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“You’re going to Sweden?” Wahl asked.
“That’s right.”
“What is the nature of your business in Sweden?”
“I can’t really see where that’s any of your business,” the young Swiss replied.
Wahl took his Gestapo identity disk from his pocket and displayed it in the palm of his hand.
“Gestapo, mein Herr, ” he said. “I decide what is my business.”
“I’m an electrical engineer,” the young Swiss said. “In the employ of Carl Färber und Söhne. I’m going to our Stockholm office.”
Wahl nodded curtly.
“Take your luggage from the rack, please,” he said.
“That’s been examined, too,” the young Swiss said.
“I wish to examine it again,” Wahl said.
The young Swiss shrugged. Annoyance was all over his face.
There were three pieces of luggage on the rack.
The young Swiss took them down, one by one, and laid them on the seat. Then, he gestured at them.
“Help yourself,” he said.
Wahl opened the first suitcase and felt through its contents carefully. It was thin-sided, so there was no possibility of a hidden compartment. He found nothing in the first suitcase of a suspicious nature.
In the second, he thought he was onto something. In feeling the rolled-up socks, he touched what appeared to be a hard object concealed inside them. He unrolled the socks. It was a small bottle of aftershave lotion.
“You can put those back,” Wahl said, and opened the third case.
Lorin Wahl had perhaps two seconds to see that the third case held the uniform of an Obersturmführer SS-SD.
He felt a hand over his eyes, pulling his head back, and then for a brief moment, there was a sharp pain at the base of his neck.
And then he felt nothing at all.
Eric Fulmar and Stanley Fine, equipped with diplomatic passports and in civilian clothing, had traveled to Switzerland by air via Dublin and Lisbon. In Fine’s luggage, exempt from customs examination, there had been the equivalent of $10,000 in Reichsmarks; a Swiss passport in the name of Martin Reber; the identification card and travel authorization for SS Obersturmführer Erich von Fulmar, temporarily attached to the staff of the Reichsführer SS in Berlin; and identity cards and travel authority in fictitious names for travel to Budapest for Professor Dyer, Gisella, and Fulmar.
The Reichsmarks and the American passports were genuine. The Swiss passport and the SS-SD identification and travel authority were forgeries. The counterfeit German identity and travel documents were to be used in case von Heurten-Mitnitz could not produce similar documents on his own. Or in case he changed his mind at the last minute and refused to help.
The basic cover story was that Fine and Fulmar were employees of the Department of State who were being sent to the United States Embassy in Bern for duty as consular officers. There was a three-week period (fifteen working days) before newly arrived diplomatic personnel had to present themselves to the Swiss Foreign Ministry.
Subtleties of international law and diplomatic custom were involved: Until they actually presented themselves to the Swiss Foreign Ministry and were issued the identification cards issued to accredited diplomatic personnel, so far as the Swiss were concerned—and even though they would be traveling on diplomatic passports—they would not in fact be accredited diplomatic personnel.
Under the ground rules laid down by the Swiss, who knew full well that there were as many spies and agents in Switzerland as there were in Lisbon or Madrid, Switzerland was not to be used as a transit point by Allied agents with diplomatic status to enter or leave France, Germany, or Italy.
If two Americans with diplomatic status were caught in such activity, they were expelled from Switzerland, and the U.S. Ambassador or chargé d’affaires was handed a note informing him of the Swiss government’s regret that owing to the shortages caused by the war, the United States must reduce its diplomatic staff by two individuals.
If there was a reduction in the authorized staff of a Western embassy, there was an equal increase in the staff of an Axis embassy. Or vice versa.
Individuals who were not officially accredited as diplomats were of course liable to prosecution by Swiss authorities if they violated Swiss laws regarding espionage or immigration; but the various ambassadors could not, of course, be held responsible for the actions of their countrymen who were not officially accredited to their embassies.
Upon arrival in Bern aboard a Swiss Air transport, Fine and Fulmar had boarded a railroad train for Zürich. Fine left the train there, taking with him Fulmar’s luggage and U.S. diplomatic passport.
