Checkpoint Charlie (21 page)

“All right,” Atherton said. He was exulting. “Let's give it a toss.”

“Not yet,” I told him. “Let's make sure.”

Grofield went to the airport that evening and bought a seat on the nine o'clock flight to Geneva. When he checked in at passport control one of Atherton's men had a look at his papers and reported back to us: “You were right. The contents are fake but the booklet is genuine. How did you know?”

Atherton said, “Do we toss the shop now?”

“No. They wouldn't warehouse the blanks in the shop. If we raid the shop we won't find the shipment. We'll wait for them to lead us to the blanks.”

We picked another transient out of the file that night and I did my pickpocket number on him the next afternoon; the transient was no help — he bought a cheap forgery from a bartender in the Avenue Faisal. We had to track three crooks through Algiers before one of them went into the curio shop in the rue Darlan to order a replacement passport. After that it was simple procedurals. A clerk from the curio shop led us to a house on the mountainside in the high-rent district; when he came out of the house the clerk had a 6x9 manilla envelope with him. We took it away from him and found a mint passport blank inside. That evening six of us raided the big house. We found the cartons of blanks in a safe in the basement. We turned the owner of the house over to the Algerian authorities.

It was anticlimactic. We recovered the passports but didn't touch Bertine, let alone Dortmunder. To this day both of them are buying and selling illicit good around the Mediterranean; we ourselves are among their steady customers. Such is the cynicism of the trade.

But I did have the satisfaction of beaming in Myerson's sour face. Once again he'd given me a job he thought couldn't be done; once again I'd showed him up. I think he lives for the day when I foul one up.

He actually offered me a cigar. He knows how much I hate them. Without even bothering to acknowledge the offer I turned to leave the office after handing in my report. Myerson said, “All right, since you're obviously dying for me to ask. How'd you bring it off?”

“Genius. A tablespoon with every meal.” I smiled cherubically at him.

If Myerson thinks I'll give him the satisfaction of telling him how I brought it off, he's crazy. Let him try to figure it out for himself. Maybe he'll get so worked up he'll blow one of his fuses.

*   *   *

Charlie's
Chase

“I'
VE GOT A PAPER CHASE
for you.” Myerson was unusually mellow. He neither bared his teeth nor puffed cigar smoke in my face. “I want you to look through the Hong Kong reports for the past ten weeks.”

“What for?”

“You tell me.”

*   *   *

W
HEN
I returned to his fourth-floor office he cocked his head to one side. “Well?”

“Some weeks ago someone began systematically to double our China agents.”

“So it would seem. I wanted to make certain of my readings of the reports — that's why I didn't give you any hint what to look for. But you saw it too.”

“It's a visible pattern.”

“Yes. Well, you'd better get out there and put a stop to hadn't you.” Then for the first time he smiled. Myerson's smile would frighten a piranha. It meant only that he hoped I would end up in trouble to my hairline.

As I went to the door he said to my back, “You've got to go on a diet, Charlie. You hardly fit through doors any more — you haven't got any sideways.” He was still smiling — a wicked glitter of polished teeth.

*   *   *

I
CAUGHT
the noon flight from Dulles. The next day, fuzzy with jet lag, I descended upon the China Station.

Pete Morgan, the chief-of-station, was dour and dismal, his normal hey-buddy ebullience crushed under a weight of worry. I had known him for years and never seen him so morose. “I've been wondering when somebody would show up with a hatchet. In a way I'm glad it's you, Charlie. You're tough but you're fair. I never heard of you railroading anybody just for the sake of marking up a score on your record sheet.”

“I'm obliged for the vote of confidence, Pete, but if you know about the trouble why haven't you done something about it?”

“You think I haven't? I've given seven men the chop so far. Two of them damned useful informants.”

“You've interrogated them?”

“Certainly.”

“And?”

“Four of them denied it. Three of them admit it.” He showed his despair. “They
admit
they've been bought. Bribed with huge sums in Swiss banks and new passports and visas that will set them up in South America like baronets.”

I stood at the window of his office and tried to make sense of it. Below me the Kowloon traffic of pedestrians and cars and tricycle-rickshas thronged the narrow street. I said, “The whole point of doubling an agent is not to let his employers know he's been doubled.”

“Exactly. They're busting all the rules.”

“So they're not really being doubled, are they.”

He said, “I can only see one answer. They're trying to destroy my network.”

“Why?”

“You tell me and we'll both know.”

Pete's network wasn't concerned with mainland China; that was another — and far more vast — outfit with headquarters in Langley itself and branch monitoring stations in Kyoto, Seoul, Hong Kong, Taipei, Rangoon and Delhi. Pete's more modest operation covered Singapore, Djakarta, Formosa, Macao and Hong Kong itself — the seething corrupt smuggling ports of the western Pacific. We had substations in each of them but their operations were under Pete's direct control. And it appeared he was right: someone was systematically tearing the network apart.

Pete said, “It's so damned methodical. Like a bulldozer. I don't know who and I don't know why. We used everything but rubber hoses on the seven people we've busted so far. I'll show the interrogation reports. Three of them cooperated, more or less, but all they know is they were offered six-figure bribes. The offers came by phone from public call boxes and everything else came in the mail, plain envelopes, untraceable. Now I've got taps on most of my remaining agents' phones — if the opposition calls again maybe we can get voiceprints.”

It was a crude destructive attack without any of the clandestine finesse that usually characterized warfare in our field — it was as if someone had decided to conclude a game of chess by blasting all the pieces off the board with a fire hose.

“I don't know how to fight this kind of thing,” Pete complained. “It doesn't make any kind of sense. They must know they're doing it — and they just don't care. What kind of espionage is that?”

