Golden Trap by Hugh Pentecost Read Free Book Online Page B

officer who had me somewhere close to the top of his list of enemies to be hunted down and exterminated—but slowly and painfully.
    “‘But I am American,’ the girl said. ‘I married my husband just before the attack on Poland. I was in Berlin, studying music. We have a son six years old.’
    “‘Perhaps we should say goodbye at this point,’ I said, getting to my feet.
    “‘Please!’ she said, her fingernails biting into the flesh of my arms.
    “‘There’s nothing more to be afraid of,’ I said. ‘The planes won’t be back again tonight.’
    “‘You must know of a way to help me,’ she said.
    “‘Help you to do what?’ I asked her.
    “‘To get away from Berlin. To get through, somehow, to the Allied side.’
    “‘Why do you want to get through?’ I asked.
    “‘I have to get away!’ There was a desperateness to her. ‘I can pay. Not money—but I can pay.’
    “I just looked at her with my eyebrows raised.
    “‘I can pay with information about my husband’s plans,’ she said. ‘I can pay with information about where prisoners are kept, about the traps that are set for the Allied armies when they finally get here.’
    “‘Now look, lady, that’s all very interesting,’ I said. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you’re leaving your husband and your child and planning to betray them to the enemy? That’s a little hard to swallow.’
    “‘I have no husband; I have no child,’ she said. The man I married no longer exists. He has been transformed into a monster. My child is no longer my child, but a tiny carbon copy of his father. I have to get away from them. I have to get back to some kind of humanity. I have to forget them!’”
    Lovelace turned away again toward the windows. He had forgotten his drink.
    “The detailed story would bore you, Mark,” he said. “My training taught me to disbelieve her. I had to believe that I might have walked into a carefully arranged trap. I had to believe that Colonel Schwartz was using this woman—who might not be his wife at all—to corner me. Her presence in that shell hole of a cellar could have been anything but an accident. She could have been following me for hours or days. Schwartz would want to try to identify my contacts before he lowered the boom on me. If I fell for her story and tried to get her out of Berlin, I might simply be exposing the whole underground network to Schwartz. Of course I couldn’t do it—and yet—” He drew a deep breath. “And yet she had to be the greatest actress of all time if she was lying to me. It took a risk that could only involve me in case she was actually the Judas-goat leading me to the slaughter.
    “Even had I wanted to I couldn’t have gotten her out of the city without approval from half dozen higher-ups. I explained this to her—and offered her shelter in the little apartment I had not far from the bombed-out railroad yards. It was a safe place to stay because the Allied planes had done their job there and shouldn’t be coming back. She accepted, because there was no other place she could go. Schwartz would be looking for her, knowing how dangerous she could be to him if she chose to tell what she knew to the enemy.
    “It was such a short time,” Lovelace said, his voice shaken. “Two weeks. Two weeks in which Carole and I came to know each other more intimately than some married couples get to know each other in a lifetime. She was hungry for tenderness and understanding and gentleness. I needed just as badly a relationship with someone that had no barriers, no cautions. It was like a miracle for both of us. We lived it for each day and no more. We never put into words what each of us was thinking—that if we came out of this in one piece there was a life together stretching out ahead of us that was all either of us could ever ask for. When you’re living on top of a time bomb, you hold nothing back. We knew each other, we loved each other, we dreamed of what might be. Only once