Ultimate Issue (19 page)

The landlord hung up, and Verago thought what a pity he couldn’t warn the couple what they had in store.

“Somebody’s been in my room,” complained Verago.

The landlord blinked. “Who?” he asked bovinely.

“Listen, friend,” said Verago, “if I knew that I wouldn’t be asking you. Did you see anybody go up?”

The landlord belched. He shook his head. “Anything been taken?” he asked, easing his bulk out of the chair.

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“Not that I know.” He stopped. ‘Y`ellme, have any Americans been here? Civiliansl”

“You know how close the base is,” he said. “I don’t notice any more who comes and goes.”

“Has anybody asked for me? Or what room I’m in?”

Even as he asked, Verago knew it was pointless. The OSI wouldn’t need to ask. They’d know it all.

“Maybe you made a mistake,” said the landlord “Seeing nothing’s gone. Maybe it’s Ethel. She may have moved something.”

Ethel was the garlic maid.

“Nobody’s just moved things. My room’s been searched.”

“I can tell you, nobody’s had your key while you’ve been out. I don’t see no way they could have got in.” The landlord sniffed. “Anyway, I’ll tell the missus and Joe to keep their eyes open.”

Joe was the handyman also the porter, barman, and waiter.

“Thanks,” said Verago.

“By the way,” said the landlord, “you asked for three eggs this morning.”

“So?”

“I’ll have to charge you extra,” said the landlord. “Set breakfast is two eggs and one rasher.”

“Home from home, isn’t it?” Verago grunted.

Two jets roared over the neighborhood, so low that a lantern hanging from the gabled ceiling shook.

“Ah,” said the landlord. “They’re busy at the base.”

“Yeah.” Verago nodded. “They’re very busy.”

Karlerahe

The afternoon Verago’s hotel room was searched, Helmut Pech had a meeting with his chief of section Bl.

Herr Unruh looks tired, thought Pech. The department was, of course, under great pressure, and his boss had evidently been working long hours.

“I have heard from the Americans,” said Herr Unrnh. “He goes on trial on July twenty-fift!l”

“Excellent,” said Pech.

“I have always admired Yankee ingenuity,” commented Herr Unrnh, who had been a junior Waffen SS staff officer in the war, but whose De-Nazification file had fortuitously gone astray after VE day. “They are very efficient people. I think they’ve handled it beautifully.”

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“Absolutely,” Pech agreed respectfully.

“However …” Herr Unruh looked at his subordinate across the desk, suddenly gloomy.

“A problem?” ventured Pech.

“The woman, Helga. Just how secure is she in Marienfelde?”

“Very,”

“You appreciate the problem she could present. If she eluded us, if she managed somehow “

“I don’t think there’s the slightest chance,” insisted Pech. “If I may say so, camp security is tight. I myself have given special instructions. Somebody always keeps an eye on her.”

Herr Unruh put his fingertips together. He was about to deliver a little homily.

“I was taught never to take a chance. I have always followed that principle. In our work, Helmut, we must assume the worst and act as if it could happen any moment. You follow me?”

“Of course,” said Pech, “but I assure you “

“We are dealing with an unusual problem, and it red quires an, . . unusual approach. You understand? Of course you do. Now, we have nothing to worry about with the American. As for that man ” Herr Unruh clicked his finger. “You know the one I mean.”

“Martin,” volunteered Pech, “Martin Schneider.”

“Yes. Well, somebody did us a favor. He is dead. So we’ve no more worry on that score. Which leaves us Helga. I think we should make sure that even if, by some bad luck, she managed to, er, to get out and about she’d be stuck, unable to go anywhere.”

Pech waited.

“And Helmut, I need not remind you that it must be done legally. We are bound by democratic laws.” The smile was a very thin one. “We have to obsene every dot and comma of the citizen’s rights. We must adhere at all times to our constitution.” The smile became broader. “Indeed, I stress that our organization is charged with its protection.”

“No question, sir,” said Pech.

“So I suggest we use a purely administrative method.” Pech liked Herr Unruh. The man really knew how to run his section. Everything could be tape-recorded because everything always appeared perfectly legal.

“Have you seen her passport]”

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Pech shook his head.

