Simon Tolkien Inspector Trave Trilogy: Orders From Berlin, The Inheritance, The King of Diamonds. Simon Tolkien

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       BERLIN

      Heydrich dismissed the Lisbon courier with a cursory salute and slit open the package with a silver paper knife adorned with an eagle and swastika – a present from his wife on the occasion of his last birthday. The report was in English but he could read the language fluently. He grimaced at one point, but then nodded twice at the end as if satisfied with its contents and picked up the telephone. He was in luck. The Führer was in Berlin and would see him that afternoon.

      Heydrich sat back in his chair and closed his eyes, allowing his mind to travel back six years to when he’d first met Charles Seaforth on a warm September day just like this one, with the sun shining down on Berlin. It was a good time, full of promise. Hitler had succeeded to the chancellorship a year earlier, and the transformation of the country was already under way. The currency was stabilized, rearmament had begun, and you could sense the country’s new-found sense of purpose wherever you went. Heydrich’s star was on the rise, following that of his master. Three months earlier, Ernst Röhm and Heydrich’s other rivals in the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing, the SA, had been dispatched on the Night of the Long Knives, and his power base in the Gestapo and the SS was now unchallenged. Years of consolidation lay ahead as the party took control of every facet of life in the new Reich, but the way ahead was clear.

      Seaforth had come to Germany ostensibly on a covert operation to recruit agents for the British Secret Service, but his real purpose had been to seek out Heydrich and enlist in the service of the Führer. Heydrich had never encountered an enemy agent who displayed such a single-minded eagerness to betray the country of his birth. He had wanted money, but not an excessive amount, and Heydrich had sensed from the outset that the motive of financial gain was entirely secondary to his new recruit’s passionate, overarching desire to hurt England. This was what mattered to him – he appeared to have no great intrinsic interest in or enthusiasm for National Socialism and the new order in Germany. The resurgence of German power was important to him because he believed that it would lead to war. His certainty on this point had surprised Heydrich. War with England had seemed far from inevitable back in 1934, with a sympathetic government at the helm in London and the Führer moving cautiously step by step to consolidate his power. But Seaforth had been proved right, and his accurate prediction of the future had increased Heydrich’s respect for his new agent.

      Seaforth’s hatred for his country was the reverse of everything that Heydrich stood for. Heydrich prided himself on his patriotism, but here he was, placing his trust in a man who wanted to commit high treason. Why? Partly, of course, because Seaforth’s story made sense. Heydrich had verified the details, and Seaforth certainly had no reason to love England after all that had happened to him. But Heydrich also instinctively recognized that the wellspring of anger that drove each of them forward was essentially the same, even if it led them in opposite directions. Heydrich had been enraged by the November criminals who had signed away the fatherland in 1918, just as Seaforth abhorred the British generals and politicians who had sent their people to die in droves year after year in the mud of Flanders and northern France. Only their conclusions separated them: Heydrich wanted to change his country, whereas Seaforth wanted to destroy his.

      But it was more than rage that they had in common – they shared a capacity to channel and direct their anger. Both were prepared to be extraordinarily patient in the pursuit of their goals; they did not take unnecessary risks but instead built slowly and carefully towards a position of power. For Heydrich, the policy had already paid dividends – he had complete power over the lives of everyone in the Reich through his control of the SD and the Gestapo. Seaforth’s rise had been slower, but the war had helped his cause with the concentration of MI6’s focus away from Soviet Russia and onto Germany, where his fictitious network of agents was located. With Seaforth’s help, Heydrich had been able to liquidate all the other high-level British agents operating inside Germany. He’d done it gradually, picking them off here and there so as not to give the game away either to Seaforth’s superiors in MI6 or to his own rivals in the Abwehr, the official Reich intelligence service run by Heydrich’s rival, the wily Admiral Canaris. But now, finally, Seaforth was the only MI6 spymaster receiving high-level intelligence from inside the Reich, and he was climbing the ladder of seniority inside the British Secret Service at a rate that would have been inconceivable two years earlier. One day soon he might become deputy chief, and MI6 would become an unwitting branch of the Gestapo.

      Yet now, out of the blue, after all the СКАЧАТЬ