The Nostradamus Traitor: 1 (The Herbie Kruger Novels) Read online

  The Nostradamus Traitor

  John Gardner

  In Memory of S.W.’s Father

  GEORGE THOMAS

  Killed over Germany 1945

  R.I.P

  Contents

  1. London 1978

  2. London l978

  3. London 1978

  4. London 1978

  5. London 1978

  6. London 1978

  7. London 1978

  8. London 1978

  9. London 1978

  10. London 1978

  11. London 1978

  12. France 1941

  13. London 1978

  14. London 1940

  15. London 1978

  16. London 1978

  17. London 1940

  18. London 1978

  19. London 1978

  20. England 1940-41

  21. England 1941

  22. London 1978

  23. Paris 1941

  24. Paris 1941

  25. Paris 1941

  26. Paris 1941

  27. Paris 1941

  28. Paris 1941

  29. Paris 1941

  30. Paris 1941

  31. Paris 1941

  32. Paris 1941

  33. London 1978

  34. France 1941

  35. France 1941

  36. London 1978

  37. Germany 1941

  38. London 1978

  39. London 1978

  40. Germany 1941

  41. Wewelsburg 1941

  42. London 1978

  43. Wewelsburg 1941

  44. Wewelsburg 1941

  45. London 1978

  46. Wewelsburg 1941

  47. Wewelsburg 1941

  48. London 1978

  49. England 1941

  50. London 1978

  51. London 1978

  52. London 1978

  53. London 1978

  54. London 1978

  55. London 1978

  56. London 1978

  Preview: Garden of Weapons

  Who was the first agent from the operations branch of F Section to reach French soil? The question is straightforward; the answer is not. The war diary for March 1941 includes a laconic remark under a French section heading: ‘After a second failure to land the Brittany Agent, the operation was successfully carried out on the night of 27th’. An undated postwar note of Thackthwaite’s in an honours and awards file mentions that the agent was a gaullist one. Nothing else seems to be recorded about him, not even his name or field name; and for lack of evidence about him we must assume that he fell straight into enemy hands or that he joined some other service on arrival.

  M.R.D. Foot: The S.O.E. in France 1940-44, pp. 161-62

  1

  LONDON 1978

  SHE WAS DRESSED IN a severe grey suit: stylish, but cut by a tailor who lacked flair. No overcoat, in spite of the chill overcast afternoon.

  Yeoman Warder Kemp watched her approach with some apprehension. Though he had been with the elite band of pensioned NCOs and warrant officers who make up the Yeoman Warders of the Tower of London for less than six months, Kemp had learned to smell out the questioners before they reached him. This one had questioner stamped all over her plumpening figure.

  It still amazed Kemp that, whatever the season or weather, tourists flooded the Tower in droves. The magic of its horrors and associations was a historic magnet which defeated snow, ice, rain, fog, or heat. Even now, early on this unpleasant spring afternoon, the place was full, and the usual long queue snaked from the Wakefield Tower to view the crown jewels.

  He turned and walked two paces down the path, his back to the rising stone of the White Tower, as though to meet the woman halfway.

  She would be late fifties, early sixties, he judged: the hips filling out and breasts starting to sag heavily; hair once golden now almost silver. Flecked with gold—Kemp imagined that he had a poetic bent. Good-looking piece at one time. The face had the bone structure for it; the high cheekbones and good jaw line, yet even that was starting to flesh out. Her eyes, however, were remarkably clear—grey, like the colour of the suit she wore and the day itself. Shrewd eyes, taking in everything and already holding Kemp steadily as she drew near.

  She was foreign, he was pretty certain of that; but, the school outings apart, most visitors were foreigners—Yanks, Arabs, Pakis, Nips. They all came to have a sniff at Britain’s past. The English who came were in the minority; though, to Kemp’s delight, the Tower seemed to be on most Scottish people’s visiting lists.

  “Excuse me.”

  He had been right. Middle European accent. Kraut probably.

  “Ma’am?”

  “I am trying to find someone in authority.”

  “Perhaps I can help. What is it exactly that you’re…?”

  “No, I think not. I need someone in authority.”

  “If you could tell me, ma’am. Difficult to get to see any of the office people here without an appointment. Or do you, perhaps, have an appointment with somebody?”

  “No. No. There is a Governor of the Tower of London, yes?”

  “Yes. The Major of the Tower. He acts as Governor in Residence. Not an easy man to see.”

  “He would have records?”

  “That depends what it was you wanted to know. Now the guide book…”

  She smiled, as though out of pity for him. “No, it will not be in any guide book.”

  “Ah, well, I’m not sure. If you could give me some inkling…”

  “Inkling?” Her brow furrowed.

  “Some hint.”

  “Ah.” The woman paused, her eyes leaving Kemp’s face for the flutter of a moment. Then back again. An intake of breath; controlled, but like someone about to take a plunge into icy water. “Very well. Your name first though, please. You are a Beefeater, yes?”

  “Yeoman Warder, ma’am. Beefeater’s a kind of nickname.”

  “So.”

  “Yeoman Warder Arthur Kemp.”

  “Kemp.” She repeated so that it came out “Camp.”

