Flowers From Berlin (20 page)

Peter Whiteside gently released her arm. He wore an expression that begged her forgiveness. Her own thoughts conflicted in more ways than they came together. And there was something very awkward and very terrible about the whole moment. For several seconds she lived and breathed in limbo. She was terribly shaken and knew it.

Yet, beneath this all, there was Stephen. Her Stephen. What right did these men like Peter, with the agencies of government behind them, have prying into the beliefs of a New Jersey minister?

“Do you have any proof as to what you’re saying, Peter?” she asked.

“Proof?” he repeated. “Sadly, no. Just theory, and we know an American fitting his description ----

Laura rallied and interrupted. "I curse you and all those like you, Peter," she said in remarkably civil tones. "Whatever my husband believes, it is his right to believe it. He's done nothing to you or anyone else, has he?"

Whiteside answered softly. "Not that we know."

"Then stay away from him. Let him live his life. For all I know, people like you are the reason he has to behave as he does."

She turned to walk away from him, but his hand was on her arm again. "Just one condition, Laura," Peter Whiteside said.

She looked at him and waited.

"We spoke in confidence," he said. "You must respect that much. We spoke in strict confidence!"

"I'll give you that much, Peter," she answered. "But no more. I cherish you as a family friend. But don't come to me with any of your bloody cloak-and-dagger stuff ever again. It's a dishonorable, dirty activity. I don't like it. I refuse to take part in it."

She turned away.

"Laura . . . ?" he called as she left. "Good luck to you, Laura. I mean it. Good luck to you."

But she never looked back. She felt Peter Whiteside's eyes boring into her for several hundred yards as she hiked. Only once did she look over her shoulder and that was from a considerable distance. Peter was just a distant figure in black by then. Very small, he was, and very undistinguished and unimportant from that perspective. She was angry with herself for ever allowing him to get her so upset. What kind of world was it, after all, where grown men played such games?

*

She took the bus from High Street. When she arrived home there were raindrops again. She pushed through the iron gate before her father's home and, once indoors, saw the day's post waiting for her.

The letter from Stephen was on top. She set down her book and opened it. She began to read as she walked upstairs, thinking her father might be napping.

At the top of the stairs she stopped. She reread, as if Stephen's handwriting made no sense. But it did make sense. And her old Stephen had emerged from his year-and-a-half rumination.

…There is nothing in the world more precious than you, Laura…. my own fault that you left me. . . more than anything else, I pray for your safe and early return. . . darling, Laura. . .

The phrases leaped out at her. It was as if a prayer had been answered. Laura yelled with joy. She ran from room to room looking for her father.

He was not in his bedroom, nor the sitting room. Her concern grew as she rushed downstairs, the letter still in her hand, and moved to his study where he often fell asleep on the couch. She still did not see him. She ran to the music room, the conservatory, and the library.

"Papa?. .. Papa!" No answer. She returned to the front door, where he often left a note if he had been called away suddenly. No note. And his raincoat was still on its hanger in the closet.

Frantic, she turned and looked in the kitchen in the rear of the main floor.

Then she saw her father. She stared in horror through the kitchen window and saw her father on the lawn behind the house. He was slumped in a frightful angle against one of his prized pear trees. From the distance, his face seemed ashen and lifeless, his arms at his side like those of a marionette with severed strings.

Then Laura was moving faster than she had ever moved in her life, She was down the back stairs to the pantry, out the back door, and across twenty yards of garden.

"No! No!" she shrieked, tears flowing down her cheeks now, mingling with the raindrops that failed to rouse her father.

Nigel Worthington did not move.

She slid to her knees beside him, embraced him, and yelled again, shaking him as if to raise him from the dead, and for half of a tormented moment, she thought that was exactly what she had done.

Dr. Worthington's eyes flickered dumbly, failed to focus, wandered, then zeroed in on his daughter.

"Papa!" she cried, half a gasp, half a plea.

"What the . . . ?" he asked. He raised his arm and put it around Laura's shoulder.

"Can't a man take a nap without scaring his daughter half to death?" he asked.

She was crying so hard she was laughing now, or maybe it was the other way. "No!" she said. "Not under a tree in the rain!"

He looked around. He heard the rustle of raindrops on his fruit trees.

"It doesn't rain
under
trees," he protested mildly. "It only rains
on
trees." He paused, rallied, wakened some more, and added, "What's Stephen got to say?" he asked. "The good-for-nothing parson wrote to you, did he?"

