XPD (26 page)

‘Here’s your Mr Stein,’ said the bearded man.

The man at the stove put down the teaspoon and, still holding the tilted frying pan, offered his hand. Stuart shook it.

‘Charles Stein,’ said Stuart. ‘I was in London.’

‘Phoned his home and got your message using one of those whistle gadgets,’ explained Jimmy.

‘That’s right,’ said Stuart.

‘Jimmy is a communications engineer,’ explained Paul Bock, the man at the stove. ‘I’m just an amateur, but I’ve been using my little microcomputer to get into main frames by telephone for years.’ He had a soft German accent.

‘Are you political activists?’ Stuart asked.

‘COMPIR,’ said Jimmy. ‘Computer pirates. We’ve no political ideals. Our idea of having fun is accessing password files. We’re sort of a club …’

‘The bank where I work has got a really big computer,’ said Bock. ‘It took us months to crack the “bug fixes” and find our way inside.’

‘What are “bug fixes”?’

‘Modifications that the manufacturers keep adding to stop people like us,’ said Bock. ‘Do you want an egg? Soft or turned over?’

‘Soft.’

‘Jimmy eats them turned over. They taste like plastic.’

There was an open packet of cigarettes on the table. Jimmy leant across and nipped the end of one and tried to tease it out of the packet. When it did not budge he shook it more fiercely like a terrier with a rat. Finally it came free. ‘Help yourself,’ he said and pushed the packet towards Stuart.

‘No thanks,’ said Stuart. ‘It’s too early for me.’ He watched Jimmy light the new cigarette from the stained, misshapen old one.

‘Tell me everything you know about Operation Siegfried,’ said Bock. He turned round with the frying pan and tipped the eggs on to the plates, two at a time. He was a muscular boy with a short haircut and a carefully shaved face. Under a shabby silk dressing gown he was wearing a clean blue shirt and the trousers of a grey suit. He saw the puzzled expression on Stuart’s face. ‘I have to go to work,’ he explained. ‘Jimmy is lucky he doesn’t have to disguise himself in these absurd uniforms.’

Stuart became painfully aware of the ‘uniform’ that he himself was wearing. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Now tell us about Operation Siegfried.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘We can get rough, Mr Stein,’ said Paul Bock. ‘You might find that hard to believe, but we can get very rough.’

‘I believe you can get rough,’ said Stuart. ‘So why don’t you believe me when I say that I’ve never heard of Operation Siegfried?’

Jimmy took the bread knife and roughly sliced some bread. He tossed a slice to each of the other men. Stuart dipped a piece of it into the soft yolk of his egg and ate in silence.

‘If you’ve got something to tell me, then tell me,’ said Stuart.

Paul Bock cut his egg into rectangles and ate it section by section between his fingers. ‘I work in the bank – a big German bank – no matter its name at the moment. We got this information from the bank’s computer.’

‘Is that difficult?’ asked Stuart.

‘This computer was a beauty,’ said Jimmy, rubbing his hand over his half-grown beard. ‘Could be this is one of the most complex of its sort anywhere in Europe.’

‘But we cracked it,’ said Paul Bock. ‘Or Jimmy did.’

‘Paul got the hardware keys,’ said Jimmy. ‘Until we could physically unlock the machinery, I couldn’t even begin. And he completed the first codes for the terminal keyboard. Then it got trickier. The bank have performance-measuring consultants who tune the computer; they notice the access per programme, and we didn’t want them to get suspicious. We had to trickle the stuff out bit by bit; spread it over a few weeks.’ He coughed and thumped his chest with his fist still holding the cigarette.

‘This material is ultra secret,’ said Bock. ‘There were many software keys, each one opening up more and more secret stuff.’

‘It’s like a series of doors,’ explained Jimmy. ‘You’ve got to unlock each and every one to get into the inner sanctum. And every door has a sort of burglar alarm that will close down the terminal and store a message saying that someone has attempted an unauthorized access.’

‘And you managed all that?’ said Stuart, not without a trace of genuine admiration.

‘Jimmy’s a wizard,’ said Paul Bock.

‘So what
is
Operation Siegfried?’ Stuart asked.

‘We are not quite sure,’ admitted Jimmy. He put his cigarette into the ashtray and began to eat.

