The Folks at Fifty-Eight (8 page)

He looked again. The Russian convoy had gone. Now there was nothing moving for miles. He thought of making a dash for it, but caution told him to wait a little longer. From where they crouched, the flat and uninspiring terrain allowed them an advantage. They could see the enemy from distance. However, once they left the safety of cover and started running across that field, it would offer the enemy a similar advantage. A few more minutes wouldn’t hurt.

As Hammond searched for signs of further Soviet troop movement, he thought back to the last time he’d undertaken a rescue mission on mainland Europe. His mud-spattered face smiled grimly as he compared the two missions and found nothing in common between them.

The previous rescue effort had been that hastily-organized dash to Rouen, and he’d been in uniform: a night-time assault with a team of professionals alongside, and surprise in his favour. In Rouen the main German army had been miles away, up on the Pas de Calais, peering nervously into the mist of the English Channel.

In Rouen, he’d had the assault and exit planned, the French Resistance to spirit them cross-country and a British Royal Navy submarine waiting offshore to ferry them home. He’d also had a fallback plan, which would not have been good news for Davis Carpenter, but would probably have given Hammond’s team a chance to escape with their lives.

Carpenter’s rescue from Rouen had been conventional combat, subject to the rules of war and the Geneva Convention. Magdeburg was anything but that.

In Magdeburg he was a rogue agent, working unofficially and alone. Not only that, but he’d killed three Soviet officials. He had no fallback position, no rules of engagement, no Geneva Convention, or even any official acknowledgement of his existence. In Magdeburg he was deniable, and they would deny.

Which all led him to one inescapable question: why the hell had he agreed to do it?

He considered the question, and compared the two individuals who owed him their lives.

The girl who crouched alongside him was a beautiful young German, innocent and helpless and easy on the eye, but in reality little more than a child.

In stark contrast, Davis Carpenter was an overweight bureaucrat, who had taken a stupid risk without consideration for others. A desk-bound strategist, who happily sent others on missions that all too often resulted in their deaths, without any empathy for the courage needed or sympathy for loved-ones left behind. He was a man for the bigger picture and the larger stage, the end and not the means; the greater good rather than the individual tragedy.

He thought back to that afternoon, when Carpenter had arrived out of the blue and explained the deal. He had jumped at it. A State Department appointment, in exchange for ‘another minor bit of business in Europe’; there was no decision to make. Carpenter said it was a long-overdue reward for Hammond saving his life in Rouen. Hammond couldn’t believe his luck.

He nodded a furious agreement and signed on the dotted line, then shook Carpenter by the hand and thanked him for remembering. He had been so desperate for a chance to join the State Department and escape the drudgery of that insurance company, he would have agreed to anything. At the time he’d considered rescuing and wet-nursing a good-looking young woman a small price to pay.

Three days after that he had set out for Europe, in good humour. They sneaked him onto a prototype Stratofreighter, ostensibly running long-range tests out of Andrews Field. The tests went well. The following day the plane touched down at Wiesbaden. From there he made his contacts in Frankfurt without problem or incident. They in turn contacted their people to the east of the country, and arranged his overland transport to Magdeburg. Everything, it seemed, was going according to plan.

But then he reached Magdeburg and the price suddenly soared, because in the early hours of the morning, on the day he arrived, the Soviet authorities discovered Catherine Schmidt hiding in an attic. They took her into custody and questioned her at length about the gruesome murders of three Red Army officers. She shook her pretty head and claimed she knew nothing about the killings. Stanislav Paslov, the head of the Soviet MGB in southern Germany, drove over from Leipzig specifically to question her. He hadn’t believed a word she said.

Fortunately, the local Saxony-Anhalt cell boasted an informer in the Leipzig headquarters. He gave them details of her interrogation, and told them of MGB plans. They told Hammond.

The authorities in Magdeburg planned to transfer her to their counterparts in Prague, for further questioning about a similarly-gruesome murder there. After that, they intended taking her up to Moscow, where the Mingrelian Monster himself, the great and terrible Lavrenti Beria, awaited her arrival.

