Straits of Power (6 page)

An aide checked names on a personal-data assistant, then turned to the director of the CIA. “Everyone present is cleared for Peapod and TOUCHSTONE Alfa, sir.”

The meeting resumed. Hodgkiss gave a summary of Jeffrey’s assessment of the two documents. The president peered at Jeffrey from far across the table. “Are you
absolutely
positive, Captain?”

“Yes, sir. Those have to be Beck’s own reports.”

“No doubts in your mind whatsoever?”

“None, Mr. President. They were definitely written by someone who was there.”

The FBI director butted in at once. “I take strong exception to that.”

The president furrowed his eyebrows, but gestured to go on.

“Is it not true, Captain Fuller, that that ‘someone,’ as you put it, might have ‘been there’ by being on
your
ship repeatedly, knowing
you
extremely well?”

Jeffrey was staggered, and speechless.

“Well?” The FBI head was very hostile.

“You mean someone who was in battles on
Challenger,
as some sort of spy, and helped the Germans reverse-engineer reports that were the mirror image of what I saw and did? So that the reports would be believable to me?”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“My crew are loyal. We’ve been in nuclear combat together. They all passed thorough security checks.”

“Answer my question. Is it not possible those reports were prepared as counterfeits of Beck’s real ideas and tactical style and the lessons he learned, with help from a well-informed plant on the Allied side?”

“I
suppose
in theory it’s possible. . . . But only in theory.”

The FBI man was visibly exasperated. “I’ll take a tack you’re more familiar with. . . . What do you think of mutineers, Captain?”

“Not counting refusal to obey an illegal order?” Illegal orders included being told to violate important safety procedures unnecessarily, or to massacre civilians. “Real mutineers are traitors.”

“And are not defectors traitors too?”

“I—”

“Forget your sympathy because they come from the other side over to us. Are they not traitors to their country?”

“Yes. But—”

“And are you not aware that many defectors turn out to be double agents, really working for our enemies all along? Or change their minds and want to go home? Or are actually working both sides against each other for their own selfish interests?”

“Counterespionage is outside my expertise, sir.”

“Well, it’s not outside the FBI’s expertise. So, now that I have opened your eyes to the reality that lies
beyond
your expertise, Captain Fuller, is there not a traitor among your people?”

Jeffrey shook his head. “It’s impossible.”

“You forgot something. I’m not surprised, considering.”

“Sir?”

“I’m glad to see you’ve distanced yourself from her lately. The situation was becoming outrageous enough as it was.”

Hodgkiss jumped in. “That’s unfair, Director, and frankly, I think it’s in bad taste.”

“There’s nothing fair about spy hunting, Admiral. Every angle must be examined with a complete lack of emotion. Ilse Reebeck is a defector to the Allies. Therefore, to the Axis she is a traitor. Traitors are traitors, period. She had a close personal relationship with you, an intimate one, which
you
ended, did you not, Captain?”

“Yes.” Jeffrey was getting angry.

“Can you prove that Ilse Reebeck has not changed loyalties again, or that she was not a double agent all along?”

“But she helped the Allies in ways that no one else could. She risked her life for us.”

“Spies risk their lives every day. That proves nothing. Those previous missions of yours could have gone ahead had she never existed. They would probably have been successful too, by reaching deeper into
American
personnel resources to assist you and your SEALs.”

“I can’t deny that possibility.”

“I consider Reebeck hopelessly compromised. We’ve had mounting suspicions about her the past few weeks. Odd messages being left for her on the phone. Brush bys from strangers who then evade our best trackers.”

“You’ve had Ilse under
surveillance
?
”

“As I said, she’s a turncoat. We’re narrowing in now on solid evidence that she works for the enemy.”

“I can’t believe it. It must be some sort of Axis scheme to discredit her, ruin her usefulness to us.”

“That’s what they’d want us to think,
isn’t it
? So they can work her hard as a source for them while we dismiss it as a ruse?”

