The Eldorado Network (56 page)

'That goes without saying,' Luis agreed.

'And the price of success would be the eventual sacrifice of the entire Eldorado team.'

Luis shrugged. 'The Abwehr would have to know that they had been deceived,' he said, 'or there would be no deception.'

There was a moment of silent satisfaction, like the pause between the last note and the first applause.

'Good,' the Director said. 'Shall we drink to that?'

They drank. 'Now then, what about the money?' Luis said briskly.

'My dear chap, you've had such a long and trying day. Why don't we leave the technicalities to another--'

'Not on your life. A deal is a deal.'

Julie groaned. She looked away in despair.

The Director licked up a drip of champagne that was running down the outside of his glass. 'What were you thinking of?' he asked.

'I work for you, free of charge, and keep what the Abwehr pays me. When Eldorado collapses, you compensate me for my lost earnings.'

'That sounds like rather a lot of money.'

'Yes, it is. It adds up to a million dollars.'

The Director nodded. 'Well, a million dollars, in the context of this war, is nothing much. It wouldn't pay for the squadron of bombers we lost last week, or one quarter of the ship that gets torpedoed in the Atlantic every day. No, I can see that yours is minor expense, Mr Cabrillo, and if it were up to me I should authorise it without thinking twice. As it is, such matters are decided by my masters in London, a notoriously tight-fisted and narrow-minded crew. Regrettable, of course; inefficient and inflexible and crass and all those other sterling qualities which have made British

Intelligence the crippled beast which it is. On the other hand, what am I to do?'

In that case the deal's off,' Luis announced.

'What a pity,' the Director said. 'Here we have an opportunity to shorten the war, to save thousands of lives--  perhaps tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives -- and all for a million dollars. What a great, great pity.'

'Rotten shame,' Templeton murmured.

'The point is,' Luis said, 'you can always have another war, but this is my only chance to make a million dollars. You see what I mean?'

Julie suddenly turned and said: 'Here, catch.' Something hit Luis in the chest and fell to the floor. He picked it up: a key. 'What's this?' he asked.

'Key to the office. I shan't need it any more.'

He stared at her, and saw that she was .forcing down the corners of her eyes and compressing her lips to keep back the tears. He felt genuinely perplexed. 'Why do you take it so seriously?' he asked her. .'It's just business, that's all.'

'Go to hell,' she mumbled.

Luis rubbed the key against the side of his nose. 'You definitely need Eldorado?' he said to the Director.

'To be sure of success, yes, we do.'

'The operation is very important?'

'Tremendously important. Crucial.'

'Then it's worth a million dollars.'

The Director finished his champagne and gave the glass to Templeton. He walked over to his desk and unlocked a drawer. He took out a chequebook, wrote in it, blotted it, detached the cheque, got up, and gave it to Luis. 'I advise you to cash it quickly, he said. 'The Treasury is not terribly well-off at the moment.'

Luis carefully read the cheque, ending with the signature. 'Thank you, Mr Philby,' he said. 'I've always wanted one of these.'

He turned and held it out to Julie. 'Would you look after it for me?' he asked. 'And the key, too?'

For a moment she sat and stared at his outstretched hands. Then she stood up and took the key and the cheque. 'Can you give me a light?' she asked Templeton.

He produced a lighter.

They all watched while she set fire to the cheque. The flames stretched and shrank and stretched again as she turned the paper. Templeton held out a large ashtray and she let the last corner drop into it.

'What an extraordinary thing flame is,' Luis said. 'Have you noticed? It has colour but no substance. Its shape is always changing, so it has no shape. You can see through it. It has no independent existence. It depends on something else for its existence, and then it destroys the very thing that created it. Isn't that strange?'

'A Load of bullshit,' Julie said.

'Such a pleasure meeting you both,' the Director said. 'I look forward enormously to a long and fruitful relationship, Luis.'

'Thank you, Mr Philby.' They shook hands.

'Please call me Kim,' the Director said. 'All my friends do.'

Templeton took Luis and Julie down to the lobby.

'Nice chap,' Luis said.

'I think he's brilliant,' Templeton told him. 'And so does everybody else here. There's no reason why he shouldn't go right to the very top.' He pushed open the front door. 'I've laid on a car for you. The driver knows where to go.'