By then Hammond had long since stopped smiling. In the space of five hectic days his part in an unofficial back-scratching exercise had graduated from a covert walk in the park to something bordering suicidal.

“When can we go?”

The girl was clearly impatient. An older and wiser Gerald Hammond was more cautious.

“Not just yet. When I’m sure it’s safe.”

“Where are we?”

“On the floodplain, to the south-east of Dessau, I hope. Don’t you know? This is your country.”

“It was my country, but not any more. Now my people have no country. Barbarians have taken it from us. Anyway, I only know Berlin, and a little of Prague, I suppose.”

“Well, I’m betting the River Mulde is on the far side of those woods. If it is, we should be able to follow it all the way up past the town.”

As she peered across the fields to the woods beyond, following the tip of a grubby finger, he quietly studied the girl beneath the layers of caked-on dirt. She was more than easy on the eye, she was stunning, with classically beautiful features and clear blue eyes that laughed and sparkled through the fear.

Crouched low in the stagnant water and peeping over the rim of the ditch, she reminded him of an impish tom-boy, with her face and limbs streaked with dirt, and her long blonde hair hanging in damp and matted strands. The white cotton and lace skirt she wore was now torn, stained with grass and embedded with grime, but the body that so beautifully distorted the mud-spattered jacket was not that of an impish tomboy but a fully-formed and exquisitely-proportioned young woman.

As he quietly watched her, he found himself inexplicably drawn and wanting to believe in her innocence. She was obviously young and beautiful, but she was also deceptively strong; agile and athletic and mentally tough.

“Can’t we risk it? I’m getting cold.”

She had posed the question without any hint of complaint. Hammond studied the empty road and the fields beyond. He knew they needed to make the northern outskirts of Dessau before dusk, but there was still that large expanse of open ground to cross before they could make the cover of the woods. He decided they had no choice. They had to chance it.

“I suppose we have to. We can’t stay here forever. We’ll head for the woods over there, but if you hear anything or see anybody, you drop immediately and lay still. Got it?”

She nodded. He clambered out of the ditch and pulled her after him.

Then they ran; over the road, into the field and across the open farmland; eyes scanning the surrounding countryside, lungs gasping for breath, progress hindered by the cloying mud that grabbed at their feet and wearied their legs.

Ten minutes later, they made the woods on the far side of the fields, and paused to rest exhausted limbs. He checked to see if anyone had spotted their frantic dash for cover. He saw no one.

“I think we’re safe, for the moment anyway. Now let’s find the river.”

Posing as Wall Street lawyers, State Department officials, and government advisers, these grey-suited men began building espionage networks in Europe with neither approval nor knowledge of President or Congress. They met and plotted in New York City, at the Council on Foreign Relations, in a building on the corner of East Sixty-Eighth Street and Park Avenue: a building numbered fifty-eight.

This day, however, two of those same grey-suited individuals could be seen strolling together in the unusually public arena of Washington’s National Arboretum. With collars turned high and hats pulled low, Marcus Allum and Daniel Chambers walked as they talked, stopping only occasionally to allow passers-by to move out of earshot before resuming both stroll and conversation.

“So where are we on this Magdeburg business?”

The pretentious and sombre Daniel Chambers was the more senior and sinister of the two. Thin of face and narrow of mind, Chambers was a grey man in every sense of the term. From the charcoal-grey suit and silver-grey hair to the sombre thoughts that inhibited his being, Chambers was colourless. A graduate of Harvard Law and a name partner at the Wall Street firm of Cartwright Chambers and Kent, Daniel Chambers treated those around him, and particularly his State Department counterparts, as intellectually inferior. It was a trait that sometimes amused, but more often infuriated, his current companion and co-conspirator, the manic-depressive Marcus Allum.

