Sea of Spies by Alex Gerlis

Author:Alex Gerlis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2020-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Istanbul

September 1943

On the Friday – the morning after Michael Doyle’s escape from the Kayseri – all hell broke loose in the Abwehr office and the corridors encircling it in the German consulate next to the Park Hotel.

Manfred Busch, the deputy head of the Abwehr station, was in charge while his boss was on a trip to Berlin, a short working visit somehow extended into a lengthy holiday in the Bavarian Alps. A postcard with a photograph of mountains on the front and a message hoping he was coping lay on Busch’s desk. In normal circumstances, Manfred would have been delighted his boss wasn’t around. Heinrich Scholz was only head of station because he was a loyal Nazi, a Party member from the early days, trusted by Berlin rather than professional intelligence officers like Busch. It was a constant source of tension in Berlin that many senior Abwehr officers weren’t even Nazi Party members.

Scholz’s approach to the job was to interfere, to throw his considerable weight around and indulge his taste for food, drink and girls. He was incapable of running operations himself and in the few hours spent in the office – he arrived late and left early – devoted his efforts to claiming credit for anything that was going well and ranting at people when there was a problem. Every so often he’d come up with some hare-brained idea which his colleagues would be obliged to waste their time on.

The Kayseri was one such hare-brained idea and it had become a mess. Busch had never liked the idea of the Abwehr running the brothel in Unkapani. Everything about it felt wrong. He disliked Ulrich, the man Scholz had brought in to run it, whom he regarded as untrustworthy and incompetent. He felt they didn’t have enough control of what was going on there and he was appalled that Ulrich had allowed the place to be in hock to various criminal elements such as the Jew who controlled the prostitutes there and the Kurds supplying the alcohol. In Busch’s opinion the Kayseri was an amateur operation, there to give Scholz easy access to prostitutes rather than be a proper intelligence operation – little information of note had emanated from the place.

And as for Ulrich, he was just another of Scholz’s Nazis; from what Busch could gather Ulrich was an Austrian who lived in Switzerland for a while and had fled from there after killing a man. There was undoubtedly a degree of cunning about him but he was no Abwehr intelligence agent, and what had happened at the Kayseri the previous night was a perfect example of this.

At the end of August all the Abwehr operatives in Istanbul – the agents, the informers, the runners, the drivers – had been instructed to keep their eyes open for a man who’d been spotted in Baghdad with Martindale, a British agent in the city with a reputation for incompetence. The Abwehr agents who’d seen him in Baghdad hadn’t got a name

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