Spy and the Thief (3 page)

“Look, mister, I don’t ask questions and I don’t answer them. I do my job, that’s all.”

“Are you a Communist, Ivar?”

The bulky man shifted in his chair, looking at his hands. “I guess so. I guess I would be if I knew what they were talking about.”

“Who paid you to kill O’Neill?”

His eyes came up to meet Rand’s. “Do you really think I’ll tell you, mister?”

“You don’t have to, Ivar. We know the orders came from a Russian agent. Just one thing—did they tell you
when
to shoot him?”

Ivar Kaden hesitated and then said, “Before he went into the Foreign Office on Wednesday night.”

“Yes,” Rand mumbled to himself. “Before.” He got to his feet and motioned to the guard. “I’m finished. You can take him back.”

Rand left the building and drove back to his office. He phoned the Foreign Office to check once more on the code books; all were safe. He had to face the fact that Barton O’Neill had been killed by the Russians at the very moment he was about to perform an important and vital mission for them.

There seemed only one possible explanation—that they had feared a trap and killed O’Neill to keep him from talking. But what could the actor tell? He was not a regular Communist agent—more of a freelance operator who sold his secrets to the highest bidder. It was doubtful that he would know any more about the secret workings of the Soviet espionage network in England than was already on file at British Intelligence.

Sitting alone in his office, Rand had almost decided to drop the investigation. After all, the code was safe, the spy was dead, the assassin was in prison. What more was there to do? Did it really matter
why
they’d had him killed?

Parkinson came in with a report. “This man from the Russian Embassy,” he began, eager to deliver his news. “British Intelligence has a constant watch on him. His name is Barsky, and he’s a known agent.”

“That’s the one who visited Ivar Kaden on Wednesday morning?”

Parkinson nodded. “But more important, a man believed to be O’Neill was seen in a pub with Barsky on Monday. Does that help?”

“It only confirms what we already suspected,” Rand told him. “O’Neill must have got the idea of going after a code book when he landed the part in this television play being filmed in the lobby of the Foreign Office. He must have already known there was a man in the Message Center whom he could impersonate. And once he got that impression of the lock on Sunday, he knew the last obstacle to a code book was removed. So on Monday he made his offer to the Russian contact man.”

“The Embassy sent the word to Moscow—to Taz, probably—and the word came back to kill O’Neill. Does that make any sense, sir?”

Yes, Rand conceded to himself, they were, back to the same puzzle. “Many things don’t make sense in this business, Parkinson,” he replied weakly.

“Perhaps they thought he already had one of the code books. Using the key and his disguise, he could have entered the building at any time.”

Rand shook his head. “One thing we failed to find in his attaché case was any sort of false identification. He apparently was unable to forge the necessary pass to get him past the guard in the lobby. He could only work his plan when he was already inside the lobby with the television crew. Since he had to have time to make the duplicate key, he couldn’t try for a code book until Wednesday night.”

“Without identification, how could he have gotten by the second guard, at the Message Center door?”

“You know how those things are, Parkinson. The first guard would have been a lot more careful than a guard checking on only a half dozen people he sees every day. Once through that locked door, O’Neill was apparently sure he could bring off the rest of it by using his makeup and his acting abilities.”

“So what have we got, sir?”

Rand closed his eyes. “We have an agent with a better-than-ever chance of stealing one of our diplomatic code books and getting away with it. Although it would be tremendously important to the Russians to get their hands on it, they have the man killed just before his mission is accomplished. Why?”

Why? The question remained, even after Parkinson had left the office. Rand sat brooding about it in silence, knowing that he could never drop the case until he knew the answer. He thought of talking to the girl at the Foreign Office again, but somehow he knew the answer didn’t rest there.

He went to the window and pressed his forehead against the cold glass, staring out at the muddy Thames, trying to put himself in the place of a man in Moscow whom he’d never met.

Why did they kill him? Because he knew too much? No.

Because he knew too little?

