just sat on his bunk and did not move.

Angered by Hunyadi’s stupor, Krol stepped forward and fetched the detective a mighty slap across the face. ‘Strip, damn you!’ he bellowed.

Blearily, Hunyadi obeyed.

When at last he stood naked in front of Kroll, the guard turned and marched out of the room. ‘Follow me!’ he commanded.

As Hunyadi left his cell for the first time in months, another guard fell in behind him and he walked between the two men, the almost noiseless shuffle of his bare feet in stark contrast to the crunch of the guards’ hobnailed boots upon the concrete floor.

It was only when they turned a corner and he could see the courtyard dead ahead, that he finally grasped what was happening.

His heart began to thunder, as if it was trying to hammer its way out of his chest.

He could see the gallows now, and on it were three nooses, hanging side by side. Two men, as naked as Hunyadi, stood with the nooses in front of them, hands bound behind their backs. Nobody stood behind the third noose, and Hunyadi understood that it was meant for him.

He did not recognise the men. The paleness of their flesh appeared grotesque.

Why do they need us to be naked? Hunyadi wondered to himself. What final insult is this?

He was halfway across the courtyard now. Little pebbles in the gravel dug into his heels.

He thought of Franziska. He wondered what she was doing now. He had heard stories of people feeling something they described as a kind of snapping shock at the moment when their loved ones passed away, as if some invisible thread were snapping. I wonder if she’ll feel it, thought Hunyadi.

And then suddenly Hunyadi realised that the terror which had haunted him for so many days that he could no longer recall what it felt like to live without it was only the fear of dying and not of death itself.

As soon as he understood that, even the fear of dying lost its grip on him and faded away into the still air of the courtyard.

Krol turned and looked back at Hunyadi, to make sure that the man had not begun to falter. And the guard, who had led so many men to their deaths these past few months, was astonished to see Hunyadi smiling.

‘Stop!’ called a voice.

All three men, the two guards and Hunyadi, came to an abrupt halt. They turned in unison to see a man, wearing the finely tailored uniform of a camp administrator, come tumbling out of the same doorway from which they had only just emerged.

‘What is it?’ demanded Krol.

‘Bring him back,’ said the man.

‘I will not!’ roared Krol. ‘I have my orders!’

‘Your orders have been overruled,’ said the administrator, ‘unless you’d care to take it up with General Rattenhuber in Berlin!’

Krol blinked, as if a bright light was suddenly shining into his face. Grabbing Hunyadi by the arm, he marched the naked man back inside, followed by the second guard, who looked as confused as his prisoner.

As the three men stepped into the shadows of the concrete block house, they heard the heavy clunk of gallows trap doors swinging open.

‘What is happening?’ stammered Hunyadi.

To this, Krol just shook his head in stunned amazement.

‘What’s happening,’ explained the administrator, ‘is that your death has been postponed.’

‘But why?’

‘You have a friend in high places, Hunyadi. Very high places indeed.’

‘Hitler?’ gasped Hunyadi.

The administrator nodded.

‘But he’s the one who put me here!’ shouted Hunyadi. ‘I demand an explanation!’ But even as he spoke, Hunyadi became aware of how difficult it was to make demands of any kind when fat, middle-aged and the only naked man in the room.

The administrator, who had retrieved Hunyadi’s clothes from his cell, now dumped the reeking garments at his feet. ‘Ask him yourself when you see him,’ he said.

‘Pekkala,’ said Stalin, as soon as Major Kirov had left the room, ‘there is something we need to discuss.’

‘Can this not wait?’ asked Pekkala. ‘Every minute that I linger here in Moscow brings Hunyadi one step closer to Lilya.’

‘It concerns Lilya,’ answered Stalin, ‘and her family, as well.’

‘You mean her husband and their child?’

‘Exactly. So you have not forgotten them?’

‘Of course not,’ replied Pekkala. ‘I still remember the photograph you showed me, back when I first agreed to work with you.’

‘Yes.’ Stalin paused to clear his throat in a long, gravelly eruption from his smoke-clogged lungs. ‘Let us talk about that picture.’

When Stalin had sent the young Lieutenant Kirov to retrieve Pekkala from Siberia, it had been with one purpose in mind – to conduct a secret investigation into the death of the Tsar and his family. Although a statement had been issued long ago, confirming the executions in the basement of a house in Ekaterinburg, which had once belonged to a merchant named Ipatiev, Stalin had harboured his own suspicions about the accuracy of the report. He had become fixated on the possibility that one person in particular night have survived – the Tsar’s only son, Alexei, whose frailty, caused by haemophilia, had consumed the royal couple even to the end of their days. It was this very frailty, combined with the young man’s youth and innocence, which led Stalin to believe the executioners might have taken pity upon the boy, and perhaps even on some of the daughters as well. A steady flow of rumours had circulated, not only in Russia but throughout the world, that various members of the Romanov clan, once thought to have been butchered in captivity, might still be alive, after all. Eventually, inevitably, these suspicions loomed so large in Stalin’s mind that he knew he must find out the truth. And even as the thought occurred to him, he realised that there was only one man alive who knew enough about the Romanovs to dig out the truth once and for all. It was the Emerald Eye.

Stalin had kept Pekkala alive for a reason, even if he had not known at the time what that reason might amount to. The execution order had been there on Stalin’s desk and he had been about to sign it when he hesitated. Such a thing had never happened before. Even he did not know what had caused his pen to hover over the page. It was part fear, part admiration, part practicality.

Stalin knew where to find Pekkala. What he did not know was whether the Inspector would agree to join forces with a man who had once been his enemy. It would not be enough to simply order him. In order to tip the balance in his favour, Stalin had made Pekkala an offer – complete the investigation, and then Pekkala could go free.

And he had intended to keep his word, at least in the beginning, but by the time Pekkala’s investigation was completed, Stalin had changed his mind. Not only would Pekkala’s brand of expertise prove useful in running the country, Stalin could not imagine how he’d ever do without it. But he knew that Pekkala could never be forced into such an arrangement. He would have to be persuaded.

In the end, all Stalin needed was a single photograph.

The picture was of Lilya Simonova, sitting at a cafe in Paris, where she had fled at the outset of the Revolution. Pekkala’s plan had been to join her there, but his arrest by Red Guard Militia, at a lonely, snowbound checkpoint on the Russo-Finnish border as he tried to leave the country, had put an end to that.

In the photo, Lilya Simonova was smiling. Sitting beside her was a man, slightly built, with dark hair combed straight back. He wore a jacket and tie and the stub of a cigarette was pinched between his thumb and second finger. He held the cigarette in the Russian manner, with the burning end balanced over his palm as if to catch the falling ash. Like Lilya, the man was also smiling. Both of them were watching something just to the left of the camera. On the other side of the table was a pram, its hood pulled up to shelter the infant from the sun.

Procuring such a photograph had not been difficult. Stalin’s network of informants had charted the whereabouts of almost every Russian emigre in Paris.

Mother. Father. Child. The picture was perfectly clear.

Stalin’s purpose in showing the photo to Pekkala had been equally clear – to persuade him to remain in Russia, and carry on the work he had begun when he first attached the gold and emerald badge beneath the collar of his coat.

‘You must not blame her,’ Stalin had told the Inspector. ‘She waited. She waited a very long time. But a person cannot wait forever, can they?’ Better, Stalin had explained, that Pekkala should learn the truth now than to arrive in Paris, ready to start a new life, only to find that it was once more out of reach. ‘You could still go to her, of course. I have her address if you want it. One look at you and whatever peace of mind she might have won for herself in these past years would be gone forever. And let us say, for the sake of argument, that you might persuade her to leave the man she married. Let us say that she even leaves behind her child . . .’

Pekkala held up a hand for him to stop.

‘You see my point,’ continued Stalin. ‘You and I both know that you are not this kind of man. Nor are you the monster that your enemies once believed you to be. If you were, you would never have been such a formidable opponent for people like myself. Monsters are easy to defeat. With such people, it is only a question of blood and time, since their only weapon is fear. But you, Pekkala, you won the hearts of the people of Russia, along with the respect of your enemies. I do not believe you understand how rare a thing that is. Whatever your opinion of me, those whom you once served are out there still.’ Stalin brushed his hand towards the window, and out across the pale blue sky. ‘They know how difficult your job can be, and how few of those who walk your path can do what must be done and still hold on to their humanity. They have not forgotten you, Pekkala, and I don’t believe you have forgotten them.’

‘No,’ whispered Pekkala, ‘I have not forgotten.’

‘What I am trying to tell you’, Stalin had explained, ‘is that you still have a place here if you want it.’

Until that moment, the thought of staying on had not occurred to Pekkala. But now the plans he’d made held no more meaning. Pekkala realised that his last gesture of affection for the woman he’d once thought would be his wife must be to let her believe he was dead.

Now Stalin opened a file and from it he removed a picture, which he slid across the desk towards Pekkala.

It was that same photograph which he had set before Pekkala all those years ago.

A sigh escaped Pekkala’s lips. Even though he had recalled every detail of the picture, it still struck him to see it again. It was as if a hole had opened up in time and he found himself again, in this same room, in that moment when the course of his life had been altered by this single frozen image. ‘Why show me this again?’ he asked.

‘The photograph is not complete,’ Stalin said quietly, as if hoping that his words might pass unnoticed.

‘Not complete? I don’t understand,’ said Pekkala.

Now Stalin removed a second picture from the file. It was the same size as the first one, and showed almost the same image, but this one appeared to have been taken from several paces further back.

The second photo showed not only Lilya Simonova and the man beside her, as well as the pram that stood between them, but also the tables on either side. From this expanded view, it was evident that the man had been sitting at a separate table and that he was with another woman. The woman was holding a baby in her arms. The baby was laughing and it was this which had drawn the attention of Lilya and the man. The other thing which this photo made obvious was that Lilya Simonova was sitting at the table by herself. A stack of notes, perhaps the uncorrected papers of her students, lay neatly on the table top, and her hand, with a pen tucked in her fingers like a cigarette, lay on the notes, to stop them from blowing away.

As he stared at the picture, Pekkala realised that the first image he had been shown, all those years ago, had, in fact, been cropped to hide the presence of the other woman, the baby and the positioning of the tables.

In the second picture, the narrative had been completely changed.

The first picture was authentic, but the story it told had been a lie.

Pekkala’s mind reeled as he tried to grasp the magnitude of the deception.

‘I needed you here,’ explained Stalin, ‘and it would have done no good to force you to remain. The decision had to be yours. That picture came across my desk just as you were completing your first case for me. The subject of the photo, taken by one of our agents in Paris, was actually the man sitting next to your fiancee. His name was Kuznetsk and he was one of the founding members of the French anti-Bolshevik League known as the White Hand. The picture was taken to provide confirmation that the man was, in fact, Kuznetsk, prior to my issuing a liquidation order.’

Pekkala looked down again at the photo. He stared at the woman and the laughing child.

‘It was only when the picture was handed to me for approval that I noticed your fiancee, and I realised it could be useful in persuading you to stay and work for us.’

‘Why tell me this now?’ demanded Pekkala, as he struggled to contain his rage.

‘Because you would have learned the truth yourself within hours of reaching Berlin, and I would rather you heard it from me than from her.’

‘What difference would that make?’ asked Pekkala. ‘You’re the one who lied to me, not her.’

‘And the British are lying to both of us, which is something else we need to talk about if you can hold on to your temper long enough!’

Pekkala stood there in silence, waiting for Stalin to continue.

‘In case you haven’t realised this already,’ Stalin told him, ‘the British don’t care about Lilya Simonova, at least not enough to come to us and beg for help as they have done.’

‘They why would they do such a thing?’

‘Because she has something they want.’

Pekkala narrowed his eyes. ‘You think this is about the Diamond Stream?’

Stalin nodded.

‘But the officer in the prisoner-of-war camp, the one Kirov spoke to. He said they couldn’t make it work.’

‘And, at the time of his capture, that was probably the truth,’ agreed Stalin, ‘but much could have happened since then.’

‘Assuming you are correct,’ said Pekkala, ‘and that this device is now operational, that still does not explain why you are in such a hurry to rescue a British agent. Even if they are our allies, you can’t honestly believe that they will share the secrets of this weapon.’

‘They won’t,’ confirmed Stalin, ‘but Lilya Simonova might.’

Pekkala breathed out sharply through his nose. ‘And why would she do that?’

‘Because of what I am about to offer you,’ replied Stalin.

‘And what is that?’ asked Pekkala.

‘A future for the two of you in Moscow.’

‘Her home is in Paris, not here.’

‘No, Pekkala. That is where you are wrong. Paris was never her home. She did not go there by choice, the way you chose to come to Russia, all those years ago. Bring her back to the place where she is from and I give you my word you can both live out your days in peace, as you were always meant to do.’

‘For a price,’ muttered Pekkala.

Stalin shrugged and smiled. ‘Nothing is free, Inspector. Especially not diamonds.’

‘You will have my answer soon enough,’ Pekkala told him as he turned to leave.

‘That is all I ask,’ replied Stalin. ‘Now, if you could send in Major Kirov on your way out, I will explain to him what must be done.’

Kirov was waiting in the hallway, having chosen not to linger in the outer office, under the squinting stare of Stalin’s secretary Poskrebychev. It was cold in the marble-floored hallway and a pale afternoon light seeped in through the tall windows. The two guards who stood outside Stalin’s office had come prepared with winter greatcoats and dense ushanka hats which bristled with a brownish-grey synthetic pile known to the soldiers as ‘fish fur’. With hands balled into fists inside his pockets and shoulders hunched against the shivers that crabbed across his back, Kirov paced about, wondering what could be taking Pekkala so long.

When Pekkala finally emerged, Kirov sighed with relief. He was anxious to be gone from here, and not just because of the cold. Although he had visited the Kremlin many times, and had always been impressed with its architectural beauty, Kirov never felt comfortable there. Maybe it had to do with the hidden passageways he knew existed behind the wood-panelled walls, along which Stalin was known to tread at all hours of the day or night, carrying his shoes so as not to make a noise. Or perhaps it was the lack of voices. Everyone in this building seemed compelled to speak in hushed tones, as if they knew that whatever they said would be overheard by someone else, invisible and dangerous, judging their every word. Although he had no proof of it, Kirov did not doubt that this was true. And the last thing which made Kirov nervous whenever he stepped into this labyrinth was the fact that he knew he didn’t belong here. Although he had reached the rank of major and was, after all, frequently summoned to this building by none other than the Vozhd – the Boss – himself, Kirov had come to realise that he would never belong to Stalin’s inner circle. Neither would he ever achieve that indispensability that Pekkala had been given from the start. If it weren’t for the Inspector, thought Kirov, Stalin wouldn’t even know my name.

‘He wants to see you,’ said Pekkala.

‘What?’ asked Kirov. ‘Just me?’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘What about?’ Have I done something wrong, wondered Kirov.

‘He didn’t tell me anything,’ replied Pekkala.

Unable to hide his nervousness at this unexpected summons, Kirov made his way back through the lair of Poskrebychev and returned to Stalin’s study.

Out in the hallway, after only a few paces, Pekkala came to a halt, so overwhelmed by what he had just heard that he could no longer bring himself to place one foot in front of the other.

But it was not rage which sapped him of his strength.

In his years of working with the Kremlin, Pekkala had learned never to apply the rules of other men to Joseph Stalin. With him, different logic prevailed. Only a fool would believe what Stalin said, and most of them had long since paid with their lives for such naivety. With Stalin, what mattered were his actions, not his promises.

The Russians even had a word for this. They called it maskirovka. Translated, it meant ‘camouflage’, but in the minds of men like Stalin it transformed into the art of deception.

In order to survive among men like the leader of Russia, and those who carried out his will because they had been mesmerised by fear, Pekkala had taught himself to see beyond the outrage of dishonesty. Instead, the task became to answer one simple question – What does Stalin want? – knowing that no amount of blood, hypocrisy or lies would sway the Boss from his desires.

As long as Pekkala proved himself useful in fulfilling Stalin’s wishes, he was perfectly safe. The trick had become to carry out his master’s will, and not lose his soul in the process.

Terrible as it was to know that he’d been lied to all these years, Pekkala was not surprised to hear it. He even understood. Stalin had needed him, and so the Boss had done whatever was necessary to continue their fragile alliance.

It served no purpose to be angry with Stalin, now or ever. How could it, when all traces of guilt or remorse had been scalpeled from his character? There were times when Pekkala even pitied the man, existing in the spiritual wasteland of someone whose word counted for nothing.

For Pekkala, what mattered now was not how to grapple with the depth of Stalin’s betrayal, but to judge whether the offer he had made would ever be matched by his deeds.

Kirov, meanwhile, stood before the desk of Joseph Stalin.

‘Sit down!’ the Boss commanded, nodding towards the chair on the opposite side of his desk.

Kirov subsided into the chair like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

‘I am placing you in charge,’ Stalin announced.