I said, “It's a cover for something. They want us to be deaf and blind so that they can pull off something they don't want us to know about.”

“They. Who's they?”

“Anything could be happening out there — right now we wouldn't know about it, would we.”

“If you want the ball, Charlie, I'll be happy to toss it over in your court.”

Yes, I thought. That was why Myerson had picked me for the job. He hates me so much that he drops all the dirtiest ones in my lap.

“Pete said, Does Langley want my scalp?”

“Not yet. They're as baffled as you are. Nobody's putting the finger on you.”

“Ultimately it's my responsibility. The buck stops here.”

“Why didn't you make a full report on this?”

He was surprised. “I did. To the Security Executive.”

Myerson.

“Didn't you read it?” he asked. “I thought that was why you came.”

Myerson, I thought. Myerson and his “need-to-know” compartmentalization. He'd had Pete's report in his drawer all the time but he'd withheld it from me. I could picture his mock-sweet smile:
I didn't want to clutter your head with Pete Morgan's prejudged opinions, Charlie. Better you go into it with an open mind
.

I said, “Let me have those interrogation debriefings. And you can have sandwiches sent up?”

“Didn't you have breakfast at the hotel?”

“I did. But I'm hungry.”

*   *   *

T
HE AGENCY
keeps threatening to put me out to pasture and Myerson keeps intervening in my behalf — not because he likes me but because he needs me: without me to sweep up his messes for him he'd be out on his own ear.

One of the reasons the Agency hasn't made good its threat to retire me is that my head is a computer-bank of facts, experiences and associations stretching all the way back to the days of the OSS when I cut my teeth in the trade. Often a remembered iota will put me on the track of something vital when the same trivial item might pass straight over the heads of the pushbutton whiz kids in Covert Operations. It pays to keep one fossil around for the sake of continuity.

It was such an item from the deep past that provided me with a pointer toward the solution of this case. Going through the transcripts of the interviews with the three doubled agents who'd confessed, I found a clue that kept appearing like a bad penny.

“And then this voice on the phone said I could live out my days in paradise with the visas and all that money.”

“He said I'd be able to quit grubbing around in these stinking Macao sewers and move my whole family to paradise.”

“He asked me how I'd like to be rich and carefree and spend the rest of my days in paradise.”

It echoes in my mind various conversations I'd had down through the years with Karl Jurgens. A slim and possibly misleading hint to be sure; but Karl had been smitten with the idea of a paradise for his retirement. It was one of his favorite words.

*   *   *

“K
ARL
J
URGENS
?” A look of alarm passed across Pete Morgan's face. “He's a scary one. But didn't he retire from the Abwehr?”

“Some years ago.”

That made him dubious. “If that's all you've come up with, it seems to me we're back to Square One.”

“Just the same I want to send out a few coded cables.”

The replies to my cables trickled in during the next twenty-four hours. In the meantime Pete's office was a shambles, trying to deal with three more defections that had come to light. Pete's security people dragged one of them in for questioning and I sat in. The compromised agent was a Chinese cleaning lady with a sheepish expression; she kept shaking her head apologetically and wringing her hands. “I knew I should not have accepted this temptation but it was so very much money — enough to support my children in comfort for the rest of their lives. Not like the bits of money you pay me.” She gave Pete a pathetically defiant look.

He made a face and said in an aside to me, “I ought to get a transcript of this to those cheap idiots who keep trimming our budgets.”

I drew the woman's attention. “What did he say to you when he made the offer? Do you remember his words?”

“Not really, sir. It was just a voice on a telephone.”

Pete said, “We got a voiceprint — the call was taped. The man spoke Mandarin Chinese with a Peking accent.”

“More people in the world speak Mandarin Chinese than any other language,” I said drily. “In any case it's probably a red herring. This isn't a Chinese operation.”

“What makes you think that?”

“The Chinese have been dealing in subtle intrigue for three thousand years. This isn't their style — it's far too crude.” I went back to the frightened woman. “Did he offer you anything specific besides the money and visas?”

I was fishing for a word but I didn't want to put it in her mouth.

She sighed wistfully. Her head tipped back and she murmured, “He offered me paradise.”

*   *   *

I
ASSEMBLED
the cables in order and dropped them on Pete's desk. “He's been living in retirement on Tahiti.” “Karl Jurgens? He found his paradise then.”

“But he's not there now.” I indicated the cables.

Pete sat up and looked.

I said, “He left eleven weeks ago on a plane for Djakarta. Coincidence? Within a week of his arrival in Djakarta you started losing agents. Djakarta, Taipei — he was sighted there two weeks later — they're both major substations on your network and that's where you lost the first two agents. If we keep digging I'm sure we'll find traces of him in Macao and here in Hong Kong. It's Karl all right. No doubt of it.”

“But what's he up to? Surely the West German government can't be running this caper. They're on
our
side — aren't they?”

“It's not a German caper. It's got to be a free-lance job. He's hired himself out as a mercenary. Probably started to run short of money to sustain him in paradise.”

“Hired himself out where? Who's the villain and why's he doing these things to us?”

“I guess I'd better ask Karl,” I said.

*   *   *

K
ARL
J
URGENS
and I had formed a warm friendship during the hottest of the Cold War years and I didn't enjoy the prospect of dismantling him but I'd had unpleasant jobs before and I didn't intend to do halfhearted work on this one. If Karl had set himself against us he could expect no quarter from us; I had little sumpathy to spare for him.

The first task was to find him. I couldn't employ Pete's people for the legwork because I didn't know which of them might have been compromised; there were too many rotten apples in that barrel. So I had to use Myerson's authority to call in security people from Kyoto and various floating departments. The hunt fanned out across East Asia and the Malay Archipelago; I directed the operation from our communications center at Guam.