“He loves me, Papa!" she said. "He still loves me! I'm booking passage. I'm going home!"

Nigel Worthington hugged his daughter as hard as he could. He laughed with her in a way in which he had once laughed with her mother. Then he reminded her of something that he had always believed; that sometimes things work out on their own.

Laura laughed with him, grinned, and nodded, now comfortable in the fact that, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, two men loved her and there were no silly rumors about the devil's tale beneath her skirts.

Or none, at least, that she had heard. She booked passage on a ship back to New York the next morning. On a whim, she choose the French Line over Cunard.

NINETEEN

On Monday, August 28, the German ambassadors to Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg announced that the Third Reich would respect the sovereignty and neutrality of those countries. On Wednesday, Hitler received from Britain a warning not to attack Poland, and on Thursday, Hitler published the terms of a peace plan which he claimed Poland had rejected. In reality, the terms had never been presented.

On the same evening, Siegfried transmitted triumphantly at eleven o'clock. He no longer used the German language. Instead, he switched to the German naval code, a complex five-digit cipher system drawing upon a code book given him that morning by Duquaine. The book contained several thousand numerical five-digit code groups, each one representing a different word, letter, or phrase.

The complete code book would have been of extreme interest to either the F.B.I. or M.I.6—they had been able to capture only a partial one. The entire code book might have revealed, for example, that the five-digit group for ship was 54734. But the book would not reveal the key to the German High Command's system of super-encipherment. This was the additive, a second five-digit group known only to the particular spy and his spymaster. The additive might be 12121. With the additive, in such an enciphered message the word ship would appear as 54734 plus 12121, or 66855. Since each spy might use a different additive, the result was a virtual infinity of codes.

Siegfried prepared his message in advance. His hand was diligent upon the telegraph key. He reminded Hamburg that some handsome flowers had been planted aboard the Adriana. Then he added that the Adriana had pulled out of port the preceding evening. She was unescorted and would develop severe engine problems as soon as she reached the continental shelf. The German Navy could then pursue the matter.

Hamburg asked Siegfried if he wanted a new assignment. The spy answered that he already had given himself a grand one and added—to a long silence from the other end—that this would be his final assignment.

Hamburg replied with a clarification request. Siegfried shot back:

CLARIFICATION IN DUE COURSE. YOUR SIGNAL AS HOPELESS AS YOU ARE. END.

CQDXVW-2

Then Siegfried shut down, his total transmission time being ninety-seven seconds. He congratulated himself. Short and to the point. The way it should be done. Siegfried loathed unnecessary risks.

"Crap!" an irate Bluebird said to another. "He's gone."

The blips had disappeared so quickly that the Bluebirds had fumbled the opportunity. The first sixty-two seconds of Siegfried's transmission had been lost while a Bluebird groped for the wire recorder. The rest had been recorded. Wheeler and Cochrane were telephoned at their homes.

"We picked up the man who discusses flowers in German," a Bluebird told Cochrane over the telephone. "Or, what I mean is, sir, that we picked up his signal. Just his signal, sir."

Cochrane started to Bureau headquarters, as did Wheeler. They met on the marble steps and charged into Deciphering and Cryptology to find Hope See Ming and Lanny Slotkin furiously working cipher combinations.

"No good!" said Lanny, a stall away from Mrs. Ming. “No good at all!”

Lanny was used to having his way with formulas. Not tonight, though.

"Numbers!" he raged. "He's gone on a complicated numerical code. This is going to be tougher than a bull's ass!"

Hope See Ming worked calmly but with equal futility. Her command of English, Cochrane noted, was highly selective, particularly when Lanny spoke.

"You're the resident genius, Lanny," Wheeler said with a sudden tension that Cochrane had not seen before. "Why can't you figure it?"

"Weren't you listening? It's a code!"

"Well, why do we pay you, you smart the little Yid? Crack it anyway."

"Give me time. Give me time," Lanny Slotkin fumed. "I've never seen a scramble like this before."

"No one else has, either," Cochrane said.

Which included the Virgin Mary the next morning.

"Doesn't even follow the format of the previous transmissions, does it?" Mary said. "Are you sure Monitoring transcribed it right before you brought it in here to Mary?"

Cochrane referred her directly to a wire recording. She sat, listened, nodded her white head, and tapped along with her fingers.

"Are you sure our Bluebirds had the right frequency?" she asked next.

"Too sure," Cochrane answered. Monitoring Division, he explained, knew how to monitor, after all.