‘In charge of what?’ Kirov asked breathlessly.

‘Of the journey you are taking to Berlin.’

These words so confused Kirov that, at first, he could not bring himself to comprehend their meaning. Blankly, he stared at his master.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ asked Stalin.

‘I heard you, Comrade Stalin,’ replied Kirov. ‘I just don’t understand why you are saying it. I work for the Inspector. It is he who gives the orders. That’s the way it’s always been.’

‘You work for me,’ Stalin corrected him, ‘and it is I who give the orders.’

‘Of course, but . . .’ And suddenly he faltered.

Stalin raised his heavy eyebrows. ‘Yes?’

‘Very well, Comrade Stalin,’ answered Kirov, finally coming to his senses.

‘Good.’ Stalin pressed his palms together. ‘Then you may go.’

Kirov knew what he was supposed to do next. He should have risen to his feet, saluted and left. Instead, halfway out of the room, he all but skidded to a halt and wheeled about.

Stalin was staring at the Major, as if he had just placed a wager with himself on whether Kirov could make his exit smoothly. From the look on Stalin’s face, he had just won that little bet.

‘Why?’ gasped Kirov. ‘Why are you doing this to Pekkala?’

‘Because I don’t trust him,’ came the answer.

‘Forgive me for saying so, Comrade Stalin, but you have never trusted him.’

‘That is true,’ agreed Stalin, ‘at least with regard to his following my instructions, but he has always managed, one way or another, to carry out the task I set for him. I make no secret, to you or to anyone else, that I find Pekkala to be the most disobedient person I have ever allowed to keep on breathing. We have an unspoken truce, the Inspector and I. We may be very different, he and I, but we do have one important thing in common.’

‘And what is that?’ asked Kirov.

‘The survival of the country,’ answered Stalin. ‘This has been enough to secure our allegiance to each other. At least, it was until today.’

‘What has changed?’ asked Kirov.

‘This business with Lilya Simonova. For years, she has existed as a kind of dream for Pekkala – a beautiful image of the past, frozen in time since the Revolution began. But now that past has collided with the present, or soon will anyway, if you can get her out of Berlin in one piece.’

‘We will do everything we can . . .’

‘That is not what concerns me, Major Kirov. If she is there, Pekkala will find her. I have no doubt of that. It’s what happens after that which troubles me.’

Now Kirov had begun to understand. ‘And you are worried he will not return?’

‘What I’m worried about,’ answered Stalin, ‘is that he will not return with the information these Englishman are so desperate to obtain that they would come to us, cap in hand, to ask for help. I want that information here in front of me.’ He jabbed one thick, blunt finger on polished wood. ‘And only when I know exactly what it is, will I consider passing it along to those temporary gentlemen from London.’

‘I understand,’ said Kirov. ‘Would you like me to bring in the Inspector so that you can inform him about the change in command?’

‘You can take care of that yourself,’ muttered Stalin. ‘I have another meeting.’ And he began to fidget with the papers laid out in front of him.

Kirov didn’t tell Pekkala right away. He would rather not have told him at all.

The whole drive back to Pitnikov Street, the two men remained silent.

Pekkala did not press him for information, since it was clear from the look on Kirov’s face that a storm was brewing in his head.

The only sound was the soft voice of their driver, Zolkin, as he sang one of his favourite Ukrainian folksongs, called ‘The Duckling Swims’, about a young man going off to war. His low and mournful voice was interrupted from time to time by a grinding crash of the Emka’s mangled gears.

Finally, when they had tramped up to their office on the fifth floor of the building, Kirov revealed what Stalin had told him. As Kirov spoke, he could not bring himself even to look at Pekkala. Instead, he looked out of the window, past the luminous green leaves of basil, sage and rosemary which he grew in earthenware pots upon the windowsill, and rattled off Stalin’s instructions.

It seemed to take a long while to explain what was, in fact, a very simple order. By the time Kirov had finished, he felt completely out of breath. And now he waited, looking without really seeing through the dusty windowpanes, for the Inspector to make his pronouncement.

‘It’s a good idea,’ said Pekkala.

Astonished, Kirov whirled about. ‘Do you really think so?’ he gasped. It was the last thing he had expected to hear.

Pekkala had settled into his chair beside the wheezy iron stove. The stove was not lit and he had put his feet up on the circular cooking plates. From where Kirov stood, he could see the double thick soles of the Inspector’s heavy boots, and the iron heel plates, scuffed to a mercury shine. The Inspector seemed perfectly at ease, almost as if the idea had been his all along.

‘Congratulations on your first command,’ Pekkala added graciously.

‘Why, thank you,’ stammered Kirov.

‘Long overdue, if you ask me,’ continued Pekkala.

‘Well, now that you mention it,’ replied Kirov, his shattered confidence slowly reassembling, ‘I have been looking forward to the challenge for some time. I just never thought it would come.’

‘Stalin is no fool when it comes to recognising talent.’

Overwhelmed, Kirov strode across the room and shook Pekkala’s hand.

‘Be sure to tell your wife,’ said Pekkala. ‘I expect she will be pleased.’

‘I will!’ Kirov replied eagerly.

Elizaveta worked as a filing clerk in the records office on the fourth floor of the Lubyanka building which had, for many years, been the headquarters of Soviet Internal Security.

‘As soon as I have picked up our equipment for the journey,’ Kirov continued, ‘I’ll head upstairs and tell her the good news.’

‘If that suits you, of course, Comrade Major,’ Pekkala answered with a playful gravity.

‘I believe it does,’ said Kirov, lifting his chin dramatically. Then he set off to Lubyanka.

Arriving at the Lubyanka building, Kirov immediately made his way down to the basement, to consult with Lazarev, the armourer.

Lazarev was a legendary figure at Lubyanka. From his workshop in the basement, he managed the issue and repair of all weapons supplied to Moscow NKVD. He had been there from the beginning, personally appointed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the Cheka, who commandeered what had once been the offices of the All-Russian Insurance Company and converted it into the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counter-revolution and Sabotage. From then on, the imposing yellow-stone building served as an administrative complex, prison and place of execution. The Cheka had changed its name several times since then, from OGPU to GPU to NKVD, transforming under various directors into its current incarnation. Throughout these gruelling and sometimes bloody metamorphoses, which emptied, reoccupied and emptied once again the desks of countless servants of the state, Lazarev had remained at his post, until only he remained of those who had set the great machine of Internal State Security in motion. This was not due to luck or skill in navigating the minefield of the purges, but rather to the fact that, no matter who did the killing and who did the dying above ground, a gunsmith was always needed to make sure the weapons kept working.

For a man of such mythic status, Lazarev’s appearance came as something of a disappointment. He was short and hunched, with pock-marked cheeks so pale they seemed to confirm the rumours that he never travelled above ground, but migrated like a mole through secret tunnels known only to him beneath the streets of Moscow. He wore a tan shop coat, whose frayed pockets sagged from the weight of bullets, screwdrivers and gun parts. He wore this tattered coat buttoned right up to his throat, giving rise to another rumour; namely that he wore nothing underneath. This story was reinforced by the sight of Lazarev’s bare legs beneath the knee-length coat. He had a peculiar habit of never lifting his feet from the floor as he moved about the armoury, choosing instead to slide along like a man condemned to live on ice. He shaved infrequently, and the slivers of beard that jutted from his chin resembled the spines of a cactus. His eyes, watery blue in their shallow sockets, showed his patience with a world that did not understand his passion for the gun and the wheezy, reassuring growl of his voice, once heard, was unforgettable.

As soon as Lazarev caught sight of Kirov’s highly polished boots descending the stairs, he reached below the counter, whose top was strewn with gun parts, oil cans, pull-through cloths and brass-bristled brushes, coiled like the tails of newborn puppies, and lifted out a Hungarian-made Femaru Model 37 pistol, still nestled in its brown leather holster. The weapon had been taken from the body of a Hungarian tank officer on the outskirts of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 and was delivered to Lazarev for just such an occasion as this. In preparation for Kirov’s arrival, Lazarev had cleaned the weapon and loaded its 7-round magazine with freshly oiled 7.62 ammunition.

Kirov stared at the weapon, his eye drawn to the curious eyelash-shaped extension on the magazine, designed to rest against the user’s little finger when holding the gun.

Lazarev picked up the Femaru and held it out. The metal gleamed blue in the harsh light of the bulb above their heads. ‘You will find this less elegant than your issue Tokarev,’ he explained, ‘but just as lethal under the circumstances you are likely to encounter. More importantly, it is what they’ll be expecting if you are ever searched, the point being not to use the gun at all if you can help it.’

Kirov unfastened his officer’s belt, the heavy brass buckle emblazoned with a cut-out star, slid off the holster containing his issue Tokarev automatic and placed it on the table. Then, he replaced it with the Hungarian pistol. ‘Where do I sign?’ he asked.

‘No need!’ Lazarev waved away the thought with a brush of his hands.

Kirov narrowed his eyes. ‘But we always have to sign for weapons, and I know you are a stickler for the rules.’

Lazarev began to look flustered. ‘They called me from upstairs,’ he explained. ‘They said there was no need for you to sign.’

‘Who called?’ asked Kirov.

Lazarev rolled his shoulders, as if he had a crick in his spine. ‘Upstairs,’ he repeated quietly.

‘Why would there be no signature?’ demanded Kirov.

Lazarev reached across the counter top and rested his hand on Kirov’s shoulder. ‘You can sign when you return it,’ he said, a pained expression on his face. ‘How about that?’

Mystified at this breach of protocol, Kirov headed for the door. Then he stopped and turned. ‘I almost forgot,’ he said. ‘What about a weapon for Pekkala?’

Lazarev smiled. ‘Do you honestly think you can persuade him to give up that Webley of his?’

Kirov understood immediately what an impossible task that would be.

On his way to see his wife in the records office at the top of the building, Kirov stopped at the third floor, where he picked up two sets of identity papers. They consisted of a Hungarian passport, a small, sand-coloured booklet printed with the Hungarian crown and shield and the words ‘Magyar Kiralysag’ and a German Reisepass, containing various travel permits, stamps and handwritten validations. There were also driving licences, food ration books and Hungarian Fascist Party membership cards. Kirov marvelled at the attention to detail that had gone into preparing the books. There must have been half a dozen different inks used in signatures on the pale green pages of the passport, and the books themselves had been worn down in such a way that they even matched the contours of having been carried in a man’s chest pocket. If these documents had once belonged to someone else, Kirov could find no trace of alteration in the pictures, which had been heat-sealed into the identity books, cracking the emulsion of the little photograph and overlaying Kirov’s face with an image of an eagle from a registration office in the Berlin suburb of Spandau.

‘You’d better have this, too,’ said the clerk, setting before him a stack of German Reichsmark notes. ‘Spend it quickly, if you have the chance,’ he advised. ‘Pretty soon, it won’t be worth the paper it is printed on.’

Kirov picked up the brick of cash and turned to leave.

But the clerk called him back. ‘You’re not done yet!’ he said. ‘You’ll need another set of clothes.’

Led through the office to a room at the back, Kirov found himself in a room full of garments, all of them in various states of disrepair. Here, he was handed an old set of clothes by an even older clerk whom he had never seen before.

The man wore a tape measure around his neck, although he never put it to use. Instead, with a squinting of one watery eye, he judged the length of Kirov’s arms and legs and the width of his narrow chest, of which the major was slightly ashamed.

As Kirov held out his arms, the clerk piled on shirts and trousers and a tattered coat for him to try on.

‘I do have things at home besides my uniform,’ Kirov complained, his nose twitching at the smell of other men’s sweat and dogs and unfamiliar cigarettes which had sunk into the cloth.

‘But not like these,’ explained the clerk. ‘You’d be spotted as a Russian the minute you arrived in Berlin.’

‘But how?’ asked Kirov. ‘Clothes are just clothes, after all.’

‘No.’ The clerk shook his head. ‘And I will prove it to you. See here,’ he said, holding out the collar of a shirt with a Budapest maker’s label. ‘The collar of a Hungarian shirt is more pointed than a Russian shirt and the way that the sleeves are attached here is different from what you would find on a German shirt. Even the way the buttons are attached, in two straight lines of thread as opposed to a cross are different from, say, on an English shirt.’ With his thumb, he levered up one tiny mother-of-pearl disc, letting it wink in the light to show the manner in which it had been stitched. ‘Even if those around you aren’t specifically aware of these details, they will nevertheless sense that something is not right. These clothes were carefully gathered from people who had travelled to Hungary before the war.’

‘Didn’t anybody have anything newer?’ asked Kirov. ‘Or cleaner, for that matter?’

The clerk laughed. ‘That is all part of the disguise! Nobody has new clothes in Berlin any more, or Budapest for that matter, and they haven’t for quite some time. Nor do they have the opportunity to clean their clothes as often as they should. Believe me, Major Kirov, you may not like the way you look when I am finished with you, but you will fit right in where you are going.’

‘Can you do the same thing for other countries?’ he asked.

‘Of course!’ boomed the old man and he began to sweep his hands around the room. ‘Over there is England. There is Spain, France. Turkey. Wherever you go, Major, my job is to make you invisible!’

‘Inspector Pekkala is also . . .’ began Kirov.

The man held up one hand to silence him. ‘Do not speak to me of that barbarian! What he wears does not belong in Russia, or Germany, or anywhere else on this earth! His tailor ought to be shot. And even if he would agree to let me outfit him for this journey, which he wouldn’t, it is hopeless anyway. Pekkala will never fit in. Anywhere! It’s just who he is. There is no camouflage for such a man.’

At last, Kirov arrived at the records office on the fourth floor, to share the good news of his promotion with his wife.

Elizaveta was in her mid-twenties, head and shoulders shorter than Kirov, with a round and slightly freckled face, a small chin and dark, inquisitive eyes.

Few outsiders were ever permitted past the iron-grilled door which served as the entrance to the records office. But Kirov had that privilege. Thanks to Elizaveta, Kirov had been welcomed into their miniature tribe.

They retired to what had once been a storage room for cleaning supplies used by the maids at the hotel. The space had been converted by the three women who managed the records office, led by the fearsome Sergeant Gatkina, into a refuge where they could smoke and drink their tea in peace.

Elizaveta, wearing a tight-collared gymnastiorka tunic, dark skirt and navy-blue beret, sat upon a filing cabinet placed on its side against the wall.

Kirov paced about in front of her, animatedly describing his promotion. He expected that, at any moment, Elizaveta would leap up from her makeshift seat and embrace him.

But this did not happen.

All she said, at first, was, ‘Stalin is no fool.’

‘How strange,’ remarked Kirov. ‘That’s just what the Inspector told me!’

‘Stalin is not raising you up,’ she told him, leaning forward and lowering her voice, as people often did when mentioning the name of Stalin. ‘In fact, he might as well have sentenced you to death.’

‘You’re not making any sense!’ blurted Kirov. ‘I have been promoted!’

‘In order to do what?’ she demanded. ‘Give orders to Pekkala? That’s just not possible. As soon as you cross the border into enemy territory, that Finn will do exactly as he’s always done.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Whatever he chooses,’ she replied, ‘and if that choice is to simply vanish off the face of the earth like some phantom in a fairy tale, who will be held responsible?’ She raised her eyebrows, waiting for the answer which both of them already knew.

‘He wouldn’t do that,’ said Kirov. ‘He’s knows the kind of trouble I’d be in.’

‘Of course he does,’ answered Elizaveta, ‘and that’s what Stalin’s banking on. You are his insurance policy against Pekkala’s disappearance, but do not think for a minute that you are actually in charge of this mission.’

‘If that’s what you think,’ Kirov said indignantly, ‘then maybe I’ll surprise you.’

‘That may be so,’ she told him, ‘but there’s something I still don’t understand,’ she added.

‘And what is that?’ asked Kirov.

‘Even if you do find this woman, does Pekkala really think they stand a chance of getting back together?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he answered honestly. ‘I do know he still loves her.’

‘And how do you know that?’ she demanded. ‘Has he told you so?’

‘Not in so many words.’

‘Then what makes you think it is true?’

‘Pekkala used to send her money every month,’ explained Kirov. ‘You see, he knew exactly where she lived in Paris, at least until the war broke out. After that, he lost track of her.’

‘So they were communicating up to that point?’

‘No,’ Kirov told her. ‘He never told her where the money really came from.’

‘Well, where did she think it was coming from?’

‘It was transferred from a Moscow bank under the name of Rada Obolenskaya, the headmistress of the school where she had worked before the Revolution. According to Pekkala, Comrade Obolenskaya had always taken good care of Lilya and so she had no reason to doubt that Obolenskaya was actually the source.’

‘But why on earth wouldn’t he tell her?’ Elizaveta exclaimed in exasperation.

‘Until today, when Comrade Stalin told him otherwise, Pekkala was under the impression that Lilya had got married, and that she even had a family. He did not want to take the risk of damaging the new life she had made for herself. But he never fell out of love with her and I don’t think he ever will, whatever happens when we reach Berlin.’

