Angel of Doom (Anna Fehrback Book 5) Read online

  ANGEL OF DOOM

  Christopher Nicole

  © Christopher Nicole 2008

  Christopher Nicole has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2008 by Severn House.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  The Hunters

  The Scheme

  The Best Laid Plans

  A Matter of Morale

  Incident in Warsaw

  The Sentence

  Incident in Stockholm

  Friends

  The Task

  The Break

  Two Can Play

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  We dined at one of the many bar-restaurants that line the front at Arenal, the resort village situated just south of the little port of Jávea, on Spain’s Costa Blanca. Persuading Anna Fehrbach alias the Honourable Mrs Ballantine Bordman, alias the Countess von Widerstand, alias some other names she had not yet confided to me, to dine out was a triumph in itself: she normally preferred the privacy, and indeed, the safety, of her villa, perched in splendid isolation high on Montgo, the mountain that overlooks the entire surrounding countryside, as well as the beach and the sea.

  Sitting next to her in the summer twilight munching calamari and sipping Marquis de Caceres would, I imagine, make any man feel he was hovering on the edge of paradise. Although some might think it could be the other place.

  She attracted attention. Even in her late eighties she was a beautiful woman, only an inch short of six feet tall, utterly elegant in every movement. I had never seen her legs, because nowadays she always wore pants, but it was easy to tell that they were very long, and slender, and as on a warm evening she was bare-footed, her ankles exposed and her splendid toes thrust into sandals, one could envisage the perfection that lay above, just as the loose shirt, occasionally drawing tight as she moved, could yet indicate the irresistible sexuality, that combined with her perfect features, her flawless bone structure, her soft blue eyes, and even her hair, no longer pale yellow but quite white, and cut short where once it had brushed her thighs, had lured so many men, and women, to destruction: twenty-nine at the last count, and I knew that she had not yet finished recalling the events of her remarkable life. The whole was set off by the quality of her jewellery, the gold bar earrings, the huge ruby solitaire on the first finger of her right hand, the gold chain that disappeared into her shirt front and from which I knew was suspended the gold crucifix that was the sole reminder of her Roman Catholic girlhood. Just as the man’s gold Rolex on her wrist was indicative of the equality – indeed, the superiority – she had established in a man’s world.

  That she had agreed to recount her life to me, after more than fifty years of utter privacy, utter secrecy, remained the most remarkable aspect of our relationship. Most historians assumed that she was dead; quite a few refused to believe that she had ever existed. But I had come across her name while researching a book on the Nazi regime, and been struck by the excitingly evocative if indistinct reference to her as ‘the most beautiful and dangerous woman of her time.’

  Thus had begun a lifetime’s search, whenever I had been able to spare the time from earning a living. The references I had gleaned from various news items, memoirs and autobiographies, always scant and often tantalizingly enigmatic, had given no indication that those who supposed her long dead, consumed in the holocaust of the collapsing Nazi regime of 1945, were wrong. Save for an instinct, or more properly, an urgent desire, to satisfy myself that such a figure could not possibly have dwindled into nothing. And here I was, seated beside her, now, I felt, her closest friend and confidant.

  I knew I had been fortunate. I did not doubt that any phantom from her past would have been dealt with in the manner she had dealt with so many adversaries in that past, in a matter of seconds. But she had ascertained that I was what I claimed to be, a professional journalist and author who had not even been born when Hitler had tried to tear the world apart. She had been intrigued, and as Anna, whatever her skills and her profession, was all woman, flattered that I should have devoted so much of my life to finding her. And although she knew that her name had not been forgotten in certain areas – as for instance the many successors to the NKVD – and by people who would have given a great deal to be able to locate her, she was no longer concerned at anything they might do even if they did succeed in finding her.

  Anna’s life had conditioned her never to be handicapped by fear, but in any event she knew that that life was drawing to a close. She had wanted to leave something behind, and here was I, innocent of any connection with her past, clearly in love with her, for all that she was old enough to be my mother, and eager to take down the facts, however disturbing some of them might be.

  She ate daintily, as she did everything with the utmost grace, smiled at the passers-by, who could not resist staring at her.

  Yet for all her radiant good humour she was pensive. During our talks, in which she had, with amazing frankness, discussed her life, she had revealed a pragmatic acceptance, combined with, in certain instances, a good deal of girlish pleasure, of many of the things she had been forced to do, or indeed had been forced to suffer. Perhaps this was a result of the Irish ebullience she had inherited from her mother. Or perhaps it was simply that after all that had happened to her and around her there was simply nothing left for her to experience, except of course for that death which she had so many times so narrowly escaped.

  Thus when she had told me how she, and her entire family, had been arrested by the Gestapo following the Anchluss in March 1938, because her Austrian father, a liberal journalist, had been writing anti-Nazi articles, her bitterness had been tempered by the fact that she had risen above the trauma of being a seventeen-year-old girl, aware of her beauty and equally of the fact that she was in the hands of utterly cold-blooded and obviously lustful men. And women.

