Mission Berlin (The Only Good German) by Ted Allbeury

Author:Ted Allbeury [Allbeury, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0802708927
Published: 2019-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

A door in the far wall was closed and locked, and it took twenty minutes testing for security devices, but it was ‘clean’. It was an expensive rim-lock with a reverse double-action on notched tumblers and an angled ward. It kept him busy for six minutes.

The room was quite small with two leather armchairs and a swivel chair at a wide oak desk. Above the desk was an oil painting, a street scene showing old houses in Poseldorf on the outer Alster, Hamburg’s Chelsea. Mills gently touched the frame but it didn’t move. He gripped it with both hands and as he pulled, it had folded open on hinges set in the wall. Behind it was a small grey safe with a combination lock. But he had no equipment that would open a solid modern safe. He closed the oil painting back to the wall and stooped to the desk. All the drawers were locked, but they responded easily to the skeleton keys. But there were four different locks. In the three drawers on the left-hand side were red-covered ledgers with the years embossed on their spines. They covered the last ten years. As he turned the pages he saw that they were in some private code but the figures were in millions. In the top drawer on the right-hand side were insurance policies in the name of Lerner and the deeds to the house and the Hotel Helga.

In the second drawer was a magnifying glass and six folders with plastic sheets holding negatives and contact sheets. The photographs were 2¼-inch square and on the reverse side of each was the girl’s name, a man’s name and a date. The dates spanned fourteen months. Below the folders were a dozen stamp-album leaves with cellophane cover sheets. On each sheet there were empty spaces where stamps had been removed. On the first sheet there were six stamps left, they were all deep blue, value 5 cents and across the top were the words ‘Signing the compact’. On the second page was a single stamp, the centre was blue and showed an old-fashioned monoplane flying upside down. The frame was a dull red and the value 24 cents. On the other pages were other US postage stamps but there were more empty spaces than stamps. There was a small hard-backed notebook and the first ten pages were filled with names and figures. At the bottom of each page were totals. The figure on the last page was almost a million marks.

In the third drawer was a Luger and a silencer, with cardboard boxes heavy with ammunition. At the bottom were two manilla file covers. In the first was typed correspondence with an outfit called Metro Travel Inc., with an address in Washington. There were at least two full-stops missing in each letter where micro-dots had been lifted off. The second held birth-certificates for Lerner and his wife, a marriage certificate, German passports for both of them and separate American and German passports in the name of Max Tiebert, occupation – ‘Geschaftsführer’.

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