So, thought Hagemann, that is the famous chauffeur, known to the world only as ‘Fraulein S’. Who she was and where she came from, only Fegelein seemed to know. She was reputed to be the one woman Fegelein, who had a stable of concubines, had failed to bed. Hagemann had heard about this beautiful woman, but this was the first time he had ever set eyes upon her.
As the woman walked around the front of the car, she glanced up at the professor.
Hagemann was struck by the deep blue of her eyes and he realised that that the rumours of her beauty had not been exaggerated.
The woman opened the passenger’s side door and Fegelein climbed inside.
Now General Hagemann made his own way down the steps. In days past, he would simply have hailed a cab to take him back to the Gatow airport, but there didn’t appear to be any taxis any more. He wondered if the tram system was still functioning, or if that, too, had been put out of commission by the bombing. Hagemann set off in the direction of the airport. It would be a long walk, but the more distance he could put between himself and the confines of the bunker, the happier he knew he would feel.
As Fegelein’s Mercedes wove its way past heaps of rubble from the latest air raids, bound for Himmler’s headquarters in the village of Hohenlychen, north-west of Berlin, Fegelein scribbled down his report about that day’s conference in the bunker.
These days, it was usually bad news, and Fegelein was content to transmit any details from the briefings by secure telegraph from SS Headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. But good news, such as he’d heard today, required a more personal delivery, especially since he would be arriving with the gift of Hagemann’s own blueprints for the Diamond Stream device.
Besides, it gave him the chance to spend more time with Fraulein S.
Her real name was Lilya Simonova, although he rarely used it even when speaking to her directly. Although there were plenty of people around with Russian-sounding names, especially here in the east of the country, Fegelein felt safer not advertising the fact that his own chauffeur was one of them. Besides, it lent her an air of mystery which he was happy to exploit, since it helped to baffle those gossiping fishwives who were always whispering behind his back.
Having served briefly as Fegelein’s secretary, Lilya had taken on the role of chauffeur, after his original driver had got drunk and crashed the car into a lamp post on the way to pick him up. This driver’s name was Schmoekel and he, like Fegelein, had been a former cavalry man until being invalided home when he had ridden his horse over a mine. The incident had left Schmoekel with a grotesque scar across one side of his face. Unfortunately, it was the side which faced Fegelein when he was sitting on the passenger side of the two-seater car he had been given by the SS motor pool. Fegelein found it unpleasant to have to look at this deformed creature every day and he was more relieved than angry when Schmoekel finally smashed up the car, providing him with an excuse to reassign the mangled cavalryman to a desk job far away.
Replacing Schmoekel with Fraulein S had been a stroke of genius. As she took over the task of shuttling him back and forth from the Chancellery to the apartment of Elsa Batz on Bleibtreustrasse and to Himmler’s headquarters at Hohenlychen, north of Berlin, Fegelein had noticed that Fraulein S was a better driver than Schmoekel, as well as a good deal softer on the eyes.
Fegelein was well aware of the rumours, circulated by his jealous rivals in the high command, about his apparent failure to bed this particular woman. One particularly hurtful piece of gossip made out that Fraulein S was ‘too beautiful’ for him, as if the woman was simply too far out of his league for him to even contemplate what he had so easily achieved with numerous other secretaries before her.
But that, Fegelein protested in his imaginary conversations with these rumour fabricators, was precisely the point. There had been so many others, literally dozens by his count, and every single one of them had since moved on, either because he had fired them or because they had requested transfers which, under the circumstances, he was obliged to grant them.
It had reached the point where he actually required a good secretary, and one who was going to stick around for a while, more than he needed to satisfy his instincts.
Pretty though she was, Fegelein had been forced to forgo any dalliance with Fraulein Simonova in favour of running a competent liaison office. Humiliating as it might have been to hear his manhood criticised, he could reassure himself that these gossip-mongers were simply envious of his marriage, of his standing with the Fuhrer, of the trust Himmler had placed in him and yes, even of the woman who sat beside him now.
‘I’m not sure we have enough fuel to reach Hohenlychen,’ said Lilya. ‘I didn’t realise we would be leaving the city.’
‘There’s a fuel depot in Hennigsdorf,’ replied Fegelein. ‘We can stop there on the way.’
Lilya glanced at the rolled-up blueprint lying on the dashboard. ‘That must be important, for you to be delivering it in person.’
‘It’s the best pieces of news we’ve had in months,’ replied Fegelein. Then he turned his attention to the pad of paper on his lap, where he had written out the notes for his report to Himmler. ‘How does this sound?’ he asked. ‘The success of the guidance system known as Diamond Stream . . .’
And then he paused. ‘Should I call it a system? That doesn’t sound quite right to me.’
At first, she didn’t reply. The moment she heard the words ‘Diamond Stream’, the moisture had dried up in her mouth. ‘How about “the Diamond Stream technology”?’
‘Much better!’ Fegelein crossed out the old word and wrote in the new one. ‘The success of the guidance technology known as Diamond Stream has revitalised the V-2 programme to the extent that we can now deliver to the German people the reassurance of military superiority, while at the same time making it clear to our enemies that we are far from being defeated on the battlefield. No,’ he muttered. ‘Wait.’
‘Is it the word “defeated”?’ asked Lilya.
‘Exactly,’ answered Fegelein. ‘I can’t use that. I can’t even mention defeat.’
‘How about “Making it clear to our enemies that we are still masters of the battlefield”?’
‘Excellent!’ He glanced at Fraulein S and smiled. ‘Where would I be without you?’
One of the most valuable lessons that Lilya Simonova had learned during the frantic days as British Intelligence rushed her through her training at Beaulieu was that once she had convinced her sources of information that she could be trusted, the sources would repay this trust with loyalty of their own. After this, the sources would remain stubbornly faithful, not only because the bond between them had become a reality, but also because of how much they stood to lose if they were wrong. Not only the life of the agent, but also the lives of the sources depended on the appearance of truth.
To forge that bond with her enemy, knowing all along that it was balanced on a lie, had triggered in her moments of what bordered on compassion even for the monster that was Fegelein.
This was the hardest thing she had ever done. It would have been easier to kill Fegelein than to cultivate his loyalty and trust, even as she was betraying it herself. Before it all began, she would never even have considered herself capable of such a thing. But the war had made her a stranger, even to herself, and now she wondered if it would even be possible to return to a place where she could look in the mirror and recognise the person she had been.
It had taken many months to earn Fegelein’s trust. During this time, she had passed every test, both official and unofficial, which Fegelein could think to throw at her. On the advice of her handlers back in Britain, she had made no attempt to gather information during the time when she was being vetted. No contact had been established with courier agents. No messages had been transmitted. This was because of the danger that false information might be fed to her, and carefully monitored to see if Allied intelligence acted upon it. As Lilya later discovered, Fegelein had employed this tactic several times.