  She accepted that her survival had been because the senior SS officer to whom she had been presented as a prize had recognized that in her striking looks, her athletic ability, her IQ of 173, and above all, the speed and decisiveness of her reactions, he had uncovered a prize indeed. She could still be bitter at the stark choice with which she had been presented: work for the Reich, and your family will survive; refuse and they, and you, will go to a concentration camp. But she could also be proud of the way she had triumphed over the quite horrendous training she had been forced to undergo, to the extent that she had been taken into the most secret of German secret services, the SD the Sicherheitsdienst, the world within even the private world of the SS, becoming in the process the protégé of Reinhard Heydrich.

  She could be amused as she recalled her, on the surface, disastrous marriage to the Honourable Ballantine Bordman, when she had spied for the Reich in the very heart of the British Establishment, just as her eyes could still soften as she remembered Clive Bartley, the MI6 agent who had ‘turned’ her and got her back to Germany as a double agent. Equally she could be amused at her affair with the American agent Joe Andrews, the man who had got her out of the Lubianka Prison in Moscow, where she had been awaiting trial for an attempt on the life of Joseph Stalin.

  That had made her a triple agent, and vastly increased the dangers to which she had been exposed; for if the Americans and the British had soon afterwards found themselves fighting on the same side, they had had very different ideas on how their prime secret agent should be used. She had made it very clear that her real allegiance had always been to Clive Bartley, and it had been on his instructions that she had
overseen the assassination of ‘Hangman’ Heydrich in Prague in 1942, a coup that still gave her immense satisfaction, even if she deeply regretted the repercussions the Czech people had been forced to suffer.

  But then the Allies had determined that her talents should be used for the assassination of Hitler himself. And it had all gone disastrously wrong.

  I knew she was still brooding on that, as we had reached this point in her life story when last we had talked. I touched her hand. ‘It cannot possibly be considered your fault,’ I argued. ‘MI6, the OSS, whoever it was, gave you duff material to work with.’

  ‘I accept that.’ Her voice was low and enchantingly musical. ‘But to plant it . . .’

  ‘You had to sleep with Hitler. I understand how ghastly that must have been.’

  She squeezed my fingers, an unforgettable gesture of intimacy. ‘You do not understand at all.’

  ‘Well . . . I suppose I wouldn’t, really.’

  She gave a delightful gurgle of amusement. ‘Oh, having sex with him was a chore. That was because of all the pills that quack Morell pumped into him, so that he found erection difficult and at times impossible. But I made him ejaculate and be happy.’ Even after all her experiences she could still take pride in her sexual skills. ‘But I could not stop myself . . . feeling sympathy for him. I knew he was a monster on an unprecedented scale. I knew he was responsible for millions of deaths. I knew that if he were even to suspect that I was a British agent he would have me tortured to death, and probably watch it happening. Yet I felt sorry for him. He was such a tortured little man in himself. He had created a horror world with himself as its centre, first in his mind and then, I’m not sure even he knew exactly how it had happened, in reality. He was terrified, because he was prematurely old and mentally exhausted, because he wanted to get out to fulfil his dream of rebuilding Vienna as the most beautiful city in the world, and there was no way he could. And of course –’ she gave a quick smile – ‘when I was with him I assumed that within a couple of hours he would be dead. All I had to do was place my bag containing the bomb beside his bed, set the timer, kiss him goodbye, and leave.’

  ‘And it didn’t go off.’

  ‘The bag was even returned to me, with the bomb still inside. I can tell you, that flight back to Berlin was the longest three hours of my life. I didn’t know what had happened, or more correctly, what had not happened. All I knew was that I was sitting with enough explosive on my lap to blow the plane and everyone in it to Kingdom Come. At any moment.’

  ‘But you sat it out. Did I ever tell you that you have got to have more guts than any woman who ever lived? Or any man, either.’

  Another quick squeeze of the fingers. ‘You say the sweetest things.’

  ‘But the second bomb did go off. Only a couple of hours after you had left Rastenburg on that second visit. And still he wasn’t killed. All because a staff officer had moved Stauffenberg’s briefcase to the other side of an upright. Almost makes you believe in Fate.’

  ‘Almost,’ Anna said. ‘Hitler certainly believed it was an Act of God. It never crossed his mind that perhaps neither God nor the Devil wanted the problem of dealing with him.’

  ‘But it still had to count as a failure, to the Allies. What was London’s reaction?’

  ‘I imagine they were disappointed.’

  ‘But they didn’t blame you.’

  ‘At the time, I didn’t see how they could. As far as they were concerned, I had had nothing to do with it. After the first failure they pulled me out of any further attempts, but they still wanted me to control the assassination plot, from a safe distance. They didn’t realize how deeply I was already involved. On Himmler’s instructions I had “infiltrated” the conspiracy. When I did that, I realized how little secrecy was being maintained, how everyone seemed to know what was going on. I was aghast. And Himmler wanted names, more and more names. I stalled him as long as I could. But then Hitler became suspicious himself. I had to produce my list and my evidence. That would have condemned everyone to death. The only possible solution was for Hitler to die before he could read the list.’

  ‘And as he didn’t die . . .’

  ‘Five thousand people, men, women, and children, were tortured to death.’ She gave a little shudder. ‘Do you suppose either God or the Devil will want to receive me?’