It was an old, comfortable Daimler. Julie curled up in a corner of the deep back seat and watched the bright lights drift by. She was light-headed with stress, alcohol and fatigue.' Why must you always be such an obstinate bastard, Luis?' she asked.

He stretched his legs, and linked his hands behind his head.

'You knew what I'd do to that cheque, didn't you?' she said. 'That's why you gave it to me. You're a maniac.'

'It made a beautiful flame,' he said.

Templeton went back upstairs and found Philby talking to Meredith.

'I was afraid I might have done permanent damage to his blasted Spanish honour,' Meredith said.

'No, no. You softened him up nicely,' Philby said.

'I've put a man outside their apartment, sir,' Templeton told him. 'And I'll collect them personally in the morning.'

Philby smiled his thanks. 'I rather like the fellow. I'm glad he agreed to help us.'

'Supposing he hadn't agreed?' Meredith said. 'You could never have turned him loose again. Not with what he knows.'

'Dear me no.' Philby found some champagne dregs in a bottle and poured them out. 'Mr Cabrillo just saved his own life. Now it will be interesting to see if he can help us save ours.' He sipped, and made a, face. 'Flat,' he said.

Next morning, Luis and Julie moved out of their apartment and went to, live in the British Embassy. Luis protested briefly against the shift but Templeton soon made him see that it was essential, both for efficiency and for security.

While they were packing, Julie said to Templeton: 'What happened to Wolfgang? Or shouldn't I ask?'

'It's no secret, in fact it's in all the papers. The poor chap had a heart attack while he was walking back to the German Embassy. I'm told the embassy took possession of the body last night.'

'Funny heart attack,' Luis said. 'I saw blood on his shirt.'

'Haemorrhage,' Templeton said.

'Ah.'

'I'll tell you what I don't understand,' Julie said. 'What did your boss Meredith mean when he said Adler wasn't removed for Luis's benefit?'

'Did he say that?' Templeton asked.

'You heard him,' Luis said.

'Dear me. He really shouldn't have said that.'

'Answer the question,'Julie said. 'If you didn't do it for Luis, why did you do it?'

They both stopped packing and stared at him.

'Oh . . . Must you know?' he said wretchedly.

'Give!' Julie cried. 'We're all on the same side now, remember?'

Templeton thought about it, his eyes shifting nervously. At last he said: 'Very well, since you insist. The fact is that there was another reason, an extremely urgent reason.'

'What?' she asked.

Templeton changed his mind. 'I can't say.'

'You clod,' Luis said.

'It's just too soon. In due course, perhaps . . .'

'Oh, garbage,'Julie snapped.

In the afternoon Luis was introduced to the controllers with whom he would be working. Templeton and Julie went over to the office and began the process of putting Brad-bum & Wedge into voluntary liquidation. By the end of the day, all the Eldorado files had been moved to the embassy and Luis had finished drafting his first report to Madrid under the guidance of British intelligence. Within a week the entire Eldorado Network was in action again, and the personality of a new sub-agent -- the eighth--  was taking shape.

Luis worked an eight-hour day and a seven-day week for the rest of the summer and the whole of the autumn of 1942. He and Julie shared a flat on the top floor of the embassy; Templeton had arranged a job for her in the Press Office. In many ways life was easier for Luis: he had a skilled team advising him and directing him, checking his reports, doing his research. But it wasn't like the old days. 'It's not so much fun,' he complained to Julie. 'They're all so damned efficient, they take all the sport out of it.'

'It's not supposed to be fun,' she said. 'It's supposed to work. Is it going to work?'

He shrugged. 'Only Madrid knows that.'

In the short crisis that followed the deaths of Christian and Adler, Richard Fischer had been appointed temporary head of Madrid Abwehr. He made a good job of it, and the appointment became permanent in September.

A couple of. weeks later, during his weekly meeting of controllers, he suddenly interrupted Franz Werth's report on Seagull. It was unknown for Fischer to interrupt a report. Everyone was very surprised. Fischer looked quite agitated, too, which was unlike him.

'Never mind Seagull,' he said. 'Never mind Knickers or Wallpaper or Haystack or what any individual agent is saving. Put it all together! Look at the overall picture! Where does it point?'

The controllers looked blank.

