Read Online World War Two Will Not Take Place by Bill James - Free Book Online Page A

better off not knowing this, especially as Mount’s report to London on the ruined chair had been an outright lie. Suppose he went ahead and it came to light he’d ignored the ban on forced entry; Mount would most likely get kicked out of the Service. What kind of job could an ex-snoop get? Yellow Press reporter, maybe. He didn’t think much of that, though.
    Any break-in would involve two different peril types. First, to Mount, personally and physically, and through him to Toulmin. If they’d detected and arrested him, Mount’s search would give final proof of Eisen-Toulmin’s treachery: a spy suddenly short of whispers had turned up desperately seeking his whisperer. Get both into a Gestapo sack. Second, came the prospect of an appallingly flagrant espionage catastrophe that would fracture Anglo-German relations and put at hazard Hitler’s state visit to London, so dear to the king. If SB considered any or either of these likely, he might urgently pull Mount out of Germany. This wouldn’t be another panic, but tactics, based on a profit and loss forecast. In that estimate, loss might look much likelier. SB had seen God knew how many troops sent to their death in the war. The experience made him careful with his men’s and women’s lives. Also, he’d want to safeguard the Hitler visit, if that’s what Edward and Wallis desired, and what he might desire for his own purposes, also. The monarch employed him, was his commander in chief. Fealty: SB owed it, existed for it.
    Mount didn’t feel ready to quit Berlin yet, though. He’d look like someone who did a bunk when things went rough and left his agent to the hunters. Wasn’t Mount bound to feel big loyalty to someone he’d taken part with in a thoroughgoing foursome, this in addition to Toulmin’s worth as an informed, informer voice? If things went rougher Mount might still have to run, or try to: effect ‘instant unscheduled closure of mission and withdrawal’, as the official vocab went. Decoded and de-euphemized, ‘unscheduled’ meant ‘Christ, they’re on to us’. And ‘withdrawal’ meant ‘make a run for it’. But he judged galloping retreat not at all necessary so far.
    He did recognize another worrying uncertainty. If they knew about Toulmin, how long had they known and watched him? As a result, did they also know about Toulmin’s trysts at the Steglitz apartment, and about Stanley Charles Naughton? Mount wondered, and knew SB would also wonder. Mount chose not to make him wonder even more by disclosing too much. At any rate, not immediately. Mount thought of the woman on the stairs and the broken chair conversation. Was she really just a woman on the stairs and the broken chair conversation only a broken chair conversation? Did she report back somewhere? And report back what?
    But he mustn’t let himself get paralysed by such doubts and frets. The training preached carefulness, yes, but also enterprise, resolve, audacity. He began to plan the break-in. It might be unavoidable. There’d be two objectives. One: discover if Toulmin were there, possibly dead. Two: suppose Toulmin weren’t in there dead, look for anything that might say what had happened to him: mainly, this meant documents, notebooks, memos, blood and bone fragments on the wallpaper, photographs, letters. He saw complexities:
    (1) He must decide the best time of day or night for it.
    (2) No window entry was possible because Toulmin didn’t live on the ground floor, so Mount would need a reconnaissance to identify the apartment from inside the building, before an actual crack at entering.
    At Lichtenberg, Toulmin’s place was in one of those famous apartment blocks made of prefabricated concrete slabs, plattenbauten . Mount loved the mass-produced look of them. For coolness and lack of frippery, these buildings went even further than the ‘New Objectivity’