‘If he thinks he can just pick up where he left off,’ said Elizaveta, ‘then he is just a dreamer.’

‘There are worse things to be,’ Kirov answered defensively, ‘and maybe he just wants to save her life. After all, that’s what I’d do for you.’

Only now did she rise to embrace him. ‘I want you to make me a promise,’ she said.

‘What would that be?’ asked Kirov.

‘If it comes down to you or Pekkala,’ she said, her voice muffled against the chest of his neatly pressed tunic, ‘promise you’ll make the right decision.’

‘All right,’ Kirov told her softly. ‘I will.’

When the money first started arriving in her account, back in the summer of 1933, Lilya Simonova thought that somebody had made a mistake. After receiving her statement in the mail, and seeing that there was considerably more in her account than should have been there, she went to the bank manager to find out what had happened.

‘Everything is in order,’ he assured her. ‘The money has been wired from Moscow.’

‘But by whom?’

‘Rada Igorevna Obolenskaya,’ replied the manager. ‘Does that name sound familiar to you?’

‘Why yes,’ said Lilya, still confused. ‘Yes, it does, but . . .’

‘I am given to understand,’ interrupted the manager, ‘that additional amounts will be deposited each month.’

‘For how long?’

The manager shrugged. ‘No limit has been set.’

‘And is there any message from Rada Igorevna?’

‘None that I know of.’

‘What should I do about this?’ Lilya wondered aloud.

‘I’ll tell you exactly what to do,’ said the manager. ‘Take the money. Take it and be glad.’

The next month, just as the manager had said, another deposit arrived from Moscow. And it continued to arrive, without fail, for the following eight years.

Lilya Simonova attempted to make contact with her former employer. She had no idea where the headmistress might be living but wrote to the address of the school where they had worked together, hoping that she might still be there or that someone who remembered her might be able to forward it. But she received no reply and, after many attempts, she finally gave up.

In 1937, at a place called the Cafe Dimitri, where expatriate Russians often gathered to drink tea, Lilya ran into someone she had known in Petrograd before the Revolution. Her name was Olga Komarova and her children had attended the school where Lilya taught. When Lilya mentioned to her the gifts which had been sent by Rada Obolenskaya, a strange look passed over the face of her friend.

‘But that’s impossible,’ said Olga Komarova. ‘The school was burned to the ground, right at the beginning of the Revolution. It couldn’t have been more than a day after you left.’

‘Well,’ replied Lilya, ‘that explains why no one got the letters I sent. But Rada was a woman of means. I don’t think she needed her job to survive financially. Even with the school gone, I’m sure she still had money tucked away.’

Olga Komarova reached across and rested her hand upon Lilya’s. ‘No,’ she said softly, ‘you don’t understand. The poor woman was in the school when the Red Guards came to burn it down. They told her to leave, but she refused, so they burned the school anyway, with her inside it. Lilya, she’s been dead for years.’

‘You must be mistaken,’ Lilya insisted.

‘But I’m not,’ said Olga Komarova. ‘I saw them drag her body from the ashes. She was still holding that camera of hers. Aside from you and that school, I think it was the only thing she valued in this world.’

The next day, Lilya Simonova went back to the bank manager and told him what she had learned.

‘There’s a simple explanation,’ said the man. ‘She must have left it to you in her will. The executors of her estate must have arranged for these payments to be made.’

Lilya took him at his word but, even though it was a tidy explanation, her suspicions were never completely laid to rest. Then, in June of 1941, when the German army launched its campaign against Russia, banking routes between Moscow and Paris, which had been occupied by Germany for the previous year, shut down and the money stopped coming in as abruptly as it had first appeared.

An hour after leaving Lubyanka, Kirov was back at the office on Pitnikov Street.

There, Pekkala informed them that a car was already on its way to transport them to a military airfield on the outskirts of Moscow. As yet, neither of the men knew exactly how they would be arriving in Berlin.

Gloomily, Kirov slouched in the chair by the stove. Little clouds of raw cotton peeked from the chair’s tattered upholstery. Kirov’s condition did not look much better than that of his chair. He had already traded in his uniform and was now dressed in the Hungarian clothes he had been given. He looked depressingly shabby, unemployed and unemployable.

‘You don’t look so bad,’ said Pekkala, trying to cheer him up.

‘That’s easy for you to say,’ grumbled Kirov. ‘You get to wear your own kit.’

‘It’s because I have a certain universal quality,’ Pekkala announced grandly.

‘He said you were a barbarian.’

‘There are worse things to be called.’

Realising that he was never going to gain the upper hand in this conversation, Kirov turned his attention to the pistol given to him by Lazarev. ‘I can’t understand it,’ he said. ‘You have to sign for everything in that place! And you get in all kinds of trouble if you don’t return every little scrap of equipment you are issued. Why would they change their minds, all of a sudden?’

‘What would be the point of having you sign for a gun you will never return?’ asked Pekkala.

‘But of course I would return it!’ protested Kirov.

‘Not if we don’t make it back,’ replied Pekkala.

Kirov stared at him in amazement. ‘Do you mean they don’t expect us to survive?’

‘It looks that way to me.’

Kirov launched himself to his feet, as if he meant to march back to NKVD headquarters and demand an explanation. Then, realising the futility of such a gesture, he slumped back into his chair.

Just then, they heard the squeak of brakes.

Pekkala walked over to the window and glanced down into the street. ‘It’s time for us to leave,’ he said.

As Kirov and Pekkala set off on their journey to Berlin, Inspector Leopold Hunyadi had only just arrived in the city, still wearing the rags of his prison uniform.

Now he stood face to face with Adolf Hitler.

For this meeting, Hitler had chosen the rubble-strewn Chancellery gardens, where he was in the habit of walking his German shepherd dog, Blondi, at least once every day. He had dismissed his usual escort of armed guards, determined to keep his time with Hunyadi as secret as possible.

‘Hunyadi,’ muttered Hitler, drawing out the man’s name like a growl. ‘What have I done to deserve this?’

Hunyadi had no idea what Hitler was talking about, but it occurred to him that if he so much as asked, he might find himself on the next plane back to Flossenburg. So, for now at least, he held his tongue.

Hitler began to walk along the pathway, which had once been lined with flowers but now resembled a gangplank laid across a cratered field of mud. The dog walked on ahead, straining at its leash.

‘There is a spy,’ continued Hitler.

Hunyadi looked around at the jagged teeth of broken windows. ‘Here?’ he asked. ‘Now?’

Hitler shook his head, then jerked his chin towards the ground. ‘Down there, in the bunker.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Information has leaked out. The Allies are broadcasting it on the radio, as if to taunt me for my ignorance. I cannot allow it to continue. That is why I brought you here.’

‘You want me to find the spy?’

‘Exactly.’

‘But what about your own security service?’

Hitler breathed out sharply. ‘If Rattenhuber and his gang of Munich Bulls had done their jobs when they were supposed to, you would not be standing there now.’

‘No,’ answered Hunyadi. ‘I would be dead.’

Hitler glanced at him and shrugged. ‘Death awaits us all, Hunyadi.’

Hunyadi cleared his throat. ‘If I may ask, why call on me for this? I do not see why you would place your faith in me, especially since you yourself ordered my execution for what you have termed crimes against the state.’

‘Ah!’ sighed Hitler, resting his hand briefly on Hunyadi’s shoulder. ‘Yours was a crime inspired by love, misguided of course, but understandable in the circumstances. It is because of this love that I know I can trust you to carry out your task.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Hunyadi.

‘At my request, your wife Franziska has been taken into custody by some friends who have remained loyal to me among the Spanish authorities.’

Hunyadi felt the bile rise in his throat. ‘On what charges?’ he spluttered.

‘I am sure they have come up with something,’ remarked Hitler.

‘Why don’t you just take me back to Flossenburg and hang me?’ demanded Hunyadi. ‘Why must you put me through this?’

‘Because, my old friend, I no longer know whom to trust,’ Hitler stamped his heel into the sandy soil, as if to trample out a fire which had broken out beneath his feet, ‘down there in the bowels of the Reich. If I give this mission to a member of my own security, who is to say I am not entrusting an investigation to the very people who should be investigated? No, I needed someone from outside. Someone I know will not smile in my face and then stab me in the back, as others have tried to do. Don’t you see, Hunyadi? It is your hatred which convinces me that you are the right man for the job, and your love for that woman which has guaranteed your loyalty.’ Now he fixed Hunyadi with a stare. ‘Do you honestly mean to turn me down?’

‘Under the circumstances,’ answered the detective, ‘I don’t see how I can.’

Hitler nodded with satisfaction. ‘Then it is settled.’ He reached into his tunic and removed a thick envelope. ‘Here is everything I know about the case.’ He handed the envelope to Hunyadi.

‘If what you say is true,’ said the detective, ‘I may need to question some very high-ranking people.’

‘Yes.’

‘I doubt they will appreciate the intrusion.’

‘Indeed they won’t, but you have my word they will endure it. In the envelope I have just given you,’ said Hitler, ‘you’ll find a number that will connect you directly to the main switchboard in the bunker. If anybody tries to obstruct you in your duties, no matter who they are, just have them call and I will personally explain the situation.’

They had reached a place where they could go no further. The path was blocked by a huge piece of smashed masonry and the ground beyond had been cratered by explosions.

From the moment he had set eyes on Hitler that day, Hunyadi’s first thought had been to kill the man, with a rock, with his bare hands, with his teeth, and then to simply vanish among the ruins. But what Hitler had said about Franziska paralysed him. He had no doubt that, even with the Allies and the Red Army closing in upon Berlin and the German army little more than a heap of wreckage propped up by pensioners and teenage boys, there were some still prepared to carry out their Fuhrer’s wishes. When these men learned of what he’d done, Franziska would be dead within the hour.

He wished he could go back in time, to that moment when he had emerged from his bunker and found the young corporal ensnared by the rusting barbed wire. He wished he could have turned his back and walked back down again into the musty earth, leaving the man to be torn to shreds by their own artillery.

The fact that this had even occurred to him, a man who usually confined himself within a world of fact, not dreams, showed him just how powerless he was.

And Hitler knew it, too. Why else would he have dared to meet Hunyadi alone and without his usual escort of armed guards?

Now, in one last attempt to reason with the man, Hunyadi reached out and took hold of Hitler’s arm.

Hitler was startled. Few people ever touched him. Even his mistress seemed to hesitate before allowing her pale flesh to brush against his own, still paler skin.

The dog began to growl, lips curling up around its teeth.

Realising his mistake, Hunyadi let his hand slip away. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘We have been bound together all these years by the debt you think you owe me. Allow me to absolve you of that now. Just let us go, me and my wife, and if you cannot do that, then at least let her go free. Don’t hold this over me. It may well be that we no longer share that friendship, but at least there was a time when we did not think of each other as enemies. I beg you to remember that.’

Hitler stared at him. A look of intense curiosity spread across his face.

For one brief moment, Hunyadi convinced himself that his wish might be granted, after all.

‘The debt I owe you is mine to repay,’ said Hitler. ‘I will decide when the slate has been wiped clean, and I will decide how it’s done.’ He glanced up at the sky. ‘It will be night soon,’ he said. ‘Time for me to head back underground. I will leave you here, Hunyadi. You can find your own way home.’ With those words, Hitler turned and made his way back towards the Chancellery entrance. The dog followed close upon his heels.

As the sun set over the ruins of the city, the brassy evening light suffused with yellow dust, Hunyadi set off towards his flat on the Kronenstrasse. No one seemed to notice him as he shuffled along in his dirty prison clothes. He looked like just another refugee, of which there were thousands roaming the streets in search of shelter and food.

In spite of the fact that Hunyadi had not been home in weeks, he found the door to his apartment still locked and everything inside untouched since the moment of his arrest. The air was musty and still. In spite of the cold, he opened the windows, then sat down at his desk, turned on the light and read through the report Hitler had given him.

When he had finished, he sat back in the chair, laced his fingers together and set his hands on top of his head. For a long time, he just stared at the open window, watching how the night breeze brushed against the curtains. There must be some way out of this, he thought. Lost in the caverns of his mind, he searched for a solution, but there was none. Hunyadi was utterly trapped. There was nothing to do but proceed with the task he had been given.

He returned the envelope of documents to his chest pocket, rose to his feet, breathed in deeply and strode out of the room.

After a short walk across town, he arrived at the Pankow district police station where, up to the moment of his arrest, he had spent his entire career.

The sergeant on duty was surprised to see him. ‘Inspector Hunyadi!’ he exclaimed, ‘I thought . . .’ he hesitated, ‘well, I thought they . . .’

‘They did,’ replied Hunyadi.

The sergeant nodded vigorously. ‘And what can I do for you, Inspector?’

‘I will be requiring my old office.’

‘But I don’t think it’s available,’ spluttered the man. ‘It belongs to Inspector Hossbach now.’

‘Hossbach!’ muttered Hunyadi. An image appeared in his mind of the small, rosy-cheeked man, his face split almost in two by a patently insincere smile. ‘And how long did he wait,’ Hunyadi asked the sergeant, ‘to move into my room after I left?’

The sergeant’s tactful silence was an answer in itself.

Hunyadi climbed up the first flight of stairs and made his way along a stretch of industrial carpeting worn almost bare by the path of his own feet over the years until he reached his office door.

He did not bother to knock.

Hossbach was sitting with his feet up on the desk, reading a monthly magazine called Youth, which passed itself off as a pictorial journal celebrating what it touted as ‘the human body and spirit’ but was, in fact, little more than pornography.

As soon as the door opened, Hossbach tossed the magazine over his shoulder and swept his feet off the desk. He snatched up the receiver of his phone, as if to give the impression that he had been engaged in some important conversation. ‘God damn it to hell!’ he shouted. ‘Didn’t anyone teach you how to knock?’ Then he paused, astonished, the heavy black receiver frozen in his hand. ‘You!’ he gasped.

‘Hossbach.’ It looked for a moment as if Hunyadi was going to say more, but he didn’t, leaving the man’s name to hover in the air like the tone of a lightly struck bell.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Hossbach, replacing the receiver in its cradle. ‘I thought they shipped you out in chains!’

‘I managed to get loose,’ remarked Hunyadi.

‘So,’ Hossbach narrowed his eyes in confusion, ‘are you back on the force?’

‘Not exactly. I’m doing some work for an old acquaintance.’

‘And you need my help?’ Hossbach wondered aloud.

‘I need you to get out of my office.’

And now the irritating smile began to spread across Hossbach’s face. ‘Well now, Hunyadi,’ he began, ‘I’m just not sure that’s possible.’

Hunyadi removed the envelope from his coat pocket and began to rummage through its contents.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Hossbach.

‘It’s in here somewhere,’ Hunyadi answered vaguely.

‘I’m damned if I’m giving up this office!’ shouted Hossbach, the smile still weirdly bolted to his cheeks.

‘You may well be, at that,’ answered Hunyadi. ‘Ah! Here it is.’ He pulled out a business card, bearing the initials AH, intricately twined into a monogram. Below that was a number, written in black fountain pen. Hunyadi placed the card down on the desk and, with one finger, slid it across to the detective. Then he picked up the phone receiver and handed it to Hossbach. ‘Make the call,’ he said. ‘I’ll be waiting right outside.’

Having returned to the hallway, Hunyadi closed the office door behind him. He breathed in the familiar smell of the office: a combination of cigarette ash, hair tonic, sweat, the eye-watering reek of mimeograph ink and of over-brewed coffee, although Hunyadi doubted that any real coffee had been drunk here in a long time. The air was filled with the clatter of typewriters and the voices of men who smoked too much, none of which he could distinctly hear, so that they merged into a throaty purr whose familiarity Hunyadi found reassuring.

After a few minutes, the door opened and Hossbach stepped into the hall. He was clutching a small orchid in an earthenware pot. His face was utterly white, as if the blood had drained out of his heart like dirty water from a bath. He said nothing as he walked away to find another office, the orchid stem wobbling over his shoulder, as if waving goodbye to Hunyadi.

On the night of 12 April 1945, Kirov, Pekkala and their guide found themselves strapped into uncomfortable metal seats in the unheated cargo bay of a Junkers transport plane.

Pekkala looked around at the aircraft’s curved frame supports, which arched down the bare metal of the interior walls, giving him the impression that he had been swallowed by a whale. Just then, Pekkala could not remember whether the story of Jonah had actually taken place or if it was simply the invention of some long-dead holy man, intended to steer the listener towards some greater truth which now eluded him.

The Junkers had been captured the year before when Russian troops overran an airfield near Orel. Since then, it had been used in several missions that involved dropping supplies or spare parts to Red Army soldiers encircled by the German Army.

On this occasion, however, the cargo was human.