‘There is a secret fund – a Trust, they call it – formed by some of the most powerful organizations of the Bundesrepublik,’ said Paul. ‘Steel companies, armaments, car-parts manufacturers, insurance companies, publishers and very big banks. We know that the senior trustee is a man named Böttger, who is president of a bank based in Hamburg. Like all the other men involved, he has never been associated with any post-war political party. That’s significant.’

‘In what way significant?’ asked Stuart.

‘If you were going to resurrect the Third Reich,’ said Paul Bock, ‘would it not be a good idea to tell your agents to avoid all political activity?’

‘The war was thirty or more years ago,’ protested Stuart. ‘You mean they’ve been asked to wait that long for Operation Siegfried?’ It all seemed highly unlikely.

‘They are patient and full of cunning,’ said Paul Bock. ‘The Third Reich was planned to last for one thousand years; Hitler himself said so. What is thirty or forty years to such people?’ He got up to put his plate in the sink. A floorboard creaked under his weight.

‘And you think these people are starting a Fourth Reich?’ said Stuart. ‘In what way is my name involved with such plans?’

‘We got your name from the computer,’ said Paul Bock. ‘We got a print-out and committed it to memory before destroying it. There were many names, each with a code word, the significance of which we have not yet decided; your name was the only one which sounded unmistakably Jewish. It seemed to us impossible that you would be a supporter of their aims. Therefore you must be an intended victim.’

The two men, Jimmy and Paul Bock, looked at one another. They realized that they were not convincing their visitor. It had not been planned this way: to see Charles Stein up here in this grubby little house with the smell of yesterday’s boiled cabbage coming from next door. The plan had been to meet with him in the lobby of some luxurious hotel in central London, or even take him for a meal in a restaurant. Paul Bock looked round the greasy kitchen. Why should anyone take them seriously once they had seen this dingy slum?

‘It’s all true,’ said Jimmy. ‘You may not believe it, but it’s all true.’

‘We’ve done all we could,’ said Paul Bock, continuing the conversation with his friend as if their visitor had already departed. ‘We warned him.’

Boyd Stuart finished his egg. ‘What about some hard information?’ he said. ‘What about more names?’

‘We wondered if you could be on some sort of death list, Mr Stein,’ said Paul Bock politely.

‘And I’m wondering if you have been watching too much late-night TV,’ said Stuart.

‘Get stuffed,’ said Jimmy. ‘We told you, and that’s that.’

Stuart pushed his plate aside and stood up to get a paper towel to wipe his fingers. Through the rain-spattered windows he saw a grim industrial landscape and the Grand Union canal, its stagnant water littered with ice-cream wrappers and floating beer cans. A narrow boat, timbers rotting, had settled low enough for scummy water to lap on to its deck. Beyond the canal, the rusting tracks and ruined shed were the remains of a railway system which had once made the world gasp with envy. A diesel locomotive came into view, hooted and stopped. Stuart tossed the paper towel into the bin under the sink and said, ‘What about a little more evidence?’

Paul Bock said, ‘We’ll talk about it.’ He took Jimmy out of the room and when they returned Bock was wearing the jacket of his smart grey suit.

‘Can you give me a lift to the tube?’ Bock said, looking out of the window. ‘I think I’ll need my raincoat.’

‘Certainly.’ Stuart turned back to Jimmy when he got as far as the landing. ‘But why the swastika badges and the Nazi decorations?’

Jimmy smiled. ‘Then I don’t have to feel bad about lying and cheating my customers.’

‘I see,’ said Stuart. He followed Paul Bock down the narrow staircase into the gloomy shop and out of the front door. Summer seemed a long way away; the clouds were still grey and there was only the faintest glimmer of sunshine on the horizon. They got into the Aston and Stuart followed the insane maze of one-way streets to the underground railway station.

‘I wish you’d give me more information,’ said Stuart as Paul Bock got out of the car. ‘Give me some details of the Trust: what is its address? Do you know how it is funded?’

The German leant close to the window. ‘Perhaps next time,’ he said.

‘Why not now? If my life is in danger the way you say it is, why not now?’

‘Because we don’t believe you are Mr Charles Stein,’ said the German. ‘Jimmy thinks you’re the police. I’m not certain who you are, but the computer print-out shows nearly one hundred million dollars against your name … I’ve worked in banks. You are not a man who’s ever had use of a fortune. Men who handle such money don’t come knocking on doors in King’s Cross early in the morning; they send others to do it for them. You tell Mr Stein to come in person.’ He smiled and was gone in the crowds hurrying into the station.