Wheeler snarled angrily. "He was off the air so fast that they didn't even have time to say 'triangulation detection,' much less attempt it." Wheeler shrouded himself in white smoke from his pipe. "Think he's our bomber?" he asked.

"It's worth a try, isn't it?" Cochrane answered. "Same precision and secrecy on the air as with bombs. How many pros could be working this area, anyway?"

"Maybe a lot," Wheeler said.

"Maybe only one," Cochrane answered.

The two men stood by a sixth-floor window which overlooked the Washington Mall. City lights were long since out, but the slender Washington Monument rose like a gray giant in the reflection of the quarter moon.

"Our Siegfried's been busy lately, Bill," mused Wheeler in a low, brooding rumination. "Lots of dots and dashes. Lots of numbers that mean nothing to us and everything to him. All of Europe's going to hell and our Siegfried-boy is busy as a rooster in a chicken coop and he’s doing to us exactly what he’s doing to the chickens." A long cone of white smoke, then: "What's he doing next, Bill? Got a guess?”

Bill Cochrane answered with a frustrated shrug. "I don't know," he admitted. “What I know is that all hell is going to break out soon.”

“How do you know that?” Wheeler asked.

“Instinct,” Cochrane said, barely thinking about it. “It’s in the air. Same as those blips. I can feel it coming.”

*

Friday, September 1. German armies invaded Poland from the west. Chamberlain's Government demanded that they withdraw. Luftwaffe bombers attacked Warsaw day and night while the British and French armies mobilized.

Six hundred seventy nautical miles southeast of Nantucket an enormous explosion ripped through the engine room of the
HMS Adriana
. Seven crew members, all boiler and furnace men, died in the blast. Another five were critically injured. Part of the ship was aflame for four hours, but the blaze was eventually quelled. But there was a greater problem now. There was a fissure in the center of the hull and
The Adriana
was taking on water. There was a red alert on board, and help from the nearest American port remained two days away in choppy seas.

On
-
Saturday, September 2, a civilian evacuation of London began. And on Sunday, September 3, England and France declared war on Nazi Germany. So when dawn broke in the northwest Atlantic Ocean that same morning, the
Adriana
was officially a ship of a combatant nation.

A German U-boat lined her up from a distance of two miles. The
Adriana
's sonar had picked up the submarine since ten hours out of Red Bank. But now the frigate was helpless and the U-boat advanced for the kill. Audaciously, the German submarine commander pulled to within a half mile of his prey, knowing the British vessel had no defense.

Six torpedoes were launched.

The first hit the
Adriana
in the stern, almost squarely in the rudder. It blew out the entire screw propeller and rocked the ship mercilessly with the subsequent explosion. The
Adriana
convulsed first with fire, then with water. The panic among the crew would have spread in all directions, except it did not have time.

A second of the six torpedoes found its mark, blasting
The Adriana
at the midpoint on the port side, thirty feet below the waterline. The explosion blew the ship sideways in the water and left a wound as wide as ten trucks in the frigate's side. The damage would have been enough to sink
The Adriana
by itself, but the weakened hull was in no condition to withstand the vibrations of the hit, either. Thus the second torpedo broke the ship in two, as the entire hull began to go. Fuel leaked into the fires left by the dual explosions and then there were further smaller explosions. Then there was black smoke everywhere, and suddenly the bow of the ship was raising itself toward the lightening morning sky, and then there was one final shattering explosion brought on by another torpedo. The ship blew into more pieces than anyone aboard would ever be able to comprehend.

There was no time for lifeboats
. The Adriana
capsized within five minutes and went under, like a child's toy in a boat pond, within nine. The entire crew of 186 English seamen, plus seven British and two American civilians, went down with her.

*

In Washington on Monday evening, Bill Cochrane was in the living room of his new quarters. He sat in shirt sleeves and his suit pants in a faded armchair, a brandy by his side and his arms folded behind his aching, sorrowful head. He thought of the three sailors he had seen in Union Station. They would have done better, he thought, to have gotten so drunk that they never could have found their ship again.

He turned on the Philco console at one minute after nine. The President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, came on the air with what had been announced previously as "an extraordinary message to the American people."

In truth, it was. France and Great Britain were finally at war with the little Austrian corporal and his Thousand Year Reich. Roosevelt, speaking from the White House, asked for "an adjournment of all partisanship and selfishness," and asked that Americans join together to work toward "a true neutrality" which would "keep this newest world war from the western hemisphere."

