Flowers From Berlin (34 page)

"I don't even want to know about it," Cochrane said. "I just need one number from Herr Mauer."

Whiteside watched the Germans, who spoke so briskly in their own language that both he and Cochrane had difficulty. "I think you've earned it," Whiteside said.

Mauer thought so, too. Before dinner he stepped into the adjoining room with Cochrane. A five-digit additive to the naval code should be all Cochrane needed, Mauer agreed. And there had been a standing Abwehr order in effect since 1937, known only to those of his rank or higher:

All operatives in North America were to maintain the same additive. Changes over such a distance would be too difficult to effect. Any serious agent in America was working the code books with the same combination.

"So what is it?" Cochrane pressed.

"April 20, 1889," Mauer said. "It's so evident that I'm surprised no one tried it."

Cochrane blanched for a moment, then the realization was upon him.

"Four, two zero, eight nine," he said. "The date. Naturally."

Mauer was grinning with the ugly irony of it.

"A significant date to all Germans," Cochrane said.

"To all Nazis," Mauer corrected. Cochrane did not argue the point.

"The date of birth of Adolf Hitler," Cochrane said. And Whiteside grimaced with him.

*

In Liberty Circle, Reverend Fowler appeared on foot leaving the railroad depot. He was halfway to his home when a DeSoto with New York plates pulled to the curb next to him. Fowler was more than mildly surprised to be confronted by two Englishmen, one with a northern brogue and the other who'd evidently been born within sight of another St. Paul's. Fowler was even more perplexed to find that both had weapons aimed in his direction.

Both Englishmen leaped from the DeSoto while Fowler froze. He held his hands aloft, as if accosted by highwaymen, and protested that if they wanted his wallet, they were welcome to it.

"We don’t want your bloody wallet," said McPherson, who grabbed the minister by the top rear of his coat and slammed him hard against the car. A frisk revealed nothing. Then they handcuffed him, shoved him into the rear of the DeSoto, and were off, reporting to Peter Whiteside by telephone much later that evening.

Stephen Fowler offered no resistance, even when given no explanation for his abduction. For his captors, he had only forgiveness and advice:

"I don't know who you are or what you think you're doing," Stephen Fowler said. "But you've made the most dreadful of mistakes."

THIRTY-EIGHT

When Lanny Slotkin entered Foley's on Washington's Twenty-fifth Street, Cochrane was at the bar, seemingly planted in one place, concerned with the magical contents of a beer mug.

Lanny couldn't resist. He ambled to the bar and overtook an unsuspecting Cochrane from behind.

"Bill Cochrane. Imagine. Never seen you here before." Cochrane looked up, made a show of staring first at the mirror behind the bar, then turned.

"Hello, Lanny," he said. "Long time no. . . no what?" Cochrane grimaced. Slotkin glanced at the beer, and several dollar bills and some coins at Cochrane's solitary place at the bar. Cochrane breathed heavily.

"No see," said Lanny, suddenly quite chummy. "Long time no see."

"I'll buy you a beer," Cochrane offered.

He wrapped an arm around Slotkin and held him to the brass rim of the bar. "Hey! Bartender!" he boomed, his Virginia accent more evident than Slotkin, of Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, had ever noticed. "My friend here is an F.B.I. man. Set him up!"

"Not so loud," Slotkin urged. "I don't want people to know—"

"Ah, who the hell cares, anyway?" Cochrane scoffed.

The bartender drew a stein of beer for Slotkin, gave the younger man an indulgent grin, and departed.

"You bust your ass for the lousy F.B.I. and they put you on the street," Cochrane said in more subdued, sorrowful tones. "Well, I'm through busting mine. You just look out for yours, Lanny. That's tonight's advice from this old war horse." Cochrane lifted his mug.

"Cheers." He drained it.

"Cheers," answered Slotkin, not knowing what else to say. He sipped generously.

