The Company of Strangers Read Online Free

without…’
    ‘Maybe you should ask Captain Weber,’ said Voss, desperate, lashing out at anything to save himself.
    ‘Captain Weber,’ said Weiss, writing him down in his book of the damned.
    ‘I was doing him a favour putting the files on the plane in the first place, as I was for…’He coughed at a garrotting look from Weiss and changed tack. ‘Is this part of the official inquiry, sir?’
    ‘This is the preliminary investigation prior to the official inquiry which will be conducted by the air force, as it is technically an air force matter,’ said Weiss, and then more threatening, ‘but as you know, I’m in charge of all security matters in and around this compound…and I notice things, Captain Voss.’
    Weiss had turned away from the mirror to look at him for real. Voss stepped back and his boot heel hit the wall but he managed to look Weiss straight in his terrible eye, hoping that his own stress, from the G-force steepness of the learning curve, was not distorting his face.
    ‘I have a copy of the manifest,’ said Weiss. ‘Perhaps you should read it through now.’
    Weiss handed him the paper. It started with a list of personnel on the flight. Speer’s name had been added and then crossed out. Underneath was the cargo. Voss ran his eyes down the list, which was short and consisted of four boxes of files for the Army Chief of Staff, delivery Berlin, and several pieces of luggage going with Todt to Munich. There was no mention of a metal trunk for delivery to the SS Personalhauptamt in Berlin-Charlottenburg.
    Voss had control of his panic now, the horizon firm in his head as he came up to the moment, or was it the line? Yes, it was something to be crossed, a line with no grey area, without no man’s land, the moral line, which once stepped over joined him to Weiss’s morality. He also knew that to mention the nonexistent trunk would be a lifechanging decision, one that could change his life into death. It nearly amused him, that and the strange clarity of those turbulent thoughts.
    ‘Now you understand,’ said Weiss, ‘why it’s necessary for me to do a little probing on the question of these files.’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ said Voss. ‘You’re absolutely right, sir.’
    ‘Good, we have an understanding then?’
    ‘Yes, sir,’ said Voss. ‘One thing…wasn’t there…?’
    Weiss stiffened in his boots, the scar dragging down his eye seemed to pulsate.
    ‘…wasn’t there a self-destruct mechanism on the plane?’ finished Voss.
    Weiss’s good eye widened and he nodded, confirming that and their new understanding into him. He left thetoilets. Voss reverted to the sink and splashed his hot face over and over with cold water, not able to clean exactly, but able to revise and rework, justify and accommodate the necessity for the snap decision he’d been forced to make. He dried his face and looked at himself in the mirror and had one of his odd perceptions, that we never know what we look like to others, we only know our reflection and that now he knew he would be different and it might be all right because perhaps he would just look like one of them.
    He went outside for a smoke and to pace out his new understanding, as if he was wearing different boots. Senior officers came and went with only one topic of conversation on their hungry lips and two names, Speer and Todt. But by the end of that cigarette Voss had made his first intelligence discovery in the field, because the officers still came and went and they still had those two names on their lips but this time they were shaking their heads and the words ‘self-destruct mechanism’ and the ‘incidence of failure’ had threaded their way amongst the names.
    It comes out of here and goes in there, thought Voss. The inestimable power of the spoken word. The power of misinformation in a thunderstruck community.
    Voss went back to work. No Weber. He replotted the latest movements from the decodes. Weber returned, took a seat, braced himself