Hitler's Secret (15 page)

From the helicopter, Heydrich could see the farmer sitting in his hay cart and looking as though he was about to have a heart attack when the Flettner dropped down into his field. The field was already full of army vehicles, and black-uniformed SS troops had fanned out in search formation.

Once on the ground, Heydrich jumped out of the helicopter and marched across to the farmer, whose eyes were still wide with shock.

“Show me,” he said.

Five minutes later, they were beneath the tree, staring up at the severed lines and shredded parachute canopy. A junior officer ran towards him with Otto’s dirt-covered flying suit and helmet. Heydrich examined them carefully. American-made but issued to the RAF. As he’d thought: British agents.

“Order your men to search the whole area.” He turned to the farmer. “The Reich is grateful. I will notify your local leader of your good service.”

The farmer raised his arm in salute.

Heydrich made his way back out of the woods. Both his Mercedes and a detachment of troops for his personal use had arrived.

“So now we know where they came from and where they landed,” he said to the junior officers that had gathered around him. “I suspect there is more than one operative. Logic would suggest a man and a woman, so that they can travel as a family. The question is, where are they now?”

At that point, a young lieutenant raced across the field towards them on a motorbike. He skidded to a halt beside the briefing party and ran across to Heydrich.

“Sir, the photographic prints that you requested from the Berghof.”

Heydrich flipped open the envelope and looked at the thick sheaf of photographs of the girl. They were all the same, the most up-to-date picture of her, taken the previous year, fifty copies still damp from the processing. She was a pleasant-looking child, round-faced and smiling, her hair in pigtails like his own daughter. She was wearing traditional Bavarian dress. The photograph had been taken against a plain white background, most likely the convent’s walls.

“Distribute these to the officers. This is the girl we are looking for.”

“Sir! SS General Müller from Innsbruck.” His driver was holding up the limousine’s phone. Heydrich strode across, took the handset.

“Müller? I hope you have some positive news?”

“What I am about to propose sounds incredible, but I ask you to consider it carefully.” Müller’s voice was calm and collected, denoting his police background. The radio line was bad, but Heydrich was keen to hear what this bloodhound of an investigator had to say.

“Go on.”

“We’ve taken statements from every conceivable person in Rosenheim, Prien, and Stock. Yes, there were tourist couples visiting Herreninsel yesterday, but no one sticks out. Furthermore, there were no tickets purchased at any of the surrounding railway stations by a couple with a child.”

“So what? They could have taken a car, a series of cars.”

“And yet none has been reported stolen in the last twenty-four hours, and no one can remember an unknown couple arriving in one in any of those places.”

“They could have hidden it up a lane or a farm road?”

“Perhaps, but here is another possibility. Railway employees at Prien remember a teenage boy and girl buying tickets yesterday for Stock. Unknown teenagers. There was an altercation
with some youths from a local club of the NSFK. Then at Stock, a girl and boy of similar descriptions bought tickets to visit the palace on Herreninsel. It was in the afternoon, the last tour of the day. The ferry crew can’t recall them coming back. There is a Hitler-Jugend summer sailing camp in Stock, but all the children are accounted for. But a girl did go into the local chandlers and buy twenty yards of rope.”

“Go on.” Heydrich was listening intently, catching the edge of excitement in Müller’s clipped voice. They hadn’t found the rope that had been used to climb out of the convent window.
Probably sitting on the bottom of the lake
, he thought.

“This morning, the ticket seller at Rosenheim station sold three tickets to Innsbruck to a young man probably aged around fifteen or so. The first available departure of the morning.”

“And do their descriptions match those of the previous day?”

“More or less, sir.”

Heydrich drummed his fingers on the car. “And what do the railway people at Innsbruck tell you?”

“It would seem that they got off before Innsbruck. The ticket collector here is positive three children of these descriptions did not come past the barrier.”

Heydrich could feel the hairs on his neck prickling. The day before, flying low between the two islands, he’d buzzed a
little sailing dinghy. It had had a red sail, he recalled. And there had been two teenagers, a girl and a boy, in the boat. Late afternoon, early evening. Could it have been them?

“Herr Reichsführer,” continued Müller, “I realize what I am proposing seems unlikely —”

“How many stops did the Innsbruck train make?” Heydrich interrupted.

“About half a dozen, sir — it was the slow train.”

“Question every person at those stations. Someone must have seen something.”

Heydrich tossed the receiver back to his radio operator and made his way back to the waiting officers.

“Show me those overalls again.”

One of the officers held up Otto’s flying suit.

“On the small side, wouldn’t you say?” Heydrich said thoughtfully.

It seemed too unlikely. But when one considered it further, there was the most devilish cunning to such a strategy. Three children traveling together, when logic dictated that two adults would have taken the child. England had its fair share of displaced German children whose parents had either fled with them or had them sent abroad. It was risky, dangerous, a wild gamble on the part of the British. And yet … why not? As a child Heydrich had read Sherlock Holmes. The detective’s famous axiom came to mind now: “When you have eliminated
the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

He looked at his officers. They were waiting expectantly. Yes, he was inclined to believe Müller.

“Send word to all units that we are now looking for three children: a teenage girl and boy, and the child.”

“Yes, that’s right, I remember your school very well,” beamed the matronly mother in the railway carriage. “The headmaster was a Herr Schuler when I was there. Do you know him?”

Otto nodded, even though he hadn’t the slightest idea who Herr Schuler was. The woman had not stopped asking them questions from the moment she had sat down. He exchanged another quick glance with Leni. She, too, was being subjected to all manner of queries. It felt more and more like an interrogation.

The woman had started by asking them where they were going, and had been satisfied with their story about their visit to their godmother in Bregenz. Then she had asked them where they were from.

“Salzburg,” Otto had said confidently.

