The Führer was in full, spittle-flecked flow and Martin Bormann was taking a thorough written note, as always. The subject of Hitler’s dinner-table diatribe this evening was the perfidy and cowardice of the Italians in North Africa and the uselessness of his own generals in the east. No man was more diligent than Bormann, the ultimate administrator, and so he continued to take notes with his usual attention to detail, but this evening his mind was elsewhere, and he was worried. He had smoked a hundred cigarettes since breakfast.

Otto Kalt was dead, killed after shooting Horst Spahn. He knew that now, though the men at the SD were still not sure who Kalt was, only that he was registered as a pig farmer and Party member. The only good news was that Spahn was dead, too, which had effectively shut down the SD’s interest in the case.

Charlie Jung was another matter. He was out of contact – possibly dead or in captivity.

Bormann could trace his movements only so far. A small naval vessel had conveyed him from the Baltic, across the North Sea to England. The second-to-last message from the E-boat had told Bormann that he had been taken ashore by ship’s boat and had landed safely on the east coast late at night. After that, there was another, final, message in which the E-boat had reported coming under fire from a British naval vessel. Then nothing.

And so he must assume that the E-boat was destroyed, and that Jung was somewhere in England. It was the not knowing that shredded Bormann’s nerves. Why had he not contacted Vickery and wired a message back?

The only other fresh information Bormann had received was from Stockholm, where Abwehr agents had plotted the movements of a man, a woman and a child, taken under the protection of the British Legation before being flown out from Bromma. Presumed destination: Leuchars air base in Scotland.

All Bormann could do now was wait. He had no fears that Jung would be turned by the British secret services. He might be English by birth, but his great wealth resided inside the Reich and they both knew that Germany would ultimately be victorious. Bormann trusted him; they were like two men bound together as they plunged into a cataract. Either both survived or both died.

They had too much on each other.

Martin Bormann had been secretary to deputy Party leader Rudolf Hess when he met Jung in 1936, at a Berlin drinks party to celebrate the opening of the Olympics. Jung was there to meet Bormann because he had recently persuaded his father-in-law that it would be wise to make a large donation to the Nazi Party. With the new Nuremberg laws, things were looking decidedly uncomfortable for Germany’s Jews – and it would be best to keep in with Hitler’s crew.