“Or any other of her papers? Birth certificate? Driver’s license?”

“No,” said Pech. “You know the state she arrived in.”

“Of course. No papers. No identification. So in truth you do not know who she really is, do you?” said Unruh, beaming.

“Oh, we do,” Pech said. “We know everything about her. She ” Then he stopped. He stared at Unruh.

“My dear Helmut, you are so trusting,” said his boss. “Sometimes I think much too nice to deal with the kind of people who are our customers. The fact is, isn’t it, that we have no proof that Helga Braunschweig is who she says she is. Why, we don’t even have evidence that she is German. East or West. Everything is her word.”

“You are trying to say “

“I’m saying, Helmut, that for all we know she might be Russian, Polish, anything.” He laughed. “She could have been born in Warsaw or Kiev. She could be a very dangerous security risk. And certainly not a German citizen.”

“She has a number.”

“Yes, 6221. Which we gave her. That’s all she has.”

He opened a drawer and pushed a thin file across to Pech.

“This is an administrative order declaring her stateless. It should clip her wings a little, don’t you think, even if she tried to leave the nest?”

“Can we do that?” asked Pech, but already his face was full of admiration.

“It is our duty, Helmut. B-One has to sort the wheat from the chaff. The impostors from the genuine article. The phonys they try to plant on us, the fifth column they send across the zonal boundaries. In the absence of valid documents, we must grade a suspect stateless. No passports. No visa. No travel permits. Stuck in Berlin.”

He could not disguise his pleasure at the idea.

“Perfect, don’t you think? A very good way of keeping her in … isolation, don’t you agree?”

Pech reached for the file. “Herr Unrnh,” he said, ‘] will see to it forthwith.”

After Pech had gone, Herr Unruh basked in a glow of self-satisfaction. It was really remarkable how with a clean and final stroke of the pen and the right rubber stamp, he could reduce someone to the status of nonbeing.

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In a way, lie was sorry for Helga, of course. The existence of Displaced Person was something he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy, and he had nothing at all against the girl.

It just had to be done.

On his desk calendar, Tuesday, July 25, had been ringed in red pencil.

Herr Unruh was counting the days to the courtmartial of Captain Tower.

Saturday, July 8,1961

London

THB next night Ivanov called Laurie at 10:50 P.M.

“You are a very popular woman,” he said. “Every time I phone, you’re out.”

“Only sometimes.”

“I would like to see you again, Laurie.” He paused. “Can it be arranged?”

“What did you have in mind?” she asked.

He laughed, and she could visualise his smile. “You sound so suspicious. What do you think?”

“No,” said Laurie. “You tell me.”

“How about going to see a showy Is that innocent enough?”

This time she laughed.

“You free Monday evening?” he went on.

“What’s the play?”

“No play,” said Ivanov. “The Palladium. Second house. I’ll meet you there. Eight o’clock. How’s that for you?”

“The Palladium,” she said, surprised. “All right. I’ll be there.”

“Fine.” There was faint music in the background.

“Where are you? Where are you calling from? I can hear ‘My Fair Lady.’ “

“Oh, I’m over at Stephen’s,” he said. “Want to come across?”

Oh, yes, she thought, you do spend a lot of time with Stephen.

But aloud she said, “No, thanks, Gene, not tonight. I’m too tired.”

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“You don’t need to get up early for work,” he said, sounding a little mocking. “Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“I’m just tired. Thank you for calling. See you Monday evening.”

“You bet,” said Ivanov, in his best American, and he hung up.

“That was him?” asked Unterberg, sitting in the armchair opposite her.

Laurie nodded. “He’s taking me to a show Monday.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“What do you think?” she said.

Unterberg sat studying her for a moment. Then he asked, “You know what you’re doing, sweetheart?”

“You tell me.”

“Getting away with murder.”

And her smile worried Unterberg for a long time.

Sunday, July 9, 1961

Czechoslovakia

O for Oboe exploded 29,000 feet up, eleven miles from Bratislava, at 0415 hours.

Just as the electronics specialist who spotted the telltale blip was about to warn the commander, the missile struck the lumbering plane. There wasn’t even time to send an emergency signal to Laconbury.