Beside Pekkala sat Kirov. For the fifth time, the major was checking his parachute. Still echoing in Kirov’s head were the words of the jump instructor who had met them at the airport and having described how they would be jumping from the aircraft, went on to explain that, if his chute failed, he would reach a terminal velocity of approximately 110 miles per hour, the speed at which he would strike the ground, whether he fell from 500 or 5,000 feet, and that when he did strike the ground, he would break every bone in his body, even the tiny ones in his ears. In spite of the matter-of-fact delivery of this information, the instructor had meant this to be reassuring, since it would all be over in a second and there would be no time for feeling any pain.

Kirov, however, was having trouble seeing it that way. As he peered at the various straps and clips, he realised that he had no idea whether the parachute had been correctly assembled or not, and he was afraid to touch anything in case he accidentally rearranged or broke some important part, which would cause him to be gelatinised on impact.

He cast a scathing glance at Pekkala, who did not seem at all troubled by the fact that they would soon be hurling themselves into space. In fact, to judge from the look on Pekkala’s face, he appeared to be looking forward to it.

Muttering curses he knew no one would hear above the rumble of the Junkers’ engines, Kirov went back to checking his equipment.

Opposite them was their guide, a grim-faced man with a German accent, who introduced himself as Corporal Luther Strohmeyer.

One year before, Strohmeyer had been an Untersturmfuhrer, or lieutenant, commanding a much reduced company of Panzer Grenadiers from the SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’. During the same vast clash of armour in which his present mode of transport had been captured, Strohmeyer had been ordered to lead a frontal assault on a town called Fatezh. His orders were to attack without any preliminary bombardment of the town which, since it involved traversing a wide expanse of open ground, was tantamount to suicide. Assuming that there must have been a mistake somewhere up the line, Strohmeyer took matters into his own hands and ordered a mortar barrage on Fatezh. The Soviet defenders, surprised and out-gunned, immediately retreated, enabling Strohmeyer and his men to capture the town without a single casualty.

For this, Strohmeyer had expected an Iron Cross 1st Class at the very least, or perhaps even a Knight’s Cross to hang around his throat.

But this was not what happened.

It emerged that Strohmeyer’s company had been selected as a diversion for a much larger attack taking place to the north. He and his men were to be sacrificed. None had been expected to survive. As a result of Strohmeyer’s successful capture of Fatezh, he was charged with failing to carry out an order in the spirit in which it was given. He still had no idea what that really meant. The result, however, was exile for the duration of the war to a group known as Parachute Battalion 500, formed largely out of troops who, after disgracing themselves in one way or another, had been stripped of their rank and decorations and bundled into a military formation for whom survival was an even more remote prospect than it had been for them when they were regular soldiers.

In May of 1944, the battalion was sent to capture the Communist partisan leader Tito in his remote mountain hideaway near Dvor in western Bosnia. Not only did the battalion fail to capture Tito, but more than eight hundred of the thousand men taking part in the mission were killed or captured, thanks to a tip which the Communists had received before the battalion had even set out on their mission.

The man who tipped them off was Luther Strohmeyer, who had passed a message through an informant at the camp where the battalion underwent parachute training. Driven by bitterness at how he had been treated, the fanaticism with which Strohmeyer had entered the war on the side of the Fascists transferred almost seamlessly to the Communist cause.

Only rarely, in the months ahead, would the guilt of what he’d done emerge from the dark corners of his mind to torment Strohmeyer. Then images of the men whose deaths he had assured would flash behind his eyes and he would twitch and jerk his head, as if someone were holding a lit match too close to his face.

As soon as his feet touched the ground in Bosnia, he deserted to Soviet troops stationed in Dvor. From there, he was transferred to Moscow and cautiously welcomed as a hero for his role in saving Tito’s life.

Since then, in his work for Soviet Counter-Intelligence, he had taken part in several missions inside Germany, all of them involving parachute drops behind enemy lines. What he had learned from these jumps was not only the technique of hurling himself from a plane travelling 500 feet above the ground but also the fact that, when the time came to jump, he was never afraid. Strohmeyer did not know why he wasn’t terrified at moments like this. He knew he ought to be. Before he climbed aboard the plane, and later, after he was safely on the ground, nightmares would crowd his head like flocks of starlings taking to the sky. But as soon as the plane left the ground, all terror ceased and where it went and why, Strohmeyer had no idea, nor did he care to know.

This mission looked to be no different from the rest. A native of Berlin, Strohmeyer had volunteered to escort the Russians into and out of the city, along with the person they had been sent to rescue. He knew nothing of the mission itself, nor did he have an inkling about the identities of the men who sat before him now or the person they had been sent to extract. All he knew was the location of a safe house on Heiligenberg Street in the eastern district of Berlin and the time of the rendezvous, at noon three days from now. Although the men he was escorting were aware of the date, the actual location of the safe house had been shared with him alone by the tweed-jacketed British diplomat named Swift who briefed him on the task which lay ahead. On operations like this, it was standard procedure to compartmentalise information so that no one man knew everything. That way, if anything went wrong and one of them was captured, the entire mission would not be jeopardised.

There was one significant difference in the orders he had been given this time. On his way to the airfield, the NKVD officer who had prepared Strohmeyer for the mission instructed him to shoot both of the men he was guiding into Berlin in the event that, on the homeward journey, either of them showed any reluctance to return to Soviet lines. Exactly what constituted reluctance, Strohmeyer was not told. He had the impression that the Kremlin would rather these men did not survive and yet, clearly, they were needed for the task. One thing the NKVD officer had made clear was that under no circumstances was any harm to come to the person they were rescuing from the city. Strohmeyer knew without having to ask that his own life depended on that.

It was painfully cold in the belly of the plane. In addition to the clothes they would wear on the ground, the only protective garments they had been issued were brown cotton overalls, over which the heavy parachute harnesses had been strapped. Lulled into dream-like stupors by the frigid air, each man disappeared into the catacombs of his own thoughts.

After two hours in the sky, they were startled by a sudden, sharp rattling sound against the hull of the aircraft. This was accompanied, a second later, by a high-pitched whistling of air.

The Junker’s engines snarled as the pilot jammed the throttle forward.

Pekkala felt a weight, like chains draped upon his shoulders, as the plane began to climb rapidly.

Kirov glanced at the stranger who was to be their guide, hoping for some kind of explanation.

Strohmeyer pointed at the fuselage just above Kirov’s head.

Turning, Kirov glimpsed a line of puncture marks, through which the wind was whistling in half a dozen different pitches, as if played by a mad man with a flute.

A moment later, the cockpit door opened and a man in a sheepskin-lined flight suit appeared. ‘We’ve just crossed the Soviet lines,’ he shouted at them. ‘We took some ground fire from our own side, but it hasn’t slowed us down. We’re over Germany now. Be ready when the light comes on!’

Kirov stared enviously at the man’s flight suit, then looked up at the two jump lights, one red and one green, like knotted fists of glass.

Even as he looked at it, the red ‘prepare-to-jump’ light burst into colour.

Hurriedly and with his heart-beat pulsing in his throat, Kirov unbuckled himself from the seat.

The other two men did the same.

Carrying the heavy rope of their static lines, each man clipped himself to a rail running like a spinal cord down the centre of the roof.

The co-pilot opened the side door and the cargo bay filled with a howling rush of icy air, which drowned out even the perpetual thunder of the engines.

Strohmeyer, who was first in line, walked forward, pulling his static line like a leash, until he stood opposite the opening. Outside, in the pre-dawn gloom, he saw shreds of cloud sweep past and glimpses of landscape far below.

The red glow vanished and, in the same instant, the cargo bay was flooded by the emerald flash of the jump light.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Strohmeyer took two paces forward and flung himself head first through the opening. He extended his arms and legs into a spreadeagle attitude in the peculiar and dangerous fashion taught to German paratroopers. Then the static line, anchored to the middle of his back, came taut. The jolt on his spine almost caused him to faint. As the chute deployed, his legs swung down and he hung like a marionette, drifting now towards the ground.

Passing through a cloud, his clothes became instantly soaked with moisture. By then, the plane was barely audible.

Glancing up, he could just make out the dark silhouettes of the other two parachutes.

Directly below him lay a village. It appeared to be mostly intact although it was still too dark to tell for certain.

The thing he would never forget about these parachute drops was the silence, and how slowly he seemed to fall at first. But the closer he came to the ground, the more the speed seemed to pick up and he realised now that he was heading directly for a grove of trees, in the centre of which he could see the spire of a church.

Remembering the instructions of the jump master who had taught him back in Hungary, Strohmeyer jammed his legs together, hooking his feet, one around the other, so as not to straddle a branch on his way in. At the speed he was travelling, an injury like that would be fatal.

Beyond that, there was little Strohmeyer could do but brace for the impact and hope that his chute did not become entangled in the branches.

He tucked his legs up to his chest as the flimsy top branches clawed past him. He drifted over the largest of the trees and laughed out loud when he realised he had cleared the grove. He was coming down in a ploughed field, the best possible place to land. Strohmeyer barely had time to wonder at his luck when he spotted a thread of black running horizontally across the path of his approach.

The shroud lines of his parachute made a loud zipping noise as they connected with the power line and the silk canopy ruffled as it snagged against a telegraph pole.

As the electric current burst through his back and exploded through the soles of his boots, Strohmeyer had no sensation of actually reaching the earth. The last thought that passed through his mind before his body seemed to fly apart, atomising into the night, was that neither of the men travelling with him had any idea where they were going.

As Pekkala drifted down over the ploughed field, he kicked his legs like a man riding a bicycle until he hit the ground and tumbled forward on to his knees in the soft earth. In a second, he was up, pulling in the lines of his green silk chute. Soon, he had gathered it into a large, messy bundle. Removing his harness, he carried it to a nearby hedge and stuffed it in among the brambles until it was hidden from sight.

After hours of breathing the thin, greasy-smelling air inside the cargo bay of the plane, the damp, leafy scent of the earth filled his lungs like incense in a church.

He looked around. The wind had carried him some distance from the town but he could still see the church steeple, rising up above the trees. He could see neither Kirov nor their guide and, for a moment, he struggled against the fluttering of panic in his chest at the thought that he was lost and entirely alone.

Drawing the Webley from its holster on his chest, he made his way across the field, mud clogging his boots, until he reached a bank of grass. From there, he set off towards the church.

He had not gone far when he spotted the silhouette of a man standing on the churchyard wall, waving to him.

It was Kirov.

Neither man could hide his relief at having found the other in the dark.

It took them a while longer to locate the guide.

As soon as they spotted the man’s chute, wafting in the night breeze like some strange, aquatic creature, Kirov set off at a run to help the man, whom they could see lying motionless on the ground.

‘Stop!’ hissed Pekkala.

Kirov skidded to a halt and turned.

‘Don’t even get near him,’ warned Pekkala. ‘He’s hit a power line. The current has grounded through his body.’

As Kirov backed away, he watched a sliver of smoke, or maybe it was steam, slither from the dead man’s mouth, as if his soul were fleeing from the prison of his corpse.

With no clue as to precisely where they were, and no way to check the body of their guide for maps or any other sign of where they were supposed to go when they arrived in Berlin, the two men headed for the church, weaving between the gravestones until they reached the entrance. But the door was locked and there was no sign of life inside, so they retreated to a clump of trees in the corner of the churchyard to wait out the night. Their clothing had been soaked by the descent through the clouds and they decided to light a small fire, keeping its meagre flames hidden by a circle of stones their muddy fingers gouged out of the ground.

A cold wind raked across the field beyond the churchyard wall, rattling the branches of the trees.

Crouched above the mesh of burning twigs, both men reached their hands into the smoke as if somehow to wash them in the scent of burning alder.

With his head tucked down and chin tucked into the collar of his mud-spattered coat, Pekkala resembled one of the tramps who lived in the Vorobjev woods on the south-west outskirts of Moscow.

‘There’s no point going on,’ said Kirov, struggling to speak as his jaw trembled with the cold.

Pekkala looked up from the fire. ‘What?’ he asked in disbelief.

‘Without our guide,’ explained Kirov, ‘we’ll never find the safe house.’

‘We have some clues,’ countered Pekkala.

Kirov looked at him in astonishment. ‘Such as?’ he demanded.

‘We know that the contact is Hungarian,’ said Pekkala, ‘and the date we are supposed to meet at the safe house.’

‘It’s not enough,’ said Kirov. ‘Not nearly enough! The rendezvous is three days from now, and even if we can get to Berlin in time, what good is that in a city which is doubtless home to thousands of Hungarians, not to mention the refugees who have been pouring in from the east? You must face the fact, Inspector, that there’s no chance of making the rendezvous with Comrade Simonova.’

‘There is always a chance,’ said Pekkala.

An image appeared in Kirov’s mind of the two of them, shuffling from house to house and knocking at every door they came to. It would take them the rest of their lives. Kirov paused before he spoke again. It did not surprise him that Pekkala did not want to turn back, especially with what was now at stake. He knew he would have to choose his words carefully if he was to have any hope of persuading the Inspector to come home. ‘Inspector,’ he began, as he attempted to reason with Pekkala, ‘please consider the possibility that your judgement might be clouded in this instance.’

‘It might well be,’ replied Pekkala.

Encouraged by the Inspector’s admission, Kirov felt it safe to go on.

‘When morning comes,’ he said firmly, ‘we’ll return to the Soviet lines.’

‘Whatever you think of my judgement,’ Pekkala told him, ‘I have come too far to turn back now.’

‘But it isn’t so far!’ Kirov tried to reason with him. ‘It can’t be more than a day or two if we keep up a steady pace. All we have to do is head east. The Red Army is massing on the Seelow Heights. Once we reach the River Oder, we’ll be safe.’

‘Safe?’ echoed Pekkala. ‘How safe do you think you will be if we return to the Kremlin empty-handed?’

‘But we won’t,’ insisted Kirov. ‘As soon as we reach the Soviet lines, we can make contact with Special Operations in Moscow. They can reschedule the rendezvous at the safe house and find another guide to take us there. We’ll make it to Berlin, Inspector. It just might take a little longer than we thought.’

‘That is the problem, Major Kirov.’ Pekkala picked up a stick and jabbed it at the embers. ‘It might only be a matter of hours before Hunyadi tracks her down. So even if we did have the time to spare, Lilya Simonova does not.’

Having tried and failed to reason with Pekkala, Kirov realised that he had only one card left to play. ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘by the authority of Comrade Stalin, I am giving you an order.’

For a moment, there was only the sound of the wind in the branches of the trees.

‘And if Stalin was here with us now,’ Pekkala gestured at a patch of dirt beside the fire, ‘do you think that would change my opinion?’

Kirov stared at the place where Pekkala was pointing, half expecting Stalin to rise like some hideous mushroom from the patchwork collage of dead leaves. ‘What would you have us do, Inspector?’

‘Give me until the deadline for the rendezvous has passed,’ answered Pekkala. ‘That’s all the time I’ll need.’

‘How on earth do you expect to find her in three days, with no idea of where she might be hiding?’ asked Kirov.

‘You let me worry about that,’ replied Pekkala.

That same night, Peter Garlinski, former supervisor of British Special Operations Relay Station 53A, was woken by a heavy hand rapping on his Moscow flat door.

Bleary-eyed with sleep, Garlinski went to see what the fuss was about and found himself face to face with a sergeant of NKVD, the Soviet Internal Security Agency. The sergeant was crisply dressed, with dark blue trousers and a gymnastiorka tunic. Across his waist, he wore a heavy leather belt with a plain iron buckle and a Tokarev in its polished leather holster.

Garlinski was simultaneously worried by the sight of this man and grateful for the visit. He had not spoken to anyone since the arrival of Inspector Pekkala some days before.

‘I have come to get you out of here!’ announced the sergeant, a rosy-cheeked man with a double chin and thick, dark eyebrows. His short-fingered hands, the colour of raw pork, were criss-crossed with scars across the knuckles, as if he had once punched his way through a window.

‘Out of here?’ Garlinski asked suspiciously. ‘Where to?’

The sergeant poked his head into the room. ‘Some place better than this.’

‘Finally!’ sighed Garlinski.

‘Pack your things,’ said the sergeant.

‘I have no things.’

‘All the better. Follow me!’

They walked towards the gate, the sergeant’s iron heel plates sparking off the flint stones of the courtyard. Outside in the street, a car was parked, its engine running.

The sergeant got behind the wheel.

Garlinski climbed into the back.

‘We have to make a stop at Lubyanka,’ said the sergeant, as he put the car in gear and set off down the road. ‘You haven’t been debriefed yet.’

‘I know!’ Garlinski replied excitedly. ‘I’ve been waiting for that.’

‘It won’t take long,’ said the sergeant. ‘Then we can get you to your new apartment.’

‘What about employment?’ asked Garlinski. ‘I think I could be very useful. I’m trained as a decoder, you know. I was head of a listening post back in England.’

The sergeant glanced at him in the rear-view mirror and smiled broadly. ‘Sounds like you’ll have your pick of assignments. Not like me. I have no special talents.’

