‘Nothing as yet,’ Helms said. ‘But quick decisions are not in the Soviet playbook. Everything has to go via Moscow, usually to Beria, then back. You might be left hanging for a few days. Sorry about that. Oh, and I heard you had a conversation with the pocket flying machine, Hanna Reitsch. How did that go?’

‘Interesting,’ Wilde said. ‘She thought she wasn’t giving anything away, but in fact she was. She was obviously harbouring a secret, and enjoying every minute of it. Thought she was taunting us. If anyone flew her beloved Hitler out of Berlin, it was her.’

And then, of course, there was her link to the mountain guide August Jaeger. That question had caught her unawares.

The Office of Strategic Services had outposts in Munich, Wiesbaden, Frankfurt and, most recently, this one in Berlin. It was housed in a large private villa on the pleasant Foehrenweg street, one of the less bombed areas of the city. It even had a hint of the pre-war greenery and suburban tranquillity that, in Third Reich days, must have been what attracted Wehrmacht General Ludwig Beck to make the place his home.

Beck was dead, of course, having shot himself when the July Plot against Hitler failed, but his house still stood untouched and was conveniently situated in the American sector, just south and east of the wooded outlying district of Grunewald.

Wilde was itching to get on with the inquiry. The idea of waiting around in Berlin kicking his heels hoping for a response from the Russians was unsettling.

‘When – if – they do come through with assistance, Tom, a word of warning,’ Helms said, as they settled down with drinks in the comfortable mess. ‘Yes, they’re our allies, yes we smile at each other in public and take hard liquor together. But there’s plenty more beneath the surface, as time will tell. What I’m saying is, don’t trust the bastards an inch.’

It was a warning Wilde didn’t really need. He had his own suspicions about Stalin’s true intentions in the post-war world. Why was it, he wondered, that the Soviets knew everything that was going on within the OSS, but that the OSS had zero information from Moscow?

One day that would have to change.

*