The Prometheus Deception (76 page)

“I think you know,” said the Russian quietly. “You can change history, my friend. After all, we both know you did it before.”

Paris, November 1940

Stephen Metcalfe—aka Daniel Eigen, aka Nicolas Mendoza, aka Eduardo Moretti, aka Robert Whelan—pulled the door closed behind him, making sure it sealed. The steel door was set into a rubber gasket, a soundproofing measure.

The entire room he was entering was, of course, soundproofed, using the most advanced technology available. It was actually a room-within-a-room, double-walled, resting on and surrounded by steel plates, six-inch rubber walls; even the air ducts were insulated with rubber and fiberglass. It was low-ceilinged, the inner walls constructed of new cinder block painted U.S. Army gray.

Not much of the shiny new gray paint was visible, though, for the entire perimeter of the room was lined with complicated-looking consoles. Even Metcalfe, who came by at least weekly, didn't know what half of it was. Some of the equipment he recognized—Mark XV and Paraset shortwave radio transceivers, teletypewriters, scrambler telephones, an M-209 cipher machine, wire recorders.

The consoles were manned by two young fellows wearing headphones and taking notes on pads, their faces bathed in the eerie green glow emanating from the round cathode-tube screens. They were wearing gloves, carefully turning knobs, calibrating frequencies. The staticky Morse signals they monitored were bolstered by aerial cables that ran throughout the building—which was owned by a sympathetic Frenchman—to the roof.

Every time Metcalfe paid a visit to the Cave, as this clandestine outstation was called—no one remembered whether the nickname came from the bar upstairs, Le Caveau, or from the fact that the base resembled an electronic cave—he was impressed with the array of equipment. All of it had been smuggled into France in parts via ship or parachuted in, and all of it was strictly outlawed, of course, by the Nazi occupiers. Simple possession of a shortwave radio transmitter could send you to the firing squad.

Stephen Metcalfe was one of a handful of agents who operated out of Paris for an Allied network of spies whose existence was unknown but to a handful of powerful men in Washington and London. Metcalfe had met few of the other agents. That was the way the network operated. Each part of the network was kept separate from the others; everything was compartmented. One node never knew what the other node was up to. Security dictated the procedures.

Here in the Cave, three young radiotelegraph operators and cipher clerks monitored and initiated covert radio links with London, with Washington, and with a far-reaching web of deep-cover agents in the field, in Paris, in the other cities of the occupied zone of France, and across Europe. The men—two Brits and one American—were the very best, trained by the Royal Corps of Signals at Thame Park near Oxford and then at Special Training School 52. Qualified radiotelegraph operators were rare these days, and the British were far ahead of the Americans in training personnel.

A radio, tuned to the BBC, was playing low; the wireless was closely monitored for encoded signals delivered in the form of curious “personal messages” before the evening news broadcast. At a small folding table in the center of the room, a chess game had been abandoned. Evening was the busiest time, when the radio frequencies were least crowded and they could transmit and receive most easily.

The walls were lined with maps of Europe, of the borders and coastlines of France, of each arrondissement of Paris. There were navigation charts, topographical maps, charts of ship and cargo movements in Marseille, detailed maps of naval bases. Yet the room was not entirely devoid of human touches: amid the maps and charts was a
Life
magazine cover photo of Rita Hayworth, and another magazine clipping, of Betty Grable sunbathing.

Derek Compton-Jones, the ruddy-cheeked man who'd opened the door for him, clasped Metcalfe's hand, shook it hard. “Glad you're back safe and sound, mate,” he said solemnly.

“You say that every time,” Metcalfe teased. “Like you're disappointed.”

“Bloody hell!” Compton-Jones spluttered. He looked at once embarrassed and indignant. “Anyone tell you we're in the middle of a war?”

“That right?” Metcalfe replied. “Come to think of it, there did seem to be an awful lot of military uniforms out there.”

One of the men wearing headphones and sitting at a console across the room turned to look at Compton-Jones and remarked wearily, “Maybe if he kept his willy in his trousers, he might notice what's happening outside of the bedrooms he spends so much time in.” The adenoidal voice and upper-class British accent belonged to Cyril Langhorne, an ace cryptographer and cipher clerk.

