Free The Grave of Truth by Evelyn Anthony Page B

where the English girl Pat cooked him dinner, and then he settled down to read them and the books he had brought with him. The subject matter was the closing days of April 1945 and the fall of the Bunker in Berlin.
    There was a six-hour time difference between Washington and Bonn; the telex from the Director of CIA West Germany reached the Director in Washington a little before two o’clock. It was decoded and passed straight through to his personal tray, because of the double prefix TP, which it carried. The Director lunched in his office; he arrived there at eight o’clock prompt and set no limit on the hours he worked. He read the telex through carefully:
    INTERPOL REPORT PROGRESS NEGATIVE . OUR INFORMATION RULES OUT TERRORIST RESPONSIBILITY FOR ASSASSINATION . ANALYSIS OF MOTIVE AND METHOD TALLIES WITH CONTACTS HERE ; UNCLE VANYA OPERATION PROBABLE TO CERTAIN . REQUEST WASHINGTON LIAISON WITH APPROPRIATE AUTHORITY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE .
    The Director pressed a button on his telephone and spoke into it. ‘File on Sigmund Walther, right away.’ He lit a pipe and puffed gently while he waited. They had been keeping a careful watch on the West German politician from the moment he had first declared his belief in détente with East Germany. His private telephone had been tapped and his office in Bonn infiltrated by an agent. There had been no evidence of complicity with the Russians, or of any motive but the one he proclaimed publicly: the reunification of Germany.
    The Director was a man of boundless cynicism in respect of human beings and their motives. He believed nothing unless it showed evidence of venality, and Sigmund Walther was too good to be true. He was bidding for power, and he had chosen a policy which had the appeal of patriotism and peace, and détente which was fashionable, and stood no chance at all of becoming a reality. So the Director believed he was a fake. That belief didn’t satisfy him because it left the true motivation of the man in doubt. Power alone was not sufficient explanation. To become leader of his party, to aim at the Chancellory itself—these were the obvious explanations why Walther projected himself as he did, but to the Director’s subtle intelligence they were too obvious. There was a muted trumpet in the dulcet tones of Sigmund Walther’s political pronouncements, a faint Wagnerian murmur that caught the Director’s ear. West Germany was stable, prosperous and firmly tied to NATO and the Western alliance. She didn’t need a saviour. There were no scandals about Walther. His business and private life was investigated over a long period without turning up a single dubious incident that could be used against him. Again it was too good to be true; the Director rejected it and told his people in Bonn to dig deeper and go back further. There had to be something discreditable. They hadn’t found anything more heinous than a succession of love affairs with girls in his student days, and there were no pregnancies, abortions, drugs or suicides to make them worthwhile. Since his marriage to Minna Ahrenberg, he had never been involved with another woman. An upright businessman, succeeding through sheer ability and personal effort, a model husband, a devoted father, an incorruptible politician with high ideals. It was all a gigantic lie; the Director was convinced of it and let his counterpart in the West German Intelligence Service know exactly what he thought. And there, strangely, he had met resistance.
    The head of German Intelligence had credentials which the West considered impeccable. He had led active resistance to the Nazis and to the SS Intelligence Service, when serving as a young officer under Admiral Canaris. He had been arrested after the Generals’ Plot of 20 July, and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he had withstood torture and protected his associates. He had been released by the Americans, held for a long interrogation,