“Er—”

“This ridiculous transmission from Istanbul only reemphasizes our doubts. It gives us a concrete thing she’s done to help the other side.” The FBI director turned to the president. “It is my categorical recommendation that Reebeck’s security clearance be pulled, and that these patrol reports from Beck be dismissed as frauds sent by the Axis as part of some monumental deception gambit.”

“But you weren’t
there,”
Jeffrey said. “You don’t know what she did for us. And with all due respect, you’re not a submariner, sir. Those reports read like the real thing. I
was
there.”

“No, Captain. I was given clearance to read your most recent reports. I do know what went on. The Germans have plenty of cause to feed you phony information, to fool you about a particular adversary’s thought processes.”

“You mean give me the wrong impression of Ernst Beck? But he’s in South Africa now. His ship is undergoing repairs in the hardened underground dry dock in Durban.”

“Just so. His superiors thus have a paramount motive for misleading you.”

Yeah, it makes it easier for Beck to break out past the Allied naval cordon there. That would strongly motivate anyone,
Jeffrey thought.

Jeffrey was positive Ilse wasn’t a spy. But he barely had a chance to open his mouth.

“And don’t stick up for your ex-lover. You let her get much too close to you, you let her get into
your
mind to learn all your preconceptions and blind spots and other vulnerabilities. She knows exactly what things you’re willing to risk your life for, and what you’d fall for in falsified reports. She fed that to the Axis, and they’re feeding it back and you swallowed it whole.”

Jeffrey sat there, confused.

The chief of naval operations spoke up. “Director, you’ve laid out one scenario. Everything you say is circumstantial. Ilse Reebeck was very thoroughly vetted in the beginning. At the moment she’s an indispensable member of Admiral Hodgkiss’s staff. Her whole family was executed on TV for resisting the Boer coup, for God’s sake.”

“Peoples’ feelings and allegiances change,” the FBI director retorted. “For all we know, deep down, she hated her family, and was glad to see them hang. Many agents are borderline sociopaths. Do you have any incontrovertible proof that she hasn’t turned, or been turned, since you cleared her?”

“No. Do you have any incontrovertible proof she’s a spy?”

“Not yet. Soon. And in the meantime, circumstantial is good enough for me. In counterespionage, circumstantial is sometimes all you get.”

The president cleared his throat. “Miss Reebeck’s current security status is not the main focus today, nor are Captain Fuller’s dating habits decisive to the agenda. His opinion that those two transmitted documents are real can’t just be ignored. . . . However, I emphasize that stronger verification is needed before any action would be justified.”

“The clincher,” the CNO said, “is that they were sent to us in one of our own most important naval codes. That was an invaluable tip-off for us, completely separate from the issue of Beck’s reports and Reebeck’s loyalty.”

The FBI director shook his head vehemently. “The Germans might have suspected that we’d soon realize the code was broken. They might fear we have moles planted in their intelligence apparatus. They could easily have passed on something seemingly priceless to us, which from their own point of view they believed we’d find out about quickly in any case.” He turned to the head of the CIA. “Am I not right?”

“Well, hypothetically. I can’t say too much about who we do or don’t have working for us where, for very obvious reasons. But we definitely have to remember that the Germans are seeing everything from a perspective that differs from ours. So yes, it’s possible that the feeding back of one of our own codes, to warn us it had been broken, could be a red herring.”

“In that case,” the FBI head declared, “the
entire
transmission is valueless.”

This point hung heavily in the air.

The president leaned forward. Everyone was immediately attentive. “To my mind, the scenario that the message is valid has still been neither proved nor disproved. What we’ve achieved is to put the different scenarios clearly out on the table.”

Everybody nodded, including the FBI director.

“All right,” the president said. “Let’s move on. The question of Peapod.”

The FBI director started in again, aggressively. “Wannabe defectors in time of war are a dime a dozen. All we really know about this guy is that he goes with whores.”

“He would still be useful to us,” the CIA director said. “We like to have our agents by the short hairs.”