Rand’s head came away from the window and he snatched up the telephone. “This is an emergency! Get me the Foreign Secretary!”

“Too little?” Hastings repeated later, not sure he understood.

Rand nodded from behind a cloud of relaxed cigarette smoke. “O’Neill was killed because he knew too
little,
not too much. I knew the code book had to be involved somehow, and then I remembered an incident in World War II. A team of American and British cryptanalysts broke the code used by Japanese military attaches. But the OSS wasn’t informed of this, and they managed to steal a copy of the code book in Lisbon. Of course the Japanese immediately stopped using the stolen code—
and the cryptanalysts had to start all over again!”

“You mean the Reds …?”

Rand nodded and poured some brandy. “I’m sure of it. Remember, we’ve been using that same diplomatic code for five years. Sometime in those five years Taz’s people broke it. Now, what would you do, Hastings, if you were sitting in Moscow with our secret diplomatic code broken, reading our messages every week, and some freelance agent you couldn’t control said he was going to steal that very code for you?”

Hastings nodded, seeing it all clearly. “Even if he got away with it, we’d have discovered the theft in a couple of hours or days and promptly changed the code. And they couldn’t just order him not to steal the book, because he’d have done it anyway and sold it to another government. All they could do is what they did—kill him before he stole it.”

“A dirty business,” Rand said, staring out at the lights of the London night. “Dirty.”

“What will you do now?”

Rand took a sip of brandy. “I’ve already done it. Our embassies switched to an emergency code book this afternoon. Taz is in for a surprise when he tries to decode the next message.”

C
ECIL MONTGOMERY WAS A
young British medical missionary who had come to the island republic of Buhadi filled with noble plans for curing men’s ills and saving their souls. He’d been there just one month when the year-old government toppled during a long night of gunfire and bloodshed, and a bomb hurled at random by a rebel terrorist killed his wife and only child.

Sometime after that, during a brief visit back to London, Cecil Montgomery decided to return to Buhadi and work for British Intelligence. His assignment was not a glamorous one, and he barely found time for it between his duties at the little village hospital and his weekly sermons at the chapel in town. But each Monday morning he walked down to the cable office near the docks and sent in his weekly coded report. It was in the form of an innocuous requisition for more supplies—a listing of Bibles and hymnbooks, medicines and foodstuffs to be shipped to his mission—and if the local authorities ever wondered why most of the requested supplies never arrived, they refrained from questioning him about it.

But the political situation on Buhadi remained far from settled, even after the government fell. Down from the tropic hills in the island’s center came two opposing rebel armies, one backing the Anglo-Indian Rama Blade, and the other following the bearded giant Xavier Starkada. Each army claimed to represent the people, and each leader claimed the other was a spy and traitor in the pay of Peking.

Oddly enough, British Intelligence agents in Asia had quickly confirmed that one of the two men was indeed a spy in the pay of the Communists, and thus Cecil Montgomery received his last and most important assignment from London.

Though he’d had little training in the intricacies of modern espionage, Cecil Montgomery did have the advantage of being on the scene. Working day and night among the poor peasants of Buhadi, he heard things and saw things. Soon he came to know both Blade and Starkada well, and made friends with their trusted aides during lulls in the sporadic fighting. And so it was that on a certain Monday morning in January he sent a coded cablegram to the cover address in London that read:
CONFIRMING IDENTITY OF SPY THIS WEEK. WILL CABLE NAME NEXT MONDAY.

The next Saturday night, by flickering candlelight in a shabby village shack, Cecil Montgomery read the documents that told him what London wanted to know. Somewhere during the middle of his regular Sunday morning service he had a passing doubt about this undercover work he was doing, knowing in an abstract way that the message he would send the following morning would sooner or later cause the death of a man. But then he remembered the bodies of his wife and child, killed by a bomb with Red Chinese markings on it, and he knew what he had to do. If the spy died as a result of his message, then at least this land of Buhadi—in a sense, his land—could begin to live in peace.

