Traitors' Gate Read online

  TRAITORS’ GATE

  Dennis Wheatley

  Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones

  For

  My friend and war-time colleague

  COLONEL SIR RONALD WINGATE

  C.I.E., O.B.E.

  who was so often ahead of official ‘Intelligence’ in correctly appreciating future enemy intentions, and whose humour, unruffled calm and wisdom were in times of stress a tonic to us all.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 A Small Buff Form for Gregory

  2 Dark Days for Britain

  3 The Leopard Does Not Change His Spots

  4 Seconded for Special Service

  5 The Scene is Set

  6 A Sinister Figure

  7 The Magnates of Hungary

  8 Thin Ice

  9 Playing With Fire

  10 Divided Loyalties

  11 The Devil Pulls a Fast One

  12 No Holds Barred

  13 A Night of Surprises

  14 Battle of Wits

  15 Anxious Hours

  16 The Kidnappers

  17 Trapped

  18 In the Caves

  19 Gone to Earth

  20 Journey into Trouble

  21 Hell on the Home Front

  22 The Prisoner in the Tower

  23 Chivalry in Our Day

  24 Playing With Dynamite

  25 The Final Hazard

  Epilogue

  Footnotes

  A Note on the Author

  The following quotations are of interest in view of the background of the story.

  ‘Secrecy can only be maintained by deception. For this purpose I am … Thus we shall keep the enemy in doubt until the last moment.’ Letter from Prime Minister to President regarding preparations for TORCH; 27/7/42. The Second World War by Winston S. Churchill, Vol. IV, p. 405.

  ‘Even the President helped out in this particular deception.’ Crusade in Europe by General Eisenhower, p. 105.

  ‘… still engaged in discussions with the Prime Minister in Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff Committee about the expedition’s build up and various deception and security measures for keeping the enemy guessing its destination.’ The Turn of the Tide by Arthur Bryant, based on the War Diaries of Field Marshal the Viscount Alanbrooke.

  Introduction

  Dennis Wheatley was my grandfather. He only had one child, my father Anthony, from his first marriage to Nancy Robinson. Nancy was the youngest in a large family of ten Robinson children and she had a wonderful zest for life and a gaiety about her that I much admired as a boy brought up in the dull Seventies. Thinking about it now, I suspect that I was drawn to a young Ginny Hewett, a similarly bubbly character, and now my wife of 27 years, because she resembled Nancy in many ways.

  As grandparents, Dennis and Nancy were very different. Nancy’s visits would fill the house with laughter and mischievous gossip, while Dennis and his second wife Joan would descend like minor royalty, all children expected to behave. Each held court in their own way but Dennis was the famous one with the famous friends and the famous stories.

  There is something of the fantasist in every storyteller, and most novelists writing thrillers see themselves in their heroes. However, only a handful can claim to have been involved in actual daring-do. Dennis saw action both at the Front, in the First World War, and behind a desk in the Second. His involvement informed his writing and his stories, even those based on historical events, held a notable veracity that only the life-experienced novelist can obtain. I think it was this element that added the important plausibility to his writing. This appealed to his legions of readers who were in that middle ground of fiction, not looking for pure fantasy nor dry fact, but something exciting, extraordinary, possible and even probable.

  There were three key characters that Dennis created over the years: The Duc de Richleau, Gregory Sallust and Roger Brook. The first de Richleau stories were set in the years between the wars, when Dennis had started writing. Many of the Sallust stories were written in the early days of the Second World War, shortly before Dennis joined the Joint Planning Staff in Whitehall, and Brook was cast in the time of the French Revolution, a period that particularly fascinated him.

  He is probably always going to be associated with Black Magic first and foremost, and it’s true that he plugged it hard because sales were always good for those books. However, it’s important to remember that he only wrote eleven Black Magic novels out of more than sixty bestsellers, and readers were just as keen on his other stories. In fact, invariably when I meet people who ask if there is any connection, they tell me that they read ‘all his books’.