The aircraft disintegrated in a ball of fire, momentarily lighting up the night sky around it. Then it was all over.

For once, ironically, Oboe’s crew had been reasonably relaxed. It was their third ferret mission in two weeks, and they were on the return run to the United Kingdom. They were looking forward to breakfast at Laconbury and seventy-two hours in London.

Nobody had talked about it, but they had started to convince themselves that this latest batch of spy missions had turned into something of a milk run.

As always, Oboe’s men knew, the Russians were keeping electronic eyes on them, but perhaps they had gotten used to Oboe’s visits. Maybe the Russians weren’t all that worried about nosey intruders over Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Not that these missions weren’t important. General

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CroxfordSimself had attended their last two briefings at the base, before takeoff. He had sat, hunched on a chair, while the intelligence officer had outlined their flight plan and, as he put it, “special areas of interest.”

They also knew that the electronic radar pictures they took, and the information the intricate gadgets on board recorded, were always rushed away, as soon as they had landed.

But they’d gotten used to it, like the SAC bomber crews at Brize and Heyford got used to getting hourly weather reports about their alert targets and the bomb technicians at Wethersfield and Bentwaters had become unmoved by the loading of nuclear weapons aboard the standby aircraft

It was all part of the daily routine, although for ferret crews it meant a little more.-They, after all, had to fly over enemy territory.

Before the attack, the misshapen, ugly WV-2E had had an uneventful night. A couple of times the probes had picked up enemy aircraft, but that wasn’t out of the ordinary. There had been some unusual radio transmissions at one point, which they recorded for analysis back home.

As always Laconbury was monitoring them, even though radio silence was the order of the day. It would Save to be something mighty special to start them chattering.

The actual blast that was Oboe’s heavenly pyre had been picked up by various monitoring facilities on the other side of the border, and by the time Oboe was due to touch down at Laconbury again, General Croxford already knew what had happened.

When daylight came, a few pieces of wreckage lay scattered over a wide area, across the fields and in the woods, but that was all that was left of the big spy plane. And its crew.

Czech army trucks soon arrived, and the soldiers cordoned off the area. A couple of hours later two carloads of Soviet air force experts turned up, and every scrap of burned, twisted metal was carefully examined and then taken away for further scrutiny. The Russians searched hard and long for any piece of electronic equipment, but the explosion had not left much for them to find.

The curlew thing was that nobody said a word about the destruction of O for Oboe. The U.S. Air Force did not announce the loss of its plane and crew, and the Russians

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stayed silent. No communique was issued by either side, no hint given to anyone, and no one, East or West, knew it had ever happened.

If there was a cold war going on, at that moment in time it was apparently by mutual agreement that certain things were kept secret. Even things they did to each other.

Monday, July 10,1961

London

IT’S like sitting in a mausoleum, she thought. Outside it was a brilliant July day, the sun blazing down from a cloudless sky, the girls in the Strand wearing their bright summer dresses, the pavements hot and sticky.

But there, in the Law Courts, it was dark and cold. Footsteps echoed in the big Gothic marble hall, and people held whispered conversations outside the courtrooms, dike intruders at a funeral.

Serena Howard sat at the end of one of the interminable mazes of corridors, hands clenched in her lap. A few feet away was a door, and on the handle an usher had hung a card reading “In Chambers.” Behind that door Daventry was asking one of Her Majesty’s judges of the Queen’s Bench to set aside Serena’s subpoena

Momentarily she considered running out of this vast medieval undertaker’s palace, into the fresh air, running as fast as she could, anywhere, anyplace, to an airport, getting on a plane, fleeing to some faraway country, just to escape from all of this.

“I’m sorry I’ve been such a time” came Daventry’s voice, and there he stood, looking down at her.

“He … he said no?” She tried to keep the tremor out of her voice.

“I explained the situation,” said Daventry, sitting down beside her. He had three law books under his arm, and now he put them on the oak bench. “His lordship was very understanding.”

“But he won’t “

“Look, Serena,” said Daventry, “he’s bound by the law.”

“What happened?” She was twisting her silver ring.

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“I’m afraid he’s declined to set aside the subpoena.”