The president chuckled at the unintentional play on words—sex and short hairs—and everyone else laughed. Jeffrey thought some of it sounded forced.

The national security advisor talked for the first time during the meeting—she was well regarded as a woman of few words. “I’m going to pose the question that has begged to be asked and answered since we came into this room. Is Peapod the same person who sent that transmission? . . . This then raises another question. Is Peapod then so priceless that, whatever it takes, we have to extract him, or is the transmission bait to help the Germans place a double agent in our midst?”

At first no one spoke.
Those are the two big questions, all right,
Jeffrey told himself.

“If he did have such high access,” the CNO thought out loud, “we’d want to keep him in place so he could give us even more. He says he knows important things about the upcoming German offensive, but insists on telling us in person. Only in person. That
does
seem a little odd.”

“What else do we know about Peapod?” the president asked the CIA director.

The DCI glanced at the people seated away from the table. “Aides, staffers, all of you out of here please.” The junior men and women left; the inner door was locked behind them.

“To answer your question, Mr. President, not much, except by logical inference and informed speculation. That plus the age-old spy-craft rule that it’s safest to assume things that seem connected aren’t coincidence. . . . If Peapod, who, on the understanding that this
stays
inside this room, uses the name Klaus Mohr, has truly done everything he seems to have done, he’s an exquisitely talented technologist. Klaus Mohr might not be his original name.”

“Even so,” the army chief of staff said, “our prewar files on persons who might pose cyberwarfare threats should contain
something.”

“People like this Peapod, this Klaus Mohr, might have been identified, searched for, early on by the coup planners, and whisked into an underground where they could continue their work, almost as a form of national treasure.”

“You’re trying to say that their best technical minds were drafted into the conspiracy and hidden away, even given new lives?”

The national security advisor pursed her lips. “So it’s plausible, or at least conceivable, that Klaus Mohr, trade attaché, is in fact someone else, and his job at the consulate is his disguise.”

The CIA director nodded. “That’s a good assessment, ma’am. Educated guesswork, intuition, hunches, lateral thinking, plain common sense, they’re squishy means of deduction but they’re effective tools in the hands of our capable analysts.”

The president spoke again. “Mohr’s presence in Istanbul, instead of somewhere else such as safe in Berlin, suggests he needs to be forward-deployed for a purpose.”

“Yes,” the CIA head replied. “Istanbul is potentially fatal ground. We know the Mossad is murdering people from the German consulate there.”

“Not at the embassy in Ankara too?” Ankara was the capital of Turkey, almost two hundred miles east and well inland.

“No, not in Ankara. Which says something, Mr. President. Istanbul is definitely Israel’s focus for their hit teams.”

“How’s Turkey taking all this?”

“They appear to not be reacting, and we can’t find out a thing about this from their government. . . . They’ve always had friendly relations with Israel. . . . Also, our brothel contact relayed that most of the people the Mossad killed were Peapod-Mohr’s subordinates.”

“You’re suggesting the Israelis have launched a campaign against whatever it is the Germans are up to?”

“That does appear to be the case, Mr. President. Even the Mossad would not be so aggressive on neutral soil without good reason. Or what seemed to
them
good reason.”

“Have we asked them?”

“Yes. They refuse to comment.”

The president grunted. “Not surprising. Israel always does look out for number one. . . . But you
are
telling us that the Mossad’s behavior seems to confirm that Mohr’s actual activities, behind his cover story, are perceived as a serious threat to them?”

“Yes.”

“Which seems to further validate Mohr as someone with crucial expertise, who needs to be close to Israel, on neutral turf, to do what the Germans want him to do.”

“Yes. At least, so the Israelis think. They’ve made mistakes before, though, killed innocent people before.”

There was another long and uncomfortable silence.

The FBI head broke it. “This is all so
circumstantial.
Whorehouses, maybe-misguided Mossad assassins, a trade attaché who might or might not be a trade attaché, who might or might not have sent us a weird transmission, which might or might not be a fake, and who might or might not sincerely want to betray his own country. . . .”