Garlinski found his gaze drawn to the scars on the sergeant’s knuckles, but he could make nothing of them and soon turned his attention to the sight of the people walking in the streets, passing through the cones of street-lamp light, still bundled in their winter scarves and furs.

The car pulled in to the Lubyanka courtyard.

Garlinski climbed out and looked around. He had heard that Lubyanka was once a fashionable neo-baroque building and it was still possible to see how grand it must have been before the Revolution. Now the windows were covered by angled metal shields, which prevented anyone from looking out, and strong lights glared down from the rooftops, obscuring his view of the sky.

A shudder passed through Garlinski. Even though he knew that he was being welcomed as a hero for his many years of service to the Soviet cause, the Lubyanka was still a place of nightmares for anyone who knew its history.

‘Where do I go?’ asked Garlinski.

‘I’ll walk you in,’ said the sergeant.

They entered the building and Garlinski was made to sign a register. The page on which he wrote was partially covered by a heavy metal screen, which hid all but the space in which he wrote his name.

‘This way.’ The sergeant beckoned for Garlinski to follow him.

The two men made their way downstairs and along a narrow corridor lined with pale green painted doors. Along the way, they passed two guards, with a prisoner shuffling along between them.

The prisoner, a young man with coal-black hair and narrow eyes, immediately turned to face the wall as Garlinski and the sergeant walked by.

There was complete silence in the corridor. Even the floor on which they walked had been covered with thick grey carpeting which dampened the sound of their footsteps.

Garlinski wanted to ask how much further they would have to go but the quiet was so threatening and profound that he did not dare to speak.

At the end of the corridor, they came to another door, which was made of dark, heavy panels and had a slightly arched top.

‘It’s the old wine cellar,’ whispered the sergeant, as he reached into his pocket for the key. ‘The men who worked at this place, back when it was still an insurance company, kept a king’s ransom in bottles down here for entertaining their wealthy clients. That’s all gone now, though, men and bottles both.’ He swung open the door and gestured grandly. ‘After you, Comrade Garlinski.’

Garlinski stepped inside. The ceiling of the room was arched and the walls were made of brick. The floor had been laid with tiles and there were shallow gutters running along the edges of the floor. He wondered why a wine cellar needed gutters. He looked around for furniture, but there was none. Not even a chair in which to sit.

He turned to ask the sergeant if they were in the right place.

The last clear thing Garlinski saw was the fist of the sergeant, knuckles spider-webbed with scars, as it slammed into his face.

He sprawled on to the floor, nearly blinded by the pain. Blood from his broken nose poured down the back of his throat and, propping himself up on one elbow, he retched as he struggled to breathe. Dimly, Garlinski watched as the sergeant removed his tunic and belt and hung them on the door handle. Then the man rolled up the sleeves of his thin, brown cotton shirt, the armpits of which were already darkened with sweat.

The sergeant’s smile had vanished. His face now appeared almost blank, as if he were only half aware of what he was doing. He reached down, took hold of the front of Garlinski’s coat and hauled him to his feet.

‘Wait!’ called Garlinski, peppering the sergeant’s face with blood. ‘There must be some mistake. I am a hero of the Soviet Union!’

Without a word of explanation and, using nothing more than his fists, the sergeant beat Peter Garlinski to death, as he had done countless others in the past.

He left the body lying on the floor, removed a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood off his hands. He studied a few new cuts on his knuckles. It was always their teeth that caused those.

Then he put on his tunic and belt and departed from the room, leaving the door open.

A few minutes later, two men dragged away Garlinski’s body, while a third mopped down the floor with a bucket of soapy water. Bubbles, poppy red, sluiced along the gutters and were gone.

In the dove-grey light of dawn, with darkness still clinging to the western sky, Pekkala and Kirov set off towards Berlin.

Although it was still cold, the breeze blowing up from the south was not as bitter as it had been the night before. Slowly, as they marched along, the warmth returned to their bones. They thought longingly of food they did not have and of the wheezy stove and battered chairs at their office on Pitnikov Street.

‘I knew it wouldn’t work,’ said Kirov.

‘What wouldn’t work?’ asked Pekkala.

‘Me giving you orders.’

‘Maybe you should have tried a little harder,’ suggested Pekkala.

Kirov turned to him. ‘Do you mean it might have worked?’

Pekkala thought about this for a moment. ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘but it would have been interesting to watch.’

They soon came across a railway track, which appeared to be heading directly towards the city. They followed it, timing their strides to the laddering of sleepers and smelling the oily creosote with which the wooden beams had been painted.

Through eyes bloodshot with fatigue, Pekkala watched the rails flow out on either side of him, like streams of mercury, converging in the distance. His memory tilted back to when he’d walked along another set of tracks which had been sutured across the earth.

In that moment, the mildness of that spring morning peeled away, leaving behind a world of bone-white snow and ice-sheathed trees and silence so profound that he could hear the rush of blood through his own veins. The cold slammed into his bones, and his heart seemed to cower behind the frail cage of his ribs.

He was back in Siberia again.

The tracks which he recalled were those of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which skirted the edge of the valley of Krasnagolyana, home to the labour camp of Borodok.

For much of the year, what few wagon trails criss-crossed that lonely forest lay deep beneath the snowdrifts or else were so clogged with mud that no one, not even the long-legged reindeer, could make their way along them.

During those seasons, the railway became the only means of crossing this vast landscape. It marked the boundary of Pekkala’s world. The land he roamed belonged to the Gulag of Borodok, whose trees he marked for cutting with red paint. Beyond the tracks lay the territory of Mamlin Three, another camp, where experiments were carried out on behalf of the Soviet military. At Mamlin, inmates were submerged in icy water until their hearts stopped beating. Then they were resuscitated with injections of adrenalin administered directly into their hearts. The procedure was repeated, with longer and longer intervals between the stopping of the heart and the adrenalin injections until, finally, the patient could not be revived. These experiments were designed to replicate the conditions of pilots brought down in the sea. Other tests, using extremes of high and low pressure, produced a steady flow of cadavers, which were packed into barrels of formaldehyde and sent to medical schools all across Russia.

For Pekkala, to walk across those tracks meant certain death if he was ever caught. But he was drawn to them in spite of the danger. At night, he stood back among the trees, while the carriages of the Trans-Siberian Express rattled past. He caught glimpses of the passengers, bundled in coats and asleep or staring out into the darkness with no idea that the darkness was staring back at them.

Until that memory finally stuttered to a halt, like a film clattering off its spool, he could not bring himself to step beyond the confines of the rails.

The first rays of sunlight glimmered faintly on the tracks. A moment later, the world around them ignited into a million coppery fragments as tiny stones out in the fields beyond, puddles of dirty water and even the powdery condensation of their breath caught the fireball’s reflection.

‘What’s that?’ asked Kirov, pointing up ahead.

Pekkala squinted at some strange, segmented creature, leaning up against one of the telegraph poles which ran beside the tracks. As he looked, it seemed to move, bowing out slightly in the centre and then settling back into its original shape. ‘Whatever it is,’ he whispered, ‘I think it is alive.’

Just then they heard a voice, calling out faintly across the empty fields.

At first, the two men could not even tell its source.

Then it came again, and they realised it was coming from the creature by the telegraph pole.

It was calling for help.

Without a moment’s consultation, the two men set off running, unsure what they would find but drawn by the exhausted terror in that voice.

Not until they were standing practically in front of it did they fully understand what they were seeing.

A man had been hanged by a rope from one of the crooked spikes used by linemen for climbing to the wires above. But his life had been saved by a boy, who had placed himself beneath the man’s feet so that the victim’s neck did not bear the full weight of the noose.

It looked as they had been there all night, or even longer.

The man’s hands had been tied behind his back. He wore heavy wool trousers and thick-soled boots, but only a flannel shirt above the waist. If he’d ever had a coat, it had been taken from him. Even though he was not dead, the noose had tightened on his throat and he was half-choked, breathing in short gasps like a fish pulled up on to a river bank.

The boy was tall and skinny, with a thick crop of ginger-red hair cow-licked vertically at the front. What strength he had was almost gone, and fatigue had made his pale skin almost translucent. His white-knuckled hands gripped the man’s trouser legs in an attempt to hold him steady.

While Kirov climbed the pole to cut him down, Pekkala took the boy’s place, settling the man’s boots upon his own shoulders and feeling the sharp heel irons dig into the flesh above his collarbone.

Carefully, they lowered the man to the ground, cut the rope from around his neck and propped him up against the dirty rails to let him breathe.

The boy sat down on the ground and stared at the men, too tired even to thank them except with the expression in his eyes.

‘Who did this?’ asked Pekkala. He had learned to speak German while at school in Finland, but his grammar was clumsy and the words crackled strangely in his mouth, as if he were chewing on bones.

‘Feldgendarmerie,’ replied the boy. Field Police.

Even back in Moscow, Pekkala had heard of these roving bands of soldiers, who rounded up anyone whom they suspected of desertion, or failure to place themselves in harm’s way. The execution of these stragglers was summary and swift. Their bodies, sometimes bearing placards on which their supposed crimes were listed, dangled from piano-wire nooses all across the shrinking territory of the Reich.

‘My son,’ said the hanged man, when he was finally able to talk. He gestured at the boy.

Pekkala wondered what charges had been laid against the man, who was not wearing military uniform, and by what stroke of fortune his son had been around to save him from the improvised gallows of the Feldgendarmerie. ‘Where are they now?’ he asked. ‘These Field Police?’

The man shook his head. He did not know. He brushed his hand towards the north to show in which direction they had gone.

‘And to Berlin?’ asked Pekkala.

With one trembling hand, the wrist rubbed raw by the wire with which it had been bound, the man reached out and pointed down the tracks. ‘But do not go,’ he told them. ‘In Berlin there is nothing but death and, when the Russians arrive, even death will not be enough to describe it.’

‘We must go there,’ replied Pekkala. He wished he could explain what must have seemed an act of total madness. Instead, he only muttered, ‘I’m afraid we have no choice.’

Neither the man nor his son asked any questions, but both seemed anxious to repay them for their kindness. Motioning for the two men to follow, they pointed across the field towards a grove of sycamore trees, on which the reddening buds glowed like a haze in the morning sunlight. Almost hidden in amongst the branches was a small brick chimney rising from a roof of grey slates patched with luminous green moss.

‘That is where we live,’ explained the boy.

‘We are grateful,’ said Pekkala, ‘but we must be moving on.’

‘If you want to reach your destination,’ warned the father, ‘then you should wait until the danger has passed. The Field Police barracks is on the outskirts of the city and they usually head back well before sunset. By mid-afternoon, it should be safe to travel. Then you can enter Berlin after dark.’

Pekkala hesitated, knowing he should take the man’s advice but so anxious to press on towards Berlin that his instincts faltered as they balanced the need against the risk.

‘We have food,’ said the boy. Knowing that only one of the men could understand what he was saying, he motioned with his hand to his mouth.

Kirov had been trying without success to follow the conversation between Pekkala and the half-hanged man. But he understood the gesture perfectly. He touched Pekkala on the arm and raised his eyebrows in a question, knowing that he could not speak without giving away the fact that he was Russian.

Feeling the touch against his arm, Pekkala glanced at the major. The reminder that he was responsible, not only for what might happen to himself but to them both, returned him abruptly to his senses. Pekkala gestured towards the house in the distance. ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.

Without another word, the four of them set off across the field.

At the edge of the woods, the ground sloped away sharply, revealing a small farmstead tucked away in a hollow.

A dog was sprawled dead outside the farmhouse door. It had been shot several times and its blood had leaked out into the mud on which it lay.

Ringing the small farmyard were racks of small cages, the doors of which were open.

‘Fasane,’ said the father, gesturing at the cages. Pheasants.

The father fluttered his fingers, to show they had all flown away. ‘I let them go,’ he explained. His voice was still hoarse and the chafing of the noose had rubbed a bloody groove beneath his chin.

‘But why?’ asked Pekkala.

The father shrugged, as if he wasn’t even sure himself. ‘So that they would have a chance,’ he said. And then he went on to describe how the band of military police had spotted the birds as they took to the air and had come to investigate. The first thing they did was shoot the farmer’s dog after it growled at them. Then, finding that the farmer had released the birds, which might otherwise have fed the hungry soldiers, they accused him of treason and immediately condemned him to death. At gunpoint they had marched him out across the field until they came to the telegraph poles. When they brought out the rope, he asked them why they had not hanged him from a tree by his own house. They told him it was so that people passing on the tracks could see his body, and think twice before they, too, betrayed their country. They tied a noose and hauled him up to hang him slowly, rather than breaking his neck with a drop.

Unknown to the military police, the boy had followed them.

As soon as the soldiers had departed, the boy rushed in and set his shoulders underneath the father’s feet. And they stood there through the night, waiting for someone to help.

The boy fetched a shovel from the back of the house in order to bury the dog. Kirov went with him, to share in the burden of digging, while the father brought Pekkala into the barn. There, he opened up a horse stall, in which something had been hidden underneath an old grey tarpaulin. The man pulled back the oil-stained canvas, revealing two bicycles.

Their chains were rusted, the brake pads crumbling and the leather seats sagged like the backs of broken mules. But the tyres still held air and, as the father pointed out, this way was better than walking.

When the dog had been buried, they sat down to a meal of smoked pheasant served on slices of gritty bread which had sawdust mixed into the flour. Meagre as it was, this seemed to be the only food they had left.

By two o’clock that afternoon, the father announced that it was safe for them to travel.

They walked out to the narrow road that ran beside the farm.

‘Stick to the back roads,’ advised the father. ‘Just keep heading west and you’ll be there in less than a day.’

‘Good luck to you both,’ said Pekkala, and he shook hands with the man and his son.

‘Udachi,’ replied the father, wishing them good luck in Russian.

Kirov gasped to hear the sound of his own language.

But Pekkala only smiled.

The man had known all along where they came from.

Wobbling unsteadily upon the bicycles, Kirov and Pekkala set off towards Berlin.

At that precise moment, Inspector Hunyadi was sitting alone in a conference room in the Reichschancellery building, waiting to begin the first of several interviews of members of the German High Command about the leak of information from the bunker.

In choosing a location for these interviews, Hunyadi had been given little choice, since this was one of the few places left in the Chancellery with its roof remaining intact.

This had, until not too long ago, been the location of Hitler’s meetings with his High Command; one at midday and the other at midnight. It was a grand, high-ceilinged room, with white pillars in each corner and paintings of different German landscapes – the Drachenfels Castle overlooking the Rhine, a street scene in Munich, a farmer ploughing his field at sunrise on the flat, almost featureless plains along the Baltic coast. In between these paintings, windows taller than a man looked out on to the Chancellery garden. In the centre of the room stood a long, oak table, on which the maps of battlefields would be unfurled and gestured at by field marshals waving ceremonial batons. Along the back wall, comfortable chairs with padded red leather seats had welcomed those whose presence was not immediately required.

At least, that’s how it used to look.

One night in late October of 1944, a 250-pound bomb dropped by an American B-17 landed in the Chancellery garden, barely fifty feet from the outside entrance to the briefing room. The explosion blew out the windows, spraying the back walls with glass, shrapnel and mud. The upholstered chairs were hurled into the air, along with the briefing-room table, in spite of the fact that it normally took ten men to lift it. In a matter of seconds, every piece of furniture in the room was wrenched into pieces, some of which became embedded in the ceiling.

At first, Hitler had insisted that the briefings continue in their usual location. The windows’ holes were sealed up with plywood. The wreckage of the table was removed and those in attendance did their best not to stare at the gashes in the walls, from which shards of window glass still protruded like the teeth of sharks.

Maps were spread out upon the floor and men crouched down to trace their fingers along routes of advance and retreat.

Forty-eight hours after the explosion, just as the midnight meeting was about to commence, a twisted dagger of metal from the bomb’s tail fin fell from its resting place in the ceiling and stuck into the floor, right in the middle of a map of the Schnee Eifel mountains.

That was too much, even for Hitler, and before he left the city for another of his fortresses, he ordered a new location to be found. By the time he returned, in January of the following year, the only place left was the bunker.

Since the power was out and the windows were blocked up with plywood, Hunyadi had resorted to a paraffin lamp to light the room. The yellow flame, tipped with greasy black smoke, writhed behind the dirty glass shroud. Most of the furniture had been removed. But the conference table was still here, along with a couple of chairs. It was enough to serve Hunyadi’s purposes, but little more. In addition, the paintings had all been removed. Now Hunyadi surveyed the dreary expanses of yellowy-brown paint on the empty walls, studded with the hooks from which the portraits had once been suspended.

Hunyadi had considered summoning everyone on his list to the police station, where he could have questioned them in one of the holding cells, but he wanted to play down the appearance of a formal interrogation. In addition, German military law usually required that any interrogation of a military official be carried out by someone of equal rank. Not only did Hunyadi lack the pay scale of the officers who would soon be marching through that door, but he wasn’t even a soldier.