“Salzburg? How interesting,” the woman had replied.

She had herself spent a couple of years in the city training to be a teacher. Of course, now she had left that behind and worked for the Party, but she had happy memories of the city and proceeded to question them about it in great detail. Her knowledge appeared to be encyclopedic, but so far Otto and Leni seemed to be holding their own. Just.

“Now, tell me this,” she continued, looking first at Leni and then at Otto. “I recall there were two lovely old bakeries by the school, Joseph’s and … what was the name of the other? Let me think … Schekter’s, that was it.” She smiled. “Which was your favorite?”

Otto frowned, appearing to think about it. “Well, they were both good.”

“Come along, young man, you must have had a preference.”

Otto mentally flipped a coin. “Schekter’s.”

The woman smiled again. “Ah, yes, I do believe their
strudl
was the best.”

“If you’ll excuse us,
meine Frau
, we must be getting off at the next station.” Otto looked at Leni hard. He was getting nervous now of this woman; there was something snakelike about her.

“Yes, we must,” Leni hurriedly backed him up, and gave Angelika a gentle shake. Sleepily, the little girl opened her eyes.

“But you are traveling to Bregenz. You don’t need to change until Kempten,” the woman said.

“That’s right, but …” Otto racked his brains for a reason.

“A friend of our family’s lives at the next stop,” Leni jumped in.

“And we have a gift from our mother for her,” Otto finished.

Angelika was now fully awake and listening in, her forehead creased in a frown.

The woman looked at Leni. “You know, young lady, I am sure you have a Viennese accent.”

“Really? You must be mistaken,” said Leni. “Come along,” she said to Angelika, “we’re getting off.”

“And what is your name?” the woman asked Angelika.

Leni and Otto shot each other another anxious glance.

“Caroline,” Leni said, just as the little girl opened her mouth. “Her name is Caroline.” She prayed Angelika wouldn’t contradict her.

Otto stood up and pulled the packs down off the rack. He slipped his over his shoulders. He could feel the tension rising.

“Young man, wait.”

“We have to go, madam, please.”

The woman suddenly got up and stepped in front of the compartment door, blocking their path. The three children froze.

“What is she doing?” said Angelika, turning to Otto, then Leni, in confusion.

“What am I doing?” The woman’s voice was cold. “I’ll tell you what I am doing. I am ordering you to sit down and remain seated while I call the guard.”

This was bad.

“I don’t understand,” said Leni. Otto could see she was fighting rising panic. “What have we done wrong?”

“You don’t understand?” The woman was clearly starting to enjoy the situation now. “Well,
I
don’t understand, either. I don’t understand how you could prefer Schekter’s to Joseph’s when no such bakeries exist.” She smiled back at them triumphantly.

There was a long moment of silence. Then Otto lunged forward, shoving the woman away from the door with all his strength. She was taken by surprise and fell heavily onto the seat. Otto pulled the door open, and Leni and Angelika dived out after him into the corridor.

“How dare you touch me like that!” The woman was struggling to get back on her feet. She grasped the doorframe with her hand for support.

Otto grabbed the handle and slammed the door back on her fingers. He heard her howl with pain as he raced after the others. He reached them in the interconnecting partition between two carriages. The steel floor plates were sliding under their feet.

Otto glanced around the wall of the partition. There was
the woman! She was stumbling down the corridor after them, clutching her injured hand.

“Young man, stop at once!” she called out. “Guard!”

“What do we do?” Leni said.

“Jump,” replied Otto.

“What about her?”

Otto unslung his pack and plunged his hand inside. He found his pistol and the silencer.

“Stop!” The woman was getting closer.

He started to screw the silencer on the end of the barrel, but his hands were shaking too much.

“Let me,” said Leni. He handed the parts to her, and she deftly assembled them. “Don’t look,” she said to Angelika, and then handed him the gun. He nodded briefly to her. There was no time, no alternative. He stepped back into the corridor. The woman was less than thirty feet away.

“There you …” Her voice died as he raised the pistol and pointed it at her chest. She stopped dead. Otto’s finger closed around the trigger, felt the pressure build. Then the woman’s face turned gray, her knees buckled, and she crumpled to the ground.

“She fainted,” Otto said. “She fainted.” He turned back to the others. “She fainted,” he said again. He hadn’t had to shoot her.

“Then let’s go,” said Leni, looking as relieved as he felt.

Otto immediately pulled down the door’s sliding glass window and leaned out to grasp the handle on the outside. He twisted it, and the door swung open, slamming into the outside of the carriage. Wind rushed into the partition. The train seemed to be moving faster than ever.

Leni stepped forward, threw the packs out, and jumped. Otto didn’t waste a second. He grabbed Angelika around the waist, swung her out, and dropped her like a stick off a bridge. He went last.

He landed with a tremendous thud on the embankment. The lush thick grass broke his fall but didn’t slow it, and he was rolling uncontrollably down the steep slope until he reached the others at the bottom, all in a tangled heap. The train chugged on. He waited until it was out of sight and then pulled himself up, helping the others. Angelika was crying softly, and Leni was rubbing the little girl’s back.

“Is she all right?”

“Just winded, I think. Nothing broken.”

“It’s not that,” sobbed Angelika. “Everything’s ruined now, isn’t it? That woman will tell the police and then they’ll take me back to the convent and we’ll never get to Switzerland and I’ll never see my parents.”

Otto squatted down beside her. “You’re wrong, Angelika. Everything’s going to be fine,” he said, gently but firmly.

“Really?” She looked doubtful but he could see she wanted desperately to believe him.

Otto nodded emphatically. “I promise.”

Angelika leaned forward and hugged him.

For a moment he was at a loss, then he hugged her back.

Yes, he had promised. And he would make it so.