Angel Rising, page 4
part #6 of Anna Fehrbach Series
‘Only one,’ Clive said. ‘And I am very inclined to break her neck.’
‘I don’t think that would accomplish much,’ Baxter pointed out. ‘Apart from getting yourself hanged, of course. The damage is done. And you are being a little hysterical. Can’t you accept the possibility that Andrews could have told Belinda the truth?’
‘Billy, Anna killed one of their people.’
Baxter struck a match. ‘Who had drugged her and raped her and thoroughly deserved to die.’
‘That does not alter the fact that he was their agent, or that he had been sent specifically to take her out, to satisfy the Russians.’
‘Granted. But it seems to have escaped your attention that the Yanks are no longer bending over backwards to satisfy the Russians, about anything.’ He puffed with some contentment.
‘I have to get up there, Billy.’
‘Why? Because you think Andrews is still thinking of killing her? After what happened to Johannsson he had better be travelling with a division of marines.’
‘I never did appreciate your sense of humour. The fact is –’ he chose his words with care – ‘Anna is becoming restless. She’s been up there for a year now, with just four visits to her parents allowed in all that time. She feels, firstly, that she may as well be in a prison, and secondly, that we have forgotten all about her.’
‘Silly girl. Not that she isn’t a problem. Now the war is over, the overwhelming urge in this country is to stop killing people. And as that is Anna’s outstanding talent, well . . . OK, she’s bored. What does she do with her time? I suppose she could be writing her memoirs, except that we’d have to clap a D-notice on it.’
‘I can tell you what she’s doing right now.’
‘I’m interested.’
‘Well . . .’ Clive looked embarrassed, ‘She’s learning to drive.’
‘Say again? I thought—’
‘That Anna can do anything. But even Anna can only do what she’s been taught to do. When the SS trained her, they never thought to teach her to drive. Back in 1938 they never thought it would be necessary, certainly in a male-oriented society like Nazi Germany. The lack of that skill has proved both embarrassing and dangerous, from time to time. Right now one of her greatest ambitions is to correct that lack.’
‘You gave her permission to take lessons?’
‘Yes, I did. For God’s sake, Billy, she has to do something with her time.’
‘Hm. Well, when she gets her licence, you had better make sure she doesn’t have access to a car.’
‘Billy,’ Clive said, with great patience, ‘you are forgetting the point. Belinda gave Andrews that address probably yesterday morning. He could be already up there. And Anna knows who he is and who he works for. And that they sent Johannsson to do her. So maybe he wants to be friends. But you know Anna. As he is not travelling with a division of marines, what do you think will be her reaction when she opens her front door and finds Andrews standing there?’
‘She’s not armed, is she?’
‘Well—’
‘I never authorized that.’
‘Anna feels unhappy without a weapon handy. And anyway, she doesn’t need a weapon. I saw her break that woman Elsa Mayer’s neck with a single chop. And we don’t want to forget that Andrews is also a trained operative, even if he may be a little rusty. Right this minute, one of them could be dead, and I would lay odds that it’ll be Andrews. I have to get up there, Billy. This could take some sorting out.’
‘And if Andrews is the one standing?’
‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.’
Baxter pointed with his pipe. ‘This is an order. You are expressly forbidden to take executive action. No matter what he might have done, Andrews is still an American agent and we are still dependent upon American aid and support. If there is a worst case scenario, call in the local bobby and let Washington sort it out.’
‘Just like that.’
Baxter sighed. ‘Believe me, Clive, if anything has happened to Anna I will shed as big a tear as you. Call me as soon as you find out the situation.’
‘I need the use of a plane.’
Baxter raised his eyebrows.
‘It would take me at least another twenty-four hours to get up there by car,’ Clive pointed out.
Baxter looked out of the window. ‘It’ll be dark in an hour. You can’t get up there until tomorrow morning, anyway. And where do you propose to put this plane down?’
‘There has to be an airfield somewhere around there.’
Another sigh, and he started to knock out his pipe. ‘Try not to crash this one.’
*
‘I think,’ McLachlan the instructor said as the car came to a stop before the front door of the isolated house, ‘that you could take your test tomorrow, Miss Fitzjohn. After only four lessons. That is remarkable.’
He spoke with genuine regret. In all his years he had never known quite as much pleasure as over the past couple of weeks. It was not simply the ease with which the young woman seated beside him had assimilated everything he had told her, the consummate concentration she had revealed when driving, the calm, but instant reaction she had displayed when avoiding the cat that had run across the road in front of them – the last time that had happened his then pupil had uttered a piercing scream, released the wheel, and clapped both hands to her eyes – it was the woman herself.
Even the fact that she was, by his standards, too tall – five foot eleven to his five seven – merely enhanced her attractiveness. The prosaic beige calf-length skirt and matching jumper equally revealed that she had superb legs and a bust to dream about. Her soft golden hair, so long that she had to scoop it up whenever she got behind the wheel to avoid sitting on it, made a nonsense of the age she had entered on her application form; if one could overlook her figure, surely she was fifteen instead of twenty-five. This impression was accentuated by her face, her slightly aquiline but utterly beautiful features, which he had never seen other than totally relaxed, dominated by the huge, innocent blue eyes.
