Read Online Burn After Reading by Ladislas Farago - Free Book Online Page B

hung in the autumn air. The weather dampened Best’s enthusiasm and he was also disturbed by the fact that for the last few days he had been trailed by an unpleasant looking stout man, though he did not connect this shadow with the plot.
    At 10 o’clock he went to Stevens’ house and found that his colleague was also uneasy. The major went to a drawer, took out two Browning automatics, loaded them, gave one to Best and slipped the other in his pocket. While they waited for Klop to arrive, the Germans came in on the radio, on a direct beam instead of via London. Best expected another cancellation, but this turned out to be a routine request for a change in the hours of transmission. Best concluded everything was going well.
    Klop arrived and, driven by Best’s driver, a Dutchman named Jan Lemmens, the party proceeded to Venlo at a leisurely pace. As they drove, their conversation drifted to thepossibility of invasion and Stevens did a most unusual thing, especially on this sort of mission. He took a pencil and a piece of paper and jotted down a list of the contacts he would have to get out of Holland in the event of invasion. Whether or not the list was still on him at the climax of this adventure only Stevens knew. Best thinks Stevens succeeded in destroying it.
    It was shortly after four when the party arrived at the rendezvous, the red-brick Café Backus, just two hundred yards from the frontier. Nobody was in sight, but Best noticed that, for the first time in his experience, the frontier barrier on the German side had been lifted.
    Best spotted Major Schemmel on the second-floor veranda of the Backus and saw him giving a signal with a sweeping move of his right arm.
    He thought the major was beckoning him to drive up to the café but, just as he was bringing his car to a stop, he heard an outburst of shouting and shooting. A large, green, open car drove up to the café, and stopped as it hit the bumper of his own automobile. It was packed with men, two of whom sat on the hood firing submachine guns.
    Stevens leaned over and said: “I am afraid our number is up, Best!” Next moment both Britons were subdued and handcuffs snapped on their wrists. With little courtesy, they were marched into Germany, as the frontier barrier slowly came down behind them.
    The driver, Lemmens, brought up the rear, but there was no sign of Klop. In the commotion, the young officer tried to escape, but just as he was vanishing under a bush, a German spotted him. A machine gun opened up and the youthful “Cloppens” was mortally wounded.
    What Best and Stevens should have suspected long before, since the Germans had managed their end of the plot with remarkable clumsiness, was now made abundantly evident: their fabulous plot was a German trap. The idea had originated in Heydrich’s fertile brain. Its execution was assigned to a risingyoung star in the Sicherheits Dienst, Werner Schellenberg, only twenty-eight years old, a cold and calculating intellectual with a consummate talent for secret service work.
    Schellenberg was “Major Schemmel.” “I admit,” Best later wrote, “that he had completely taken Stevens and me in when we met him in Holland, but this was not really surprising since he was exceptionally well-informed and had been well-briefed for the occasion. Besides, the man was a natural conspirator, who, as events showed, kept faith with no one.”
    Heydrich had scored a fantastic scoop although he failed to reach the German Opposition. Stevens and Best were merely at the fringes of the greater plot, knew none of its real leaders and few of its details, so they could reveal nothing about it during their prolonged interrogation by Schellenberg. But they were at the very heart of conventional espionage efforts aimed at Germany, the spiritus rectors of the British spy network operating inside the Reich.
    The incident exposed the inadequacy of the British secret service, which