The Berlin Conspiracy (31 page)

“The ‘ll
A.M.
check-in’ had nothing to do with the
hotel. …” I said, trying to figure out which direction the room was in. “Chase is supposed to check in
on the radio
at eleven!”

He looked at his watch.

“Don’t say it, Horst!” I barked.

“So then we must find the password….”

“That’s right,” I said, trying to sound calm even though my heart was racing and I was gulping air. “We need the password.” I took a deep breath and had a last shot at getting rid of Horst. “I’m gonna check the room out. … You head back to the lobby. There’s a lady with a poodle in her lap down there. … She’s been watching us.”

His look said he wasn’t buying it, but I’d committed to the story. “Watch her,” I said. “If she leaves the lobby, stay with her.”

“A lady with a poodle?” he said skeptically. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. Don’t let her out of your sight.”

“What about—?”

“For Christ’s sake, Horst, do what I tell you!”

It did the trick. He hesitated but he started back down the stairs, tail between his legs. It was for his own good. If there were people waiting for me, they wouldn’t know about Horst unless we walked in together. Anyway, his job was to get me past the lobby and he’d done that. The rest was up to me.

I found the room and stood at the door for a moment, gathering my thoughts. The strange thing was that if I had second-guessed Harvey King correctly, and one of his shooters had been waiting in the room, then I’d be as good as dead when I opened the door. But if they knew, I was as good as dead whether I opened the door or not, so there was nothing to lose. There was a thin ray of hope—and it was toilet-paper thin—that I’d been wrong and the room would be empty.

I dug into my pocket to retrieve the pack of Lucky Strikes, thinking the least I could do was take one of the bastards with me. I was about to slip the key into the door when I realized that I hadn’t reloaded after putting one in Chase’s neck. I took a step back, leaned against the wall, and twisted the bottom of the pack open. After carefully removing the molded Styrofoam container that held the cyanide missiles, I flipped the top of the pack open and, holding my breath, removed one of the pellets. I carefully dropped it down the barrel, as Sam had demonstrated. After replacing the Styrofoam holding the last two shots, I stepped up to the door again, slipped the key into the lock, took a deep breath, and turned it. The door swung open and I stepped into a completely empty room.

I had to laugh because I realized that as relieved as I was, I was also a little bit disappointed that I’d got it wrong about Harvey’s game plan.

“Can we make a deal?”

I spun around and almost fired a cyanide pellet into Horst, who was standing behind me in the doorway.

“Jesus Christ, Horst! If you keep sneaking up on people like that, you’re gonna get yourself killed!”

He stepped in and closed the door.

“What kind of deal?” I said.

“That you don’t bullshit me again.”

“What’s the other half?”

“Other half?”

“There are usually two sides to a deal. I don’t bullshit you again is one side, what’s the other side?” He looked quizzically at the pack of Luckys I was aiming at him and I put them back in my pocket.

“I’m not stupid,” he said.

“I don’t think you’re stupid, Horst. Just a little inexperienced.”

“Is this why you have tried to get rid of me?”

I started the search with a basket of fruit that was sitting on the table. The note said “Welcome to the Victoria Hotel” in German, English, and French.

“Look, Horst,” I said, “the only thing I want right now is to find the goddamned password….”

“I can help,” he said. I gave him a look. He wasn’t going to go away, so I suggested he check the bathroom.

“Of course!” he said enthusiastically, and went in.

“Look for anything unusual or out of place,” I called after him. “Writing on a bar of soap or a bottle of shampoo … Look in the bath, on the mirror, unroll the toilet paper, open up all the towels and washcloths, check the pockets of the bathrobes. … Check it all! If there’s a shit floating in the goddamn toilet, see if it spells anything!”

I started going through the desk—hotel stationery, envelopes, room-service menu. … I flipped through a
Welcome to West Berlin
magazine and turned the ink blotter inside out in case something was written on the back. The clock by the side of the bed read 11:18. If it wasn’t too late already, it would be soon. I pulled the sheets off the mattress and was taking the pillows out of their cases when Horst walked in, absorbed in a piece of paper he was reading.

“Did you find something?” I asked.

“No …” he said slowly. “I was just thinking—”

“Don’t think, look!”

