Coburg’s left hand was still gripping the handle of his leather briefcase. They had found him like that, on the shoreline rocks, under a warm, late-summer sun. He was half-dead but he wasn’t going to let go of the case. His fingers were long and bony and they held on to his precious possession as if even death would not part him from it.
Now, deep into the voyage back to the mainland, there was still no sign that he intended to ever release his grip.
‘Are they in there, the papers?’ Wilde asked Harriet when she stood back from her efforts to soothe his fever.
She nodded.
‘I’d like to take a look at them.’
‘There’s no hurry.’
‘Still, I’ve come all this way on the back of what you told me – I’d very much like to look at the evidence.’
‘Go ahead then, if you can get them off him. He doesn’t seem inclined to release his hold.’
In the end, Coburg simply didn’t have the strength to resist and Wilde gently untied the cord and prised the briefcase from his talon-like fingers. The German’s eyes were wide and imploring, but he said nothing.
‘I need to look at this, Herr Coburg. Don’t worry, your property is safe with me. We’re on your side.’ Wilde snapped open the case and slid out dozens of foolscap pages, efficiently pinned together into different sections with large paper clips.
Coburg nodded in resignation. ‘They tell you everything,’ he said in perfect, though accented, English. ‘The whole story. Müller, Eichmann, Eberl…’
Wilde placed the papers on a small fixed table and began to go through them. The paper on top was a hand-drawn map of what used to be Poland but was now divided up into districts of occupation and given new names denoting their changed status as integral parts of the Reich – the General Government, Bialystock, Warthegau. Within these areas, camps were clearly indicated by a black cross and a tiny skull. The crosses were fiercely inscribed in black ink as though stabbed with a sharp-nibbed pen.
Beside each camp was a single word: Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Janowska, Auschwitz. Harriet had mentioned some of these names, but otherwise they meant nothing to Wilde. Given what he already knew, however, their purpose was all too clear. The inked skulls, the crosses and the testimony he had heard second-hand from Harriet told him that these were the Nazi death factories.
The chart was also a spider’s web of railway tracks from major cities and what appeared to be holding camps, each leading ineluctably to the end of the line.
He looked through the other pages; they were official documents with printed headings of the RSHA – the Reich Main Security Office – and the department involved, Referat IV B4. Each was stamped with the words STRENG GEHEIM – top secret. Wilde spoke enough German to get the gist. These were official orders regarding requisitions and deployments of railway carriages, locomotives, drivers and guards. To the innocent eye, their import was not immediately obvious, but Wilde had a pretty good idea what they referred to. The figures, too, were informative. Each carriage of each train had a number beside it. With a chill, he realised that the figure referred to the human consignment on a specific transport. These cattle cars all seemed to contain upwards of a hundred people, so a train forty carriages long might hold 4,000.
The details of these transports were for internal consumption only, and never supposed to see the light of day. They were there because, despite everything, the Nazis still adhered to the correct Teutonic way of doing things. Everything must be in order, everything must be properly recorded – even their own insane acts of cruelty.
Then came papers headed as draft minutes of a conference held in a villa at Wannsee near Berlin and dated 20th January of the present year. It was an area of Germany that Wilde knew. On page one was a list of attendees, which was headed by the late Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office and thus overlord of both the Gestapo and the SD. Wilde did a quick calculation; this conference had taken place less than five months before Heydrich’s assassination in Prague by two agents sent from England. Wilde scanned through the other names but only two caught his eye: Heinrich Müller and a man called Adolf Eichmann, which sounded like the name Coburg had mentioned.
‘Is it possible we are being followed?’ Skoog said from above.
The words broke Wilde’s concentration. He turned and saw Skoog at the entrance to the cabin. He wasn’t sure that he had heard the old seafarer’s question correctly. ‘What did you say, Skipper?’
‘I merely wondered whether it was at all possible anyone might be following us. Only, I have noticed that there is always a boat half a league behind us, and it seems like it might be the same boat. It is travelling at a not dissimilar speed to ourselves, which is unusual in these waters, for we are going at a good rate.’