No matter what location he chose, the reception was likely to be chilly, especially since most, if not all of them, would already know why they were being summoned. Even to be questioned meant that their loyalty had fallen under suspicion.

As the minutes passed, Hunyadi felt the quiet of the room settling like dust upon his shoulders. Even though his rational mind assured him that he was not back in a cell, he still felt trapped in this windowless space and it was all he could do not to bolt into the street. He thought about all the people he had sent to prison over the years. Rarely had he ever felt pity for the people he’d helped to convict, but now he grasped the full measure of their suffering. It was strange that this had come to him only after his release from Flossenburg. In the weeks he had spent in that cell so much of his mind had shut down that every emotion, no matter how extreme, had been dulled to the point where he felt almost nothing at all. Maybe that was the true punishment of prison – not the loss of time but rather the inability to feel its passing.

A few minutes later, the door burst open and there stood Field Marshal Keitel, with cheeks almost as red as the crimson facing on his greatcoat. Without waited to be welcomed, he stamped into the room, removed his hat and tossed it on to the table. Then, resting his gloved knuckles on the polished surface, he leaned across until the two men’s faces almost touched. ‘You miserable little man!’ he spat. ‘Did you ever stop to think that I have a war to run?’

Keitel, in his early sixties, had greying hair, a high forehead and fleshy ears. When he closed his mouth, his teeth clacked together like a mousetrap, causing the flesh around his jowly chin to quiver momentarily.

‘I just have a few questions,’ said Hunyadi, removing a notebook from his chest pocket, along with the stub of a pencil. ‘Please sit,’ he told the field marshal, gesturing at a chair on the other side of the table.

‘I won’t be here long enough!’ roared Keitel. ‘Just hurry up and ask me whatever it is you need to ask, so you can report back to the Fuhrer that I am not the source of any information leak.’

‘So you are aware of the leak?’

‘Of course! For months, there have been rumours.’

‘What kind of rumours?’

Keitel breathed in sharply through his nose. ‘Things finding their way on to the Allied radio network.’

‘What things?’

Keitel shrugged angrily. ‘Useless gossip, mostly. The sordid details of people’s lives.’

‘The Fuhrer seems to think it is more serious than that.’

Slowly, Keitel leaned away from Hunyadi. He pulled himself up to his full height, fingers twitching inside grey-green leather gloves. ‘He has no proof of that, at least none that I have seen or heard about. If you ask me, he’s chasing a ghost, and we have other, more important things to occupy our minds. It is simply a distraction, which is exactly what the Allies had in mind.’

‘So you will admit the leak exists?’

The field marshal shrugged. ‘Possibly.’

‘And where, if you had to guess, would you say the leak is coming from?’

‘If you ask me, they are the kind of details one hears talked about among the secretaries, of which there are several working in the bunker.’

‘So you think it is one of them?’

‘I’m not accusing anyone,’ snapped Keitel. ‘It’s just a hunch, but one that carries weight if you can see this from the Allies’ point of view.’

‘And how is that?’

‘Whoever they are using for this, if there is anyone at all, is someone they consider expendable.’

‘How so?’ asked Hunyadi.

‘How long did the Allies think they could go on telling bunker secrets before Hitler sent a man like you to find the source? Now have you asked enough questions or are you going to keep me here all day?’

‘No, Field Marshal,’ said Hunyadi, closing his notebook. ‘You are free to go.’

The next man through the door was Hitler’s adjutant, SS Major Otto Guensche. He had come straight from his duties at the bunker and wore a brown, double-breasted knee-length leather coat over his dress uniform. He was very tall, with sad and patient eyes; a man who looked like he was used to keeping his mouth shut.

Hunyadi realised at once that he would get little out of Guensche. After a few, perfunctory questions about life in the bunker, all of which Guensche answered in a slow and quiet voice, as if he was certain that others were listening, Hunyadi sent him away.

There followed a line of secretaries – Johanna Wolf, Christa Schroeder, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge. If anything, these women were tougher than the field marshal. They gave almost nothing away, but from the upward darting of their gazes and the twitching of the muscles in their jaws, it was clear to Hunyadi, from his years of questioning suspects in the dingy, glaringly lit interrogation cells of the Spandau prison, that these women had plenty they could tell. The question was whether they had, and Hunyadi did not think so. Their loyalty ran so deep that it was oblivious to the kinds of political manoeuvrings that other, more highly placed members of the Fuhrer’s entourage might have found tempting.

After the secretaries, Hunyadi interviewed Hitler’s chauffeur Erich Kempka, a rough, sarcastic man, who was himself a victim of the rumour leak. The story of his infidelities had been described more than once by ‘Der Chef’.

Then came Heinz Linge, one of Hitler’s valets, so nervous that he might have uttered some inconsequential detail in his sleep and thereby brought about the downfall of the Reich; his right eye began to twitch uncontrollably and Hunyadi dismissed him earlier than he had planned to out of fear that the man might be about to suffer a heart attack.

After Linge’s departure, Hunyadi glanced at his watch and realised that the day was almost over.

His final visitor was Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s emissary to the Fuhrer’s court and, judging from the reputation that preceded him, someone universally disliked.

Unlike all the others, Fegelein appeared completely at ease, and it was this which made Hunyadi suspicious.

‘Why am I here?’ demanded Fegelein.

‘The Fuhrer believes that there is a leak of classified information from his Berlin Headquarters. Some of it is finding its way to the Allies, who are broadcasting it from their radio stations.’

‘You mean “Der Chef”?’

‘You have heard of him?’

‘Everybody has, but if that’s why you’ve brought me in I can tell you right now you are wasting your time.’

‘You may be right,’ answered Hunyadi, ‘but I must speak with everyone who has access to classified information in the bunker. And that would include you, Gruppenfuhrer, since you attend the Fuhrer’s briefings every day.’

‘That’s my job,’ he replied.

‘Nevertheless,’ said Hunyadi, ‘we must satisfy the Fuhrer’s curiosity.’

Fegelein slumped down into the chair on the other side of the table. He breathed in deeply and then sighed. ‘So ask away.’

‘I only have one question,’ said Hunyadi.

Fegelein blinked in confusion. ‘That’s all?’

‘If there was a leak,’ asked Hunyadi, ‘then where, in your opinion, would it come from?’

Fegelein thought for a moment before he replied. ‘Somewhere down the line,’ he said.

‘Down the line?’

‘Someone who has learned to slip between the cracks,’ explained Fegelein. ‘A person you see all the time but never notice. But you are wasting your time looking at me, and others like me. My kind of people do not risk our lives on spreading gossip. We have far too much to lose for that.’

‘Thank you,’ said Hunyadi. ‘You may go.’

Fegelein stood up and turned to leave. But then he turned back. ‘Why only one question?’

Hunyadi smiled, almost sympathetically. ‘If you were indeed the source of the leak, would you have admitted that to me?’

Fegelein snorted. ‘Of course not!’

‘Precisely,’ said Fegelein.

‘So why bring us in here at all?’

‘Firstly, because that is what Hitler wants. And secondly, so that there can be no doubt, in the mind of whomever is divulging this information, that they are being hunted now.’

Fegelein nodded, impressed. ‘A tactic which might lose you some friends before this investigation is over.’

‘There are no friends,’ said Hunyadi, ‘only the enemies I have already and those who do not know enough to hate me yet. In my line of work, that is an occupational hazard.’

‘If only there were someone you could turn to for help.’

Hunyadi stared at him. ‘Meaning what?’

‘Such a person might be very valuable.’ Fegelein held out his arms and let them fall back to his sides. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘If you are implying that I can request assistance from the SS, I am already aware of that.’

‘The SS is a large organisation which does not take kindly to strangers snooping about in their business,’ Fegelein told him flatly. ‘What you need is someone who can get the job done while still maintaining absolute discretion.’

Hunyadi narrowed his eyes with suspicion. ‘And this person might be you? Is that what you’re suggesting?’

‘It might be.’

Now I know why they hate you so much, thought Hunyadi. ‘And why’, he asked, ‘would someone like you make me an offer like that?’

‘Because I know who you work for, and I have lately found myself on the wrong end of his sympathies. Any gesture I can make to remedy that situation is worth doing. So you see, if I help you, then I am also helping him. All I ask in return is that, when the time comes, you remember who your friends are.’

‘I’ll keep it in mind,’ Hunyadi answered cautiously.

Fegelein handed him a business card. On one side, in embossed letters, were his initials, HF, and on the other side was a Berlin telephone number. ‘This is how to reach me, day or night,’ said Fegelein.

After the man had departed, Hunyadi turned his thoughts to the things he had learned that day. The most useful information had come, not from what his visitors had said, but from what they did not say. Tomorrow, he would go to the bunker, and report his findings in person to Hitler. The news was unlikely to go down well, and Hunyadi wondered if the messenger would be the first to fall.

That evening, after a meal of quail braised in a mushroom and cognac sauce, delivered from the kitchens of Harting’s restaurant on Muhlenstrasse to the apartment of his mistress, Fegelein sat in a high-backed chair made of crushed yellow velvet, smoking a cigar. Lazily, he held the phone receiver to his ear while his master, Heinrich Himmler, grilled him about the meeting with Hunyadi.

‘What did he want?’ demanded Himmler. ‘What is he looking into?’

‘A leak,’ replied Fegelein. ‘A flow of information from the bunker which has been finding its way into the hands of the Allies. Apparently, you can hear it almost every day on that pirate radio station of theirs.’

‘Is there any truth to it?’

‘No idea,’ sighed Fegelein, ‘but even if there is, it’s nothing serious.’

‘Nothing serious!’ scoffed Himmler. ‘How the hell can you say that?’

‘Because the information is useless,’ explained Fegelein. ‘It’s just gossip. There’s nothing to indicate that military secrets are being passed on to the enemy, at least from the bunker.’

‘Then why did he have to bring in a detective?’

‘Not just any detective,’ said Fegelein. ‘It’s Leopold Hunyadi.’

‘Hunyadi!’ exclaimed Himmler. ‘The last I heard, he was going to be shot, or hanged or something.’

‘He appears to have dodged both the bullet and the noose,’ replied Fegelein. ‘I must say I am not at all surprised. I have looked at Hunyadi’s police record. It is very impressive. He has received all four grades of the Police Meritorious Service medal.’

‘Four?’ asked Himmler. ‘I thought that there were only three – gold, silver and bronze.’

‘They gave Hunyadi one with diamonds, created just for him. Hitler personally stuck the badge on him, back in 1939. Do you know he also speaks four languages, including Russian, Spanish and Hungarian?’

‘Yes, yes, Fegelein,’ Himmler replied angrily. ‘Anyone would think you were starting up a fan club for Hunyadi! And none of this explains why Hitler did not give the case to our own man, Rattenhuber. He’s in charge of security in the bunker and he’s the one who should be investigating this.’

‘And he would be,’ answered Fegelein, ‘if Hitler trusted anyone at all down there in that concrete labyrinth.’

‘Do you mean he suspects us? The SS?’

‘I mean he suspects everyone, Herr Reichsfuhrer.’

There was a long pause, during which time Fegelein studied the whitening ash of his cigar as it slowly extinguished itself. Knowing Himmler’s distaste for tobacco, he did not dare to take a puff even when talking to the man on the phone, for fear that Himmler might hear the popping of his lips as he drew smoke.

‘We need to keep our eye on this,’ Himmler said at last. ‘If it does turn out that one of our own people is involved, it will destroy whatever faith Hitler has left in us.’

‘I have taken steps to see that does not happen.’

‘What steps, Fegelein? What have you been up to?’

‘Just extending the hand of friendship to a colleague,’ replied Fegelein. ‘I told Hunyadi to come to me if he ever needed help.’

‘And why would he go to you instead of anybody else?’

‘Because I let him know that I can be discreet, and I predict that he will soon accept my offer.’

‘As soon as he does that,’ said Himmler, laughing softly, ‘he will belong to us. But what makes you so sure he will call upon you?’

‘Everyone needs someone like me at one time or another,’ answered Fegelein, ‘and I sense that Hunyadi’s time is coming.’

‘Let us hope so,’ said Himmler. As usual, he hung up without saying goodbye.

For a moment, Fegelein listened to the rustles of static on the disconnected line. Then he put the phone down and set about puffing his cigar back to life.

As Kirov and Pekkala made their way along a muddy road, still 30 kilometres from Berlin, they did not see the roadblock until it was too late.

The windswept farmland had given way to shallow, rolling hills. Through this, the road twisted and turned, the way forward obscured by thick forests of poplars and sycamores, whose patchwork bark seemed to conjure up the shapes of faces, staring wall-eyed at the travellers as they passed by.

They were coasting down a hill, bicycle chains clattering over the spokes, banking to the right and then sharply to the left. It was all they could do just to stay in their seats. Just before the bottom of the hill, the road straightened out, and it was here that a squad of German Field Police had chosen to set up a barrier made from downed trees blocking first the left-hand side of the road and then the right, so that anyone hoping to pass would have to zigzag through the obstacles.

There was nothing that Pekkala or Kirov could do. They had no time to draw their guns or to retrace their steps. They barely had time to stop before they reached where the policemen were standing.

Two men, each wearing long rubberised canvas trench coats and carrying sub-machine guns, stood in front of the first blockade of trees. Hanging from forged metal links around their necks were the half-moon shields of the German Field Police, each one emblazoned with a large eagle and the word ‘Feldgendarmerie’, which had been daubed with a yellowish-green paint that glowed in the dark.

The police grinned, pleased with the success of their trap, as Kirov and Pekkala skidded to a halt in front of them.

At first, it seemed as if these two ‘Chained Dogs’ were the only ones manning the roadblock, but then the woods appeared to come to life, and half a dozen more police emerged from bunkers on either side of the road.

‘Papers!’ barked one of the policemen, holding out his hand.

Fumbling in their pockets, Pekkala and Kirov each produced their documents. As they undid the buttons of their coats, the policeman caught sight of Pekkala’s Webley, tucked away inside his shoulder holster. Immediately, the man swung his sub-machine gun up towards his chest. ‘Slowly now,’ he said.

Pekkala removed the revolver. Grasping it by the brass butt plates so that the barrel pointed at the ground, he handed it over. As he did so, he noticed for the first time how young these soldiers were.

They could not have been more than sixteen years old, gaunt and acne-spattered faces peering from beneath the iron hoods of their helmets. With underfed and spindly bodies tented beneath their raincoats, they looked like scarecrows come to life.

And yet Pekkala knew what casual brutality could come from those whose youth had shielded them from any frame of reference but the one they had been taught since birth. They were the children of the later war and when they crossed paths with the Red Army, these boys would be the last to surrender, if they were even given such a chance.

Now the two men were searched, and Kirov’s gun was also confiscated.

‘Herr Hauptmann!’ shouted the boy who had demanded their papers.

Another man emerged from the bunker on the left. He wore the rank insignia of a captain, and his silver-braided epaulettes were trimmed with the dull orange piping of the German Field Police. The captain was considerably older than the others, his unshaved chin flecked with a grey haze of stubble. He might have been their father, or even their grandfather. The man carried a short-stemmed pipe, which he paused to light as he made his way on to the road. Unlike his men, this officer did not wear a long coat. Nor did he carry the half-moon badge of his profession. Instead, he was bundled in a field grey tunic, so worn that it seemed to be moulded to his body. Across his back and down his forearms, the woollen fabric had faded almost white. Pinned to his left chest pocket was an Iron Cross 1st Class and tucked into a buttonhole were two medal ribbons, one for an Iron Cross 2nd Class and another to commemorate his service on the Russian front.

‘You were right, Herr Hauptmann!’ exclaimed the boy. ‘You said we might catch a few more of them if we stayed out after dark, and look what we have here!’ He shoved the two men forward.

‘Thank you, Andreas,’ said the captain, sounding more like a schoolmaster than a commanding officer.

The boy handed him the papers belonging to Pekkala and Kirov, saluted and stood back.

Puffing thoughtfully at his pipe, the captain flipped through the Hungarian identity books, unfolding the insert at the back which identified both Kirov and Pekkala as tradesmen for a company called Matra, located in the Hungarian city of Eger, which had a contract to make footwear for the German military.

Ever since they had first come in sight of the roadblock, neither Kirov nor Pekkala had spoken a word. Pekkala could feel his heart beating against a leather strap of his empty holster which he had strapped across his chest. He had designed the contraption himself, so that the gun could be carried at an angle that was easiest to reach, which put the Webley just beneath his solar plexus on the left side of his ribcage.

Both men realised that they were completely at the mercy of their captors. There was nowhere to run, no chance of fighting their way out and, unless this captain intervened, these boys would soon have them swinging from ropes.

‘They are Hungarians,’ said the officer, more to himself than to the others.

‘Shall we hang them?’ asked Andreas, unable to conceal the excitement in his voice.

Wearily, the officer glanced up at him. ‘These papers are in order and, in case you had forgotten, Hungary is one of the few allies we have left. Besides, according to these documents, these men work for a company that might well have made your boots.’

