Spy Who Read Latin: And Other Stories (2 page)

Parkinson shook his head. “He couldn’t have gotten away with it.”

“That’s something we’ll never know. He obviously thought he could. Check on this Corbin fellow right away, will you?”

Parkinson returned in an hour with the news that James Corbin—the real James Corbin—was vacationing in the south of France for two weeks.

“But,” Parkinson argued, “the inside guard would have asked him why he wasn’t away on his holiday. He’d have had to say something—and how do we know he could imitate Corbin’s voice well enough?”

“He was a character actor as well as a secret agent. We’ll have to assume he thought he could bring it off. He was in the building and he had a key, and that would have automatically cancelled out a lot of suspicion. He must have met Corbin at some time, though—perhaps over a few beers at a pub one night. Maybe that’s how he learned about the size and binding of the code books, if he didn’t learn it from another agent. We’ll have to question Corbin when he returns. Even a completely trustworthy person can let things slip at times.”

Toward mid-afternoon a phone call from Scotland Yard brought news of O’Neill’s killer. He was a suspected Communist named Ivar Kaden, an unemployed dock-worker with a long criminal record. On the morning of the murder he’d been visited at his flat by a minor official of the Russian Embassy.

“All right,” Rand conceded reluctantly to Parkinson. “So the Russians order a man killed just as he is about to steal our code book for them. Why? Was it a mistake, or what?”

“They don’t make many mistakes, sir,” Parkinson said.

“Then why did they have O’Neill killed?”

“Because he knew too much. Spies always know too much.”

“Too much about what?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

Rand was still enough under forty to resent being called “sir,” but he never corrected Parkinson. The fellow did his job, and he was acquiring a good knowledge of the intricate world of Concealed Communications. But just then Rand wanted to think, so he sent Parkinson away.

Alone, staring out the window at the great sweep of the muddy Thames, he wondered how the weather was in Moscow that day. He often wondered about Moscow, and sometimes he tried to visualize the man in the Kremlin who was his counterpart. He knew nothing about Taz except his name, which was the same as a river in western Siberia. Sometimes he pictured a gentle little man who worked eight hours a day over coded messages and secret writings, and then took the Moscow subway home to a wife and four waiting children. On days like this, though, when Taz became the shadowy figure on the other side of a giant chessboard, Rand pictured something quite different.

Was it Taz who had pressed a button in Moscow and ordered the death of Barton O’Neill on a London street? The same Taz who went home every night to his wife and four waiting children? Rand sighed; he knew there were men in London and Washington and Paris who did the same thing.

There was a soft knock on the frosted-glass door and Hastings entered, carrying a folder of reports. “I have an idea about this O’Neill thing,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Well, he was an actor. And actors often have stand-ins or doubles, don’t they? Look, the Russians have been after one of those code books for five years now. They certainly wouldn’t murder the one about to get it for them, would they? I think the man they killed was O’Neill’s double, and the whole thing was some sort of diversion to cover the real theft of a code book.”

Rand smiled. “They’ve checked the dead man’s fingerprints. It was O’Neill, all right. Besides, a bit-part character actor wouldn’t be likely to have a double.” He paused to light a cigarette. “In any event, I was prepared for a possible diversion. The real code books were moved to a room upstairs on Monday. The Message Center has just been going through the motions since then, sending messages upstairs still encoded.”

“Maybe that’s it,” Hastings said. “The Russians found out you were setting a trap and killed O’Neill.”

But Rand would have none of it. “Everyone in that Message Center is completely loyal—I’d stake my life on it. Besides, if there is a spy there, O’Neill’s complex plot would have been completely unnecessary.”

“What about the girl who saw O’Neill taking the impression of that lock?”

“Audrey Fowler? We’ve checked her. She’s a bit naïve, but perfectly trustworthy. She’d hardly have reported O’Neill in the first place if she weren’t.”

“So what do we have?”

Rand shrugged. “A dead spy.”

“Why?”

“Perhaps because he knew too much. About something.”

The next day, Friday, Rand went down to visit Ivar Kaden in jail. He interviewed him in a bare room with pale green walls and barred windows. The man was sitting across the table while a guard stood silently with his back to the door.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” Rand began.

Kaden was stocky with middle age, and a shadow of beard traced itself across his cheeks. “You’re the one jumped me the other night,” he said, and his muscles seemed to ripple at the recognition.

“It was my job,” Rand told him. “The same as your job was killing Barton O’Neill.”

“You’re bloody right! That was my job and I did it.”

“How much did they pay you?”

A sly smile now. “Enough.”

“Why was he killed?”

“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-even 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 attachés. 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 free-lance 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.”

B
Y THE FIRST LIGHT
of the new day the airport at Tirana presented a grubby appearance from above. The patchwork runways had been lengthened to accommodate the regular jet nights from Phnompenh and Shanghai, but otherwise little had been done to improve facilities since the last time Father Howard had passed through. That had been so many years ago, and now he was going home—to Paris and then to London.

But first there was the stop at Tirana, a sleepy little city set among the Albanian hills. It was the capital of the country, but somehow from the airport it reminded him more of the Chinese villages he’d known so well.

He’d expected the ring of alert soldiers that surrounded the big jet as it coasted to a stop. Things were like that in Albania today. Watching them now with their carbines poised, Father Howard reflected on the vagaries of a political climate that could ally two such nations as little Albania and giant Communist China.

Presently a gloomy little man in a long leather coat boarded the aircraft and followed the stewardess quickly down the aisle to his seat. “Your passport, please,” he said in thickly accented English.

Father Howard looked up at him, trying to smile. “I’m traveling from Shanghai to Paris,” he said. “My passport is not valid in Albania.”

“I must ask you to come with me to the Administration Building,” the gloomy man said.

“But—”

“Only a formality.”

Father Howard glanced out again at the grim circle of soldiers. Then he sighed, shrugged slightly to his traveling companion, and followed the man in the leather coat down the aisle. The dampness of the Albanian weather cut through him as soon as they stepped outside. “I don’t understand any of this.”

“You were a missionary priest in China?” the man asked as they crossed the long stretch of patchwork asphalt in the direction of the Administration Building.

Father Howard avoided a shiny puddle. “A long time ago. Things have not been easy for us in recent years.”

The man grunted and kept walking. It was then that Father Howard happened to glance back at the waiting plane and saw his battered old carpetbags being lifted from the luggage compartment. “You’re taking my baggage!” he gasped, and turned to retrace his steps.

He was striding purposefully toward the big jet when the two bullets hit him in the back of the head, and then he knew no more…