'It's obvious!' Fischer exclaimed. 'All that stuff from Seagull about fleets of ships getting sent round the Horn to Suez and not coming back.'

'But that was a month ago,' Franz said.

'Exactly! And three weeks ago Knickers heard about those crated Spitfires and Hurricanes with Syrian lettering on the crates.'

'En route to Russia, we decided,' said Otto Krafft.

'Then why weren't the crates lettered in Russian? And what about Nutmeg's report on that special secret training centre for the British Army Catering Corps in wherever-it-was--'

'Harrogate,' Dr Hartmann said. 'They taught rather exotic cooking, as I recall. Goats and stuffed squid, and soon.'

'And we all thought it meant desert warfare, eating Arab food,' Fischer said. 'Wrong again!'

'What, then?' Otto asked.

'Look at last week's report from Garlic. Massive Commando training in the Western Islands of Scotland. Endless amphibious landings. Now where do you find terrain like that in Europe?'

'You mean rocky islands?' Franz asked. 'Mountains and sea and stuff? Norway?'

'With goats, for God's sake!' Fischer cried. 'Goats that live within flying distance of Syria and sailing distance of Suez! And if that isn't enough we've been staring at a dozen other clues every time we open an Eldorado report!'

'Good heavens. It must be Greece,' Dr Hartmann said.

'Of course it's Greece,' Fischer told him.

'They're going to invade Greece?' Otto asked, but Fischer was no longer listening. 'You're in charge until I get back,' he told Franz. 'I'm on the first plane to Berlin. How could we be so blind?'

Six weeks later, British and American forces landed in Morocco and Algeria. They were not opposed.

The news surprised and dismayed everyone in Madrid Abwehr. It surprised Luis too. He and Julie met the Director in his office on the day the landings were announced. Philby was very pleased. 'Complete success,' he said. 'The enemy was quite convinced it was going to be somewhere else. Well done.'

'I thought it was going to be Norway,' Luis said. 'I had convinced myself it would be Norway.'

'Hell, everyone tips Norway,'Julie said. 'Norway's been done to death.'

'Of course. That's why I thought it was a good bet, because it's become unfashionable, everyone's so bored with Norway, so--'

'Shall we have a drink?' Philby asked. He rang a little brass bell and a secretary came in. 'Now that Eldorado and his friends have sacrificed themselves so nobly,' he said, "there's something you deserve to know. It goes back to your poor friend Adler, and why he had to have his heart attack. Actually, it goes back a lot further than that, but Adler's death was the point at which you became involved.'

He waited while his secretary found out what they wanted, and gave it to them, and went out.

'Adler didn't die simply to protect and preserve your operation,' Philby said. 'Good health.'

'So I was told,' Luis said. 'Cheers.'

'The fact is that we couldn't allow him to defect, either. If the Abwehr believed that he had betrayed all their secret agents to us, they would obviously cease trusting those agents. That was the last thing we wanted, since every one of their agents had long ago been intercepted by us and turned around.'

'What?'Julie stared. 'You mean all the Abwehr agents in England are working for you? That's incredible.'

'Yes, isn't it?' Philby said. 'Presumably that's why the Abwehr goes on accepting and endorsing their reports. Perhaps I shouldn't claim that all their agents are working for us. Some of them refused, some were temperamentally unsuitable, some were too stupid, but when that happened we simply replaced the man with one of our own chaps and kept sending reports in the original fellow's name, using his style and technique. The point is that everything the Abwehr gets out of Britain comes from us.'

'Let's get this straight,' Luis said. 'You British are actually running all German intelligence operations in Britain?'

'It's a highly successful business,' Philby said. 'Naturally the enemy keeps paying all his agents, and so we get that money. Managing double agents is an expensive affair, but we expect to show a profit at the end of the year.'

'Now I know how you got away with it for so long, Luis,' Julie said. 'I could never understand why the Abwehr didn't see through Eldorado,' she told Philby. 'I kept thinking of all those real agents in England sending back genuine reports, and I knew that sooner or later someone had to notice that Eldorado's stuff was always different. But if there never were any real agents ...'

'Occasionally we had enquiries from the Abwehr,' Philby said. 'You know: requests to such-and-such an agent to check this set of figures or that location. Sometimes we recognised items that had appeared recently in Eldorado reports, reports that we'd intercepted.'