Free The Seventh Secret by Irving Wallace Page B

today?"
    "You did. His daughter, Emily Ashcroft, and friends, buried him outside Oxford."
    "So?"
    "So this—the Ashcrofts were finishing a biography on Adolf Hitler called Herr Hitler. Then Dr. Ashcroft got a lead of some kind from someone in Berlin that Hitler didn't shoot himself in the bunker as everyone believes. The informant said it wasn't Hitler's remains that the Russians dug up. There were no remains of Hitler. Dr. Ashcroft went to West Berlin to look into it. The day before he was to excavate around the bunker, he was killed by a hit-and-run driver in a freak accident."
    "A real accident?"
    "We don't know."
    Tovah studied Shertok's serious scholarly face. "Thanks for the information. What's that got to do with me?"
    "Maybe something." Shertok shifted uneasily. "This morning I got a coded message from Chaim Golding, who heads Mossad in West Berlin. He says that Emily Ashcroft has decided to finish the job on her own. She arrived in West Berlin today. Registered at the Bristol Hotel Kempinski."
    "How do you know all that?"
    "Chaim Golding knows everything that goes on in Berlin, both Berlins, especially when it has to do with Hitler." Shertok hesitated. "I realize you've had a rough assignment here and you're tired. You have a vacation due you. You're planning to go straight back to Tel Aviv and have a reunion with your parents and boyfriend. But—well ..."
    "You want me in Berlin."
    "Golding wants it. So does the director. You know the city. You know German. You know how much we want the truth—whatever it be—about Hitler. Mossad would like you to postpone Tel Aviv. Stay in Berlin for a week at least."
    "To do what?"
    "To meet Emily Ashcroft. Find out what her father knew, or what she knows now, about Hitler's not having died when he was supposed to. You can be Tovah Levine again. Use your old cover, the Jerusalem Post. Maybe try to—to interview her."
    "Ben, you know better than that. She's not going to want to talk to any reporters."
    "Her father did."
    "Yes, Ben, but look what happened to him."
    "You may be right. Well, no matter how you do it, on some pretext or other meet her, ingratiate yourself. Find out what she knows. I don't think anything will come of it, but who can tell? We've got to be sure, Tovah, that the big one didn't get away."
    "Whatever you say. When?"
    "Tomorrow morning to Buenos Aires. From there straight to West Berlin."
    "My hotel?"
    "You're already booked into the Bristol Hotel Kempinski."
    "Cozy."
    "Yes, I told you, we want you as close to Emily Ashcroft as possible." He handed her the plane tickets. "Maybe this time you'll come up roses."
    She smiled wanly. "In my hand, I hope. Not on my grave."
    Â 
    I n West Berlin, at ten o'clock in the morning of an overcast day, Evelyn Hoffmann had emerged from the Café Wolf and stood briefly beside the bookstore on the corner of Stresernann Strasse and Anhalter Strasse to inhale the fresh morning air.
    What she was doing now, and would do the remainder of the morning and part of the afternoon, was a routine that she had followed for twenty-two years, certainly almost without variation for the last ten years.
    But this morning, before beginning her routine, Evelyn Hoffmann paused briefly to study her reflection in the window of the Café Wolf. What she saw did not displease her. At seventy-three, one could not expect to appear as one had at twenty-three. In the early days she had been a beauty, everyone had agreed. She had been taller than medium height, with ash blond hair, slender, sophisticated, reserved, with pride in her long shapely legs. She still cherished a description that dear Keitel—Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel—had given of her after the war: "Very slender, elegant appearance, quite nice legs—one could see that. She seemed to be not shy, but reticent and retiring—a very, very nice person." In fact, she had modeled for the great sculptor, Otto Brecker, in the nude, and had hoped to be a film