'True.' Russell checked his watch. He was due to meet Dallin in an hour, which left him time to eat a bowl of soup at the Adlon before walking to their usual meeting place in the Tiergarten. The soup proved better than he expected - the Adlon still managed to produce a decent meal, especially for its old habitues - and the sun had emerged once more as he ventured across Pariser Platz, though the Brandenburg Gate and onto the camouflaged Chaussee, or the East-West Axis as it was now called. Huge nets interlaced with lumps of foliage were suspended above the arrow-straight boulevard, which would otherwise have offered the perfect direction-finder for anyone seeking to bomb the government district.
Russell headed out across the still-frosty grass in the general direction of the Rose Garden. No one seemed to be following him, but it wouldn't matter if they were - the Germans were already aware of his meetings with the intelligence man from the American Consulate. Indeed, they were probably under the impression that they had set the whole business up.
In the summer of 1939, Reinhard Heydrich's foreign intelligence organisation, the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, had seized on Russell's known contacts with the Soviet NKVD and blackmailed him, or so they believed, into working for them. But when war broke out his Anglo-American parentage made him more relevant to the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht intelligence service that was run by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and the SD had graciously handed him over. It had taken the Abwehr several months to claim the gift - as Russell later found out, Canaris had been knocked for six by the depravity of German behaviour in Poland - and when they did finally pull him on board, his duties proved much lighter than expected. Russell had considered refusing, if only to test the continuing potency of the original SD threats to Effi and his family; but if all the Abwehr wanted was help translating English and American newspaper articles, it didn't seem worth the risk. And there was always the chance that working for Canaris might provide him with some protection against Heydrich.
This happy arrangement had continued through the first winter of the war, and the calamitous spring and early summer of 1940.
Throughout that period Russell had also been paying off another debt. Although his mother was American, he had grown up in England and felt essentially English. He was a British national, with a passport to prove it. As Hitler's aggressive intentions became clearer, and the possibility of an Anglo-German war grew ever more likely, he had faced the certainty of deportation and years of separation from Paul, Effi and everyone else he cared for. In March 1939 the Americans had offered him a deal - an American passport, which would allow him to remain in Germany, in exchange for a little low-level intelligence work, contacting possible opponents of the Nazis in the fast-expanding Reich. He had accepted their offer, and safely managed a few such contacts before the war broke out. Over the next year, much to Russell's relief, the Americans had disappeared into their shells, and made no demands that he couldn't ignore or endlessly defer. But in the autumn of 1940, with France kaput and England on the ropes, they had started pressing him again. Rather than seek out the contacts they prescribed, any of whom might turn him in to the Gestapo, Russell had come up with a suggestion of his own - could he not act as a safe, neutral and deniable channel between the Americans and the Admiral's Abwehr, passing on information which each had an interest in the other knowing? Russell knew that the Abwehr had created such links with the British through Switzerland - why not operate a similar arrangement with the American Consulate here in Berlin.
He secured a meeting with the Canaris's deputy General Oster, and finally a meeting with Canaris himself. The Admiral had liked the idea, and so had the Americans. Since November 1940, Russell had been carrying messages between them, and feeling very pleased with himself. The work was safe in itself, and more to the point, gave the Abwehr and the Americans respectively good reason to keep him out of Heydrich's clutches and spare him any riskier assignments.
It seemed too good to be true, but his luck continued to hold. After Hitler's invasion of Russia, Russell had braced himself for new approaches from the SD and the Soviets, but neither had yet made contact. The latter, he assumed, would find it difficult to reach him, and the former had apparently lost track of his existence. He only hoped that yesterday's visit to Zembski's studio hadn't started bells ringing in Heydrich's belfry on Wilhelmstrasse.
He had almost reached the Rose Garden, with more than ten minutes to spare. He walked on around it, in the vague direction of the huge concrete flak tower which loomed over the distant zoo. Despite the sunshine the Tiergarten was virtually empty; there were two women pushing prams and several men in uniform enjoying a kick-about, along with the usual army of darting squirrels. Scott Dallin was nowhere to be seen, which probably meant that he was already sequestered in the Rose Garden.
The American was sitting on one of the benches, hands in pockets and overcoat collar turned up, a hat concealing most of his golden-brown hair. 'Hi,' he said. 'Jesus, it's cold.' Russell sat down beside him.
Dallin was another tall Californian, but any resemblance to Gerhard Strohm ended there. If the latter looked like a refugee from The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the former might have stepped out of a Scott Fitzgerald novel. He always looked well turned-out, even when most of his Consulate colleagues had been reduced to scarecrows by the clothing shortage - though he did have a tendency to wear the sort of colours that suited sunny California rather better than corpse-grey Berlin.
Money was the obvious reason. Dallin had grown up in Santa Barbara the son of a water tycoon, so one of Russell's friends at the Consulate had told him. He had attended an Ivy League college in the East, and encountered no apparent problems in securing a plum post in the diplomatic service. When he had arrived in Berlin a year or so ago it had been his first trip out of America, and it had showed. Dallin wasn't stupid, but he knew very little and didn't seem sufficiently aware of that fact. His obvious doubts about Russell probably stemmed from reading the official file and discovering his communist past. A man like Dallin would have no idea how anyone good or intelligent could become a communist, and would therefore assume that the man in question was either a knave or a fool. And since Russell was obviously not a fool, the odds on his being a knave of some sort had to be high.
'Imagine how cold it's getting outside Moscow,' Russell said.
'I guess that's something,' Dallin agreed. 'But let's get this over with. What's the word from the Admiral?'
'He has some figures for you,' Russell said, pulling a folded sheet of paper from his inside pocket and passing it over. 'Oil and manpower. Oil and manpower shortages, to be precise.'
Dallin studied the figures, and let out a low whistle. 'These don't look so good for Adolf.'
'If they're true, they're not.'
'You think they're faked? An under-estimate, I suppose.'
Russell shrugged. 'I've no way of knowing, but my guess is not.'
'So why pass them on? It's an admission of weakness.'
'Ah. The second half of the message is that Stalin is considering a separate peace. Provided Moscow doesn't fall, that is - Uncle Joe will only negotiate from a position of strength.'
Dallin thought for a moment. 'I don't get it,' he said eventually. 'Is there a connection?'
'Canaris doesn't mind you - us - supporting the British, in fact he wants that to continue, because one thing he dreads is a German victory in the West. But he doesn't want us joining up with the Russians, because the other thing he dreads is a German defeat in the East. So his main aim is to prevent that happening, to keep the two wars separate. The statistics are supposed to convince us that the Soviets will avoid defeat whether we help them or not, and the separate peace rumour - which is almost certainly a fiction - suggests that helping them would be against our own interests, and that any tanks we send them might eventually be used against us.'