Angel Rising Read online

  ANGEL RISING

  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 Publishing.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  The Pursuit

  The Quarry

  Incident in Scotland

  Sisters

  Criminal Matters

  Incident in Brazil

  The Gathering Clan

  Friends Like These

  Death in the Dark

  Closing In

  The Goal

  Epilogue

  ‘There was a pause – just long enough for an angel to pass, flying slowly’

  Ronald Firbank

  Prologue

  We drove into the hills behind the Costa Blanca resort of Javea, to visit the historic site of Guadaliest, where some centuries ago a fortress town had been split asunder by an earthquake. I was not sure this was a journey we should risk, because although the ruins are spectacular, viewing them involves a good deal of walking, either uphill or down again, and my companion was in her late eighties. But she pooh-poohed the suggestion that it might be too much for her.

  This attitude was typical of Anna Fehrbach, alias the Countess von Widerstand, alias the Honourable Mrs Ballantine Bordman, alias Anna Fitzjohn. Her ebullient confidence had carried her, when hardly more than a girl, through the horrors of the Second World War, not to mention the traumas of trying to survive afterwards, which for her had been greater than for most, as she had remained for too long the most wanted woman in the world.

  I had been fortunate in coming into her life as she had been realizing that the time was approaching when she should be preparing to leave it. She had closed the book on her career several decades ago, when circumstances had led to the decision that the time had come for her to disappear, and by which time she had achieved the immense wealth that had enabled her to do so, completely and without trace. Her vanishing act had caused many people to wonder if she was dead, or had ever existed, or merely been a figment of frightened men’s, and women’s, imaginations. But after having withdrawn for so many years entirely from the life she had once lived, and understanding that even her retirement was drawing to a close, she had felt the urge to leave behind some proof that she had been, that she had played so important a part in history, had, indeed, influenced the course of those tumultuous years. And while she was in this retrospective mood, who should appear but a journalist who had spent many years of his own life tracking her down.

  Of course Anna Fehrbach was well aware that there were quite a few people, principally resident in Moscow, interested in discovering whether she might still be alive, and thus she had regarded me with suspicion when at last I had traced her to her secluded villa situated high on Montgo, overlooking Javea. And when I had first called upon her, having by then learned enough of her from guarded references in autobiographies and other memoirs, the descriptions of her as the most beautiful but also the most deadly woman of her time, I had had no doubt that I was taking a considerable risk. Anna’s skills were immense, but they, and her survival, had rested on a single supreme characteristic: when she felt it necessary, or herself to be in danger, she acted without hesitation, and with tremendous speed, and her actions were always lethal.

  But her perception of the world, governed by her genius – as a girl she had had an IQ of 173 – had taken her no more than a few seconds to discern that I was too young and too innocent to have ever been an enemy, and that I was suffering almost an obsession with this nebulous figure I had sought for so long. And Anna, whatever her reputation for cold-blooded ruthlessness, remained essentially a woman, and thus susceptible to flattery.

  So we had struck up a strange relationship, almost that of mentor and pupil, with the pupil falling more and more under the spell of the mentor as she had told me her story. Much of it was disturbing, certainly amoral, but when one was in the company of Anna Fehrbach morality was irrelevant. Thus I could glance sideways at her as we followed the winding road, and picture what had been. She remained tall, only an inch beneath six feet, and slender, although her full shirt still suggested what might lie concealed. Her legs were long. I had never seen them, as at her age she always wore pants, but her feet and ankles, exposed by her sandals, were exquisite. As was the bone structure of her face. The skin was now drawn a little tight, but the beauty was untarnished. The whole was set off by the jewellery she was never without, the little gold bar earrings, the huge ruby solitaire on the forefinger of her right hand, the gold Rolex on her left wrist, and of course the gold chain that disappeared, enticingly, into her shirt front and from which, I knew, was suspended the crucifix which was the only reminder of her Catholic childhood. Only her hair, now quite white and cut short, where once it had been pale gold and brushed her thighs, definitely established her age.