  He nodded.

  “I am Hildegarde Fenderman. Frau Fenderman. I come from Germany. The West. The Federal Republic; though for a long time I lived in the East. This is my first opportunity to visit England. I came from the East, with permission, a year ago, and have been made a citizen of the Federal Republic. I came to nurse my sister who is now dead, leaving me a little money. This is how I make this visit. It is a pilgrimage here to the Tower of London.” She hesitated, as though uncertain whether she should continue.

  “Yes?” Kemp prodded.

  “I come, because I wish to see where my husband died and where he is buried.”

  “Your husband?”

  “Claus Fenderman. He was a spy, Mr. Kemp. A spy for the Nazis. Your people caught him, I understand. I am told he was executed here, in the Tower of London. May the sixteenth, 1941. It is not in your guide book.”

  When telling the story long afterwards, Kemp could not resist a touch of the dramatic. He would say that he went cold. Looking over Frau Fenderman’s shoulder, he could see across one corner of Tower Green to the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula. On the Green, many people had gone to their deaths and some of them—including Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey, Monmouth, and Essex—lay at rest within the chapel. Yeoman Warder Kemp was one hundred per cent certain that Frau Fenderman’s husband, Claus, was not among them.

  2

  LONDON 1978

  BEFORE RETIREMENT TO THE Yeoman Warders, Arthur Kemp had served with the same Scottish regiment for the best part of thirty years. Roughly a decade of that time had been spent as Warrant Officer
to the regimental intelligence officer. He had, in fact, seen off three IOs who, in their time had been promoted laterally, in the perpendicular, and, in one sad case, horizontally. But Warrant Officer Kemp had always remained. The reasons for this were simple. He was dedicated and cunning; a double-triple-checking bastard, with a highly developed sense of suspicion.

  It had been said of Kemp that, on the Day of Judgement, he would step forward and demand to see the Archangel Gabriel’s authority in writing, his ID, and a certificate from the Celestial School of Music before one note could be blown on the last trump.

  Kemp was highly sceptical now, about Frau Fenderman and her unlamented ex-agent husband; yet he retained a correct and courteous attitude towards her, giving the impression that he would do all within his meagre power to help on her quest: making it plain that it might take a day or two. Did she have that kind of time? She did. She would be in London for at least ten days.

  From under his tunic, Kemp drew out a small, four-ringed plastic-covered notebook into which he carefully recorded details in a small, legible hand. Full name; place of birth (Dresden); nationality (“You did say they’d granted you a Federal Republic passport?”); passport number; address during her stay in London. The latter turned out to be a small private hotel in Bayswater.

  “Know it well, Frau Fenderman, know it well. Now, someone will be in touch once I’ve passed these details on. You’ll get an interview here no doubt. Just leave it to me.”

  She thanked him, nodding slowly several times—a woman well used to answering questions and filling in forms.

  Kemp watched her walk away towards the Bloody Tower and through the gate that would take her out, past the cafe and souvenir shop to the modern main entrance. Returning his notebook, he glanced at his watch and made a mental note of the time. There was a little over twenty minutes of his duty left to run before the relief would arrive.

  By rights he should report the incident to the senior yeoman warder, but ex-Warrant Officer Kemp’s experience in these matters told him that if he followed that course of action nothing would be done.

  Less than an hour later, notebook held like a weapon, Kemp stood outside the Major of the Tower’s office, having cut aside all possible red tape and asked for an appointment, on a matter of utmost urgency: Kemp’s dramatic phraseology.

  Within two hours of Frau Fenderman’s conversation with the Yeoman Warder, the Major of the Tower was on the telephone making two short calls—one to a Home Office contact, the other to an old school friend at the Foreign Office. The Foreign Office won hands down.

  Nobody really imagined that there was anything desperately important attached to this odd request from a German national wishing to see where her husband had been executed and buried, but the Foreign Office man was sharp and knew all about intelligence straw gathering. At least he could place the report.

  Kemp was recalled to the Major of the Tower’s office where he repeated his statement, which was then typed up for him to read and sign.

  At about eight that evening, a nondescript youth on a motorcycle picked up the document from the Tower.

  3

  LONDON 1978

  HERBIE KRUGER GOT THE job. Big Herbie as the older and more knowledgeable called him to his face. Juniors copied their elders in this, but had a tendency to be unkind. They said Herbie was burned out. It happens to legends in all walks of life. Herbie was a Cold War legend. For part of the fifties and sixties he ran a straggling, widely spread network within the Deutsche Demokratische Republik: on the ground itself, with plain local cover as an engineer—and no help from the diplomats. His was the last group of cells to get rolled up in the mid-sixties purge, and Herbie only got out by his fingernails.

  Since then, having once been a German national, they’d given him trade cover in Bonn, but that began to get threadbare so London brought him home, gave him what the wags called a grace and favour flat in St. John’s Wood and an office in the Annexe off Whitehall where he looked after some of the Eastern Bloc paperwork and went out on vetting jobs when the trade delegations came to town.

  Where it really mattered they had few doubts about Herbie Kruger. They certainly did not think of him as being over the hill. At forty-eight he was at the height of his powers and it was even suggested that if the Federal Government in Bonn had left him alone they might well have been spared a great deal of the embarrassment over the long-term filching of NATO documents which came to light towards the end of ’77. Herbie always maintained that the pundits were wrong and that modern intelligence gathering was not merely a question of satellites, computers, and electronic hardware.

  When the Bonn NATO secrets disaster first became known in Whitehall, Herbie smiled, shrugged, and said it was inevitable: there were not enough human bodies on the ground. Those who mattered did not shrug; they cursed the Treasury for its shortsighted niggardliness and nodded wisely to Herbie, for they agreed. They agreed to such an extent that Herbie Kruger’s desk in the Annexe was, in fact, cover for a recruiting drive.

  What Herbie Kruger was really doing among the Eastern Bloc paperwork and the trade delegations was quietly putting together a new team to be manipulated in Germany—a pair of watchers in Bonn and a brand-new cell in the East. All this he would run from London. Hence the current job landing on Herbie’s desk on the morning after Yeoman Warder Kemp’s conversation with Frau Fenderman.

  Herbie had massive hands to scale with the rest of him: hands which put the fear of God into friends and enemies alike. Particularly when their owner was drunk. Now the hands caressed the flimsy document with that characteristic gentleness of which big men are so often capable.

  This gentle manner had given Herbie Kruger another nickname among the lowest echelon juniors who, behind his back, called him Moose M alloy—after the character in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely.

  Young Worboys and his crony Hablin went as far as a bad impersonation of Herbie uttering Malloy’s immortal line “Cute as lace pants,” following which they would collapse in giggles like a pair of schoolboys.

  When this second nickname came to the attention of the Director, he nodded and smiled, for it was apt. Big Herbie could not hide, nondescript, in a crowd like the perfect covert operator, but he had other assets. He looked as thick as lumpy porridge and had a slow and decidedly stupid smile which had been the undoing of many people.

  He was smiling now as he read Yeoman Warder Kemp’s statement for the third time, though the smile was directed at the line of writing, in the Director’s green ink, scrawled at the foot of the page. Thought you would be interested. Suggest you check out and keep happy, warm, or on ice!

  For all the outward display of lumbering good humour, drunkenness (well attested by any of the juniors who had been invited for an evening out with Herbie), and sentimentality (again verbally documented and often taking the form of floods of tears while both stoned and conducting Mahler on the stereo), Herbie Kruger was as methodical as they came.

  After reading the document for a fourth time, he leaned back, large fingers laced behind his dome of a head, and considered the correct line of approach. After ten minutes be picked up the telephone and put in a call to the Bayswater private hotel and discovered that Frau Fenderman was registered there but out at the moment.

  He then called Pix and asked them to send up a bright boy whom he instructed to go out into the wilds of West Two and get what he described as “a set of sneak previews.”

  Next he rang Registry and asked about the status of their files on German espionage agents (1934 through 1945), arrested, tried, and executed in the United Kingdom. They did not hold the files, he was told. Special Branch had them in the archives at the Yard so he filled in a Most Urgent requisition and boosted it along to the Director for action. To underline the urgent part he called Tubby Fincher, who was food taster and whipping boy for the Chief, and let him know that he wanted the files last week. Tubby sighed and pointed out that they would be restricted and that the SB would try to he
el tap. To which Herbie promised that he would personally heel tap—on people’s asses—if he didn’t have what he wanted by the morning.

  That left two more calls. One to Grosvenor Square, the other to the West German Embassy in Belgrave Square.

  “No sweat,” his CIA contact in Grosvenor Square said. If they had any details on Frau Hildegarde Fenderman they’d be passed on. He’d go rake over a few files right away.

  The representative from the BND, the Bundesrepublik Deutschland’s equivalent security service, did not give a direct yes or no until Herbie hinted that he would share any resultant information. It was always a question of horse trading with the West German boys—especially with their recent record of security failures.

  During the afternoon, Herbie got Tubby to come over to the Annexe—Tubby being privy to almost everything the Old Man did or thought.

  Herbie half rose when Tubby—so-called because of his emaciated build—arrived. He also gave his Moose Malloy smile.

  “Ah, the Chief’s ear. Frau Fenderman.”

  Tubby dropped into a chair as though exhausted, nodding before his skeletal rump hit the seat.

  “It’s okay, Herbie. I’ve talked to the SB personally. Restricted, of course, but they’re supposed to be pulling the stuff you want today. In turn they want it back pronto.”

  “Copy the lot. I would in your shoes. Stuff like that could produce results. I’ve been thinking…”

  Herbie went on to slowly expand his theory that surviving members of Nazi agents’ families should be checked as a matter of routine. It was a vague and somewhat pointless theory, but Tubby knew Herbie Kruger well enough to detect this was mere chat, vocal deflection before he came in with his real request.

  “What you want, Herbie?”

  “Ah. Well, I thought, maybe, it would be a good idea if you called Frau Fenderman at her hotel to fix the appointment. If she gets a thick accent like mine over the telephone…” The thought drifted off like smoke.

  “If she’s got a conscience.” Tubby nodded. “Anything to hide from East or West she might run.”