Citadel (5 page)

“The Bricquebec incident described a roar, not
a put-put or a dying fart. The roar would be a
Lysander climbing to parachute altitude. They
normally fly at 500, and any agent who made an
exit that low would surely scramble his brains and
his bones. So the plane climbs, this fellow bails out,
and now he's here.”

“Why would he take the chance on a night drop
into enemy territory? He could come down in the
Gestapo's front yard. Hauptsturmführer Boch
would enjoy that very much.”

Actually the Abwehr detectives hated Boch
more than the French and English combined. He
could send them to Russia.

“I throw it back to you, Walter. Stretch that
brain of yours beyond the lazy parameters it now
sleepily occupies and come up with a theory.”

“All right, sir, I'll pretend to be insane, like you.
I'll postulate that this phantom Brit agent is very
crafty, very old school, clever as they come. He
doesn't trust the Maquis, nor should he. He knows
we eventually hear everything. Thus he improvises.
It's just his bad luck that his airplane awakened
some cows near Bricquebec, the peasants complained,
and so exactly what he did not want us to
know is exactly what we do know. Is that insane
enough for you, sir?”

Macht and Abel were continually taking shots
at each other, and in fact they didn't like each other
very much. Macht was always worried about Is-
Russia as opposed to Not-Russia, while the
younger Abel had family connections that would
keep him far from Stalin's millions of tanks and
Mongols and all that horrible snow.

“Very good,” said Macht. “That's how I read it.
You know when these boys arrive they stir up a lot
of trouble. If we don't stop them, maybe we end
up on an antitank gun in Russia. Is anyone here interested
in that sort of a job change?”

That certainly shut everyone up fast. It frightened
Macht even to say such a thing.

“I will make some phone calls,” Abel said. “See
if there's anything unusual going on.”

It didn't take him long. At the Bricquebec prefecture,
a policeman read him the day's incident
report, from which he learned that a prominent
collaborationist businessman had claimed that his
papers were stolen from him. He had been arrested
selling black-market petrol and couldn't identify
himself. He was roughly treated until his identity
was proven, and he swore he would complain to
Berlin, as he was a supporter of the Reich and demanded
more respect from the occupiers.

His name, Abel learned, was Piens.

“Hmmm,” said Macht, a logical sort. “If the
agent was originally going to Sur-la-Gane, it seems
clear that his ultimate destination would be Paris.
There's really not much for him to do in Bricquebec
or Sur-la-Gane, for that matter. Now, how
would he get here?”

“Clearly, the railway is the only way.”

“Exactly,” said Hauptmann Macht. “What time
does the train from Cherbourg get in? We should
meet it and see if anyone is traveling under papers
belonging to M. Piens. I'm sure he'd want them returned.”

A few days earlier (cont'd.)

“Have I been misinformed?” asked Basil. “Are we
at war with the Russians? I thought they were our
friends.”

“I wish it were as easy as that,” said Sir Colin.
“But it never is. Yes, in one sense we are at war with
Germany and at peace with Russia. On the other
hand, this fellow Stalin is a cunning old brute,
stinking of bloody murder to high heaven, and
thus he presumes that all are replicas of himself,
equally cynical and vicious. So while we are friends
with him at a certain level, he still spies on us at
another level. And because we know him to be a
monster, we still spy on him. It's all different compartments.
Sometimes it's damned hard to keep
straight, but there's one thing all the people in this
room agree on: the moment the rope snaps hard
about Herr Hitler's chicken neck, the next war begins,
and it is between we of the West and they of
the East.”

“Rather dispiriting,” said Basil. “One would
have thought one had accomplished something
other than clearing the stage for the next war.”

“So it goes, alas and alack, in our sad world. But
Basil, I think you will be satisfied to know that the
end game of this little adventure we are preparing
for you is actually to help the Russians, not to hurt
them. It benefits ourselves, of course, no doubt
about it. But we need to help them see a certain
truth that they are reluctant, based on Stalin's various
neuroses and paranoias, to believe.”