He carried the message in his breast pocket that Monday morning, written in pencil on a standard cablegram form. It was a sunny morning, with a warm wind blowing in off the ocean—the kind of day his wife had always liked. Not until he was across the street from the cable office did Montgomery see the two men who waited there for him.

Something had gone wrong, something had gone terribly wrong. They knew.

Then he was running wildly, and they were after him, through the narrow twisting lanes of the old town, seeking a shelter where he knew there was none. In all this town, among all these people whom he’d helped so much, he knew there would be no hiding place.

Finally, winded from his run, he paused against a rough stone wall in a dead-end alley facing the white marble church that was a town landmark. He took a piece of notepaper from his pocket, and a ballpoint pen, and slowly but deliberately began to write a message. It took him two minutes to write the few words, and when he’d finished he folded the paper twice and scrawled two initials on the outside. Then he stuffed the folded paper deep into his pocket.

By that time the two men were standing at the end of the alley, their dark outlines stark against the whiteness of the church beyond. They walked slowly toward him, knowing there was no way out for Cecil Montgomery. The doctor-missionary waited calmly now, his lips moving in a silent prayer.

The taller of the two assassins had a pistol with a silencer on it. The other carried a dagger with a curved blade that caught the morning sunlight.

The man with the dagger struck first.

It was January in London, and the weather was not good. A three-day fog had all but paralyzed air travel, and even on the ground there seemed to be a slow uncertainty about life. Even in his usually cozy office overlooking the Thames, Rand could feel the chill winter dampness. The weather depressed him, and the man across the desk did nothing to brighten his spirits.

“Rand, are you familiar with the island of Buhadi?” Colonel Nelson liked to open conversations with a question, a habit that may have lingered since his early days as a rural schoolmaster.

“Indian Ocean, isn’t it? We granted their independence a year or so ago?”

“That’s the place. It’s always been an oddity, a mixture of races and national interests—Indians, Africans, British, and even some Chinese. Could be a bigger problem than Cyprus if not handled right. Anyway, the Buhadi government’s been pretty much in a state of chaos lately. Two opposing rebel chiefs are claiming authority, and we know the Communists are in there with both feet.”

“What’s our interest, Colonel?” Rand asked. He never cared much for political background, and he was waiting for Colonel Nelson to get to the point.

The Colonel lit one of his familiar cigars. “We have an agent there—at least, we did have until he was killed last Monday. A minister chap named Montgomery. He started working for us after his wife and child were killed on the island. Every Monday morning he reported by cable, using one of our combination ciphers.

“Anyway, he’d uncovered evidence linking one of the rebel leaders with the Chinese Reds, and he was to send us the man’s name last Monday. Somehow they found out, and stabbed him to death in an alley. Of course they went through his pockets and took the cablegram he was going to send, along with his notebook and wallet. But they missed this, or else didn’t think it was important.”

Colonel Nelson passed over a folded piece of paper. On the outside were the letters”
C.C.
Rand felt his pulse quicken. The particular branch of British Intelligence of which he was the head was known to insiders as
Double-C,
from its official designation of Concealed Communications. “How’d you get this?” he asked.

“Our embassy man found it on the body and forwarded it to us in a diplomatic pouch.”

Rand unfolded the paper and read the eight words written on it.
Father come our art in is earth bread.

“What do you make of it?” Colonel Nelson asked.

“Looks like a code or cipher of some sort.”

“Especially since he addressed it to your department.”

“He knew about Double-C?”

“All our agents are told of it.”

“You think he wrote this message just before they killed him?”

“I’m sure of it. We’ve checked the handwriting, and even compared the ink with that in a ballpoint pen found on his body. There’s no doubt he wrote it.”

Rand was busy doodling the more obvious possibilities on his pad.
Father come our art in is earth bread.
First letters: F-c-o-a-i-i-e-b. Nothing. Last letters: r-e-r-t-n-s-h-d. Nothing.

Rand put down his pencil and said, “I don’t think it’s one of our standard ciphers. Is it anything your people use?”