Best Kept Secret

34





‘GOOD DAY, SIR ALAN,’ said Giles as the three of them were shown into the cabinet secretary’s office. ‘May I introduce my sister, Emma, and my brother-in-law, Harry Clifton?’

Sir Alan Redmayne shook hands with Harry and Emma before introducing Mr Hugh Spencer.

‘Mr Spencer is an assistant secretary at the Treasury,’ he explained. ‘The reason for his presence will become clear.’

They all sat down around a circular table in the centre of the room.

‘I realize this meeting was called to discuss a most serious matter,’ said Sir Alan, ‘but before I begin, I would like to say, Mr Clifton, that I am an avid follower of William Warwick. Your latest book is on my wife’s side of the bed, so unfortunately I won’t be allowed to read it until she’s turned the last page.’

‘That’s very kind of you, sir.’

‘Let me begin by explaining why we needed to see you at such short notice,’ said Sir Alan, his tone of voice changing. ‘I would like to reassure you, Mr and Mrs Clifton, that we are just as concerned about your son’s welfare as you are, even if our interests may differ from yours. The government’s interest,’ he continued, ‘centres around a man called Don Pedro Martinez, who has fingers in so many pies that we now have a filing cabinet exclusively devoted to him. Mr Martinez is an Argentinian citizen with a residence in Eaton Square, a country house at Shillingford, three cruise liners, a string of polo ponies stabled at the Guards Polo Club in Windsor Great Park, and a box at Ascot. He always comes to London during the season, and has a wide circle of friends and associates who believe him to be a wealthy cattle baron. And why shouldn’t they? He owns three hundred thousand acres of pampas in Argentina, with around five hundred thousand head of cattle grazing on it. Although this yields him a handsome profit, in fact it’s nothing more than a front to shield his more nefarious activities.’

‘And what are they?’ asked Giles.

‘To put it bluntly, Sir Giles, he’s an international crook. He makes Moriarty look like a choir boy. Allow me to tell you a little more of what we know about Mr Martinez, and then I’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have. Our paths first crossed in 1935, when I was a special assistant attached to the War Office. I discovered he was doing business with Germany. He had forged a close relationship with Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, and we know he met Hitler on at least three occasions. During the war he made a vast fortune supplying the Germans with whatever raw materials they were short of, although he was still living in Eaton Square.’

‘Why didn’t you arrest him?’ asked Giles.

‘It suited our purposes not to,’ said Sir Alan. ‘We were keen to find out who his contacts in Britain were, and what they were up to. Once the war was over, Martinez returned to Argentina and continued trading as a cattle farmer. In fact, he never once went back to Berlin after the Allies had entered the city. He continued to visit this country regularly. He even sent all three of his sons to English public schools, and his daughter is currently at Roedean.’

‘Forgive me for interrupting,’ said Emma, ‘but how does Sebastian fit into all of this?’

‘He didn’t, Mrs Clifton, until last week, when he turned up unannounced at forty-four Eaton Square, and his friend Bruno invited him to stay.’

‘I’ve met Bruno a couple of times,’ said Harry, ‘and I thought he was a charming young man.’

‘I’m sure he is,’ said Sir Alan. ‘Which only adds to Martinez’s image as a decent family man who loves England. However, your son unwittingly became involved in an operation our law-enforcement agencies have been working on for several years when he met Don Pedro Martinez for the second time.’

‘The second time?’ queried Giles.

‘On June eighteenth 1954,’ said Sir Alan, referring to his notes, ‘Martinez invited Sebastian to join him at the Beechcroft Arms public house to celebrate Bruno’s fifteenth birthday.’

‘You keep that close an eye on Martinez?’ said Giles.

‘We most certainly do.’ The cabinet secretary extracted a brown envelope from the papers in front of him, took out two five-pound notes and placed them on the table. ‘And Mr Martinez gave your son these two bank notes on Friday evening.’

