A Game of Spies Read Free Page A

watching the weather. When it warms sufficiently, time will be up. We will meet again in one week at this bench. You’ll apprise me of your progress then.”
    They sat for another minute in silence. Then the man stood, creakily. He put the cigar back between his lips. “Klinger is forty-five,” he said. “Short. Dark. With a mustache just turning gray. The seventh floor?”
    â€œI highly recommend it.”
    â€œThank you, young lady. There are five hundred marks in the newspaper, to help you along. If Klinger proves valuable, more can be arranged. Auf Wiedersehen.”
    â€œAuf Wiedersehen,” she said.
    She watched as he moved away, haltingly, leaning on the cane. She kept watching until he was out of sight. Then she stood, folding the newspaper under her arm, and strolled slowly away in the other direction.
    After a moment, a man sitting on a nearby bench came to his feet. He folded his own newspaper beneath his arm, pulled the brim of his hat lower over his face, gave Eva another moment to gain some distance, and then fell into step behind her.
    LAKE WANNSEE, DÜSSELDORF
    Hagen could feel another headache coming on.
    He reached for the bottle of SS Sanitäts aspirin and twisted off the lid. He was going through the little aspirin bottles quickly these days—too quickly. It would have concerned him, if only he’d had the time to be concerned by such trivialities.
    He took two of the pills, added a third, and washed them down with the last cold sip of ersatz coffee in the mug by his hand. He returned the vial to the drawer of his desk and sat still, waiting for the headache to soften a bit before he proceeded to the next bit of unpleasantness on his roster for this altogether unpleasant day.
    Around him, the villa was filled with the soft, professional sounds of business progressing as usual. In a room to his left, spies were being trained: he could hear the muted whir of cameras and the intermittent crackling of radio sets. Farther down the hall, a sample interrogation was proceeding in polite, gilded tones.
    The villa, a sprawling holiday resort of several dozen rooms, had been built in 1914 but only recently had been taken over by the SS Security Service—Hagen’s organization, the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst. Until a few months before, he thought, the sounds in the villa must have been very different indeed, as wealthy Berliners on vacation had slept, dined, played cards, and made love.
    But times changed.
    These days more than ever, times changed.
    After a few minutes, the headache lost its edge, settling in for the duration as a dull thud. Hagen decided he could wait no longer. But the energy required for the task before him, which once would have been available in surfeit, felt beyond his grasp. Over the past few months, for the first time in his life, he had started to feel his age. The problem, no doubt, was a lack of activity. He sat behind this desk day after day, wrangling over minutia and nonsense.
    He recognized, however, that he was no longer a young man. And he intended to age gracefully, if that was possible for a soldier such as himself. The time for active involvement in operations had passed. The maneuver in Holland had been his last. His legacy would come in the form of a pupil, a piece of clay to be molded in his image. And he had accepted this fact, as dispiriting as it sometimes seemed.
    After a few moments, he exhaled a long, measured breath. He had been working too hard, he thought. He was feeling philosophical, and at his core he was not a philosophical man. A vacation was in order. If he could force himself to relax, things would look brighter.
    A vacation. Still more idleness.
    His lips pursed. After another moment, he summoned his resolve, shoved his chair back from the desk, straightened his dark tailored suit, and left the office.
    He found William Hobbs standing on a balcony outside his room, facing the gray waters of Lake Wannsee and smoking a