  Dennis had a full and eventful life, even by the standards of the era he grew up in. He was expelled from Dulwich College and sent to a floating navel run school, HMS Worcester. The conditions on this extraordinary ship were Dickensian. He survived it, and briefly enjoyed London at the pinnacle of the Empire before war was declared and the fun ended. That sort of fun would never be seen again.

  He went into business after the First World War, succeeded and failed, and stumbled into writing. It proved to be his calling. Immediate success opened up the opportunity to read and travel, fueling yet more stories and thrilling his growing band of followers.

  He had an extraordinary World War II, being one of the first people to be recruited into the select team which dreamed up the deception plans to cover some of the major events of the war such as Operation Torch, Operation Mincemeat and the D-Day landings. Here he became familiar with not only the people at the very top of the war effort, but also a young Commander Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels. There are indeed those who have suggested that Gregory Sallust was one of James Bond’s precursors.

  The aftermath of the war saw Dennis grow in stature and fame. He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I’m not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place.

  Dominic Wheatley, 2013

  1

  A Small Buff Form for Gregory

  Late on the night of July 25th 1942 a little group of senior staff-officers stood talking together in a small underground room. They all looked tired and a little pasty. That was hardly to be wondered at as they worked, on average, sixteen hours a day and seldom emerged from the fortress-basement in which, as members of the Joint Planning Staff of the War Cabinet, they had their quarters.

  The semi-circular cellar in which they stood had been converted into a mess only as an emergency convenience during the worst air raids of 1940. In its centre two card tables put together enabled six officers to sit down to a meal. One angle was curtained off and behind it a Royal Marine heated soup or knocked up an egg-dish as required; against the wall in the other stood a steel filing cabinet; but, instead of papers, its shelves carried an assortment of bottles and glasses. Crowded into the small space in front of it, the Planners were imbibing stiff whiskies and sodas before betaking themselves to their bunks in a still lower basement.

  Usually their off-duty chatter was as light as that of other men, but they had just come from a midnight conference at which a momentous decision had been announced and instructions for intensive detailed planning given to them by their masters, the Chiefs of Staff.

  ‘Well, Mr. Marlborough has got his way,’ remarked a tall Air Commodore, ‘but God alone knows how it will pan out.’

  A Captain, R.N., nodded. ‘Pity we couldn’t have postponed the issue till 1943. Having to go over to the offensive so early means risking e
verything we’ve got.’

  ‘Roosevelt’s insistence that American troops should be employed against the Germans in 1942 left us no option,’ shrugged a Gunner Colonel. ‘Since the Washington Conference it has only been a question of whether we did Sledgehammer or Gymnast.’

  ‘The Cherbourg job would have been murder,’ declared a Brigadier of Royal Marines. ‘And, even if we could have established ourselves on the peninsula, we haven’t got the weight of trained troops to break out. It would have become a wasting sore.’

  The sailor nodded. ‘At least we can console ourselves with the thought that we stopped Marshall and Harry Hopkins forcing that one on us, and have all along backed the P.M.’s preference for North Africa.’

  ‘If it comes off it will pay tremendous dividends,’ put in a Group Captain who always appeared to be a little sleepy, but was never quite as sleepy as he looked. ‘With the whole of the south side of the Med. in our hands convoys will be able to go through again; and Malta, instead of being a drain on us, will become a dagger aimed at what the old man calls “the soft underbelly of the Axchis”.’

  The tall Air Commodore took him up quickly. ‘Now that Rommel has given the Auk such a bloody nose there can be no hope of the Eighth Army doing Acrobat this year; and it will be months before we can achieve a big enough build-up in Algeria to attempt an advance into Tripolitania. Any idea of a link-up in 1942 is now only wishful thinking.’