“You see,” said the general, “he would trust us a
great deal more if we opened a second front. He
doesn't think much of our business in North
Africa, where our losses are about one-fiftieth of
his. He wants our boys slaughtered on the French
beaches in numbers that approach the slaughter of
his boys. Then he'll know we're serious about this
Allies business. But a second front in Europe is a
long way off, perhaps two years. A lot of American
men and matériel have to land here before then.
In the meantime we grope and shuffle and misunderstand
and misinterpret. That's where you'll fit
in, we hope. Your job, as you will learn at the conclusion
of this dreadful meeting about two days
from now, is to shine light and dismiss groping and
shuffling and misinterpretation.”

“I hope I can be of help,” said Basil. “However,
my specialty is blowing things up.”

“You have nothing to blow up this time out,”
said Sir Colin. “You are merely helping us explain
something.”

“But I must ask, since you're permitting me unlimited
questions, how do you know all this?” said
Basil. “You say Stalin is so paranoid and unstable
he does not trust us and even spies upon us, you
know this spy exists and is well placed, and that his
identity, I presume, has been sent by this absurd
book-code method, yet that is exactly where your
knowledge stops. I am baffled beyond any telling
of it. You know so much, and then it stops cold. It
seems to me that you would be more likely to
know all or nothing. My head aches profoundly.
This business is damned confounding.”

“All right, then, we'll tell you. I think you have
a right to know, since you are the one we are proposing
to send out. Admiral, as it was your service
triumph, I leave it to you.”

“Thank you, Sir Colin,” said the admiral. “In
your very busy year of 1940, you probably did not
even notice one of the world's lesser wars. I mean
there was our war with the Germans in Europe
and all that blitzkrieg business, the Japanese war
with the Chinese, Mussolini in Ethiopia, and I am
probably leaving several out. 1940 was a very good
year for war. However, if you check the back pages
of the
Times
, you'll discover that in November of
1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland. The border
between them has been in dispute since 1917.
The Russians expected an easy time of it, mustering
ten times the number of soldiers as did the
Finns, but the Finns taught them some extremely
hard lessons about winter warfare, and by early
1940 the piles of frozen dead had gotten immense.
The war raged for four long months, killing thousands
over a few miles of frozen tundra, and ultimately,
because lives mean nothing to
Communists, the Russians prevailed, at least to the
extent of forcing a peace on favorable terms.”

“I believe I heard a bit of it.”

“Excellent. What you did not hear, as nobody
did, was that in a Red Army bunker taken at high
cost by the Finns, a half-burned codebook was
found. Now since we in the West abandoned the
Finns, they were sponsored and supplied in the
war by the Third Reich. If you see any photos from
the war, you'll think they came out of Stalingrad,
because the Finns bought their helmets from the
Germans. Thus one would expect that such a highvalue
intelligence treasure as a codebook, even half
burned, would shortly end up in German hands.

“However, we had a very good man in Finland,
and he managed somehow to take possession of it.
The Russians thought it was burned. The Germans
never knew it existed. Half a code is actually not
merely better than nothing, it is
far
better than
nothing, and is in fact almost a whole codebook,
because a clever boots like young Professor Turing
here can tease most messages into comprehension.”

“I had nothing to do with it,” said the professor.
“There were very able men at Bletchley Park before
I came aboard.”

What
, wondered Basil,
would Bletchley Park be?

“Thus we have been able to read and mostly
understand Soviet low- to midlevel codes since
1940. That's how we knew about the librarian at
Cambridge and several other sticky lads who,
though they speak high Anglican and know where
their pinkie goes on the teacup, want to see our
Blighty go all red and men like us stood up to the
wall and shot for crimes against the working class.”

“That would certainly ruin my crease. Anyhow,
before we go much further, may I sum up?” said
Basil.

“If you can.”