Loathed by some and mistrusted by many, two distinct Marcus Allums ruled the Office of Occupied Territories. One was a taciturn and uninspiring Deputy Assistant Secretary, who’d sit alone in his office with a look of thunder on his face while the grey clouds gathered and the grey schemes hatched. The other was a charismatic and charming Princeton graduate and Ivy League athlete, the life and soul of any party, and the lifeblood of Occupied Territories.

On good days Allum was the State Department’s political chameleon: tall, slim, fair-haired and sharp as a whip, flattering and seducing the ladies who lunch with a ready smile and an instant quip, and blending into any scenario from the sleaziest bar to the Oval Office.

On bad days he was best avoided, and today was fast becoming a bad day.

“It all went pear-shaped; someone talked.”

“Someone?”

“It’s the only explanation. We had her well hidden. They found her too easily.”

“Someone in Germany?”

“Had to be. Everything here’s watertight.”

“You’re sure about that, Marcus?”

Allum wasn’t at all sure. He was privately worried about his own department, and the distinct possibility that it had somehow been infiltrated by a Soviet mole. For all of that, he wasn’t going to allow the arrogant and pretentious Daniel Chambers any reason to initiate a purge of his office, or to see just how worried he was.

“I have to believe it.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“We still haven’t heard from Hammond, but there’s still time.”

Marcus Allum held the confident façade. Chambers frowned.

“Well, you recommended him, Marcus. This goes south, and you’ll go with it.”

“Yeah, well, don’t worry about me. What was it Twain said? Reports of my death, and all that exaggerated shit. Anyway, I don’t see a problem; or at least, not yet. Hammond’s one of the best. He may even be the best. I know I never saw anyone better. He’s been in tough spots before. He’ll pull this one out. I’m certain of it.”

“I hope so, Marcus. I hope so for your sake. I spoke to Conrad yesterday. He’s not happy. If we lose this girl, he just might blame me, and then guess who I’m gonna blame?”

Allum gave a humourless grin. He knew the game as well as anyone could, and he knew how ruthless Chambers could be. Chambers wouldn’t hesitate to feed him to the lions, if it meant saving himself. Allum was under no illusion about that.

“So tell me something I don’t already know.” They strolled for a while before Allum spoke again. “Conrad Zalesie’s nobody’s fool. Anyway, I briefed him this morning. He knows we’re doing everything we can. It wasn’t our fault the silly bitch got herself arrested. I mean, who the hell asked her to start carving up half the Sov army? Anyway, my money’s on Hammond.”

“You’d better hope you’re right. I get the feeling Conrad’s taking this one personally.”

“Yeah, I kinda got that feeling, too.”

Despite his assurances and the undoubted skills of his old Princeton friend, Marcus Allum was a good deal less certain than he sounded. Daniel Chambers asked about Hammond.

“Gerald Hammond? The name’s familiar.”

“He was OSS, with Jedburgh. Before that, he was the one who pulled Carpenter out of Rouen that time. I think he was one of a handful who could have done it.”

Chambers looked puzzled.

“I don’t follow. If he’s as good as you seem to think, why did you wait until now to bring him on board? Why didn’t the State Department snap him up straight after the war?”

Allum smiled as he recalled the belligerent and artless Hammond.

“Nobody trusts a man you can’t corrupt, Daniel. You should know that better than most, and Gerald Hammond’s incorruptible. He has a moral compass that points six degrees west of self-righteous; it never varies. He’s straight, and he’s as belligerent as hell. It’s a shame. With a little flexibility, he could have gone all the way.”

“But you still trusted him for this?”

“I didn’t have a lot of choice. This business with the girl happened too fast. I had to move, and I didn’t have time to worry about the fine points. But do I trust Gerald Hammond? Yeah, I trust him. Out in the field I trust him a hundred per cent. It’s when he gets back to Washington and resets that moral compass, that’s when I have to put him on a short leash. That’s when the real headaches begin.” He took the opportunity to change the subject. “So, how’d it go with the president?”

Chambers appeared even more sombre than usual.

“He still won’t sanction any covert activity, and the rest are still on the fence.”