  After what she had told me, it was simple to see beyond this elderly but still entrancing mask, and picture the seventeen-year-old Austro-Irish schoolgirl, arrested with her family in Vienna in March 1938 because her father was an anti-Nazi journalist. Or the innocent who, because of her beauty and her intelligence, as well as her athletic skills, had been sent to an SS training camp, taught to seduce and then to kill, and inducted into the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst, the most secret of the Nazi secret services, and thus become the mistress as well as the private assassin of Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s Hangman, compelled to obey his every command because the Nazis held her parents hostage for her loyalty.

  I could imagine her, if I dared allow myself, being strapped naked to a bar in a Gestapo torture chamber to be punished for a breach of discipline, or rolling in the arms of Clive Bartley, the MI6 agent who had ‘turned’ her, and to whom she had given all her angry, youthful, loyalty.

  I could imagine her suspended naked by her wrists in a cell in the Lubianka Prison in Moscow, being tortured by the NKVD with jets of water after her failed attempted – as ordered by Heydrich – assassination of Josef Stalin, just as I could imagine the Angel from Hell, as she often described herself, committing a terrible vengeance when the American, Joseph Andrews, had secured her release.

  I could see her again avenging herself, and thousands of Nazi victims in concentration camps, by master-minding and completing the assassination of Heydrich in Prague in 1942, just as I could see her undergoing the humiliation of sharing Hitler’s bed in order to place the bomb that would blow him to perdition . . . and had not done so.

  And most of all, I could see her, when the Americans had allowed themselves to be convinced by their then Soviet allies that she was too dangerous to be allowed to live, killing the old friend they sent to ‘eliminate’ her, after he had made the fatal mistake of attempting to enjoy her beauty before completing his mission.

  But she had survived all of that, and even, in the collapse of the Third Reich, managed to extricate her parents from their prison, and get them to the supposed safety of England, and herself to a new life, hopefully free of the traumas of the past. But . . .

  I pulled into a parking spot in the little town beneath the ruins. We had had a splendid lunch at a delightful restaurant called El Riu, but in the last stages of the drive she had been pensive, as she often was when considering her past. I had not wanted to disrupt her reverie, but now I ventured, ‘When last we talked, you suggested that things did not work out quite the way you had hoped, when the shooting stopped.’

  She seemed to awake with a start. ‘Do you really suppose the shooting has ever stopped?’ She still spoke English with the soft Irish brogue she had inherited from her mother. ‘Certainly for me. There were just too many people who wanted me, for too many reasons. Did not someone once say, once you climb on the back of a tiger, you can never get off. I was just coming up to twenty-five years old when I fled Nazi Germany. And do you know how many people I had killed by then, either for the SD or for MI6? Or,’ she added, ‘simply to stay alive?’

  ‘I have been keeping count,’ I admitted. ‘Fifty-three.’

  ‘Fifty-three,’ she mused.

  ‘But,’ I pointed out. ‘As you once told me, you were fighting a war. Had you been a fighter pilot you would have received the Victoria Cross.’

  ‘It is still quite a burden to carry to one’s grave, even had it stopped then. I so wanted it to stop then, to turn my back on my past . . .’ Another gentle sigh. ‘You know –’ and I felt now she was talking to herself rather than to me – ‘with perhaps six exceptions, they were all guilty men, and women, if only by belonging to such horrendous organizations as the SS and the Gestapo or the NKVD, or trying to betray me. But . . .’

  ‘They wouldn’t let you retire.’

  She made a moue. ‘Clive had planned it all so carefully. I was supposed to have died along with most of the others, when the Russians stormed Berlin. But I had made the mistake of trusting people.’ She brooded for several seconds, and I knew she understood that had been her greatest, indeed, her only, weakness, caused by the extreme loneliness of her profession, the urgent necessity of a very young woman, as she had then been, to find a friend in whom she could confide, on whom she could rely.