“I was thinking,” he repeated, “that if this instruction referred not to an eleven o’clock check-in at the hotel, perhaps this number of confirmation is also not for the hotel. …”

He handed me the typewritten page that had been folded into my passport. I reread it:

“Can it be that it has something to do with the password?” he speculated.

“Horst,” I said. “I think you might be a genius.”

“I suppose it’s possible,” he smiled. I picked up the phone and dialed reception. It rang several times before the girl’s harried voice came on the line.

“Reception.”

“This is Mr. Teller.”

“Yes, Mr. Teller,” she said wearily.

“Did you get the confirmation number for my reservation?”

“I’m sorry?”

“My employee gave you a piece of paper with the confirmation number for my reservation. Did you use it?”

“We have no confirming numbers in our reservation system, Mr. Teller.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said, and hung up. I heard a sarcastic “You’re very welcome” as I put the receiver down.

“You get a gold star, Horst,” I said, sitting down at the desk, picking up a pen and a piece of hotel stationery.

“It’s a strange password,” Horst said, studying the page. “Quite difficult to say.”

“It’s not the password, but it just might tell us what the password is.” I wrote the letters and numbers down as they were configured:

EZECH13V10

“It makes no sense,” Horst said, looking over my shoulder.

“It’s not supposed to make sense,” I said. “It’s a code. The whole point is that it doesn’t make sense unless you know how to read it.” I started writing the digits down in every possible combination.

Backward:

01V31HCEZE

Dropping alternate letters:

EEH31 or ZC1V0

Replacing letters for their numerical equivalent in the alphabet and vice versa:

5–26–5–3–8-M-21-J

None of it helped. The only word I could squeeze out of the letters was
CHEZ
but that didn’t go anywhere, so I tried different groupings:

EZ/ECH/13/V10

EZ could be
EASY
… ECH could be
ECHO.
… That gave me the idea to try the marine radio alphabet. It would read:

ECHO-ZULU-ECHO-CHARLIE-HOTEL

Hotel. Now I was getting somewhere. … And
V
would be
VICTOR
in radio speak, which might as well be
VICTORIA,
so you had
HOTEL VICTORIA.
… But what about the rest
of it? I didn’t like it, it was too fucking sloppy. I crumpled the paper, tossed it aside, grabbed a fresh sheet, and started over:

EZECH13V10

“Perhaps he had a book with the key to the puzzle,” Horst said. “A codebook of some sort.”

“He didn’t have any books on him.”

“Perhaps it’s here, in this room somewhere.”

“If you can find a book—” I stopped short, looked back at the letters. I wrote out what I was thinking:

EZE CH13 V10

“That’s it,” I said, reaching across the bed, pulling the side-table drawer open.

“I don’t understand,” Horst said, examining my writing.

I grabbed the book that was in the drawer, sat on the bed, and flipped through it.

“Know your Old Testament, Horst?”

“Not so well,” he confessed.

“It’s a good thing I do, then. How about Ezekiel,
chapter 13
, verse 10?” I found the passage. “Ever read that one?”

I displayed the book for Horst. Across the page was scribbled the word:

BABYSITTER

I opened the briefcase,
fired up the walkie-talkie, and threw the Bible to Horst. “Now would be a good time to learn how to pray,” I said.

Flipping the television set on, I pulled a chair up to the screen and waited for it to warm up. A picture finally emerged of JFK and a couple dozen dignitaries standing on a temporary platform that looked like something they’d erect in Dodge City for a public hanging. The structure was intended to let the president and his entourage look out over the wall into East Berlin, but they weren’t seeing much since the authorities on the other side had overnight hung giant banners with anti-Western propaganda from the Brandenburg Gate, effectively blocking the view.

Dialing around until I found a channel without a signal, I raised the volume of the static noise, then leaned into the speaker and hit the send button on the radio.

“Babysitter, checking in…” I said, doing my best to re-create Chase’s macho monotone. “Do you read me? … Over.” I released the button and waited.

“This is Big Daddy. …” Henry Fisher’s voice came back loud and clear. I hadn’t really thought about it, but I wasn’t surprised. Henry was the logical choice for Control. “You’re late, Babysitter,” he said. “What’s the problem? … Over.”