Her jewellery, the gold bar earrings, the huge ruby solitaire on the forefinger of her right hand that he had seen when she had taken off her gloves to sign her application, the gold Junghans watch on her left wrist – how on earth had she come into possession of a German watch? – indicated that she was extremely wealthy, while the absence of any ring on the third finger of her left hand established that she was unattached. In addition, she had the aura of being a writer, who had apparently chosen to live in this remote part of the Highlands in an equally remote but large and clearly expensive house while she worked on her novel . . . had he not had a wife waiting at home with his tea, McLachlan knew he would have found it difficult to resist the temptation to make an advance.
Now she said, ‘How very nice of you to say that, Mr McLachlan.’ Her voice, low and caressing with a delightful Irish lilt, perfectly matched the rest of her. ‘When can it be arranged?’
‘I will see to it, and let you know.’
‘Thank you.’
He got out of the car and came round it to open her door for her. He would have had to do this anyway, as she was in the driver’s seat, but this enabled him to have a last look at the silk-encased calves and knees as she also got out. ‘You’ll be buying a motor car, then?’ he ventured.
Anna straightened her skirt and indicated the small Austin in the open garage beside the house. ‘I already have a motor car, Mr McLachlan. But at present only Mrs Bridie is able to drive it. Thank you again.’
She turned away and went to the front door. McLachlan watched her open it and disappear, and then drove away.
*
‘How did it go?’ Bridget Bridie was a large woman, the same height as Anna but at least twice her weight.
‘He says I’m ready to take my test.’
‘That was quick. I’ll make a cup of tea.’
Her idea of a celebration, Anna thought, remembering the days when Birgit, her German maid, had invariably welcomed her with a glass of champagne. She wondered where the poor, silly woman was now, when she could have been here, with her, in total safety . . . and total boredom!
She went upstairs to her bedroom. It was a comfortable room, spacious and light, its two large windows overlooking the moors and even the distant roofs of the village. The situation was bleak; not all that far from the sea it was constantly swept by a breeze that even in the spring could be chilly. But the house itself was warm. The bed was comfortable, the appointments adequate, and if there was no en-suite bathroom, such luxuries being apparently unknown in old Scottish houses, there were only two of them to share the one available, and Mrs Bridie never got in the way.
Although they had now lived together for just on a year, Anna had still not discovered what Mrs Bridie thought of it all, whether indeed she considered herself a housekeeper or a gaoler; she never attempted to interfere in Anna’s habits of exercising every morning and taking long runs across the moor by herself, although she did insist, whenever her charge wished to go into the village, on accompanying her.
Anna took off her gloves, kicked off her shoes and lay on her back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Without Clive’s regular visits she thought she might have gone mad. And the visits, however regular, were still only once a month: he was a busy man. Apart from that, she had only left this house for four trips of more than a couple of hours, to see her parents in their new home, in the south.
In the beginning she had sought nothing more. The feeling of utter safety, utter relaxation, the absence of bomb damage or indeed bombs, that was part of the ambience both of the house and Mrs Bridie, after seven years of living on a knife edge, of constantly risking her own life, and constantly robbing other people of theirs, had seeped over her like a hot bath. The memories had all been nightmares.
But they were also the entire substance of her adult life. They could not simply be tied up in a neat parcel and stowed in the attic to amuse future generations. She had, aged seventeen, been locked up in a Gestapo cell, waiting to be raped or tortured, just as she had, aged eighteen, been strapped naked to a table, again in a Gestapo cell, to have electrodes attached to her genitals and inflict unbelievable pain and unforgettable humiliation.
As a result of that unreasonable punishment for a minor offence, she had found herself in the arms of Clive Bartley and her life had taken on a new dimension. That had eventually brought her to this salvation, but the six years between had heightened the precariousness of her existence. She had been forced to shoot and slaughter her way across Europe, not to mention Russia and America, just to survive. Those years were there; they could never be eradicated.
But there were other factors constantly lapping at her subconscious, growing in intensity throughout the long winter months. When they had first got together, and he had persuaded her that her future, and the future of her family, had lain with the British rather than the Germans, Clive had sworn to look after her for the rest of her life. Well, so far at least, he had fulfilled that promise. But over the past couple of years, although they had in the beginning only been able to meet perhaps twice a year – whenever she had been sent on a mission to a neutral country by Himmler – he had increasingly suggested that he would like to share that future with her. That idea had appealed to her also. If, as an agent under his control, he had been forced to commit her to some of the most dangerous episodes of her life, he remained the only man she had ever known who she had been able to trust absolutely; there had been two others she had considered trustworthy, the American Joe Andrews and the Swiss Henri Laurent, and both had let her down with consequences that, but for Clive, could have been catastrophic.
