Too Bad to Die by Francine Mathews Read Free Book Online

deception operations intended for the Nazis to swallow—hook, line, and sinker. It was Ian who suggested dumping a corpse padded with fake Top Secret documents on a beach in Spain, where German agents were sure to find it; Ian who came up with the idea of luring a German ship to rescue British pilots falsely downed in the Channel. The object that time was to overpower the crew and steal their Enigma encoding machine—for Alan Turing’s use, of course.
    Ian was good at planning conferences as well—he’d been behind all of the meetings between Churchill and Roosevelt over the past four years—but his true gift was for conspiracy. He was a natural deceiver. He delighted in the confusion of his enemies.
    It was the kind of success, of course, that he could never tell his mother about.
    â€”
    T HE OMELET ARRIVED. Oranges came with it, and dates; bitter black coffee and
eesh baladi,
the flatbread the Egyptians made so well.
    Ian ate and smoked and pursued his thoughts.
    Consider the Fencer, now. Ian had been obsessed with the German agent for months, to little purpose. He did not know his name. He had never seen his face.
    He was not even sure that the Fencer was male.
    Alan Turing had stumbled across the code name in the course of parsing intercepts at Bletchley:
der Fechter
—the Fencer—recurred in the private correspondence between Adolf Hitler and Walter Schellenberg. Schellenberg was an SS brigadeführer in the foreign intelligence branch of the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi Party’s security service. The Fencer reported to Schellenberg, it seemed, but he was Hitler’s weapon of choice: the agent consulted in the direst circumstance, the eleventh hour, the last stand. Not simply an assassin, Fleming knew, but a singular intellect who commanded entire teams of operatives and killers.
    It was the Fencer who planned the Venlo Incident in 1939, when the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were pressured to “defect” to the German Reich; but the royal failure to jump was blamed on Schellenberg, who’d served as Hitler’s courier. The Fencer survived to manipulate the Duquesne spy ring in New York two years later, which the FBI said they’d penetrated from the start. Thirty-three German agents were rounded up and convicted of treason a few days after the United States entered the war. But Ian knew what the FBI wasn’t telling: the Fencer had deliberately blown Duquesne and his spies. They were a necessary diversion from a far deadlier ring the Bureau had yet to pinpoint.
    When German Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess parachuted wildly into Scotland, babbling about peace talks, it was the Fencer who shut him up: Hess refused to cooperate with MI5 because he was terrified the Fencer would kill his wife, Ilse, if he did. Ian figured Hess was right to worry. The Fencer was good at revenge. Take Prague, where Reinhard Heydrich had been assassinated a year and a half before. By the time Adolf Opálka and his Czech Resistance team threw a grenade in Heydrich’s car, the Fencer had already penetrated Opálka’s network. After he and his men shot themselves in a Prague church crypt and Opálka’s family were sent to their deaths at Mauthausen, it was the Fencer who suggested a broader example for the Czech Resistance. British intelligence estimated nearly five thousand Czechs were murdered as a result.
    And just two months ago, he—or she, Fleming mentally conceded—had planned the daring rescue of Benito Mussolini from an Italian mountaintop. The Fencer had tracked the imprisoned dictator for two months as his captors moved him from hiding place to hiding place. Then a Nazi team snatched Mussolini without a shot being fired.
    From an inaccessible peak. Reached only by cable car.
    The Allies were still chattering about it.
    The Fencer could plan. The Fencer could execute. And none of his enemies lived to breathe his name.
That
was power, and that was why Hitler