The President added that he could not, however, expect every American to be neutral in thoughts. "A neutral," Franklin Roosevelt concluded, "cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience."

"I know what that means," Bill Cochrane spoke aloud to the console. And he saw the old alliances from the First Great War drifting slowly back into place. And then for another moment he was a boy again, skipping stones into the Rivanna River when his own father went off to war.

Each new generation, he thought, fails to learn from the one before.

J. Edgar Hoover was also very good at grasping Roosevelt's meanings, particularly when beckoned anew to the White House the next day. Roosevelt had allotted ten minutes for Hoover, less if possible.

The President was livid. The
Adriana
had been in touch by shortwave with the British Naval Chancellery at Foggy Bottom in the hours between her crippling and her annihilation. There was little question that
HMS Adriana
had been sabotaged on American shores and German naval intelligence had known. A submarine had been sent specifically to stalk and kill her after she left port.

"And you know, of course, J. Edgar," said Roosevelt, his face already drawn with tension, "the only way the German Navy could have known that quickly would have been by wireless."

"That's correct, Mr. President," Hoover answered.

Roosevelt looked up from his desk. He wore a gray cardigan sweater belonging to his eldest son; his eyes were drawn and haggard. "J. Edgar," he said. "If you think this is beyond the scope of your Bureau, other arrangements could be made."

Hoover's response was chilly. "I assure you, Mr. President, that our field agents should be very close to a resolution by now."

"See that it's resolved quickly," Roosevelt concluded. "Or I'll expect your resignation. That's all."

*

It was the moment to shake Hamburg to its foundations.

Siegfried leaned into his transmission key a few moments past eleven on Wednesday. He gave Hamburg a coded lesson in American civics:

MY ASSESSMENT OF U.S. POLITICS AS FOLLOWS: THERE IS ONLY ONE ROOSEVELT. AMERICANS HAVE NO OTHER LEFTIST PRO-JEWISH PRO- BRITISH LEADER OF SIGNIFICANCE. PREDICT CONFIDENTLY THAT REMOVAL OF ROOSEVELT WOULD RESULT IN NEW ADMINISTRATION EITHER NOW OR AFTER 1940 ELECTION MORE AMICABLE TO NEW ORDER OF GERMAN NATIONAL SOCIALISM, OR AT LEAST TO HISTORIC AMERICAN ISOLATIONISM. IN THIS MANNER, AMERICANS CAN BE EFFECTIVELY KEPT FROM JOINING EUROPEAN WAR.

Siegfried grinned. He pictured the reactions of those thick-browed Gestapo dolts at AOR-3. Then he fired off his conclusion.

CAN EASILY PLANT FLOWERS FROM BERLIN FOR PRESIDENT F.D. ROOSEVELT. SEEK PERMISSION FROM NO ONE LOWER THAN THE FUEHRER HIMSELF BEFORE I PROCEED. END.

CQDXVW-2

Siegfried relaxed and treated himself to a Pall Mall. Almost forty-five seconds expired before his receiver was alive with a response from Hamburg. Siegfried grinned at the jittery dots and dashes.

"The frightened little Gestapo twits," he cursed to himself, blowing out a long stream of smoke.

Hamburg began,

DO NOT HAVE AUTHORITY TO ASSIGN-

Siegfried angrily whirled from his receiver to his transmission key. How these underlings could waste precious time! He slashed into their message:

I AM NOT SEEKING YOUR PERMISSION, YOU INCOMPETENT MORONS! WILL PROCEED ONLY ON DIRECT PERSONAL ORDERS OF ADOLF HITLER. OBTAIN SAID PERMISSION THROUGH APPROPRIATE GESTAPO CHANNELS! AWAITING RESPONSE SUNDAY NIGHT. END.

CQDXVW-2

Siegfried boldly leaned back from his key, his shoulders square and erect. He stared at the receiver. Not a whimper from Hamburg. It was about time they learned who was in control. About time, indeed.

*

In Washington, Siegfried's entire transmission had come in clear as a bell. The Bluebirds had a complete recording. Cochrane, who had come up corpse-cold in his responses from twelve chiefs of urban bomb units, oversaw the Bluebirds' progress, then oversaw everyone in Cryptology as they tried to distill Siegfried's anguishing blips.

"Mary Ryan has been in this repulsive business for a long time," Mary Ryan said with pride late on Thursday, "and she has never seen a cipher like this one. Alphabet soup, that's what it is. Heavy on the boiled pork and roast potatoes."