‘But that’s more money than Sebastian has ever had in his life,’ said Emma. ‘We only give him half a crown pocket money each week.’

‘I expect Martinez realized that such a sum would be more than enough to turn the young man’s head. He then trumped it by inviting Sebastian to accompany him to Buenos Aires at a time when he knew the boy was at his most vulnerable.’

‘How did you come into possession of the two random five-pound notes Martinez gave to my son?’ asked Harry.

‘They’re not random,’ said the man from the Treasury, speaking for the first time. ‘We’ve collected over ten thousand of them in the past eight years, as a result of information supplied by what I believe the police call a reliable source.’

‘What reliable source?’ demanded Giles.

‘Have you ever heard of an SS officer called Major Bernhard Krüger?’ asked Spencer.

The silence that followed suggested that none of them had.

‘Major Krüger is a resourceful and intelligent man, who was a police inspector in Berlin before he joined the SS. In fact, he’d ended up in charge of the anti-counterfeit squad. After Britain declared war on Germany, he convinced Himmler that it would be possible for the Nazis to destabilize the British economy by flooding England with perfect copies of the five-pound note, but only if he was allowed to select the finest printers, copper engravers and retouchers from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was the commandant. However, his biggest coup was to recruit the master forger Salomon Smolianoff, whom he had arrested and sent to prison on no fewer than three occasions when he was with the Berlin police. Once Smolianoff was on board, Krüger’s team were able to forge around twenty-seven million five-pound notes, with a face value of a hundred and thirty-five million pounds.’

Harry had the grace to gasp.

‘Some time in 1945, when the Allies were advancing on Berlin, Hitler gave the order that the presses were to be destroyed, and we have every reason to believe they were. However, a few weeks before Germany surrendered, Krüger was arrested trying to cross the German-Swiss border with a suitcase full of the forged notes. He spent two years in prison in the British sector of Berlin.

‘We might have lost interest in him if the Bank of England hadn’t set alarm bells ringing by informing us that the notes found in Krüger’s possession were in fact genuine. The governor of the bank at the time claimed that no one on earth was capable of counterfeiting a British five-pound note, and nothing could convince him otherwise. We questioned Krüger about how many of these notes were in circulation, but before he would give us that information, he skilfully negotiated terms for his release, using Don Pedro Martinez as his bargaining chip.’

Mr Spencer paused to take a sip of water, but no one interrupted him.

‘An agreement was struck to release Krüger after he’d served only three years of his seven-year sentence, but not until he’d informed us that, towards the end of the war, Martinez had made a deal with Himmler to smuggle twenty million pounds’ worth of forged five-pound notes out of Germany and somehow get them to Argentina, where he was to await further orders. That wouldn’t have proved difficult for a man who’d smuggled everything from a Sherman tank to a Russian submarine into Germany.

‘In return for another year off his sentence, Krüger informed us that Himmler, along with a handful of carefully selected members of the top Nazi leadership, including possibly even Hitler himself, were hoping to escape their fate by somehow getting to Buenos Aires, where they would then live out their days at the Bank of England’s expense.

‘However, when it became clear that Himmler and his cronies would not be showing up in Argentina,’ continued Spencer, ‘Martinez found himself in possession of twenty million pounds in forged notes that he needed to dispose of. Not an easy task. To begin with, I dismissed Krüger’s story as pure fantasy, invented to save his own skin, but then, as the years passed, and more and more bogus five-pound notes appeared on the market whenever Martinez was in London or his son Luis was working the tables in Monte Carlo, I realized we had a real problem. This was proved yet again when Sebastian spent one of his two five-pound notes on a Savile Row suit and the assistant didn’t suggest that they were not genuine.’

‘As recently as two years ago,’ chipped in Sir Alan, ‘I expressed my frustration with the Bank of England’s stance to Mr Churchill. With the simplicity of genius, he gave orders that a new five-pound note should be put into circulation as quickly as possible. Of course, bringing such a note into circulation could not be done overnight, and when the Bank of England finally announced its plans to issue a new five-pound note, they gave Martinez notice that he was running out of time in which to dispose of his vast fake fortune.’