I put the mouthpiece directly in front of the television’s speaker and pressed
send
without saying anything.

“I’m getting a lot of interference here, Babysitter. Are you on line? … Over.”

“It’s the goddamn radio….” I said. “What’d you do, get a deal from the Japs? … Over.”

“What’s your location? … Over.” I was afraid he was going to ask that question. Since it was reasonable to assume that the hotel had a designation, and I didn’t know it, I stalled.

“Didn’t get that…” I said. “Can you repeat? … Over.”

“Are—you—at—home? … Over,” he said slowly, enunciating each word and handing me the hotel’s designation. It wasn’t a mistake on his part. Unlike my “Babysitter” designation, which was an internal security precaution, location designations were a safeguard against eavesdroppers, which you had to assume were out there in spite of the secure channels.

“Yeah, yeah … I’m at home….” I confirmed. “Over.”

“How’s the kid? … Over.”

“I gave him his medication and he’s fast asleep … Over.”

“Okay, stand by, Babysitter. … Over and out.”

I sat back in the chair and exhaled a lungful of air. The fact that we’d made it that far was as close to miraculous as it gets, at least in my experience.

“What shall we do now?” Horst asked.

“We wait,” I answered.

Horst tried to sit still, flipped quickly through the
Welcome to West Berlin
magazine, then threw it aside and flitted around the room, ready to explode. He started to say something, but I guess my look told him I wasn’t interested in conversation.

I didn’t mind that Fisher was running Control. In fact, it could be a bonus—at least I knew what I was dealing with. Henry was the kind of guy who would see aborting a mission as a personal failure, so he’d filter his risk assessment, ignoring anything that didn’t stare him in the face. It was how I got away with the static-noise ploy.

Harvey was the exact opposite—he always assumed the worst. He had big ideas, but lots of guys have big ideas. Harvey’s genius lay in being able to pull them off and that was the result of his obsession with detail. Like a grand master of chess developing his game, he would’ve spent weeks, probably months, thinking this operation through, putting it together, studying it from every conceivable angle, then taking it apart again until he could see no flaws. It was why he had argued so strongly for a postponement. The last-minute change from Kovinski to me made him nervous. Without properly vetting the deviation from his carefully worked-out plan, letting all the possibilities and potential pitfalls sink in over a period of time, he couldn’t predict the problems it might create. The only solid argument he was left with was that my past with the Company might blow the cover story, even though he knew there were any number of elements that I might upset. Had he written the plan with me in mind, for instance, he probably would’ve arranged for more security than just Chase.

In all his plotting, Harvey had seen something that prevented him from placing the gunman in the same room with the patsy—originally Kovinski, now me. If I could get at that, maybe I could get at where he did place him. I was close, so damn close to spoiling these bastards’ day, but I needed to know where to find that shooter….

“Come in, Babysitter, this is Big Daddy. … Over.” The walkie-talkie crackled to life. I picked it up, raised the volume on the television, and signed on.

“Babysitter here … Over.”

“We’d like to get some photos, Babysitter. …” Fisher said. “Go ahead and draw the curtains. … The window should already be open. … Put the kid in front of it and I’ll let you know when we’ve got what we need. … And keep out of sight. … Over.”

Horst was already standing beside the window, the drawstring clenched in his fist. “Not yet,” I said, getting into position behind the drapes.

“Okay …” I put my zombie face on again. “Open….”

Horst pulled the curtain, revealing a crowd of somewhere close to a million people jammed into the plaza below me. I felt like the pope standing there in the window, except that the faithful were facing the wrong way. All eyes were focused on the stage that had been set up in front of city hall and the star-spangled pulpit where Kennedy would stand in less than two hours, a twelve-foot-high American flag below him, a massive red, white, and blue ribbon spanning the width of the platform behind him.

Horst and I had entered the hotel through a back door, so it was my first look at Rudolf-Wilde Platz and it was a hell of a scene—a sea of faces filled the long rectangular space, spilling out into the adjoining streets in all directions as far as I could see. The more dedicated had claimed a spot near the stage by staying overnight in tents
and sleeping bags; others were spending hours up a tree to ensure their view.