Chapter 22

Boyd Stuart did not view every foot of the Nazi newsreel film. It would have taken five working days to look at all of it: a fact that was clearly evident from the film tins which were stacked ceiling high in the two fireproof store rooms downstairs in the basement, along the corridor from the ‘viewing room’, as the cinema was officially called.

Two ‘research clerks’ had begun viewing and sorting the footage as soon as the first reels arrived. It had come to the SIS Ziggurat building south of the river via a cover address in Wardour Street. Most of it came through agencies and libraries but there was privately owned footage too, and some poor-quality pirated material which had been made by reversal process from positives. All of the film submitted was in response to the news that a film company, compiling a documentary for TV, was paying top footage rates. It was wanted urgently but that was a normal requirement in the business of film and TV.

Boyd Stuart had spent all day screening the film that had been shortlisted for him. By the afternoon of Monday, 16 July, he was growing dizzy with images of Adolf Hitler and his followers. He had watched the Führer staring stern-faced at maps, striding past ranks of soldiers, climbing into the Führerwagen of the train and climbing down from it, leaning out of its lowered windows to shake hands with Hitler Youths or accept flowers from flaxen-haired girls.

At four
P.M.
he first caught sight of the face he sought. He picked up the phone and told the projectionist to stop the film, mark the frame and bring it to the editing bench. Only fifteen minutes after that, he found the same man in two lengthy sequences of Hitler meeting Benito Mussolini alongside a train at Anlage Süd in August 1941. A large crowd of Hitler’s immediate staff had wanted to see the two dictators together, and there were many cameras in evidence amongst the German soldiers, SS men and Italians, jostling together on the raised wooden platform made especially for the dictators to alight from the train.

Stuart put the reel of film on to the editor’s flat bench. He wound it with his hand to find the frame he wanted, and held it illuminated and magnified on the small screen. He put a magnifier over the part of the image that interested him, but it enlarged the patterns of film grain and the texture of the viewing screen’s fresnel glass so that the picture became a confused blur, like some abstract painting.

Kitty King came into the room and put a cup of tea down by his elbow. ‘You’ve found something?’

‘Three different sequences, and there will be more.’

‘And this is the photo you found after the Wever farm explosion?’ She leant forward to study the big enlargement which was pinned over the bench.

‘Wever said he’d never worn one of those camouflage jackets before that journey to Merkers. I’ve looked up the dates and times of the American advance. That photo must have been taken at the salt mine on or about 2 April 1945. That’s Breslow next to him. The civilian is the one I’m trying to identify. Reichsbank Director Frank he was calling himself in 1945.’

‘And now you’ve found him?’

‘I think so but I’d like to find him enough times to get a positive identification.’

‘He’s in uniform for this one.’ She pointed at the lighted screen.

‘But the Germans let their security people wear any uniform and any rank they fancied when they were at work. I’ve got other photos that resemble him. Now I’ll enlarge them to some reasonable size.’

‘The dark room will curse you, Boyd. They’re up to their ears in work.’

‘I’ve got a triple-A priority, Kitty. There is nothing that takes precedence over whatever I need.’

She looked at him. She knew about the priority but didn’t understand it. She tried to find the answer in his face and, having failed, smiled at him. ‘It’s just history as far as I can see, darling,’ she said. ‘It’s only people who still remember those days who care: old fogies like the DG, and Mr Brittain in Plans, who won the MC and wears it on Remembrance Day.’ She touched her hair to push it back from her forehead, in a manner more narcissistic than remedial. She was especially beautiful there in the half-light of the cinema. Stuart felt a keen desire for her, and he saw her arch her body as if she sensed it.

‘I wish you’d move in with me,’ he said.

‘I’ll stay with you tonight, if you want me,’ she said softly. ‘But I’m not moving in; not with you, not with anyone.’

‘Why not?’

He expected her to raise her voice. They had had this sort of discussion before and it always had turned to the sort of jokiness that cloaked bitter recriminations. ‘Everything I touch …’ she continued in the same lowered tone, ‘I sit down in a chair and I wonder if it was
her
favourite chair. I grab a dressing gown and I stop … wondering if I’m going to look like
her
in it. I look in the mirror and I see other women looking back at me. That’s not what I want, Boyd.’ There was something essentially feminine about her resentment of these inanimate objects, thought Stuart. She never seemed in any way jealous, or even curious, about any women he might have met in California.