Back in England, Lilya had been told that she should become active as an agent only when she was absolutely certain that her source’s confidence had been secured. Her life depended on that decision. That much she had known from the start. What Lilya had not known, at least in the beginning, was that you could never be certain. All you could do was guess, hope that you were right, and begin.
That day came when Fegelein appointed her as his new driver, replacing the grimly scarred man who had held the job up until then. Usually, after his midday meetings with Hitler, it was Fegelein’s habit to spend the remainder of his time at the apartment of his mistress, leaving Lilya Simonova outside in the car in which Fegelein would leave behind the briefcase containing any briefing notes to his master, the Lord of the SS.
Fegelein left the briefcase in the car because he thought it would be safer there than in the house of Elsa Batz, whom he cared for, up to a point, but whom he did not trust.
Alone in the car, Simonova would read through the contents of the briefcase and, later, would deliver the information, along with any gossip she had picked up from Fegelein that day, to a courier agent, who then forwarded the details to England.
Lilya knew very little about the courier, other than the fact that he worked at the Hungarian Embassy.
For the transfer, Lilya would deposit information in the hollowed-out leg of a bench in the Hasenheide park, just across the road from the Garde-Pioneer tram station. Occasionally, messages would be left for her there, indicating that she was to make contact with her control officer in England, whom she knew only as ‘Major Clarke’. For this purpose, she had been issued a radio, to be used only in such emergencies.
Her last contact with Major Clarke had been only the day before, when he had ordered her to find out all she could about this Diamond Stream device.
And now there it was, barely an arm’s length away, resting on the dashboard of the car as they roared across the German countryside, bound for the lair of Heinrich Himmler.
‘Wait!’ Fegelein said suddenly. ‘Pull over! There’s something I forgot.’
Lilya jammed on the brakes and the car skidded to a halt, kicking up dust at the side of the road. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s Elsa’s birthday.’ Fegelein looked at her helplessly. ‘We’ll have to turn around.’
‘And keep Himmler waiting?’
‘Better him than Elsa,’ mumbled Fegelein.
As she wheeled the car about, the chart case tumbled into Fegelein’s lap.
‘I won’t be long, but I’ll need you to wait in the car. You can look after this while I’m gone,’ Fegelein told her, replacing the map case on the dashboard.
‘Of course,’ she said quietly.
‘Where would I be without you, Fraulein S?’ repeated Fegelein. As he caught sight of her luminously blue eyes, his gaze softened with affection. Those eyes were like nothing he had ever seen before, and their effect on him had never lessened since the first day he caught sight of her in Paris. She was sitting at a desk in a dreary, smoke-filled room crowded with secretaries typing out documents for translation by the city’s German occupation government. Pale, bleached light glimmered down through window panels in the roof, whose glass was stained with smears of dirty green moss. Whenever he thought about that moment, Fegelein would hear again the deafening clatter of typewriters, pecking away like the beaks of tiny birds against his skull, and he remembered the instant when she had glanced up from her work and he first saw her face. He had never recovered from that moment, nor did he ever wish to.
‘Where would you be?’ she asked. ‘In search of the perfect word for your reports to the Reichsfuhrer. That is where you’d be.’
Her words were like a cup of cold water thrown into Fegelein’s face. ‘Exactly so,’ he replied brusquely, turning back to face the road. In that moment he realised that the reason he had not thrown himself at her long ago was because he had fallen in love with this woman, and he could not bring himself to treat her the way he had treated the others, and even his own dismally promiscuous wife.
‘Was that General Hagemann I saw with you on the steps of the Chancellery building?’ she asked.
‘He prefers to be called a professor,’ confirmed Fegelein, ‘but that was him all right, and since he has just misplaced a very valuable rocket, it may be the last time you see him.’
‘He lost a rocket?’
Fegelein explained what he had learned. ‘It’s probably at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, but I expect the old general would sleep a little better if he knew that for a fact. And I would sleep a little better, too, if you would take my advice and agree to carry a pistol. I’d be happy to provide you with one. These are dangerous times and they are likely to get more so in the days ahead. I gave one to Elsa, you know, and she seems happy with it!’
‘Perhaps because she needs it to defend herself against you.’
Fegelein laughed. ‘Even if that was the case, I’d have nothing to worry about! What Elsa needs more than anything is some lessons in target practice. Believe me, I tried to teach her, but it’s pretty much hopeless.’
‘Well, I don’t want a gun,’ said Lilya. ‘How many times have I told you that?’
‘I have lost count,’ admitted Fegelein, ‘but that doesn’t mean I’ll give up trying to make you see some sense.’
The truth was, Lilya did carry a weapon. It was a small folding knife with a stiletto point and a small device, like the head of a nail, fitted into the top of the blade which enabled the user to open the knife single-handedly and with only a flick of the thumb.
It had been a gift from a man she almost married long ago. One late summer day, they had gone on a picnic together to the banks of the Neva River outside St Petersburg and he had used the knife to peel the skin from an apple in a single long ribbon of juicy, green peel. Before them, white, long-legged birds moved with jerky and deliberate steps among the water lilies.
‘What birds are those?’ she had asked.
‘Cranes,’ he replied. ‘Soon they will begin their long migration south.’
‘How far will they go?’ she asked.
‘To Africa,’ he told her.
She had been stunned to think of such a vast journey and tried to imagine them, plodding with their chalk stick legs in the water of an oasis.
Later, when she got home, she had discovered the knife in the wicker basket which they had used to bring the food. When she went to return the knife, the man told her to keep it. ‘Remember the birds,’ he had said.
It was not until much later that she noticed a maker’s mark engraved upon the blade – of two cranes, their long and narrow beaks touching like two hypodermic needles – engraved into the tempered steel.
Of the possessions she had carried with her on that long journey out of Russia, this knife was the only thing she had left. The diamond and sapphire engagement ring, which she had been wearing when she arrived in England, was taken from her for safekeeping by the people who trained her for the tasks which had since taken over her life. She wondered where that ring was now, and also where the man was who had slipped it on her finger, on the island in the Lamskie pond at Tsarskoye Selo, already a lifetime ago.
Then the voice of Hermann Fegelein broke into her memory, like a rock thrown through a window pane. ‘I will not always be your commanding officer,’ he said. Reaching out, he brushed his hand across her knee.
‘I know,’ she replied gently, glancing down at his arm.
And if Fegelein could have known what images were going through her head just then, his heart would have clogged up with fear.
Radial artery – centre of the wrist. Quarter-inch cut. Loss of consciousness in thirty seconds. Death in two minutes.