‘Then we should hang them just for that,’ piped up the other boy. He pointed at the muddy clumps of leather on his feet. ‘I’ve only had these things three weeks and they’re already falling apart.’

The officer just shook his head. ‘Indeed they are, Berthold, but perhaps they were not built to last.’

Berthold blinked at the officer in confusion, unable to grasp the meaning of his words.

‘And what about these guns, Herr Hauptmann?’ Andreas held them up for the officer to see.

‘Why shouldn’t they have guns?’ asked the captain. ‘Everyone else does.’

‘Well, what are they doing out here?’ demanded Berthold. ‘It looks pretty suspicious if you ask me.’

‘But nobody is asking you,’ replied the captain. ‘Put them in the truck tonight. Then, in the morning, you take them in to Major Rademacher. He can decide what to do.’

Growling under their breath, Berthold and Andreas turned and shoved their captives past the second barricade.

They left their bicycles propped against the felled trees of the roadblock and followed the policeman down the road.

‘And make sure they stay put!’ the officer called out before he climbed back into his bunker.

The truck which the captain had mentioned was hidden in the woods only a short walk down the road. It had been painted with a curious camouflage pattern, made from leafy branches which had been laid upon the metal bonnet and cowlings and then painted over with a lighter shade of green than the original colouring, leaving the silhouette of the branches behind when the second coat had dried.

Andreas climbed into the back, which was covered with a canvas roof. ‘In!’ he barked at the two men, motioning for them to climb aboard.

Sitting across from each on the hard wooden benches, Kirov and Pekkala were handcuffed to a metal rail which ran behind each bench.

Andreas patted Kirov gently on the face before climbing out of the truck. ‘Good night, gentlemen!’ he said, as he shuffled away through the leaves.

The sun was just rising over the shattered rooftops of Berlin when Leopold descended to Hitler’s private quarters on the fourth and deepest level of the bunker.

There, Hitler welcomed him into a small, cramped sitting room, whose space was largely taken up by a cream-white couch, a small coffee table and two chairs. Hitler was already dressed. He gave the impression of being a man who seldom slept at all, and Hunyadi suspected that this was not far from the truth.

Here, in the stark electric light, Hitler’s skin looked even paler and more bloodless than it had done in the Chancellery garden. He stooped as he moved about, as if, somehow, he felt the weight of the tons of earth between them and the ground above. He was dressed, as he had been before, in a pale green-grey double-breasted jacket, a white shirt and black trousers, neatly pressed.

‘So, Hunyadi!’ he growled, ‘have you caught our little songbird yet?’

Hunyadi was startled by the power in his voice. From his outward appearance, Hitler appeared as someone who could barely speak at all. ‘Not yet,’ he replied, ‘but I have learned a few things since we last spoke.’

Hitler held his arm out towards the couch and gestured at Hunyadi to sit. Hitler lowered himself down in one of the chairs, settled his elbows on to the wooden arms, and leaned forward expectantly.

Before Hunyadi could speak, a door on the far side of the sitting room opened and Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun, appeared, wearing a blue dress flecked with tiny white polka dots and low-heeled black shoes. She had a round, guileless-looking face, with a softly shaped chin and narrow, arching eyebrows. These were darker than her brownish-blonde hair, which had been combed back to reveal her forehead.

To Hunyadi, who immediately rose to his feet, she looked like she was getting ready to go to a party.

Behind her, through the open door, Hunyadi could see an unmade bed. But it was a small bed, and he struggled to imagine how two people could have fitted in it comfortably. The furnishings in the room – everything from the lampshade to the pictures on the walls – showed nothing that would indicate the presence of a man. Hunyadi wondered if they slept in separate rooms, even though both of them were crammed together in this dungeon. It may have been a well-decorated dungeon, but it was a dungeon, nevertheless.

Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun was not widely known outside the bunker. She rarely appeared with him in public and it was only when her car was stopped for driving erratically across the Oberbauer Bridge, early in 1944, that Hunyadi had learned of her existence. The police officer who pulled her over, an old friend of Hunyadi’s named Rothbart, had been on the point of arresting the woman for being drunk behind the wheel, along with her loud and even more inebriated companions who occupied the back seat, when two carloads of SS security appeared to escort the woman away. Rothbart’s name, home address and service number were taken down by an irate SS officer, whose sleeve bore the black and silver cuff title of the Fuhrer’s Headquarters. Then, after warning Rothbart to keep his mouth shut, the officer helped the woman out of the driver’s seat, opened the rear door of the sedan and waited until she climbed in beside her friends before getting in himself behind the wheel.

The last thing Rothbart heard as the car sped away into the dark was laughter and the popping of a champagne cork from the back seat of the car.

‘That was Hitler’s girl!’ Rothbart had confided to Hunyadi. It was the first time he had ever heard the name of Eva Braun.

‘And who is this?’ she asked, barely glancing at Hunyadi as she walked into the sitting room. Instead, she busied herself with attaching a small golden ring into her earlobe.

‘My name . . .’ began Hunyadi.

‘Is not important,’ Hitler said abruptly. ‘It’s a friend of mine from the old days. That’s all. He’s working on something for me.’

‘I see,’ said Eva Braun and, in an instant, it was as if Hunyadi had ceased to exist. ‘I am going up to the canteen to get some breakfast,’ she told Hitler. ‘Is there anything you want?’

‘A glass of milk,’ he replied, ‘but do not hurry back on my account.’

Then the two men were alone again.

With clawing fingers, Hitler beckoned at Hunyadi. ‘Tell me!’ he whispered urgently. ‘Tell me everything you know.’

‘Based on what you’ve told me,’ said Hunyadi, ‘I believe you are correct. There is a leak.’

‘Yes? And?’ Hitler’s eyes bored into the detective.

‘Everyone I spoke to is aware of it,’ continued Hunyadi. ‘However, I do not believe that the person responsible for the leak is operating from inside the bunker.’

Hitler sat back suddenly, as if he had been pushed by a ghost. ‘But how could it be otherwise? The information is coming from here and nowhere else!’

‘I agree,’ said Hunyadi, ‘but I believe that this is happening indirectly. Somebody who works here, among you, is speaking to someone on the outside. A wife. A husband. A lover, perhaps, but in any case it’s someone they trust implicitly.’

‘What brings you to this conclusion?’ asked Hitler.

‘The one thing shared by everyone I spoke to yesterday was their fear. Fear of you. Fear of the Russians. Fear of the judgement they may have to face some day. None of them, not even the lowest in rank, would risk their lives to smuggle out the gossip you are hearing from Der Chef.’

‘And yet that is exactly what they’re doing!’

‘Without realising it, yes,’ agreed Hunyadi. ‘I am willing to bet that your informant does not even know that he or she is delivering secrets to the enemy and, given how long this information has been leaking out, we can be sure of two things.’

‘What two things?’ demanded Hitler.

‘The first’, replied Hunyadi, ‘is that the relationship required to enable such a transfer of information is a long-standing one. The second is that consistency of the information, and the kind of information you have been able to pinpoint as having come directly from your headquarters, implies that it is being passed on in the course of normal conversations. It is just chatter, which people feast upon no matter where or who they are. It is part of human nature. There is nothing threatening, per se, in the information itself, at least as far as we know. This is why the informant believes there is no danger in discussing it.’

‘Then we arrest them all!’ cried Hitler, leaping to his feet. ‘Interrogate everyone! Smash their fingers with a hammer one by one until we get the answers we are looking for!’

Hunyadi waited patiently for Hitler to finish his tirade.

A faint flush of colour brushed across his cheeks, but now it drained away again, leaving his face even more bloodless than before. He slumped back into his chair. ‘I see that you do not share my enthusiasm, Hunyadi,’ he muttered.

‘You cannot arrest everyone,’ stated the detective. ‘We do not have the time to pursue so many suspects.’

‘And why not?’

Because, Hunyadi thought but did not say, by the time I have questioned them all, both you and this city will belong to Joseph Stalin. ‘The first thing we have to do is stop the leak,’ he said, ‘before it grows too big to control. After that, you can start thinking about punishment.’

Hitler nodded slowly. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘but how do we accomplish that?’

‘With respect,’ said Hunyadi, ‘I suggest that we don’t even try.’

‘What?’

‘Do nothing,’ replied the detective.

‘Nothing!’ Hitler’s breath erupted into a long gravelly laugh that finished in a spasm of coughing. ‘But why?’

‘Because you must understand this leak for what it is,’ said Hunyadi. ‘As far as we know, it exists as nothing more than a distraction, to make you second-guess the loyalties of those around you. In this, it has already achieved its objective.’

‘I am perfectly aware of that,’ said Hitler. ‘What worries me is not what I’m aware of, but that which I strongly suspect.’

Hunyadi sighed and nodded. ‘There is a path we can pursue.’

‘Go on.’

‘The information seeping from this bunker is smuggled out of Germany the same way it’s smuggled back in.’

Hitler narrowed his eyes. ‘You mean by radio?’

‘Precisely, and since there has been no interruption to the flow of information, we can assume that messages are still being transmitted from an illegal wireless set. And if we can locate it . . .’

‘And how big are these wireless sets?’

Hunyadi shrugged. ‘The smallest of them can be hidden in a briefcase.’

Hitler shook his head. ‘And how do you plan on finding such a tiny object?’

‘I have an idea,’ answered Hunyadi, ‘but it will require you making an announcement at your next briefing.’

‘What sort of announcement?’

‘One that is incorrect,’ Hunyadi told him, ‘and yet which would prove irresistible to whomever is causing the leak.’

‘You mean some shred of bunker gossip?’ asked Hitler intently. ‘A sordid affair? A child born out of wedlock?’

‘No,’ said Hunyadi, ‘because even if those details might get passed along to the Allies, they are not truly matters which concern us.’

‘I see,’ Hitler murmured, touching his fingernails against his lips. ‘So it must be something bigger. Something of real significance.’

‘A military secret,’ suggested Hunyadi, ‘and yet one which the Allies would be unable to confirm, at least not for a few days.’

‘A few days?’ echoed Hitler. ‘Is that all?’

‘If I am correct that the radio operator is still transmitting messages, we should not have long to wait.’

Hitler breathed in deeply, then let his breath trail out. ‘Yes,’ he whispered, as Hunyadi’s plan took shape inside his brain. ‘I think I know exactly what to say.’

‘And from this,’ continued Hunyadi, ‘we will be able to locate not only the radio operator, but also to confirm whether information of strategic value, rather than just parlour chat, is being funnelled to Der Chef.’

‘We’ll do it!’ Hitler clapped his hands together, the sound like a gunshot in the confined space of the room. But then he paused, and his hands drifted down once more on to the wooden armrests of the chair. ‘But that still does not explain how you plan to catch this radio operator?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Hunyadi, ‘which brings me to my final request.’

‘Name it and it will be granted if such a thing is possible.’

‘I might need to disrupt the power grid.’

‘Which power grid?’ demanded Hitler. ‘The one to the Chancellery? To the bunker itself?’

‘No.’ Hunyadi paused. ‘I mean the whole city.’

Hitler stared at him blankly for a moment. ‘You’re going to shut off the power to Berlin?’

‘Possibly.’

Hitler puffed his cheeks and looked around the room. By the time his gaze returned to Hunyadi, Adolf Hitler was smiling. ‘By God, Hunyadi, you can plunge us into darkness for a decade if you think it just might work!’

‘Gentlemen!’ said Hitler, rising from behind the table in his briefing room.

Across from him, members of the High Command waited expectantly for his announcement. They stood shoulder to shoulder, crammed into the little space like commuters on the metro.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Hitler, ‘I am pleased to report that the Diamond Stream device is now fully operational, and is currently being installed in all V-2 rockets.’

‘How long will it take before launches commence?’ asked Fegelein, who stood at the front of the jostling crowd.

‘It is imminent,’ replied Hitler. ‘Tell that to Himmler when you see him.’

‘At once!’ barked Fegelein, cracking his heels together.

That night, lying on the bed in the apartment of his mistress Elsa Batz, Fegelein drank cognac from a bottle, stark naked except for his socks. He had decided to wait until morning before driving to Himmler’s headquarters with news of the Diamond Stream device. Bad news Fegelein usually dispensed by telephone, but good news, such as this, he preferred to deliver in person. Himmler normally went to bed early and any benefit Fegelein might have derived from heading out immediately to Hohenlychen would be cancelled out by having woken up his master.

‘The idea of it!’ huffed Fegelein. He paused to take another swig of cognac.

‘Of what?’ asked Elsa. She was sitting at a table by the window, wearing a white dressing gown, and casually filing her nails. Elsa was a round-faced woman with platinum-blonde hair and rosy cheeks, who had formerly been employed as an exotic dancer at the ‘Salon Kitty’ on Giesebrechtstrasse. Available solely to high-ranking members of the military, Salon Kitty was one of the only nightclubs allowed to operate in Berlin, for the reason that it was secretly run by the SS. What went on there was filmed by members of Rattenhuber’s Security Service, to be used later as blackmail or as an excuse for arrest.

From the first moment Fegelein saw Elsa Batz, one night back in the summer of 1944, he had known that their lives would somehow become entwined. From her languid movements, up there on the stage, and the sleepy sensuality in her eyes, Fegelein perceived a strange familiarity about her from which he could not walk away. This fact brought him no joy. He knew, from all the other mistresses he had kept over the years, exactly how complicated and expensive this was going to be. With equal certainty, he knew that the physical attraction he felt for Elsa Batz had nothing to do with whether or not he would actually like her. In fact, in a very short time, he might well grow to despise her. But that had nothing to with how badly he needed to possess her.

Fegelein was well aware that Salon Kitty was nothing more than a honey trap. He even knew where the cameras were located and the names of men who had, when confronted with the evidence of blackmail, chosen to end their own lives rather than end up like dogs on Rattenhuber’s leash.

That was why, in a very short space of time, he persuaded Elsa to quit her job and then set her up in this luxurious apartment on Bleibtreustrasse.

It was here that he spent several nights a week, at times when his wife, Gretl, would assume that he was up at Himmler’s headquarters at Hohenlychen, north of the city. The fact that Fegelein kept a mistress, in spite of the occupational hazard associated with marrying Eva Braun’s sister, did not come as a surprise to anyone who knew him. Fegelein felt fairly certain that even his wife was aware of the apartment on Bleibtreustrasse, although she never mentioned it. His wife, it seemed, neither knew, nor cared to know the details. In marrying a man like Fegelein, contending with a mistress was inevitable.

Much to Fegelein’s surprise, he and Elsa Batz did not grow to hate each other. It was true that they had very little in common, but what they had turned out to be enough. Unlike all the other women he had kept, Elsa Batz remained content to be Fegelein’s mistress. She never set her sights on being anything more than she had ever been to him, and this alone ensured the survival of their relationship.

‘The idea’, continued Fegelein, ‘that, after everything I’ve done for Hitler, he would so much as entertain the notion that I might be guilty of treason is just absurd.’

The rustle of the filing ceased. ‘But you say there is, in fact, a leak of information.’

‘Probably,’ replied Fegelein. He was staring at the ceiling as he spoke. ‘But it’s just small stuff. With a million Russian soldiers waiting on the Seelow Heights, ready to pour into Berlin any day now, we all have more important things to care about.’ He took another drink. The cognac burned in his throat. ‘It’s trust I’m talking about. Hitler should trust me in the same way Himmler does, and in the same way that I trust Fraulein S!’

At the mention of that name, Elsa Batz felt something twisting in her guts. Fegelein often mentioned his secretary, and always in the most glowing of terms. It had lately occurred to Elsa that she might not be Fegelein’s only mistress. She had satisfied herself with being who she was because she knew that, sooner or later, Fegelein would abandon his post as Himmler’s liaison. When the battle for this city commenced, Fegelein himself would not be part of it for any longer than he had to. When the time came to run, it was she, and not Fegelein’s dreary wife, who would accompany him to safety. He was her ticket out of here. All she had to do was make sure nothing came along to change his mind.

‘She trusts me, too,’ muttered Fegelein, more to himself than to Elsa. ‘Trusts me with her life, and so she should.’

‘I trust you,’ Elsa said softly.

Fegelein glanced across the room at her. ‘What?’

‘I trust you with my life,’ she told him.

He blinked at her uncomprehendingly. ‘What are you talking about, woman?’

Fegelein often scolded her like this, but there was something in the coldness of Fegelein’s voice this evening which caused a feeling of dread to wash over Elsa Batz. In that moment, she suddenly realised that she was about to be replaced by this mysterious Fraulein S. It seemed obvious, now that the idea had presented itself. She had been ignoring all the signs. Until this moment, her safety had relied upon doing nothing. But now, to do nothing would not just be the end of her cosy apartment on the Bleibtreustrasse. It would be suicide.

‘Who is this man who’s asking all the questions?’ she asked, changing the subject.