"I hear that Frank Lerrick has taken over my game," said Cochrane in a low, confiding grumble. "Well, we'll see what he can accomplish that Bill Cochrane couldn't, right, Lanny?"

"I suppose so."

Cochrane received a refill on the beer.

"The trouble with Frank Lerrick is the same as the trouble with Hoover," Cochrane rambled unsteadily. "They never get laid, 'cept maybe with each other with Clyde Tolson sandwiched in between."

"Cochrane! Would you cut it out?"

"A man's got a right to squawk about his former employers, Lanny."

"Yeah, but I come here every night," Slotkin snapped back, trying to hush Cochrane. "Now, knock it off."

Cochrane was silent for a moment. "Every night? How come I've never seen you?"

"Because you never came here. Until now."

"That must be it!" Cochrane slapped his side. Slotkin tried to move away but Cochrane planted an arm around his shoulders.

"Not so fast, Lanny. I want you to tell me your secrets."

"What secrets?"

"Hope See Ming. That's the lady's name, isn't it?"

"What about it?"

"What about it?" rejoined Cochrane, repeating. "You sit there looking at her the whole time. Do you mean you can't tell me about it now? What do you do in the evenings, anyway?

Play with Sally Fivefingers?"

"Cochrane, you're really smashed!"

"I can't believe you, Lanny," Cochrane said in astonished tones. "Hope's Chinese, right?"

"So?"

"So her you-know-what is sideways, Lanny. You mean you didn't know that?”

Slotkin turned crimson. Cochrane held him with an arm like a tentacle.

"The sideways ones are the best, Lanny. You're a genius and you didn't know that? Haven't you even tried to get into her?"

"Cochrane . . ."

"What about little Dora McNeil, Lanny? You work with her all day. You got anything going there?"

Slotkin was searching for an escape. There wasn't one.

"Do you know what little Dora puts behind her ears to make herself attractive to men, Lanny?"

"What?" Slotkin asked unwillingly.

"Her ankles," Cochrane replied drunkenly. "She puts her ankles behind her ears."

Slotkin started to physically struggle against Cochrane's arm. It was hopeless. "What's the matter with you, Lanny?" Cochrane asked. "Two lovely ladies and you haven't serviced either of them. Are you a pansy, Lanny?"

"I'm not a pansy!" Slotkin snapped. Three heads turned in his direction from the far end of the bar. "I don't want to drink with you, Cochrane," Lanny howled. Cochrane let Slotkin push his arm away, "I don't want to talk, either. You're roaring drunk and—"

"Some thanks I get."

"I don't owe you thanks for anything."

"No?"

"No."

"How about the time you leaned on poor little Mr. Hay? Hoover was looking for names. I could have mentioned you, Lanny."

"That was your idea."

"You didn't have to go along with it."

"Cochrane, what do you want from me? What are you doing here, aside from making a spectacle of yourself?"

Cochrane recoiled with sudden earnestness and sobriety. Then his expression was one of mournfulness. "Lanny, I want nothing from you except sympathy," Cochrane said. "I lost the best job I'd ever had. Hell. It hurts. I'm sorry if I'm sounding off. I've been over-served here by a sadistic barkeep."

Slotkin was off stride from Cochrane's mercurial shift in mood. "Hey, no offense," he said. "I understand."

"The thing is," said Cochrane in confidence, "we had those numbers lined up. The naval code? I think I had it," he said drunkenly. "I was going to go through some of the old intercepts and try out my numbers. Now Wheeler or Lerrick's going to try it and grab all the gravy."

Slotkin's ears twitched and stood up straight. "What numbers?" he asked.

Cochrane took a long appraising look at Lanny Slotkin. "What the hell. You did a favor for me once, pushing around Hoover's pet dwarf." His voice went very low and he withdrew a fresh yellow pencil from his jacket pocket. He took a cardboard coaster from the bar.