‘And then those mountebanks at the Bank of England,’ came back Mr Spencer with some feeling, ‘announced that any old five-pound notes presented to the Bank before December thirty-first, 1957, would be exchanged for new ones. So all Martinez had to do was smuggle his forged notes into Britain, when the Bank of England would happily convert them into legal tender. We estimate that over the past ten years, Martinez has been able to dispose of somewhere between five and ten million pounds, but that leaves him with another eight, perhaps nine million still secreted in Argentina. Once we realized there was nothing we could do to alter the Bank of England’s stance, we had a clause inserted into last year’s budget, with the sole purpose of making Martinez’s task more difficult. Last April, it became illegal for anyone to bring more than one thousand pounds in cash into the United Kingdom. And he’s recently discovered, to his cost, that neither he nor his associates can cross any border in Europe without customs taking their luggage apart.’

‘But that still doesn’t explain what Sebastian is doing in Buenos Aires,’ said Harry.

‘We have reason to believe, Mr Clifton, that your son has been sucked into Martinez’s net,’ said Spencer. ‘We think he is going to be used by Don Pedro to smuggle the last eight or nine million pounds into England. But we don’t know how or where.’

‘Then Sebastian must be in great danger?’ said Emma, staring directly at the cabinet secretary.

‘Yes and no,’ said Sir Alan. ‘As long as he doesn’t know the real reason Martinez wanted him to go to Argentina, not a hair on his head will be harmed. But if he were to stumble on the truth while he’s in Buenos Aires, and by all accounts he’s bright and resourceful, we wouldn’t hesitate to move him into the safety of our embassy compound at a moment’s notice.’

‘Why don’t you just do that as soon as he steps off the ship?’ asked Emma. ‘Our son is worth considerably more to us than ten million pounds of anybody’s money,’ she added, looking to Harry for support.

‘Because that would alert Martinez to the fact that we know what he’s up to,’ said Spencer.

‘But there must be a risk that Seb could be sacrificed, like a pawn on a chessboard you have no control over.’

‘That won’t happen as long as he remains oblivious to what’s going on. We’re convinced that without your son’s help, Martinez can’t hope to move that amount of money. Sebastian is our one chance of finding out how he intends to go about it.’

‘He’s seventeen,’ Emma said helplessly.

‘Not a lot younger than your husband was when he was arrested for murder, or Sir Giles when he won his MC.’

‘Those were completely different circumstances,’ insisted Emma.

‘Same enemy,’ said Sir Alan.

‘We know Seb would want to help in any way he could,’ said Harry, taking his wife’s hand, ‘but that’s not the point. The risks are far too great.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ said the cabinet secretary, ‘and if you tell us you want him taken into custody the moment he disembarks from the ship, I’ll give the order immediately. But,’ he said before Emma could agree, ‘we have come up with a plan. However, it cannot succeed without your cooperation.’

He waited for further protests, but his three guests remained silent.

‘The South America doesn’t arrive in Buenos Aires for another five days,’ continued Sir Alan. ‘If our plan is to succeed, we need to get a message to our ambassador before it docks.’

‘Why don’t you just phone him?’ asked Giles.

‘I wish it was that easy. The international switchboard in Buenos Aires is manned by twelve women, every one of whom is in the pay of Martinez. The same thing applies to telegraphs. Their job is to pick up any information that might be of interest to him, information about politicians, bankers, businessmen, even police operations, so he can then use it to his advantage and make himself even more money. Just the mention of his name on a phone line would set alarm bells ringing, and his son Diego would be informed within minutes. In fact, there have been times when we’ve been able to take advantage of the situation and feed Martinez with false information, but that’s too risky on this occasion.’

‘Sir Alan,’ said the assistant treasury secretary, ‘why don’t you tell Mr and Mrs Clifton what we have in mind, and let them make the decision.’