The other one, Johnny Betts, from Pittsburgh, a topflight radiotelegraph operator, turned and said, “Roger that.”

“Ha,” said Langhorne. “Stephen here would roger anything in a skirt.”

Compton-Jones laughed, blushing. Metcalfe joined the laughter good-naturedly, then said, “I think maybe you boffins need to get out a little more. I ought to take you all over to One Two Two.” They all knew he was talking about the famous bordello at 122 rue de Provence.

“I'm all set there,” boasted Compton-Jones. “I've got a regular girl now.” He winked at the others and added, “I'll be seeing her later on after I pick up the latest shipment of spare parts.”

“That your idea of a deep penetration of France?” asked Langhorne.

Compton-Jones's face turned an even deeper crimson, while Metcalfe roared with laughter. He liked the men who worked here, particularly Compton-Jones. He often referred to Langhorne and Betts as the Bobbsey Twins, though they looked nothing alike. Their Morse and cipher work was the crux of the operation. It was grueling and tense, and Metcalfe knew that their japery was one of the few ways they had of relieving the grinding tension. They also considered Metcalfe their own personal Errol Flynn and regarded him with a combination of jealousy and awe.

He cocked his head, listening to the music playing low from the radio. “‘In the Mood,'” he said. “Good old American music—that's Glenn Miller, broadcasting from the Café Rouge in New York City.”

“No, sorry,” corrected Compton-Jones, “I'm afraid that's the Joe Loss Orchestra, mate. From London. That's their signature tune.”

“Well, I'm glad you guys have all that leisure time to listen to the radio,” Metcalfe said. “Because somebody's got to do some work.”

He reached inside his dinner jacket and pulled out from its lining the wad of papers, somewhat the worse for wear. He held them aloft, smiling proudly. “Complete plans of the German sub base at Saint-Nazaire, including details on the U-boat pens, even the water-locks system.”

“Good show!” marveled Compton-Jones.

Langhorne looked impressed despite himself. “Get that from your little Gestapo crumpet?”

“No, actually, from the private study of the Comte Maurice Léon Philippe du Châtelet.”

“The Vichy arsehole?” Langhorne said.

“The very one.”

“You're codding me! How'd you get into his private study?”

Metcalfe inclined his head. “A gentleman doesn't kiss and tell, Cyril,” he mock-scolded.

“His
wife!
Good Lord, Stephen, have you no pride? The
madame
's an old mare!”

“And the
mademoiselle
's quite a little filly. Now we've got to smuggle this out to a courier as soon as possible and fly it over to Corky in New York. I also need you to key in a digest of this and put it over the airwaves for further analysis.”

He meant, of course, Alfred “Corky” Corcoran. His boss. The brilliant spymaster who ran the private network of agents that included Metcalfe.

Private network: they answered only to Corcoran, not to some government agency, not to a committee. But there was nothing illegal about this, nothing extragovernmental. For it was the inspiration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself.

It was a strange time in America. Europe was at war, but America was not. America watched, waited. The voices of isolationism were loud and strong. As were the voices that argued passionately that the United States must get involved, must attack Hitler and defend her European friends—or all of Europe would be under the sway of Nazi Germany and it would be too late. Then Hitler would be an overwhelming foe.

Yet there was no centralized intelligence agency. Roosevelt desperately needed reliable, unbiased information on what the Nazis were really up to, on how strong the resistance to Hitler was. Would Britain survive the war? Roosevelt didn't trust Military Intelligence, which was amateurish at best, and he despised the State Department, which was both isolationist and prone to leak to every newspaper around.

So, late in 1939, Franklin Roosevelt called in an old friend and fellow Harvard man. Alfred Corcoran had served in G-2 Military Intelligence during the First World War, then attained great prominence within the top-secret world of MI-8—known as the “Black Chamber,” the New York–based code-breaking unit that had cracked Japan's diplomatic ciphers in the 1920s. After the Black Chamber was shut down, in 1929, Corcoran played a major behind-the-scenes role in resolving a series of diplomatic crises throughout the 1930s, from Manchuria to Munich.