“By breaking the Russian crypto, you know that
a highly secure, carefully guarded book code has
been given to a forthcoming Russian spy. It contains
the name of a highly important British traitor
somewhere in government service. When he gets
here, he will take the code to the Cambridge librarian,
present his bona fides, and the librarian will
retrieve the Reverend Thomas MacBurney's
Path
to Jesu
s—wait. How would the Russians themselves
have … Oh, now I see, it all hangs together.
It would be easy for the librarian, not like us, to
make a photographed copy of the book and have
it sent to the Russian service.”

“NKVD, it is called.”

“I think I knew that. Thus the librarian quickly
unbuttons the name and gives it to the new agent,
and the agent contacts him at perhaps this mysterious
Bletchley Park that the professor wasn't supposed
to let slip—”

“That was a mistake, Professor,” said Sir Colin.
“No milk and cookies for you tonight.”

“So somehow I'm supposed to, I don't know
what, do something somewhere, a nasty surprise
indeed, but it will enable you to identify the spy at
Bletchley Park.”

“Indeed, you have the gist of it.”

“And you will then arrest him.”

“No, of course not. In fact, we shall promote
him.”

The Second Day/The Third Day

It was a pity the trip to Paris lasted only six hours
with all the local stops, as the colonel had just
reached the year 1914 in his life. It was incredibly
fascinating. Mutter did not want him to attend flying
school, but he was transfixed by the image of
those tiny machines in their looping and spinning
and diving that he had seen—and described in detail
to Basil—in Mühlenberg in 1912, and he was
insistent upon becoming an aviator.

This was more torture than Basil could have
imagined in the cellars of the Gestapo, but at last
the conductor came through, shouting, “Paris,
Montparnasse station, five minutes, end of the
line.”

“Oh, this has been such a delight,” said the
colonel. “Monsieur Piens, you are a fascinating
conversationalist—”

Basil had said perhaps five words in six hours.

“—and it makes me happy to have a Frenchman
as an actual friend, beyond all this messy stuff
of politics and invasions and war and all that. If
only more Germans and French could meet as we
did, as friends, just think how much better off the
world would be.”

Basil came up with words six and seven: “Yes, indeed.”

“But, as they say, all good things must come to an end.”

“They must. Do you mind, Colonel, if I excuse
myself for a bit? I need to use the loo and prefer
the first class here to the
pissoirs
of the station.”

“Understandable. In fact, I shall accompany
you,
monsieur
, and—oh, perhaps not. I'll check my
documents to make sure all is in order.”

Thus, besides a blast of blessed silence, Basil
earned himself some freedom to operate. During
the colonel's recitation—it had come around to
the years 1911 and 1912, vacation to Cap d'Antibes—
it had occurred to him that the authentic
M. Piens, being a clear collaborationist and seeking
not to offend the Germans, might well have reported
his documents lost and that word might,
given the German expertise at counterintelligence,
have reached Paris. Thus the Piens documents
were suddenly explosive and would land him either
in Dachau or before the wall.

He wobbled wretchedly up the length of the
car—thank God here in first class the seats were
not contained as in the cramped little compartments
of second class!—and made his way to the
loo. As he went he examined the prospective
marks: mostly German officers off for a weekend
of debauchery far from their garrison posts, but at
least three French businessmen of proper decorum
sat among them, stiff, frightened of the Germans
and yet obligated by something or other to be
there. Only one was anywhere near Basil's age, but
he had to deal with things as they were.

He reached the loo, locked himself inside, and
quickly removed his M. Piens documents and
buried them in the wastebasket among repugnant
wads of tissue. A more cautious course would have
been to tear them up and dispose of them via the
toilet, but he didn't have time for caution. Then he
wet his face, ran his fingers through his hair, wiped
his face off, and left the loo.

Fourth on the right. Man in suit, rather blasé
face, impatient. Otherwise, the car was stirring to
activity as the occupants set about readying for
whatever security ordeal lay ahead. The war—it
was such an inconvenience.