‘He hasn’t gone to Bavaria?’

‘No,’ Moravec insisted. ‘He dare not be seen in Nuremberg. To do so would blow open the fiction that he is acting independently.’

‘Before we begin,’ Cal asked, now that everything was laid out, ‘I need to know if, as I suspect from all this, you suppose what you seek is in Henlein’s offices at the Victoria Hotel and not at Frank’s headquarters?’

‘Yes.’

‘To be sure of that you must have someone on the inside?’

The two Czechs exchanged looks but it was Moravec’s call and he nodded. ‘But we will not reveal the name.’

‘Naturally. But is this person in a position to aid any attempt to get to the written details of the invasion and Hitler’s instructions?’

It was Veseli who answered. ‘To do so would expose the agent, who is able to tell us everything the leadership of the SdP are doing and thinking.’

‘So I assume that I would not be given contact with this person?’

‘No!’ Moravec replied, emphatically.

Cal nodded; he had expected nothing less, because whoever that asset was he looked to be too precious to put at risk even for such a prize. ‘Can I ask if you have planned an operation to get hold of these documents?’

‘If we were certain that an invasion is imminent,’ Veseli said, ‘we would use the full power of the state so our police and army can counter the attempts of the Sudetenlanders to carry out the kind of tasks they have been set.’

‘Always assuming,’ Moravec added in a mordant tone, ‘that we have allies in the West to help us fight the German army.’

‘So,’ Cal asked pedantically, ‘is there a fully worked-out plan in place that does not depend on an imminent invasion?’

Moravec paused for several seconds before he replied, Cal thought more for effect than anything else; he wanted it to look as if the answer was being dragged out of him. ‘There is.’

‘But you cannot carry it out?’

‘For the reasons I gave you as we walked around the Jewish cemetery.’

‘Is it one that I could execute given the right circumstances?’

‘I believe so,’ Moravec replied. ‘Otherwise I would not have brought you to this place.’

‘And if Henlein takes flight, which he is bound to do under the circumstances of German invasion, what then? He would not want to fall into your hands, would he?’

That got two nods.

‘So you must have more than just a pre-planned assault on the hotel; there must be one to take him between there and his house, which he might go to on the way, or a place where you could ambush him before he gets to the German border?’

That got Cal a full flashing smile, in truth no more than an acknowledgement that he had discerned the obvious; these people had plans in place for any eventuality.

‘Naturally,’ Moravec said, ‘should the invasion come, our police would storm Henlein’s hotel and Frank’s Nazi HQ to find evidence of their activities, things that could be shown to the neutral press to increase pressure for their aid. They would not, we think, be able to remove or burn all the files in time and if they did so prematurely that would alert us to the aggressive movements of the German army.’

‘You know, you should do it now and tell your president to go to hell.’

‘To which he would say, the consequences would bring on that which we most fear. Imagine Hitler’s closing speech at Nuremberg on Monday if we do that, and besides, both locations are well defended, Henlein’s house less so, but there are plenty of locals in Asch who would come to his aid to fight us, so taking even that would not be easy.’

‘Even if you took him by surprise?’

‘A difficult thing for a Czech to do when they cannot even get into his hotel if they are local, and no stranger would be allowed entry unless they could prove they were ethnic Germans.’

‘Go in numbers?’

‘How many? Remember, in Cheb too he is surrounded by his own kind who would be keen to protect him.’

Veseli took over. ‘And how can we surprise him when we would need the army to take the place?’

‘Understand,’ Moravec interjected, ‘that apart from manning the defensive emplacements in the borderlands, most of our troops have been withdrawn from the disputed provinces to locations where they pose no threat to the German minority. Left in place it would be too easy for Goebbels to claim the soldiers were committing atrocities.’

‘Even the police in Cheb are kept in their station unless an incident occurs they must deal with, and they have strict instructions to stay well away from the Victoria Hotel.’

‘I need copies of those ambush plans and I need to go and take a look to see if there is any way that I can implement what you dare not.’

‘You need more than that, my friend,’ the older Czech replied. ‘You need a reason to be there.’

‘Understand, sir,’ Veseli said, the honorific making Cal wonder to whom he was talking until he realised that in introducing his agent Moravec had not given him any name. ‘Cheb is not a large town and it is ninety-ten per cent ethnically German, Asch almost wholly so.’

He paused to make sure Cal understood.

‘They are doubly suspicious of strangers at the moment, regardless of their nationality, unless they know why it is they have come there, and given the number of members of the SdP in both places, any outsider would be treated a suspicious person as a matter of course and watched.’

‘Presumably, then, you do not go under the name of Karol in Cheb?’

The two other men only exchanged a half a flicker of a look, but it was enough to tell Cal that Karol Veseli was not his real name, but certainly his given one in a Czech-spelt version and, he suspected, if asked to spell it, though it would sound the same, it would read very differently. Given his looks, added to what he had just said about Cheb, it was clear he could not move around there without arousing suspicion unless he was a long-term resident himself.

Cal knew something about small towns, having spent four years before the World War in a Scottish one and found himself an outsider to people who knew each other from their very first day at school right through to their places of work. Without those connections it was hard to discover who was cousin to whom and to understand all the local matters that constituted old enmities and long-standing grudges.

In such places you watched the generations come and depart, caught sight of the same faces in their main streets, shops and events, as well as seeing your fellow citizens procreate and age. Captain Karol Veseli, or whatever he was called, to do what he did in such a community, had to be either wholly or partly an ethnic German and he certainly looked like one.

So it was a fair bet he was a ‘traitor’ to his own kind, or a Czech patriot, depending on which side of the divide you occupied. Whatever, he was playing a very dangerous game in which there was only one price for exposure and it would not be just a bullet; discovered, he would be ripped limb from limb.

‘I doubt we would be sitting here if you did not have some notion of how we can visit there and move around freely.’

‘Last night you were observed dining with an American female journalist,’ Moravec ventured, his tone cautious. ‘A Miss Corrine Littleton.’

There was no point in Cal asking how he knew her and her occupation; it was his job to know and Moravec already knew he and Vince had been followed to the restaurant. Question: did her job have a bearing on that card being dropped on the table? Had that been part of a jigsaw Moravec was toying with?

Cal knew also enough about intelligence work to realise that a lot of what went on was manipulation and he wondered if that was what he was being subjected to now. He had come to Prague looking for facts about dissent in Germany and now he was being edged in another direction entirely, not that it made much difference if the end result was the same.