"I think this was it, Lanny," Cochrane said. "But play around with it. Don't jump to conclusions. And for Christ's sake, don't say where you got this. You'll get yourself fired."

"I won't say anything."

"And you promise you'll wait two or three days?"

"Promise."

Cochrane blinked, as if to clear his brain. Then he wrote on the coaster in a labored, stumbling scrawl: Four. Two zero. Eight nine.

"I think that's the additive, Lanny boy," Cochrane said.

"Where'd you get it?" Slotkin asked, accepting it, staring at it, and placing it within his coat pocket.

"I got lucky. Trial and error. What else works in life?" Cochrane reached for his beer. "Cheers, Lanny." He raised his mug. "Wear your glory in good health."

Slotkin raised his own mug and couldn't believe his good fortune. "Cheers," he answered. "Yes, cheers."

*

So this was it, Laura thought the next evening. The irrefutable evidence. The smoking gun. Her husband was what they said he was. That, and more.

Laura stood in the cramped hollow behind the wall within the spire of St. Paul's. Downstairs, Cianfrania and Hearn had secured the doors of the church, front and back respectively, while Whiteside and Bill Cochrane had led her upstairs. They had pried loose the outer panels of the chamber with a pair of butcher's knives—they broke one steel blade in the process—and had then, once the panels were loose, simply removed the nails.

And there, behind a second set of board, were the instruments of Siegfried's transmissions. The streamlined, gray metal transmitter that could fit into a small suitcase, the electrical wire, the receiver in a wooden crate, the copper antenna leads, and a German naval code book, fresh and complete, unlike the one at Bureau headquarters.

Whiteside and Cochrane hooked a sixty-watt bulb into an overhead light and reassembled the transmitter.

"We should send at seven in the evening," Cochrane said. "That's when Siegfried used to send."

"Who has the steadier hand?" Whiteside asked toward six-thirty. "You or I?'

They dummied the transmission key and took turns trying.

"It has to feel like Siegfried on the receiving end, too," Cochrane said. "Or no one's going to buy the act."

Cochrane's hand was steadier. Laura watched and said nothing, taking it all in, alternating her thoughts between her husband, Bill Cochrane, and Whiteside.

Cochrane wrote out a brief exchange for transmission. He and Whiteside buttoned into five digits per word for sending, then Laura double-checked their work.

Cochrane sat down at the telegraph key at precisely seven. He began launching numbers into the stratosphere. When they came down in Hamburg, the unscrambled text read:

FDR OPERATION COMPROMISED BY DISLOYAL TOP AGENT OF REICH WITHIN F.B.I.. ABORTING MISSION. WILL ALSO IMMEDIATELY REVEAL TO F.B.I. IDENTITY OF SAID AGENT AND DEPTH OF DUPLICITY.

CQDXVW-2

Unscrambled in Bureau headquarters by the officious Lanny Slotkin, the message unraveled the same way. Slotkin burst from his seat as if his pants were on fire. He waved his hand in the air triumphantly, screamed, "I got it!" and hit his hip on Hope See Ming's desk as he dashed from the Bluebirds' chamber.

He scurried through the hall, passing Bobby Charles Martin, who instinctively always wanted to trip him, and was virtually airborne past Dora McNeil, who had herself all gussied up for someone's benefit that evening.

Slotkin burst unannounced into Frank Lerrick's office. Lerrick, whose desk was piled high with classified documents, bolted to his feet, his face turning red, and was set to explode with the ferocity of one of Siegfried's most potent creations.

But Slotkin silenced him.

"I got it. I cracked it. It makes perfect sense in English. Here," he said, handing the white pad with the interpretation to Lerrick.

Lerrick took it and read.

Slotkin gushed excitedly. "It works! It works!"

At which time, Dick Wheeler loomed like a Kodiak bear in the doorway, glared in, and puffed his pipe furiously.

"What in hell is all this racket about'?" he snarled. "Lanny?"