Yet over the past year, when she had been entirely his to do with as he wished, the question of a permanent relationship, whether in or out of matrimony, had not been allowed to arise. Anna knew that the little Italian woman Belinda Hoskin had been his mistress for several years, without marriage, so perhaps he was not the marrying kind. But she would willingly have settled for being his mistress, if that could mean moving in with him. It was impossible to believe that he might prefer the domestic pleasures of Belinda to what she could offer. But then, Belinda did not have fifty-three corpses hanging round her neck and cluttering her CV. Perhaps even Clive found that too much to handle. And he did not know the whole truth of it, the deep inner secrets that haunted her, the fact, for instance, that one of the men she had been forced to execute by her Nazi masters had been the librarian at the British Embassy in Berlin, and Clive’s personal friend, Gottfried Friedmann. Could they ever have a true relationship with that between them, however ignorant of it he might be?
The other constantly recurring and increasing nag at her mind was that she was, to all intents and purposes, destitute. She had never had to consider money very seriously in the past. Her father, as a newspaper editor in Vienna and before his arrest by the Nazis, had been comfortably off if by no means wealthy; certainly neither she nor her sister had lacked for any creature comfort. As an employee of the Reich, and even more so as a senior officer in the SD, money had simply been added to her bank account as and when the accountants thought necessary; if she had never received a fixed salary, there had never been any limit on her spending. Even her jewellery, which she prized, had never actually been hers; her SD masters had provided it to enhance her image as a wealthy socialite. That the SD had vanished into history, while she was still around, with the jewellery, was a source of intense satisfaction. But she was not about to sell any of it.
The British had never offered her any pay at all; they had relied on what had been, to them, the most important aspects of her character and her situation: her total commitment to getting her parents out of Germany, and her hatred for the regime that was blackmailing her into working for them. She had never resented this. The Americans, with their tendency to consider every aspect of life in terms of dollars and cents, had insisted upon offering her a salary, but she had never seen anything of it. It had, so they said, been deposited in an account, to be collected at the end of the war . . . supposing she was still alive. And as they had suddenly determined that she should not survive the war, she had to presume that money had been put to other use.
So now she was entirely dependent on the support of the British Government, who claimed not to know that she still existed. In fact, she was dependent upon Mrs Bridie, who controlled the accounts. Anna had no idea how much per month was being allowed for their subsistence, but none of it was hers to spend. Not that it mattered a great deal as there was not a lot for her to spend money on. Great Britain might have come out on the winning side of the war, but she might as well have lost it. The country was just about bankrupt, and almost everything was rationed, while the village, situated a mile from this house was entirely lacking in anything remotely resembling a boutique.
When Clive had first brought her to England he had given her an allowance to buy some clothes, but even in London the coupon-controlled choice had been extremely limited. When she thought of the wardrobe she had possessed when she had lived there as the Honourable Mrs. Ballantine Bordman, or even more the sumptuous gowns she had had to abandon in Berlin, not to mention her sable coat and hat, she could feel the beginning of an ulcer.
In fact, her situation was really rather amusing, because she was, or she intended to be, a millionairess. Only she knew the location, or indeed the existence, of the ten tons of gold she had had her two escorts drop into the bottom of the Horsel River; both of them were now dead. Just as she was the only person still alive who knew the whereabouts of the Nazi gold reserves, a hundred tons, which she had concealed on orders from Himmler; the last mission on which he had ever sent her. The men who had assisted her were now also all dead, again as ordered by Himmler; as they had all been members of the SS they did not lie heavy on her conscience. And that knowledge was the ace up her sleeve, her passport to a sunlit future. But getting hold of the ten per cent she had siphoned off for her own use had to come first, or it might not come at all; she did not even trust the British that far.
Now that her parents were at last safe, the recovery of that bullion had become her principal objective. She dreamed about it, had bought several large scale maps of the area around Eisenach, had committed every road, every hill, every stream, almost every building, to her photographic memory. While the gold had just about doubled in value. When she had ‘deducted’ it from the reserves she had been ordered by Himmler to conceal forever, she had estimated it to be worth five million dollars. Her recent studies of The Times, which Mrs Bridie purchased whenever she went to the village, indicated that the current value was nearer ten!
But she knew that she would have to hurry slowly. She could not possibly recover those ingots from the soft mud at the bottom of the river without help, and until she was sure where that help could come from, it would be dangerous in the extreme to let anyone know that she was in possession of such a secret. A year ago it had seemed perfectly simple: she would wait until things in Germany had settled down, then she would confide in Clive, hopefully by then her husband. and together they would organize the recovery. But now she was no longer sure of even Clive’s commitment to her. And in any event, it seemed that the province of Erfurt was now under Soviet control; becoming again involved with the Reds was not something she dared risk without considerable support.
‘Tea up,’ Mrs Bridie called.
*
‘Am I allowed to use the car, when I get my licence?’ Anna asked.
‘Why should you wish to use the car? Where do you wish to go?’
‘I just want to drive. See the country.’
‘We can go for a drive whenever you wish,’ Mrs Bridie pointed out.
But I don’t want to have you along, Anna thought.
‘I know,’ Mrs Bridie said brightly. ‘Tomorrow we’ll go into the village, to the library, get some new books.’
‘Um,’ Anna commented.
‘You do like Graham Greene, don’t you?’
‘He’s very good. But too . . . he makes me uneasy.’
