“We know this: Major Kinian had been underground in Germany for six months in the second half of 1943. As I said, he knew the country thoroughly and spoke German like a native. He got out to Switzerland in February ’44, but he didn’t make any report there. He came on to Portugal a few days later — about the middle of February — and made a telephone call to report his arrival in Lisbon and the hotel he was staying at.”
“Where was the call made from?” the Saint asked.
“From his hotel, presumably. The Avenida Palace. Of course we checked every possibility of tracing him through the hotel personnel years ago. His stay there was perfectly normal, it seems. Until after a couple of days he just didn’t come back, and he’s never been seen again.”
“And that one telephone call was his only contact with the OSS?”
Wade nodded.
“It was his only contact with anybody on his own team. Since he was on an underground mission he never came here or met the fellow who had my job at the time. After he telephoned, Washington waited two days for the report he was supposed to send to the embassy here. Then an agent was sent to contact him.” The colonel made an empty-handed gesture. “No dice. Nobody knows what happened to him.”
His story finished, the officer dropped back into his red-leather swivel chair and stretched his legs.
“With so much to go on I should have the riddle unravelled in half a day,” Simon said caustically. “You left out just one minor detail. What was this mission Major Kinian had been on?”
“He was trying to get a line on the escape plans of the Nazi bigwigs if they lost the war,” the colonel answered. “With Roosevelt pushing for unconditional surrender, there obviously wasn’t going to be much future for secondhand SS officers, or Nazi politicians, in Germany. It was common knowledge that the top boys were getting escape hatches ready for themselves and salting away plenty of funds to keep them comfortable in their retirement.”
The Saint tilted back his own chair and folded his arms.
“I’m afraid, Colonel, that if Kinian was working inside Germany on something as big as that, your predecessors should’ve expected him to disappear. Apparently he was on such a hot trail that he didn’t dare take his nose off it — even after he got into neutral territory.”
“Right. That’s the way we figure it.”
“But the game got his scent about the time he got here — and turned around and removed him.”
“I’m afraid that’s the most obvious possibility, Templar,” said the officer soberly.
Simon stood up to his full six-foot-two and walked over to the window. Somehow the spacious peace of the embassy’s grounds, the summer sunlight in the foliage of the trees, made the cruel deaths of the Second World War seem almost as remote as the battles of the Iliad.
“And that was the end of the trail,” he said quietly.
“The end of one trail,” Wade replied, and went on with fresh enthusiasm: “We kept an eye on other possibilities — and his daughter was one of them.”
“She must have been all of ten years old at the time,” the Saint said, turning to face the man in the uniform. “An obvious Mata Hari.”
The colonel allowed himself a disciplined smile.
“She was only one year old at the time, as a matter of fact,” he said. “But being as she’s the only member of Major Kinian’s immediate family who’s still alive — his wife died five years ago — we thought there might be a chance she’d give us a lead someday. And I think she has.”
The Saint’s interest had clearly picked up. He was following the colonel’s words intently.
“Without wanting to impugn the honour of the secret services,” he said, “I assume you’re thinking that Major Kinian may have taken the back door to the rich life by joining up with the lads he was supposed to be undoing.”
“It’s a possibility,” Wade said in his radio-announcer’s baritone. “Very remote, perhaps. But we had to consider that and a lot of other chances to be sure we were covering the field. And now, just recently, on her twenty-fifth birthday, Kinian’s daughter was given a sealed envelope by an attorney that’s bringing her straight to Lisbon.”
“From America?”
“Right. From Iowa. It wasn’t her father’s regular attorney who gave her the letter, or we probably would’ve known about it before. We checked him long ago. But we know the letter is from the girl’s father, and that it was given to her on her birthday by a lawyer we didn’t know he’d had any dealings with. A few days later, she quit her job and booked a passage to Lisbon — where he vanished.”
“It looks a little as if Major Kinian was trying to out-secrecy everybody, doesn’t it?” Simon commented. “You’ve no idea what was in that time capsule he left for his daughter?”
“I’m afraid not. Neither did the lawyer who delivered it. And we couldn’t have gotten a look at it afterwards without a search warrant or a burglary — even if she hadn’t destroyed it by then. But anything we did might have warned her that she was under surveillance, whereas the way things are it’s probably the last thing she’d think of. We don’t want to upset the apple cart at this point. Washington thinks you’re the man to follow through on this, rope the girl and give her plenty of slack without losing her until you’ve found out what it is she’s up to.”
“I do have a deft hand with apple carts,” Simon conceded, “and I’ll even admit to a certain natural aptitude for keeping my eye on girls. Where’s she staying?”
“The Tagus Hotel,” Colonel Wade said. “Here’s her picture. She only got in this morning, so she can’t have done very much yet. And by the way, we’ve got you a room reserved at the Tagus directly across the corridor from hers.”
“As travel agents you couldn’t be more efficient,” Simon murmured, as he picked up the snapshot from the desk. “And from the looks of this, even the entertainment on this tour is going to be first rate.”
The colonel smiled, this time more genuinely than he had before.
“Well, enjoy yourself. Hamilton says that’s one thing you can always be counted on to do. Call me if you need anything, but no routine reports are expected. And if you get in trouble, I never heard of you. You know the drill. The rest is up to you.” He shook the Saint’s hand briskly. “I hope we’re not moving too fast for you.”
“Not at all, Colonel,” Simon said from the doorway. “There’s nothing quite so likely to get me moving fast myself as a familiar aroma that’s emanating from somewhere around here — the sweet fragrance of vintage loot!”
2
Vicky Kinian had the kind of sweet dark-haired beauty that brings to mind orchards in the sunlight of a dewy morning, and arouses in the bosoms of mature men an almost painfully adolescent nostalgia for girls-next-door such as never really lived next door. She had the lovely youthful aura that the modern alchemists of Hollywood indebt themselves trying to transmute out of gold — and yet the closest she had ever been to Hollywood was the projection on a television set. She was, in actual fact, the perfect coral-lipped rose that poets imagine blushing unseen in the desert air of Arkansas or the more inhospitable portions of Sardinia, and when she turned twenty-five the longest trip she had ever taken had been from Des Moines, Iowa, to Yosemite.
So that for her there was none of the world-weary sense of a routine errand that a great many of her contemporaries would have experienced on the June morning when she walked into a Des Moines travel agent’s office to pick up an air ticket which was to waft her into considerably more hazardous excitement than International Airways customarily supplies along with its tournedos and Waldorf salads. And Vicky herself had known that she had more to be excited about even than a first trip to fabulous foreign shores. In her new handbag, along with her passport and vaccination certificate, was a third and more personal document — one she would show to no guardian of national borders and about which she had spoken to nobody — which promised mysterious developments in her life without giving any clue as to what those developments would prove to be.