  ‘You were doing a job. You hadn’t asked for it. And you—’

  ‘Oh, I was a heroine of the Third Reich, Hitler’s favourite woman. After Eva Braun. He preferred Eva because of her essentially docile personality.’

  ‘And so you survived, to the end. Was it very traumatic?’

  She turned her head to look at me, and I felt a chill. Anna Fehrbach had looked at so many people like that, seconds before she had killed them. ‘Traumatic,’ she mused. ‘I was the most wanted woman in the world. And only a few, a very few, actually wanted to rescue me.’

  ‘But you stayed with Himmler to the end. Even if you hated him.’

  ‘I hated him more than any other man I have ever known. But I had no choice He would not release my parents, even at the very end. I was fortunate that I had other friends in high places.’

  ‘Were you with him, when he died?’

  Anna Fehrbach smiled.

  The Hunters

  ‘Colonel Tserchenko is here, Comrade Commissar,’ said the female secretary, smart in her green uniform.

  ‘Then show him in.’ Lavrenty Beria rose from behind his desk, slowly. He did most things slowly, because of his bulk. He was both very tall and very heavy, his size accentuated by the great hairless head, the large, bland features on which the pince-nez seemed out of place. But as commander of the NKVD he was the second most powerful man in Russia, and the man entering his office did so apprehensively. No one willingly visited the Lubianka Prison, and to find himself actually in the office of the commissar was terrifying.

  But Beria was smiling. ‘Colonel Tserchenko,’ he said, coming round the desk with outstretched hand. ‘Nikolai! It is good of you to come.’

  ‘I obey orders, Comrade Commissar.’

  ‘Well, we all do that, do we not? Sit down.’

  Tserchenko took off his cap and sank into the chair before the desk. It creaked. He also was a heavy man, although a head shorter than the policeman, with matching features and grey-streaked black hair, cut very short; he wore the uniform of a tank commander.

  Beria returned behind his desk and also sat. ‘Yours has been a hard war, Nikolai,’ he remarked.

  ‘As it has for all of us, Comrade Commissar.’

  ‘Indeed. But some have suffered more than others. I am thinking of your poor dear sister.’

  Tserchenko frowned: his sister Ludmilla had died three years ago.

  ‘She was one of my closest and most trusted associates.’ Beria looked ready to cry. ‘A woman of immense talent. A woman with an unlimited future. To be cut off in the prime of life.’

  ‘Accidents will happen, Comrade Commissar.’ Tserchenko and his late sister had not been close.

  ‘Accidents,’ Beria remarked, perhaps to himself. He picked up the photograph lying on his desk and held it out. ‘Have you ever seen this woman before?’

  Tserchenko took it, cautiously, studied it. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘What do you think of her?’

  ‘Well, sir . . . she is quite beautiful.’

  ‘She is that. She is also the most vicious assassin who has ever walked the face of this earth.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I am not certain of her real name, but she masquerades under the title of Countess von Widerstand. I understand that she is half Austrian, half Irish, but she works for the Nazis. Four years ago, which is when that photograph was taken, they sent her here to use her beauty and her seductive skills to worm her way into our society, gain access to the Kremlin, and assassinate Premier Stalin.’

  Tserchenko stared at him with his mouth open.

  ‘She didn’t succeed, obviously,’ Beria said. ‘We arrested her
before she could complete her mission, and placed her here in the Lubianka to await trial. However, she managed to escape. She is the only person ever to have done so. This was the day after the Nazis invaded us. Everyone was very agitated. Even I, I admit it. I knew that we were in serious danger of being overrun, and thus I allowed myself to be duped by a smooth-talking American diplomat named Joseph Andrews, who told me that this woman was wanted in America for an attempt on the life of President Roosevelt, and that it would encourage the United States to grant us aid if we were seen to be prepared to cooperate with them, in this instance by handing this criminal over to them for trial, and, he assured me, certain execution. It seemed a small price to pay for the assistance we so desperately needed.’

  He paused: the colonel was looking distracted. ‘My sister died on 23 June 1941,’ he said slowly. ‘And she was—’

  ‘Yes. At that time she was in command of the women’s section of the prison, where this countess was being held.’

  ‘But . . . I was told that she died of a broken neck after a fall down a flight of stairs.’

  ‘That is what everyone was told, Colonel. It was not considered appropriate to reveal the truth at that time, and indeed what I am telling you now must remain confidential. Your sister’s death was certainly the result of a broken neck, but not as the result of an accidental fall. Despite the written release I had mistakenly given this man Andrews, Ludmilla became suspicious and insisted upon confirmation, whereupon this countess attacked her and broke her neck, and then took her pistol and shot dead the commissar to whom your sister was appealing. This man. Ewfim Chalyapov, was a personal friend of Premier Stalin.’

  ‘But if she was being returned to America to stand trial—’

  ‘That was a fabrication on the part of Andrews, her lover. She had never been in the United States at that time, and had never made an attempt on the life of the president. Having extricated her from the Lubianka, Andrews then turned her loose to continue her blood-stained career. Later that same year she shot and killed six of our agents who attempted to arrest her and return her here for trial.’