  ‘You are thinking of Henri Laurent?’

  Her mouth twisted. ‘Henri didn’t betray me, then. He intended to, but Clive scared him off. As a reputable Swiss banker, had it become known that h
e had been secretly laundering money for Himmler his career would have been over. That he reappeared in my life was because of Katherine.’

  ‘Your sister, who was captured by the Russians.’

  ‘But they released her, and then –’ for a moment her expression hardened, before relaxing again – ‘but Birgit, and Stefan . . . Birgit had been my maid for five years. She had been with me in Moscow, in Washington, and in Prague, and every time had been pretty traumatic. But always I had had her unquestioning support. I actually thought that she would follow me to hell and back. And Stefan . . . he had been my personal trainer for four years. He worshipped me. He said so, and I believed him. What had never occurred to me was that they were giving me their entire support as the Countess von Widerstand, the Fuehrer’s favourite woman, not as Anna Fehrbach. When I told them I was abandoning the Reich, they refused to follow me. I should have shot them both. I think they expected it. But I thought I had turned my back on killing. So I let them go. To buy their own salvation, as they supposed, by telling their eventual captors that I was alive.’

  Another brood. I rested my hand on hers. ‘But there were compensations, weren’t there? Like ten million dollars? When you could get to it.’

  Anna Fehrbach smiled.

  The Pursuit

  Lavrenty Beria was a very large man. Tall and powerfully built, his size was accentuated by his great hairless head and bland features, in the centre of which the delicate pince-nez seemed out of place. And, of course, there was his aura. As commander of the NKVD, the Narodny Kommissariat Vnutrennkh Del, the Russian secret police throughout the recent war, he was the second most powerful man in the country, after Premier Stalin himself. And now that the NKVD had been reconstituted as the Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennpy Bezopasnosti, or MGB, that is, from being the Commissariat for Internal Affairs to being the Commissariat for State Security, he was more powerful than ever. There could be no appeal from his decisions, and to be accused by him was to be condemned: he told the courts what sentences to pass.

  Thus Nicolai Tserchenko trembled as he entered the office. A heavily built man himself, but overweight and with a somewhat sleepy expression on his broad Tatar features, he had not been here for a year, had hoped he had been forgotten. But whatever the reasons for this summons, he could take comfort from the fact that if he had failed in his primary duty of delivering the Countess von Widerstand alive to this prison, to be tortured into confessing before being placed before a public tribunal and condemned to death for her attempt on the life of Premier Stalin back in 1941, he had at least seen her to her grave. To all intents and purposes. So the reason for this peremptory summons was a mystery.

  And Beria was looking genial enough, at this moment. ‘Comrade Colonel,’ he said. ‘Sit down. What have you been doing with yourself, since the shooting stopped?’

  As if he did not know. ‘I have—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Beria said. ‘But you must have been enjoying a considerable amount of satisfaction at having brought the business of the Countess von Widerstand to a satisfactory conclusion.’

  ‘Well, Comrade—’

  ‘Even if you did not actually do that.’ Beria’s voice suddenly cracked like a whip.

  Tserchenko winced. ‘Well, Comrade—’

  ‘I would like you to tell me again, Comrade, exactly what happened that night in Germany.’

  ‘I submitted a full report . . .’

  ‘I read your report, Comrade, and I accepted it as representing the facts. Now I would like to go through it again. Acting on information received from one of our agents in Berlin, that the countess had been authorized to leave the capital before it was entirely surrounded by our forces, and was planning to do so within twenty-four hours, you thrust an advance guard of our people forward to block the Berlin–Magdeburg road as this was the escape route you had been told she would probably take. And, unsuspecting that she had been betrayed, she blundered right into your arms. But yet you could not hold her.’