‘Some Berlin cop named Leopold Hunyadi,’ answered Fegelein.

‘A policeman?’ she asked. ‘Just an ordinary policeman?’

‘Not quite,’ said Fegelein. ‘First of all, he’s the best detective in Berlin. And secondly, he’s an old friend of Hitler’s. They go way back, apparently, but how they know each other I have no idea. I hear he’s not even a member of the National Socialist Party, so what their friendship’s based on I have no idea.’ Then he laughed. ‘Probably not what ours is based on, anyway!’ He patted the empty space beside him on the bed.

She got up and walked out of the room.

‘Elsa!’ Fegelein called after her. ‘Elsa! Come on! I was kidding!’

But there was no reply.

With the cognac swirling in his brain, Fegelein settled his head back into the pillow. The last thought through his head before he slipped beneath the red tide of unconsciousness was of Fraulein S, and the sacred bond of loyalty they shared.

The sun was setting as Hunyadi emerged from an underground station just outside the Berlin Zoo. Air raids had wrecked part of the station’s structure above ground, but the metro had continued to function. Not far from the Zoo station stood a huge concrete tower, built to support one of several anti-aircraft batteries engaged in the defence of Berlin.

Hunyadi made his way to the tower and, escorted by a Luftwaffe officer in command of the anti-aircraft defences, travelled in a rattly lift to the top of the tower. Here, on a wide circular platform, an 88mm flak gun pointed at the sky, its barrel ringed with more than a dozen bands of white paint, each one of which marked the downing of an Allied plane.

In a recessed alcove on this platform, Hunyadi found what he was looking for – a field radio station powerful enough to communicate with other flak towers all over the city.

Hunyadi’s inquiries as to where it might be possible to monitor not just military radio traffic, but all radio traffic coming in or out of the city had led him to this place.

He handed a radio operator a scrap of paper on which a series of numbers had been written. They represented all the frequencies known to have been used by Allied agents in transmitting messages to their bases in England and Russia.

After leaving instructions with the radio operator to inform him of any traffic on those frequencies, Hunyadi went down to the second level of the flak tower, entering into a bare concrete room filled with unpainted wooden crates of 88mm cannon shells. By shifting some of the crates around, although it took all his strength just to drag them, he fashioned for himself a place to sit. From one pocket, he pulled a piece of cheese wrapped in a handkerchief and from another pocket came a hunk of dark brown Roggenbrot. With no idea how long he’d have to wait, Hunyadi settled down to eat his dinner.

He was fast asleep, four hours later, when the wail of air-raid sirens jolted him awake. His first reaction, like that of every other inhabitant of this city, was to scurry to the nearest underground shelter.

He rushed towards the door, barely able to stay on his feet since the hard wood of the ammunition crate had given him a case of pins and needles. Arriving in the doorway, Hunyadi was almost knocked down by a dozen men trampling up the stairs to take their positions at the flak gun. He stepped aside to let them go by and was just about to make his way downstairs when the last man to pass called him back. ‘Stay here,’ he warned. ‘By the time you make it down into the street, the bombs will already be falling. Besides, you’re safer up here than down below.’

There was no time for Hunyadi to question the wisdom of this, because, at that moment, the room was filled with a deafening crash which dropped the detective to his knees.

‘Have we been hit?’ he asked.

‘No!’ The man laughed, holding out his hand to help Hunyadi to his feet. ‘That’s us firing at them! And you’d better get used to it, old man, because we’re just getting started.’

Dazed as he was by the blast, the only words which really struck him were ‘old man’. I’m only forty-five, he thought, but perhaps, these days, that does make me old, after all.

And then the lights went out.

He staggered back to his throne of crates, just as another shattering boom filled his ears. Vaguely, above the high-pitched ringing in his ears, Hunyadi heard a metallic clang as an empty shell casing was ejected from the breech of the 88 on to the concrete platform above him.

Hunyadi put his hands over his ears, careful to keep his mouth open to equalise the change in pressure caused by the explosions above him, and hunched over with his face almost touching his knees.

How long he stayed that way he could not tell. The firing of the gun became a nearly constant roar, the echo of one blast overlaying the next until he could scarcely tell one from the other. Sometimes, he heard the drone of planes above him and the muffled thump of bombs exploding, as well as the sharp commands of gun aimers and loaders, but it all reached him in a chorus so jumbled that the sounds seemed to come from a dream.

He had no idea if the radio man, up on the firing platform, was still monitoring the frequencies. More likely, thought Hunyadi, he is too busy doing his usual job. Hunyadi took some comfort in the fact that anyone with access to a secret transmitter would probably have sought shelter along with the rest of the city’s population, rather than stay at their post and risk being blown to pieces by the very people they were trying to help.

From time to time, Hunyadi was aware of men moving about in the darkness around him as they hauled fresh boxes of cannon shells up to the firing deck. Occasionally, someone would shine a red-filtered torch as they searched among the crates.

During a lull in the firing, Hunyadi rose up from his throne of ammunition boxes and climbed the concrete staircase to the gun platform. The air was filled with gun smoke, which seeped into his lungs and filled his mouth with a metallic taste, as if from resting a coin upon the tongue. Moving past the silhouettes of men, Hunyadi made his way through the carpet of spent shells to the chest-high wall of the platform. From here, he watched searchlights rake across the night sky, like swords wielded by some clumsy giant. In some places, dust from the bombing plumed so thickly that the searchlights seemed to break against the clouds, fragmenting their beams and angling them back to the earth. Distantly, he heard the shriek of falling bombs and then he saw the flash of their explosions, which vanished into tidal waves of smoke.

‘When you stopped firing the gun,’ Hunyadi said to a man who came to stand beside him, ‘I thought it was over.’

‘We are just cooling the barrel,’ replied the man. His features were so hidden in the darkness that it seemed to Hunyadi, still disoriented by the concussive force of the explosions, that the night itself had taken shape and was conversing with him now. ‘It’s beautiful, don’t you think?’ asked the man.

‘Beautiful?’ asked Hunyadi.

‘A terrible beauty, I grant you,’ said the darkness, ‘but a beauty nonetheless.’ He raised an arm and pointed at the sky. ‘See there!’

Hunyadi looked upwards, just in time to see a searchlight fasten on a plane. It looked no bigger than an insect, and it was hard for him to imagine something which seemed so small being capable of so much damage. Although he had lived through numerous air raids, he had always been below ground when they took place. All he had ever known of these attacks was the panic of rushing to the shelters and the distant, rumbling earthquake of the bombs as they exploded. And he was well acquainted with the aftermath, as he made his way through shattered streets, dodging fire trucks and ambulances driven by civilians wearing yellow armbands and strange, wide-brimmed helmets which made them appear like Roman gladiators. But he had never actually seen a raid in progress, as he was doing now, and he could not deny that the man had been telling the truth. There was a mesmerising beauty to this vast apocalypse.

Now two other searchlights zeroed in upon the bomber, so that it seemed to balance, helpless and impaled upon the icy spear points.

Hunyadi heard a sharp command from somewhere behind him and he turned just as the cannon fired. The roar and the sudden change in pressure shoved him off his feet. He stumbled back and fell against the wall. His head was filled with a shrill ringing sound, as if a tuning fork had been struck inside his brain. Even over this, he heard the sound of laughter and a hand reached from the dark to help him up again.

The last thing he saw before he clambered back down into the magazine was the bomber, bracketed by tiny sparks as the anti-aircraft shells exploded around its wingtips. There was a momentary smear of orange fire as shrapnel tore the bomber to pieces. Then the night became empty again, and the searchlights resumed their awkward sweeping of the sky.

The sun had not yet risen above the trees when Kirov and Pekkala, still handcuffed to the bench of the truck, were awakened by the sound of someone shuffling towards them through the leaves.

The boy named Andreas climbed in and sat beside Pekkala, a sub-machine gun laid across his lap.

His friend, Berthold, clambered into the cab, started the engine and soon they were driving down the road, heading west towards Berlin.

Andreas studied the two men, who avoided his gaze.

‘Do you speak German?’ asked the boy.

Pekkala had been staring at the floor, but now he raised his head. ‘A little,’ he replied.

Kirov kept silent.

‘We have to do what the captain says or we will get in trouble,’ explained Andreas, ‘but do you know what Major Rademacher will say when we arrive with you?’

Pekkala shook his head.

Now Andreas leaned forward. He had no gloves and wore a dirty pair of grey wool socks with the ends cut off, allowing his fingers to poke through. His pale skin and dirt-rimed fingernails stood out against the black sides of the sub-machine gun. ‘Major Rademacher will say we should not bother him with questions. He will say that we have wasted valuable fuel on this foolish errand.’

‘So you will get in trouble, either way,’ said Pekkala.

Andreas nodded. ‘Exactly.’

‘And what will he say then, this Major Rademacher?’

‘Maybe he will tell us to shoot you.’ Andreas shrugged. ‘Maybe he will shoot you himself. It all depends.’

‘Depends on what?’

‘On whether he is drunk or sober. On whether his wife yelled at him. On whether he enjoyed his breakfast. You see,’ explained Andreas, ‘there is no rule but what he says, and what he says will be a mystery, even to himself, until he says it.’

It was mid-morning when Fegelein’s car pulled up outside the brick building in which Himmler had established his headquarters at Hohenlychen, located in the countryside not far from the village of Hassleben. The Hohenlychen compound was, in fact, a rest home managed by Himmler’s medical adviser, Dr Karl Gebhardt. Himmler had moved there shortly after Hitler’s descent into the Reichschancellery bunker complex.

The building which Himmler had taken over had a sharply angled roof, scaled like the skin of a snake with red terracotta shingles. From a height of a tall man up to the gutters on the top floor of the three-storey building, the bricks had been painted bone-white. Below that, they had been left plain. The windows on the ground floor were curiously arched, in order to allow in more light than the windows on the floors above. But Himmler kept the windows shuttered. The ground floor had once been a day room for recuperating patients, but now served as a place for Himmler to conduct his meetings with a daily stream of visitors.

Himmler himself rarely appeared before 10 a.m. His early mornings were taken up with bathing and a daily massage from his steward, Felix Kersten.

Knowing his master’s schedule, Fegelein had scheduled his visit to coincide with the moment when Himmler would emerge from his private quarters; a time when his mood was likely to be at its best.

‘Shall I wait here?’ asked Lilya, sitting behind the wheel. She was dazed and tired. Fegelein had left her sitting in the car for the entire night, while he bedded down with Elsa Batz. She had not kept the engine running, for fear of draining the fuel tank, and it had been a cold night. Even the blankets, which she kept in the trunk for such occasions, had not been enough to keep her warm. At 6 a.m., just when she had managed to doze off, Fegelein had rapped his gold wedding ring upon the driver’s side window, jarring her awake, before jumping into the passenger seat and ordering her to drive to Hohenlychen.

Fegelein cast a glance at his driver.

She looked exhausted.

He knew it was his fault. With anyone else, he would not have paused even to consider this, but Fraulein S was different. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No need to wait outside. Come in and get warm by the fire.’

Normally, she would have driven the car to a stable which had been converted into a garage for Himmler’s various automobiles. There, she would have waited for Fegelein to send for her.

It was useless to protest.

Following in Fegelein’s footsteps, Lilya entered the building.

It was the first time Lilya had been inside Himmler’s headquarters.

She found herself in an immaculately tidy room, with Persian carpets on the floors, a leather couch and two upholstered chairs beside a hearth in which a small coal fire had been lit, to fend off the chill of the morning. There were several paintings on the walls, all of them of landscapes depicting gardens congested with wildflowers, tumbledown farmhouses and quiet streams, surrounded by drooping branches of great willow trees. She was struck by the sense of confinement in these pictures, a feeling which was amplified by the shutters on the windows, excluding all natural light. Electric lamps with heavy, green glass shades cast their glow across the polished wooden side tables on which they had been placed.

One other thing she noticed was the absence of the smell of cigarettes. It was such a constant everywhere else that, like the ticking of a clock, the very lack of it caught her attention. Only then did she recall that Himmler could not stand the smell of tobacco and that he had attempted, unsuccessfully, to cut it from the rations of his soldiers in the field.

I have entered the lair of the beast, thought Lilya. And yet she was not afraid. Having come this far, and in the company of Himmler’s trusted adjutant, she realised that she had moved beyond the greatest danger.

At that moment, the inner door opened and Heinrich Himmler stepped out of the shadows. He was of medium height, slightly built, with close-cropped hair, a small chin and shallow, grey-blue eyes, almost hidden behind a set of round silver-rimmed glasses. He wore a clean white shirt, slate-grey riding breeches, and close-fitting black riding boots.

‘Ah!’ he said, gasping as he caught sight of Lilya Simonova. ‘I see we have a guest.’ In spite of his jovial tone, there was menace in his voice at this unexpected intrusion.

Fegelein, attuned to every inflection of his master’s voice, quickly introduced them.

‘The celebrated Fraulein S,’ remarked Himmler. ‘Fegelein has sung your praises many times.’

Fegelein’s face reddened. ‘She was cold,’ he struggled to explain. ‘I brought her in so she could warm up by the fire.’

‘I will not detain you any further,’ said Lilya, turning to leave.

‘Nonsense!’ exclaimed Himmler. ‘Sit! Sit!’ he gestured to a chair. ‘I will have coffee brought to you.’ The rigidity had vanished from his tone, now that his authority had been established. It was he, and not Fegelein, who allowed strangers to stand in his presence.

The two men retired to the inner room, where Himmler kept his office.

As the door opened and shut, Lilya caught a glimpse of wood-panelled walls, dark green curtains covering the windows and a large desk heaped with paperwork laid out in ordered piles, like some architect’s half-finished vision of a city not yet built.

As Lilya stared at the sputtering flames, she struggled to hear what the two men were saying.

‘Another mistress, Fegelein?’ laughed Himmler.

‘No, Herr Reichsfuhrer!’ he protested. ‘It is nothing of the sort.’

‘Do not play coy with me. I know about that little pied-a-terre you keep on Bleibtreustrasse.’

‘One lady friend is enough.’

‘Apart from one’s wife, you mean?’

‘I swear there is nothing between us. She is my driver, nothing more!’

‘If you say so, Fegelein. But now, having seen her for myself, I must admit I might forgive you the transgression.’

‘I bring good news,’ said Fegelein, anxious to change the subject. ‘The Diamond Stream device is fully operational.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘Hitler himself made the announcement. Diamond Stream is to be installed in all remaining V-2s.’

Himmler grunted with approval. ‘You realise, Fegelein, that this could change everything?’

‘Yes! That’s why I came here in person, Herr Reichsfuhrer, just as soon as I possibly could.’

‘We must find a way’, said Himmler, ‘to ensure that, from now on, Hagemann answers to us. To us and to nobody else.’

‘But how?’ asked Fegelein.

‘We’ll try a little flattery and, if that doesn’t work, I’m sure we can come up with some way to blackmail him into seeing things our way. He must have some weakness. Have you seen him at the Salon Kitty?’

Fegelein shook his head. ‘I don’t think he goes in much for cabarets.’

‘Gambling?’

This time Fegelein only shrugged.

‘Well, find something!’ ordered Himmler. ‘And if nothing turns up, invent it. A well-placed lie can break him just as easily as the truth and as soon as we have shown him we can do it, he will come around.’

Fegelein said nothing, but he knew exactly what was going on.

At this stage, even rockets equipped with the Diamond Stream device would not be enough to ensure a German victory, as Hitler perhaps believed.

But they, and control over the men who had built them, might well be enough to alter the peace that came afterwards.

Even Himmler understood that the war was lost and that nothing could be done until Hitler was out of the picture. But that day was fast approaching and Himmler had convinced himself that he had to be ready to take his place as leader of the country, or whatever remained of it.

Himmler had even gone so far as to send out feelers to the Swedish diplomat Count Bernadotte, hoping to make contact with the Allies.

‘They respect me,’ he had confided to Fegelein. ‘They view me now, as they have always done, as a worthy adversary.’

In this, Fegelein knew, Himmler was as delusional as Hitler.

But he was right about one thing – the Allies would indeed respect the weaponry he still commanded.

Fegelein knew perfectly well that he was about to become irrelevant. From now on, he would have to fend for himself, or else be banished to the same corridor of hell where a place had been made ready for his master. But Fegelein wasn’t worried. He had already begun to prepare for his departure from this doomed city and for the new life he would begin far away, with Fraulein Simonova at his side.

Hunyadi opened his eyes.

He had fallen asleep, still seated on his throne of ammunition crates, with his elbow on his knee and his chin resting in the cup of his palm.

Someone had hold of his shoulder and was shaking him gently awake.

Blearily, Hunyadi focused on a man wearing the blue woollen tunic of a Luftwaffe flak gunner.

‘They’ve picked up a signal,’ said the man. ‘Our radio man says you’re to come up at once, before we lose it.’

With his feet effervescing from pins and needles, Hunyadi hobbled after the man, following him up to the firing deck.