Riptide Read Online Free PDF

But two and two were not making four.
    ‘Reggie – I think you’ve just crossed a wire. Stahl is the Tin Man. Stahl is dead. He’s dead, goddammit. They buried him ten days ago. Full military honours.
Hitler was there. Heydrich was there. Half the papers in Germany carried the story on their front pages!’
    ‘No. That’s just my point. He isn’t dead.’
    It was not in Cal’s nature to seek confrontation – he did not enjoy confrontation – but it seemed inevitable that there would be one. Perhaps the best thing was to get it over
with as soon as possible.
    ‘Reggie – are you going to talk in riddles all afternoon?’
    Ruthven-Greene dug around in his pockets as though searching for the last stick of gum or a book of matches. He
handed Cal a typed sheet folded over several times. It was tight and grubby as though it had sat in his jacket pocket forgotten for days and could not possibly be of any importance. But, he knew,
with the British that was often the way, the trivial stood on, perched upon with full blasting dignity, the world-shattering passed across as though it were an afterthought. Cal unwrapped the sheet
of paper.
    ‘It’s a de-crypt of a message we received about a week after Stahl is supposed to have died. Very hush-hush,’ Ruthven-Greene explained.
    Cal read it – curiouser and curiouser.
    ‘This guy says he saw Stahl alive after the air raid. I don’t get it.’
    ‘He’s our man in Berlin. Well placed. Corporal in the Abwehr, as a matter of fact. If he says he saw Stahl alive after the air raid, then he did. You’ll note that he confirms
from a source in Heydrich’s own office that Stahl didn’t die on the seventeenth. No two ways about it. I gather your sources, like ours initially, reported him as having died in the
raid.’
    Cal let the paper fall. A web of loyalties and assumed alliances tearing themselves up and reforming in his mind even as he spoke.
    ‘Yes,’ he said softly.
    ‘Then I think we’ve reached the same point. Two questions. Why would Heydrich go to all this trouble to convince the Boche he’s dead?’
    ‘Perhaps because he thinks he is dead?’
    ‘Good Lord, no. Stahl was his deputy, well, one of his deputies, for seven years. I’d say he’s the one man Stahl could not fool. Whoever they buried, and I rather think they
needed a body for that, it wasn’t Stahl; and, if there was a body, Heydrich would have torn it to pieces, and I do not mean that as a figure of speech, to be certain of his
identity.’
    Cal looked around the room, as though seeking reassurance in the solidity of the furniture.
    ‘Two questions, you said. What’s the other?’
    ‘Much the same as the first really. Why would your Tin Man go to all this trouble to convince the Boche he’s dead?’
    ‘Reggie – I’ve been told to co-operate with you. Don’t play games with me. You haven’t come all the way to Zurich to have me tell you Stahl spied for us. You know
that already or you wouldn’t be here.’
    ‘Quite. I saw General Gelbroaster the day I set off. He gave me the bare facts. Sort of wanted you to fill me in with the detail.’
    ‘Sort of?’
    ‘You know, first hand. You knew the blighter after all.’
    ‘Is this room secure?’
    ‘Secure?’
    ‘I mean,’ said Cal, ‘can we talk?’
    ‘My dear fellow, we are talking.’
    Reggie tucked into a sandwich. Cal found his appetite had vanished. He’d dreaded this moment ever since he got Gelbroaster’s ‘Tell RG everything.’
    ‘Stahl is Austrian. I’ve never been certain of his age but I’d think he was in his early thirties, say thirty-two or -three. He joined the Nazi Party in 1929, and a couple of
months later he contacted the Polish Secret Service and offered to spy for them. You’ll recall, the Poles looked like bigger players in Europe at that time than they’ve done at any time
since. It wasn’t such an odd move. They checked him out, and took the risk. They trained him. He’s not the kind of