  ‘We can’t expect the Germans to take this show lying down either,’ said the Colonel. ‘I’d give pretty well any odds that the moment they learn that the Americans and ourselves have gone into Morocco and Algeria they’ll scrap their agreement with the Vichy French and pour troops into Tunisia.’

  ‘And put every aircraft they can spare into Sicily and Sardinia,’ added the Air Commodore.

  ‘It could be worse than that,’ the Brigadier declared grimly. ‘If there’s a leak they’ll take measures beforehand. Then our convoys will sail straight into a trap. Just think of it. Scores of transports crammed with troops coming through the Straits of Gib. with a submarine pack lying in wait for them. And Kesselring’s dive-bombers thick as locusts coming in for the kill. It could be a massacre before we even had a chance to get ashore at all.’

  At the awful picture he conjured up the others fell silent for a moment. All of them knew that shipping tonnage we could not possibly afford to lose, hundreds of escort vessels manned by the cream of the Navy, and many thousands of our best troops—in fact everything that Britain could scrape together short of sufficient squadrons of the R.A.F. to protect her from invasion—must be gambled in this great operation.

  While they still stood silent a Lt.-Colonel, his fair hair slightly ruffled and his blue eyes a little blurred from having sat up till one in the morning reading staff papers, joined them. Smiling round, he said, ‘Well, chaps; what’s cooking?’

  The Brigadier gave him a twisted smile. ‘We’ve headed the Yanks off from getting themselves and us slaughtered on the French beaches; but Gymnast is on. That’s definite. The P.M. has given it a new code name, though. In future it is to be know as “Operation Torch”. At best, in about a year from now, we’ll have the whole of North Africa. At worst, the chaps we got off from Dunkirk, and God knows how many thousands more, will be in Davy Jones’s locker. Everything depends on the Germans being kept in the dark up till the very last moment. Even when our convoys are reported going through the Straits of Gib. the Boche must be led to believe that we intend to land the troops anywhere other than in Algeria. Thank God that’s not my headache. It’s yours, Johnny; so here’s good luck to you!’

  The Brigadier finished his whisky and added, ‘You’ll need it. This is about the toughest assignment any man has ever had.’

  * * * * *

  At the time of the above conversation no one could possibly have foreseen that Fate had designated Gregory Sallust to play a key role in this tough assignment, and even less that his uninvited participation would make him liable to court-martial, imprisonment and disgrace.

  To explain how this came about it is necessary to go back four months. To be precise, to the morning of Monday, March 30th, when at the breakfast table Gregory opened a buff envelope.

  After one glance at the flimsy it contained, he sat back and roared with laughter. It was a ‘call-up’ paper, notifying him that he must report for a medical examination within fourteen days or become liable to grievous penalties.

  His mirth was understandable seeing that for the past two and a half years he had been in closer and more constant conflict with the Nazis than had any member of our fighting Services. As a secret agent he had been parachuted into Germany in September 1939. Since then he had pitted his wits against Herr Gruppenführer Grauber—the dreaded chief of the Gestapo’s Foreign Department—in Finland, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France and Russia.

  On the other side of the breakfast table the Countess von Osterberg raised her tapering eyebrows. It was largely those eyebrows and her high cheekbones that gave her such a startling resemblance to Marlene Dietrich, and caused her still to be spoken of by those who had known her before her marriage as ‘the beautiful Erika von Epp’.

  In response to her look of interrogation Gregory flicked the paper over to her and said, ‘Early this month the Government extended the call-up to include men aged 41 to 45. It never crossed my mind that the measure would apply to me but, of course, it does.’

  Having glanced at the paper, Erika smiled. ‘But surely, darling, your name is on some special list; and all you need do is to let the people who sent this know that?’

  ‘No. I’m privately employed by Sir Pellinore. For many years past the old boy has used a part of his millions to throw spanners in the works of the enemies of Britain, and on several occasions I have been the spanner. It was natural enough that when the war came he should ask me to carry on with the good work, and I’ve always preferred to play the part of a lone wolf. If one gets caught then it can only be through one’s own ill-luck or stupidity.’

