A Game of Spies Read Online Free PDF

full dark had fallen, he would make his bid for freedom, and he had no desire to end up in the basement of Prinz Albrecht Strasse, in the hands of the Gestapo interrogators.
    He raised one finger to his mouth and began to nibble on the ragged cuticle.
    He should have gone last night—immediately after killing Borg.
    But he had lost his nerve. He had dawdled for too long, under the pretense of thinking it through from every angle, and by the time he had found his courage, the sun had been rising. So he had been forced to wait through another day, although he had been extremely conscious, painfully conscious, of the time slipping away.
    Three months had passed since he had sent the letter to the cover address in Lisbon—to a sister, according to the story he had told Hagen, back in the days when they had still been playing nice with each other. The letter had contained no codes, and no secret messages; the simple fact of its dispatch had been the trigger for the next phase of the operation. Once the letter had arrived, Eva would be activated. And so by now Hobbs should have liberated himself, so that he would be able to shoulder his part of the burden: watching her back and, using the radio transmitter in the possession of his contact family, arranging the extraction.
    But it had taken him nine days, after the Gestapo had stopped watching the flat, to summon the courage to kill Borg. It was not an easy thing, killing a man. Oldfield had warned him of that—and yet despite the warning, Hobbs had underestimated the difficulty involved.
    Perhaps he was already too late. Perhaps Eva had already fallen into their clutches. Perhaps this was all for nothing.
    Full dark descended in dribs and drabs; lights blazed to life behind blackout shades. Hobbs’ eyes continued following the pedestrians as they came onto the streets. A couple walking arm in arm. An older gentleman with a bristly, fashionable Hitler mustache. A group of young women, doing their best to look glamorous without makeup or expensive clothes. They made him think of Eva; and that led his mind to the German named Teichmann.
    If not for Teichmann, Hobbs would not have found himself in this room in Berlin with a dead man.
    Teichmann, a double agent who had been working for both the British and the Germans, had been the one who had revealed that the entire official network of MI6 agents in Germany had been compromised—by Teichmann himself. By now, the man would have hanged for it. Hobbs hoped it had not been a clean hanging. Sometimes, he knew, the neck did not break immediately. Sometimes it took hours to die: a slow, painful strangulation.
    He hoped the man had suffered.
    Eva, however, had not been given up by Teichmann; for she had been part of a separate network, a set of sleeper agents who numbered only six. Oldfield’s own show, kept separate from the rest of MI6 operations. British Intelligence was not above a few power games of their own. Nothing to compare with the endless machinations of Hitler’s intelligence services, from what Hobbs had gathered during his time at the SD villa; Oldfield and his peers only had to worry about their careers and their reputations, not their lives. But careers and reputations were lives, in the hoary old halls of Whitehall, and so games were played, secrets kept. And it was a good thing, he supposed. Had things been different—had the old boffins around Leconfield House played all their cards above the board—then Eva would not be free at this moment. She would have been just another domino in the official MI6 network, a network that had come tumbling gloriously down.
    But Eva had not been in contact with the British, during her time in Germany. She had been kept apart, waiting for her activation signal to come over the BBC, at which point she would rendezvous with her contact at a prearranged place, at a prearranged time.
    The operation had come together over three long days spent at