The Inconvenient German by Peter Steiner

Author:Peter Steiner [Steiner, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2022-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

Willi

Willi learned that the plan to get Charlie out of Germany had failed and the Flower Gang was compromised at about the same time Colonel Kurt Strang did. There was a phone call; Willi didn’t recognize the voice. ‘Bessingen has gone wrong,’ a man said. ‘We’re compromised.’ It could be a trick. But if it was a trick, they were still compromised. He thought he had no choice but to go.

Willi called Pierre. The woman answered. He warned her so that she could protect herself. He needed a car, he said. ‘I’ll pass it on,’ she said. Then he called two others to say the network was compromised, which activated the chain. Each of them called two people and so on. The message always used exactly the same words: Bessingen has gone wrong; we’re compromised.

Will called Bergemann and hung up when he answered. Bergemann called back a few minutes later from a safe phone.

Willi told Bergemann what he knew. ‘I need details,’ he said.

‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ said Bergemann.

‘I’m going south,’ said Willi. ‘I’ll call you when I get there.’

Pierre was waiting at the appointed spot in a military ambulance. He was wearing a white coat.

‘Why an ambulance?’ Willi said.

‘It was available, and it’s fast,’ said Pierre.

‘And the white coat?’

‘It’s an ambulance,’ said Pierre.

They headed directly for Bessingen.

They came to a roadblock performing routine stops. Pierre turned on the siren, and they waved him through. Lola and Willi were in the back. Lola had insisted on going along, and Willi couldn’t say no. She was no longer safe at home.

As hard as it was to think about, Willi knew that they were probably too late to save Clover and the pilot. Fedor was not supposed to be with them, so Willi was not worried about Fedor. Still, he had to find out what was over and what could be saved, and he had to move quickly. At the same time, he was putting himself and others at risk by being out and about.

He had been a policeman long enough to understand that few criminal conspiracies remain secret for as long as theirs had. Just one small mistake – not even a mistake necessarily – could expose a loose thread. Then all a halfway decent detective – or, in this case, the Gestapo – had to do was tug on the thread, and the whole conspiracy would unravel and reveal itself. And now it had. It was a catastrophe.

Now the criminality being revealed was his, the conspiracy was his. He had been running a criminal organization. He had started it, had managed it, had enlarged it, had enlisted others – some were his friends, like Fedor, not to mention Lola, and some were entirely unknown to him – and now they were all at risk. Every one of them. He and they had managed a thousand different moving pieces, and eventually the inevitable had happened.

Willi wasn’t frightened for himself. But he was frightened for all the others. He knew what would happen to them if they were caught.

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