They all looked at her.

‘He might do it for me,’ she said. ‘If I asked him the right way.’

Erik said: ‘He’s that naive?’

She looked defiant. ‘He’s in love with me.’

‘Oh.’ Erik was embarrassed at the idea of his mother being involved in a romance.

Carla said: ‘All the same, we can’t do it.’

Erik said: ‘Why not?’

‘Because if the Russians win the battle you might die!’

‘I’ll probably die anyway.’

Carla heard her own voice rise in pitch agitatedly. ‘But we’d be helping the Russians kill you!’

‘I still want you to do it,’ Erik said fiercely. He looked down at the chequered oilcloth on the kitchen table, but what he was seeing was a thousand miles away.

Carla felt torn. If he wanted her to . . . She said: ‘But why?’

‘I think of those people walking down the slope into the quarry, holding hands.’ His own hands on the table grasped each other hard enough to bruise. ‘I’ll risk my life, if we can put a stop to that. I want to risk my life – I’ll feel better about myself, and my country, if I do. Please, Carla, if you can, send the Russians that battle plan.’

Still she hesitated. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m begging you.’

‘Then I will,’ said Carla.

(v)

Thomas Macke told his men – Wagner, Richter and Schneider – to be on their best behaviour. ‘Werner Franck is only a lieutenant, but he works for General Dorn. I want him to have the best possible impression of our team and our work. No swearing, no jokes, no eating, and no rough stuff unless it’s really necessary. If we catch a Communist spy, you can give him a good kicking. But if we fail, I don’t want you to pick on someone else just for fun.’ Normally he would turn a blind eye to that sort of thing. It all helped to keep people in fear of the displeasure of the Nazis. But Franck might be squeamish.

Werner turned up punctually at Gestapo headquarters in Prinz Albrecht Strasse on his motorcycle. They all got into the surveillance van with the revolving aerial on the roof. With so much radio equipment inside it was cramped. Richter took the wheel and they drove around the city in the early evening, the favoured time for spies to send messages to the enemy.

‘Why is that, I wonder?’ said Werner.

‘Most spies have a regular job,’ Macke explained. ‘It’s part of their cover story. So they go to an office or a factory in the daytime.’

‘Of course,’ said Werner. ‘I never thought of that.’

Macke was worried they might not pick up anything at all tonight. He was terrified that he would get the blame for the reverses the German army was suffering in Russia. He had done his best, but there were no prizes for effort in the Third Reich.

It sometimes happened that the unit picked up no signals. On other occasions there would be two or three, and Macke would have to choose which to follow up and which to ignore. He felt sure there was more than one spy network in the city, and they probably did not know of each other’s existence. He was trying to do an impossible job with inadequate tools.