FDR knew that Corky was the best—and most important, FDR knew he could trust him.

With funding buried in the White House budget, and the full backing of the President, Corky set up his shop, deliberately outside of the gossipy corridors of Washington. His top-secret private intelligence ring, which reported directly to the White House, was headquartered in the Flatiron Building in New York, disguised as an international trading firm.

Corcoran had a free hand to hire the best and the brightest, and he drew heavily from the young graduates of the Ivy League colleges, well-bred young men who would be comfortable in the rarefied social circles of Europe. So many of his recruits came from the Social Register, in fact, that wags began to call Corcoran's network the Register, and the nickname stuck. One of his earliest hires was a young Yale graduate named Stephen Metcalfe.

The son of a millionaire industrialist and his Russian wife—Stephen's mother had come from a noble family that had left the country before the Revolution—Stephen had traveled widely with his family and had been schooled in Switzerland. He spoke German, Russian, French, and Spanish fluently, virtually without accent: the Metcalfes had extensive holdings in Argentina and spent part of winter there for years. Too, the Metcalfes did a steady trade with the Russian government.

Stephen's brother, Howard—the reliable one—now ran the family's business empire, since the death of their father four years ago. Stephen would occasionally join Howard, travel with him, assist in whatever ways he could, but he refused to be tied down by the responsibility of running a major business.

He was also fearless, rebellious, and fun-loving to excess—qualities that Corcoran insisted would be useful in his new cover, as an Argentine playboy in Paris.

Derek Compton-Jones cleared his throat nervously. “No need to dispatch a courier, actually,” he said.

Langhorne looked up, then quickly looked back at his console.

“Oh really? You have a faster way to get it to Manhattan?” said Metcalfe.

Just then the door at the far end of the room opened.

It was a face he did not expect to see: the grave, drawn face of Alfred Corcoran.

The old man was dressed fastidiously, as always. His tie was tied in an elegant four-in-hand. His charcoal-gray suit emphasized his rail-thin frame. He smelled of peppermint, as he usually did—he was addicted to Pep-O-Mint Life Savers—and he was smoking a cigarette. He gave a hacking cough.

Compton-Jones immediately returned to his station, and the room fell silent. The high spirits had evaporated at once.

“Christ on a raft, these damned French smokes are god-awful! I ran out of Chesterfields on the airboat over here, somewhere over Newfoundland. Stephen, why don't you ingratiate yourself with your boss and get me some American tobacco? Aren't you supposed to be a damned black marketeer?”

Metcalfe stammered a bit as he came forward and shook Corky's hand. In his left hand he clutched the stolen documents. “Of course … Corky … what are you doing—?” Corcoran was far from a desk jockey: he made frequent trips into the field. But travel into occupied Paris was difficult, complicated, and decidedly risky. He didn't often come to Paris. There must be a good reason why he was here.

“What am
I
doing here?” replied Corcoran. “The real question is, what are
you
doing here?” He turned, headed back toward the room he'd just come from, and gestured for Metcalfe to follow.

Metcalfe closed the door behind him. Obviously the old man wanted to speak in private. There was an urgency about Corky that Metcalfe hadn't seen before.

The adjacent room stored an array of equipment including a German-letter typewriter for issuing passes and ID cards. There was also a small printing press, used in simple documentary forgery—most of the serious work was done in New York or London—for creating French travel and work permits. One table held an assortment of rubber stamps, including a good copy of a German censor stamp. In one corner of the room, near a rack of uniforms, was an oak desk piled with papers. A green-shaded library lamp cast a circle of light.

Corcoran sat down at the desk chair and motioned for Metcalfe to sit. The only other place was an army cot against the wall. Metcalfe sat, anxious. He placed the bundle of stolen papers on the cot beside him.

For a long while Corcoran regarded him in silence. His eyes were a pale, watery gray behind his flesh-colored horn-rimmed glasses.

“I'm sorely disappointed in you, Stephen,” Corcoran said softly. “I established you here at the enormous expense of scarce resources, and what do you have to show for it?”