Wilde hurriedly shuffled the papers back into the briefcase; time enough to study those in detail at a later date. But even at first sight, he knew they told a devastating story. This trip from England had not been in vain. He handed the briefcase to Harriet. ‘Did you hear what Skoog just said?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t like the sound of it.’ He joined the old man at the wheel and peered back along the sleek wooden deck to the distant craft which Skoog had indicated. ‘How long has it been behind us?’
‘At least ten minutes, perhaps all the way from Huggorm. I can’t say for sure.’
‘Is it gaining on us, do you think?’
‘Certainly not by much. You can’t race through some of these narrow channels otherwise you risk being grounded, and no one knows these waters better than me. So we are going fast enough to keep our distance, I think, and I am sure we will beat it to Ekberg harbour. Why? Are you worried, professor?’
Wilde borrowed Skoog’s binoculars. He could see three men aboard the pursuing boat, three complete strangers. He handed the binculars back. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there is someone else who would like to find our passenger. Someone who does not share our good intentions towards him.’
‘Then I have a challenge – and I love a challenge. I’ll lose them.’
The visibility was perfect, yet the Solpalats lost the Arethusa. ‘Where is the boat, Huber? I can no longer see it.’
‘I think it has changed direction, Herr Gruppenführer. Somewhere among those islands ahead of us.’
‘Give me the chart,’ Müller ordered the other Gestapo man, Felberg, who had been standing at Huber’s side doing his best to navigate. The officer clicked his heels and obediently held the large nautical map out to his master. Müller took it without acknowledgement, then spread it on the deck and got down to his knees to study it. After a few moments scanning the chart, he turned back to Felberg. ‘Where do you think we are now? Which way did they go?’
The junior officer pointed to one of the larger islands. ‘We have passed this one, Vindo, and I believe the settlement we saw on the left was Boda.’
‘There was a channel there on the left – a narrow strait,’ Müller said. ‘They could have gone there.’
‘Yes, Herr Gruppenführer.’ It did not do to contradict Heinrich Müller. ‘That is quite possible.’
‘But you’re not sure?’
‘The boat was out of our line of vision when it disappeared, sir.’
Müller turned his attention back to the man at the wheel. ‘Huber, what do you think?’
The young officer chose his words with care. ‘Your suggestion that they went down the channel may well be correct, Herr Gruppenführer, but I think I would have seen them. In truth I have a strong instinct that they would have turned to the right immediately after that channel and headed for all those small islands to the north. The chart shows them as an impossible labyrinth, sir, the ideal place for a good steersman to lose himself. I fear our chances of locating them among all those rocky outcrops are remote, and our chances of hitting shoals and becoming grounded are greater. If they are trying to lose us, that might be the option they would choose. That is what I would do in their place.’
‘Good thinking, Huber.’
‘But if I may say, sir, with respect, I have had another thought.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘If they are trying to lose us in the maze of islands, that does not mean they have changed their ultimate destination.’
‘Go on, Huber.’
‘Well, it might be possible that they have only recently concluded that they are being pursued – in which case we might be able to divine their true destination from their direction of travel until this point. That means we could arrive in port before them and await their arrival…’
‘And their likely destination? What do you think?’
‘The little harbour of Ekberg looks quite likely, sir.’
Müller peered at the map again and stabbed his small finger at the map. Ekberg. Of course, that was the place they had gone to meet the woman who put him in touch with Axel Anton. Yes, indeed, Huber was almost certainly correct.
‘Good man, Huber. If this comes off, I am recommending you for promotion.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘If not, of course… well, I leave that to your imagination.’ Müller winked at the steersman. ‘Only joking, young man.’
Skoog had suggested taking Coburg straight into the heart of Stockholm, where there was a fine hospital, but Wilde and Harriet were unhappy at the prospect.
‘Isn’t there one nearer your home port, Skipper?’
‘Well, there is one some way further up the coast. Would you like to go there?’
‘I think it’s safer,’ Wilde said.
‘OK, then. But that will take us an extra hour or more. I thought you were in a hurry. What about our local doctor’s practice? That would save a lot of time – and he is a fine physician.’
Wilde glanced at Harriet. She nodded.
‘Good,’ Skoog said. ‘Then that is much more simple.’
Huber steered the motorboat into the small harbour of Ekberg. This was easy for a man with his boat skills; his father had taught him well.