  ‘As I explained in my report, Comrade Commissar, I cannot account for what happened. She tried to drive through our road-block, and we opened fire. Her driver was killed, and the car went into a ditch. We arrested her and her maid, and took them to our temporary headquarters. We could not get them out that night, as there were Germans all around us, but we radioed for assistance, and were told that we would be relieved the next day. All we had to do was hold our ground. So this we did. Both the women were securely bound, and I placed them for the night in a room, guarded by Major Morosawa. You may remember, Comrade Commissar, that you yourself appointed Major Morosawa to be my aide on this mission, because she had dealt with the countess before, in 1941, and knew all about her various tricks and abilities.’

  ‘Olga Morosawa,’ Beria remarked, ‘was a very competent officer. So, you left her alone, in charge of the prisoners.’

  ‘Well, Comrade Commissar, I felt it was proper. Both the prisoners were very handsome women, and I felt it might lead to impropriety were they left in the hands of male soldiers.’

  ‘Did you not even trust yourself?’

  Tserchenko licked his lips. ‘I . . . well . . .’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And, I may say, sir,’ Tserchenko hurried on. ‘Major Morosawa was absolutely confident that she could take care of the situation. Besides, there were two armed guards in the outer room.’

  ‘And now she is dead. As well as the two guards.’

  ‘Well, sir, she also was armed, and as I said, the two women had their hands securely bound behind their backs . . . and yet they got out, somehow, stole a truck, and escaped.’ He frowned as an idea occurred to him. ‘You do not suppose that Major Morosawa untied the countess to . . . well . . . the countess was a very beautiful woman.’

  ‘I think you can assume that she still is a very beautiful woman.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘So she escaped your custody, after shooting Major Morosawa and the two other guards . . . but you say she had no weapon and was bound.’

  ‘She must have had help, from somewhere, somehow . . . those guards were shot with a Luger pistol, and one of them had been robbed of his tunic and his side cap. Major Morosawa was armed with an American Colt automatic. But she also was shot with a Luger. There must have been someone . . .’

  ‘And with all this information, you still confidently reported her as dead.’

  ‘Well, sir, she fled to the north. Not the south as I would have expected. Therefore she could only have been returning to Berlin. And when the city fell, I searched everywhere for her body.’

  ‘But you did not find it.’

  ‘There were so many bodies . . .’

  ‘And you found no one to confirm your conviction that she had returned to the city and perished there. Perhaps you did not look hard enough, Comrade.’

  ‘Sir, I spent two months in that dreadful charnel house . . . and if I may remind you, the British Government, who seem also to have been looking for her, announced officially that she was dead.’

  ‘The British Government,’ Beria said thoughtfully. ‘Who are becoming increasingly hostile to us. They are, as always, following some devious plan of their own. However –’ he picked up a photograph from his desk and held it out – ‘tell me who this is.’

  Tserchenko took the photo, cautiously, as if expecting it to bite him. He gazed at the woman depicted, and frowned. ‘But this is the countess’s maid. The other woman we arrested.’

  ‘Ten out of ten: Birgit Gessner.’

  Tserchenko continued to stare at the photograph. ‘I do not understand. She escaped with the countess, and . . .’

  ‘Returned to Berlin? Where she died, with the countess?’

  ‘Well, sir . . . when was this taken? She looks, well . . . not very well.’

  ‘That was taken two months ago, that is, in January of this year, which, if I may remind you, is nine months after the fall of Berlin. And she wasn’t very well, when it was taken. She had spent those nine months hiding in various cellars and living off scraps, and she had just spent the previous several hours being interrogated by Military Intelligence. I’m afraid their methods are somewhat rough and ready. But she eventually told us what we wanted to know. The countess did indeed flee north after escaping from you. And she did indeed have help. There had been four people in that car you stopped. The driver, who, as you say, was shot, the countess and her maid, and another man, one of her lovers. This man escaped in the darkness and confusion, but managed to follow your people, and the countess, back to your post, where he rescued the countess and the maid, killing Olga Morosawa and two of our people while doing so.’