Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) Read Online Free PDF Page B

man you’d ever want to go up against without a tommy-gun in your
hand. Stahl then joined the SS – must have been one of the pioneers, certainly in the first five hundred – and then moved sideways into the SD. Early on he met Heydrich and at some
point in the mid-thirties Heydrich took him up, became, I guess, his patron in the party. At which point the quality of Stahl’s information became almost priceless. At least it would have
been if there’d been the political will to evaluate it. He supplied the Poles with infrequent but accurate high-level information right up to the invasion of Poland.
    ‘About a year before this some bright spark in Polish Intelligence foresaw the outcome pretty clearly and offered Stahl to the British. If you’ve been honestly briefed by your own
people, Reggie, you’ll know that your own side turned him down. There were plenty of people about that time, in the summer of thirty-eight, in any country you care to name, telling themselves
the war was not going to happen. So the Poles offered him to us. We took Stahl. They flew me out about the time of the fall of Warsaw to run him from here. It’s pretty much what I’ve
done ever since.
    ‘I met him half a dozen times, when he was part of some official delegation at our embassy in Berlin, the reciprocal visit in Zurich and at those dreadful Bierabend s the Nazis used
to organise for the foreign press and diplomats. I’ve heard him play duets with Heydrich, and I’ve seen him fend off questions from Ed Murrow and Bill Shirer, but I doubt I ever got
more than fifteen minutes alone with him at any one time. Usually in the middle of Berlin. With Gestapo thugs all over the place. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so scared in my entire
life. Everything else has come via couriers and codes. He rations what he tells us, and needless to say we ration what we pass on to you. We did nothing to draw attention to him as the source of
our information. It worked well, until now. I don’t know what’s gone wrong. An air raid I could believe. Lousy luck, but believable. But if he’s faked his own death and vanished .
. .’
    Cal had no idea how his sentence should end. Reggie finished it for him, half-eaten sandwich poised in the air, his voice not much above a whisper.
    ‘. . . And all he knows has vanished with him . . . We must have him. Really we must.’
    ‘I know. You already said that. What is it you think he knows?’
    ‘Anything or everything, it really doesn’t matter. That close to Heydrich for that long. Whatever he knows we must know too. I gather Heydrich is mad with frustration or grief
– do these buggers feel grief? do they feel at all? – whatever, he has lost someone of immense value. That much is obvious. I rather think he’s up to something very clever in
faking that funeral. He’ll have his men looking for Stahl. I pray to God we find him before they do.’
    ‘Find him? I don’t even know where to start looking.’
    ‘England, dear boy.’
    ‘England? Why England?’
    ‘Where else can he go? If he were coming to you he’d be here by now. He’s had more than a fortnight. He’d have been here in a couple of days, or so I should think. No,
he’s heading for England. I know it in my bones. He’s heading for London. And so should we.’
    ‘We?’
    ‘You and me. You’re to accompany me to England. Gelbroaster’s orders. A spot of liaison.’
    Ruthven-Greene said ‘liaison’ as though it were lunch. A pleasant way to pass a little time, rather than a diplomatic quagmire.
    ‘I guess I don’t have a lot of choice, do I?’
    ‘No, you don’t. If I’m right and your Tin Man shows up in London, we’ll need you to identify him. Would you believe we don’t have a single clear photograph of the
man?’
    Yes. Cal could easily believe that. He’d seen hundreds of shots of the Nazi hierarchy. He’d yet to see one in which Stahl had not managed to be in shadow or behind someone taller.
Always the