‘You two, tie up,’ Müller said. ‘And then we wait and watch.’
The other boat arrived three-quarters of an hour later, with two men visible – one at the wheel and another at his side. They looked like the men he had seen before through binoculars. Müller was surprised it had taken them so long and had begun to think they had chosen the wrong destination. But once he saw the vessel, he was as certain as he could be that this was the boat they had been following. No sign of the Englishwoman and Coburg, though. Either they were in the cabin or he had been pursuing the wrong boat all the way from Huggorm. Damn that Anton. He very much desired to kill him again.
Wilde jumped ashore with the mooring rope and tied up firmly and expertly. Then he helped Skoog on to land. The old man was struggling now after spending so many hours at sea. Wilde took him slowly, step by painful step, to the bench where they had found him that morning.
‘Are you going to be all right, Skipper Skoog?’
‘Oh, don’t you worry about me, professor.’
‘I want to get you some tobacco for your pipe. Is there anywhere in the town that sells it?’
‘No, you worry about yourself. You have things to do.’
Wilde shook the old man by the hand and thanked him profusely, then took his wallet and offered him his choice of banknotes. Skoog refused.
‘We have to pay you, Skipper Skoog. That was agreed. At least for the diesel.’
‘No, my grandson can pay for that – and you can repay me by continuing to do whatever it is you are trying to do to defeat the Nazis. And if that is not what you are trying to do, then I am no judge of character.’
There was something about the face of the younger man with the windswept hair. Müller had a strange feeling he had seen him before, but where? He certainly had never met him, he was sure of that. But there was a spark of recognition. How could that be? It didn’t make sense. And if that was the boat that had picked up Coburg, what part had the man played in it?
This was the perfect moment. ‘Come,’ he said to his two men. ‘Fit your silencers. You are going to board that vessel. Make caution your watchword: I promise you the Führer would not wish an international incident on Swedish soil, but if we can finish it now, all well and good. It is possible the woman is armed. We know her to be a British agent. That said, don’t hesitate to use your weapons. Shoot instantly, shoot silently, shoot to kill.’
Müller held back. As chief of the Gestapo he was too well known in the world – and he could not be implicated in a shooting in broad daylight in a foreign land, especially not in a country whose ball bearing and iron exports were so vital to the German armaments industry. His two junior agents, however, were expendable. If caught, they would say nothing.
Huber and Felberg stepped off the Solpalats and strode along the quayside. Reaching the Arethusa they stopped, looked around for unwelcome others, then jumped aboard. Now their pistols were drawn, lengthened by slim silencers. Felberg took up position on deck, partly concealed by the wheel from prying eyes ashore, then nodded to Huber who immediately ducked down into the cabin, his pistol clutched in both hands for stability.
From the Solpalats, Müller watched the proceedings on the other boat intently, waiting for the muffled, almost inaudible, sound of gunfire that was certain to come.
There was nothing, not a whisper.
Huber emerged from the cabin of the Arethusa, shaking his head. ‘Not here,’ he mouthed.
Müller raised his right hand and snapped it back sharply. His two men hurriedly disembarked and returned to the Solpalats as ordered.
‘There’s no one there, Herr Gruppenführer,’ Huber said.
‘And you are certain it was the boat we were following?’
‘Yes, sir. The old man at the wheel and the other man were the same – as was the boat itself.’
Müller agreed, but he was puzzled. Yes, it was always possible they had been following the wrong boat all along – except for one thing: the feeling deep in his gut that he knew the face of the younger of the two men from somewhere. But who was he?
From this distance, they could see the two men talking at the far end of the quay. The old man was sitting on a bench and had a pipe in his mouth. ‘This is what we are going to do, gentlemen,’ Müller said. ‘Felberg, you are going to use all your expensive Gestapo training and expertise to follow the younger of those two men. Huber, go and get a car for us in case he drives away.’
‘How do I get a car, sir?’
Müller handed him a bundle of notes. ‘Borrow one, buy one, rent one.’
Huber looked bewildered. ‘But what if no one will agree?’
The Gestapo chief smacked the side of the young man’s head. ‘You hot-wire one, dummkopf.’