Frank Lerrick looked up. "Our little resident genius from Brooklyn has done usproud," he said, not without an edge. "Take a look for yourself, Dick. This just came in. Our Lanny has grabbed the brass ring. Cracked the naval code for us."

Wheeler came forward and looked as Lerrick handed him Slotkin's notation pad.

"My, but we're in business," said Lerrick. "But what's this all mean—'compromised,' 'duplicity' within the Bureau?" His thin moustache twitched. "Not our Bureau. Can't be. Can't be!"

*

Fussel and McPherson had never guarded such an amiable, complacent prisoner.

"What exactly did your commander say about me?" Stephen Fowler asked when locked into a British safe house off Clifton Park in Baltimore.

"He said you were a dangerous lad," said McPherson in his rumbling Caledonian brogue. "Said we were to shoot you, sir, if you tried anything naughty, sir."

"You won't have to shoot me," said Reverend Fowler in conciliatory tones. "Certainly hope not, sir," added Mick Fussel. "Have to fill out a whole bloody report if I fire a weapon. Bugger up the whole day, it would."

"Somewhere someone has made a terrible mistake," Fowler said. "I intend to be the perfect guest, sit here until the mistake has been realized, and then wait for your commander to issue me his apology."

"That being the case, lad," Andrew McPherson said, "you'll be making life much easier for everyone."

"Mr. Whiteside never apologizes to anyone for anything," Fussel noted as if it were relevant. "Doesn't make mistakes."

"He made one this time," Fowler said calmly.

McPherson was a huge, burly man with a wide thick face, powerful shoulders, and a neck to properly connect the two. The son of a miner, he had been born in Dunfermline, worked in the mines a bit himself, done a stint in the Army in Africa, then moved permanently south from Scotland to Liverpool, where he had become a constable. In the mid-thirties, the talent scouts from M.I.5 were looking for some muscle with brains attached. They recruited him.

Mick Fussel came to his post as an M.I.5 babysitter in much the same manner. A humorless Cockney who was a lanky but strong six feet two inches tall, Fussel had taken a job after the Depression in an automotive parts warehouse in north London. When the day-today drudgery of shipping bumpers and fenders to railway stations proved too much for him, he noticed a recruiting poster at a bus depot for the Metropolitan Police. The poster showed a beaming young man in a crisp, smart uniform and the text beneath the photograph promised a job with a future and an interesting life.

Fussel applied, became a police officer, and was destined for quick promotion when the same recruiting drive that tapped McPherson tapped Fussel also. A man of thirty-five, his arms were long and he often had five to six inches of shirt cuff showing. His hair was streaked with gray, as if from some tour of duty he never spoke of, and, unlike McPherson, who wore his handgun beneath his armpit, Fussel kept his on his left hip.

Through the first evening of his capture, Reverend Fowler exchanged a calm banter with both men. Fussel and McPherson were under specific instructions to keep Fowler handcuffed and ankle-shackled at all times.

This they did. The only exceptions were when the minister asked if he could shower. His hands were free, and Fussel, pistol drawn, stood ten feet from the shower stall watching the minister. Afterward, when Fowler toweled off and was dry and dressed, he held out his hands obediently for the cuffs to be put back in place.

"That was very kind of you," said Fowler. "My wrists were killing me."

"I'm not here to be kind to you," answered the tall Cockney.

"No. Of course you're not. You're simply following your orders."

"Too bloody right," Fussel said. "Now let's get on with you."

He motioned to a doorway that led to a flight of steps that led downstairs. When the minister reached the first floor, he saw that McPherson was waiting, also with gun drawn. "Your Mr. Whiteside must have given me some kind of advance billing." The American grinned.

"He just said you were extremely dangerous," McPherson growled. "Keep moving and shut up."

"Have you heard from him?" Fowler asked, hopefully, ushered toward a downstairs room.

"What would it be to you if we did?" Fussel asked. The minister sounded apologetic.