  ‘Whenever you set off on a mission, though, the military authorities give you every assistance, and when you went to Russia you were accredited to the British Embassy.’

  ‘Old Pellinore is persona grata with everyone who matters, from the King down, and he often pulls strings to get things done for the War Cabinet that they prefer not to appear in themselves; so it is easy for him to get me any help I require. But the fact remains that I am not even unofficially associated with any of our Intelligence Services.’

  ‘Sir Pellinore could soon arrange that for you.’

  ‘No doubt. But I don’t want to be. I would be under orders then, and perhaps be roped in to play a part in some cloak and dagger job that I thought ill-conceived. When it is my life I am gambling with I prefer to make my own plans and keep them to myself. Besides, twice in the past year old man Grauber has as near as damn it got me; so I don’t feel inclined to give him another chance. At least, not yet, anyway.’

  Erika needed no reminding how near a shave Gregory had had last time, for she had been with him, and it still made her flesh creep to think of the sort of death that Grauber would have meted out to them. Yet, even so, death had reached out grisly fingers after their escape. That had taken place early in December and, as a result of exposure to the bitter cold, both of them had gone down with pneumonia while Gregory, in addition, was suffering from two cracked ribs.

  Fortunately they had been met on the Swiss shore of Lake Constance by their devoted friend Stefan Kaporovitch, the ex-Bolshevik General with whom they had fled from Finland in April 1940. Stefan had secured prompt medical aid, stood by until they became convalescent, then arranged for them to be flown back to England.

  Sir Pellinore had sent them up to Gwaine Meads, a great rambling mansion situated on the Welsh border, that had been in the possession of his family since the Wars of the Roses. The greater part of it was now an R.A.F. hospital maintained by him out of his private fortune; but he had retained one wing for his ow
n use, although he never found time to stay in it himself. At the moment Erika and Gregory were its only occupants as there had been no newcomers since the end of February, when Sir Pellinore had arranged for Stefan to become a consultant to the Russian Section of the War Office; so he and his charming French wife, Marie, had gone to live in London.

  By then Erika had sufficiently recovered to resume the duties she had undertaken at Gwaine Meads before she had been tricked into returning to the Continent. Technically she ranked as an enemy alien, but Sir Pellinore had saved her from internment by vouching for her, and she had since played a dual role, giving her able brain to the financial administration of the hospital and her ravishing presence to lightening the boredom of the convalescing officers.

  Gregory, on the other hand, was lazy by nature and, in spite of the acute shortage of staff on the estate caused by the war, refused to be inveigled into any regular commitment. He knew little of mechanics and practically nothing about electricity; he had never used a spade, detested weeding, and considered that the only thing more soul-destroying than looking after horses was to look after cows, pigs or chickens. So he was useless in garage, stables, garden and farmyard. But he did spend a lot of his time yarning with the gallant young men who were knocking hell out of the Luftwaffe and, occasionally, he would labour furiously from dawn to dusk for several consecutive days on some suddenly self-imposed task, such as painting the summer house or reputtying the vinery.

  It was now the end of March and, although for well over a month past he had again been reasonably fit, as he had just said to Erika, he felt no urge as yet to get back into the war.

  Standing up, he walked over to the sideboard to pour himself a second cup of coffee. As he did so, Erika surveyed him critically. He was lean and loose-limbed; of medium height but actually somewhat taller than he looked from his habit of walking with his head thrust forward, which made him appear to have a permanent stoop. His lantern-jawed face had two deep laughter lines etched like brackets on either side of his thin-lipped, resolute mouth. His eyes were brown and his eyebrows slightly bushy. From the outer end of the left one a white scar ran up towards the dark smooth hair that made a ‘widow’s peak’ in the centre of his forehead. On occasions such as the present, when something had occurred to worry him, he always reminded Erika of a very dangerous caged animal plotting to break free. After a moment she said: