Free The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva

when the bombing started and saw them infrequently. Whenever he left the office, even for a few moments, he removed the portrait from the desktop and locked it away in a drawer. Even his identification badge was a riddle. It contained no picture--he had refused to be photographed for years--and the name was false. He kept a small flat near the office, reached by a pleasant walk along the leafy banks of the Landwehr Canal, for those rare nights when he permitted himself to escape. His landlady believed he was a college professor with a lot of girlfriends.
    Even inside the Abwehr little else was known of him.
    Kurt Vogel was born in Dusseldorf. His father was the principal of a local school, his mother a part-time music teacher who gave up a promising career as a concert pianist to marry and raise a family. Vogel earned a doctorate of law from Leipzig University, where he studied civil and political law under two of the greatest legal minds in Germany, Herman Heller and Leo Rosenberg. He was a brilliant student--the top of his class--and his professors quietly predicted Vogel would one day sit on the Reichsgericht, Germany's supreme court.
    Hitler changed all that. Hitler believed in the rule of men, not the rule of law. Within months of taking power he turned Germany's entire judicial system upside down. Fuhrergewalt --Fuhrer power--became the absolute law of the land, and Hitler's every maniacal whim was immediately translated into codes and regulations. Vogel remembered some of the ridiculous maxims coined by the architects of Hitler's legal overhaul of Germany: Law is what is useful to the German people! Law must be interpreted through healthy folk emotions! When the normal judiciary stood in their way the Nazis established their own courts-- Volksgerichtshof, the People's Courts. In Vogel's opinion the darkest day in the history of German jurisprudence came in October 1933, when ten thousand lawyers stood on the steps of the Reichsgericht in Leipzig, arms raised in a Nazi salute, and swore to "follow the course of the Fuhrer to the end of our days." Vogel had been among them. That night he went home to the small flat he shared with Gertrude, burned his law books in the stove, and drank himself sick.
    Several months later, in the winter of 1934, he was approached by a small dour man with a pair of dachshunds--Wilhelm Canaris, the new head of the Abwehr. Canaris asked Vogel if he would be willing to go to work for him. Vogel accepted on one condition--that he not be forced to join the Nazi party--and the following week he vanished into the world of German military intelligence. Officially, he served as Canaris's in-house legal counsel. Unofficially, he was given the task of preparing for the war with Britain that Canaris thought was inevitable.
    Now Vogel sat at his desk, hunched over a memo, knuckles pressed to his temples. He struggled to concentrate over the noise: the rattle of the old lift as it struggled up and down the well just beyond his wall, the splatter of freezing rain against the windows, the cacophony of car horns that accompanied the Berlin evening rush. He moved his hands from his temples to his ears and pressed until there was silence.
    The memo had been given to him by Canaris earlier that day, a few hours after the Old Fox returned from a meeting with Hitler at Rastenburg. Canaris thought it looked promising, and Vogel had to agree. "Hitler wants results, Kurt," Canaris had said, sitting behind his battered antique desk like an impervious old don, eyes wandering the overflowing bookshelves as though searching for a treasured but long-lost volume. "He wants proof it's Calais or Normandy. Perhaps it's time we brought your little nest of spies into the game."
    Vogel had read it once quickly. Now he read it more carefully a second time. Actually it was more than promising, it was perfect--the opportunity he had been waiting for. When he finished he looked up and murmured Ulbricht's name several times as if he