Their price for cooperative silence was information, and, after years of running guns and dealing with those complicit in the game, Cal Jardine had amassed a depth of knowledge of the world in which he moved, both in the movement of weapons and other matters.

He knew what rumours might have a basis in truth and also had the ability to dismiss many that were fantasies, which was all grist to the mill for a man whose occupation depended on the ability to garner disparate facts from the countries surrounding his own and make connections denied to others.

Their conversation had then become general, almost friendly, and had inevitably turned to the present crisis with Germany and where that might lead, moving on to discussion, initiated by Cal, about the wisdom of training and deploying irregular forces as well as the various forms of sabotage that could be employed to penetrate enemy positions and destroy their rear communications.

It was an area where Callum Jardine had a lot of experience, gained in fighting in Iraq, the Chaco War in South America, and in training bands of Zionist settlers in Palestine to defend themselves against attacks by Arabs who resented their arrival from Europe to cultivate what both considered their ancient land.

He advised Moravec to think of guerrilla tactics in advance and not wait until an invasion happened, the trick being to train men and provide them with caches of the things they needed – handguns and rifles, grenades and explosives, as well as the means to detonate them – along with a list of pre-identified targets, choke points for any invaders, which could be reconnoitred and in some cases prepared in peacetime.

There had been a gentle enquiry as to Cal’s availability to help in such training – it was, after all, a specialised field – politely declined, given he was not a free man until his consignment of machine guns was on the last leg of its Spanish journey, but he did not entirely rule out the possibility at some later stage; it was, after all, what he did.

It was Moravec, in the course of their conversation, who had alluded – and it had been no more than that – to the reluctance of Hitler’s top generals to plan for an invasion of his country, fearing a simultaneous invasion by the French; had that aside indicated a truth based on sound verifiable fact or wishful thinking?

What could he find out in Czechoslovakia that the British Secret Service did not already know? Not very much, he surmised, but he was willing to try. More to the point, could that hint from Moravec provide a way to achieve what the people Peter Lanchester represented sought, given the level of doubt that any other course was possible, and where, if it could, did he fit in?

The more he thought on what Peter had said about the attitude of HMG, the more he saw it as a stance fully backed up by what he read in the newspapers – nothing definitive, but telling and disturbing trends about the status of British Government policy.

Neville Chamberlain had dropped so many hints in so-called off-the-record talks to journalists, both foreign and domestic, as to lay down a marker as to where he stood on the Sudetenland question and it was not on the side of intervention.

He had sent a mediator, it was true – a fellow Cal had never heard of called Lord Runciman – to broker a deal between the Czechs and the Sudeten minority. There was talk of a plebiscite in which the people could vote for what they wanted, but that mission of mediation, according to what he had read in the French newspapers, did not seem to be getting very far.

Then there were the editorials in London papers like The Times – day-late copies which he had picked up at various stops – which if they did not spout actual Government policy had a good idea of where it was headed, with leaders asking questions as to why the Czechs were being so intransigent about granting rights to their minorities, which made it sound as if the British and French Governments would go to any lengths to appease Hitler.

There was no doubt in Callum Jardine’s mind that Hitler had to be stopped and the sooner the better. He had spent too much time in the country to harbour any illusions about the intentions of the so-called Führer of the German Reich, and had seen at first hand the effect of a totalitarian police state on the behaviour of the mass of its citizenry.

Even in a big sprawling city like Hamburg, home to millions, the presence of the state was all-pervasive, with formal political opposition neutered in every aspect of what had once constituted normal life. The communists had been rounded up or fled in the first year of Hitler’s rule, the social democrats or anyone mildly left of centre cowed into silence by public beatings or selective incarceration in numerous concentration camps.

In the camps they were subjected to a brutal political re-education, a fate the Nazis were equally willing to hand out to any member of a former right-wing party as well if they did not put enough verve into their ‘Heil Hitlers’ or dig deep enough into their meagre wages to support that fraud upon the public called Winterhilfe.

Such overbearing weight did not even begin to account for what had happened to Jews, Gypsies, the mentally retarded and those considered sexually deviant. Conformity was all, strikes were banned, unions suppressed and all other organisations, from workers to Boy Scouts, subsumed into things like the Nazi-created German Labour Front or the Hitler Youth.

When it came to the rights of the citizen they were quite simply whatever Adolf Hitler or one of his satraps decided they would allow. No one openly complained and even in private it was wise to be careful for there were those all around at work, and even in your own street or tenement, just looking for someone to denounce to prove their own loyalty to the party and the Führer.

Until the beginning of the year the structures of the German army had been intact, but even they were now subject to Hitler’s will. He had removed Blomberg, the Minister of War, somehow got rid of the head of the army, von Fritsch, and appointed himself Supreme Commander. Those running the armed forces were his personal appointees, beholden to him, so now, even for the army to rise up and remove the Nazis would take a lot of nerve.

Every facet of German life was controlled, every organisation, military and civilian, including their own party organs, spied upon; it was claimed half the office walls in the Berlin ministries contained hidden microphones and that officials, for their own safety, even if it was not proven, communicated in writing or whispers to avoid the attention of the Geheime Staatspolizei.

By decree, the Gestapo were not subject to any law; you could be arrested on a whim and just disappear, it being their decision, if they put a bullet in a victim’s brain or tortured them to death, as to what the victim’s family were told. Often nothing was said; at other times a wife, father or mother received an urn of ashes accompanied by the terrifying mantra that their loved ones had died while trying to escape.

Lost in this gloomy introspection Cal had to remind himself that he had managed to live for many months outside the attentions of the state and had, in that time, helped many Jewish families to escape to a safer place, not only with their lives but with the bulk of their portable possessions.

This had been achieved when most Jews wishing to depart Germany were forced to leave with no more than what they could carry in a single suitcase, and that after having paid hefty bribes or transferred valuable property, houses, businesses and works of art to the SS for a pittance.

If there was no underground movement, the German state still possessed an underbelly in the big cities: a black market in scarce goods particularly, the best customers now those with the means to pay, the higher-ranking Nazis and the industrialists and employers who had done so well out of the suppressed workers.