The Hess Cross (17 page)

"What happened to the son?"

"I think he's still somewhere in the Pyrenees Mountains. At least, he was when Miguel and I were called to Chicago. He was a vicious kid. He once shot a German soldier and then pissed on the . . . uh, defiled the corpse."

Heather tightly gripped the stem of her wineglass, and the color drained from her cheeks. Crown cursed himself. Her eyes did not leave the glass as she said in a barely audible voice, "No one told me what you did before coming to Chicago."

"I'm a government operative. I do what my boss tells me to," Crown inadequately explained.

"What does he tell you to do?"

"Anything that needs doing. You could say I'm in the military, like you." Crown was flustered by his inability to say more.

"Is Everette Smithson your boss?"

"No, he works for my chief, just like I do. He's stationed in Chicago and runs the Chicago office."

"I don't understand what you were doing in the Pyrenees
Mountains having your men do those things," she said, gazing directly at him with such intensity that Crown looked away.

He wanted to say: What the hell, the man was an SS stormtrooper, an animal. Besides, he was already dead from the ambush they had surprised his squadron with. When you're dead, you're beyond caring. But he said weakly, "I can't talk about it."

He could feel Heather withdraw. A cloud drifted over her, and her face was completely inanimate. She sipped her wine several times without saying anything or looking at Crown. It was not anger, but a reconciling and a changing of expectations. Perhaps disappointment. Not disappointment, Crown thought. Our relationship has been professional, and we haven't had the time to develop something else. Heather was controlled, as if this was an emotional dousing learned through miserable experience.

"Don't do this," Crown said forcefully.

"What?" She looked up, startled.

"You're drawing inward and leaving me. We're not going to be together alone much on this assignment. Don't retreat," Crown said, and was dumbfounded at his entreaty. Christ, he thought, let's have a little control.

Heather hesitated; then her eyes met his. "I suspected what you did for a living, John. I guess it's really no different than my job. Maybe a little more immediate."

"Can we return to normal?"

"Sure," she said brightly. "The waiter is marching toward us with dessert."

Dinner was followed by Irish coffee at an Irish bar in the Irish neighborhood of Chicago. Heather was suitably impressed when Crown mentioned there were 22,000 speakeasies in Chicago during Prohibition, mostly supplied by the Irish neighborhoods. Like tourists, they drove by the
Biograph Theater, where the lady in red led John Dillinger to his fate in the alley. Wind whipped spray from Lake Michigan over the South Shore Road as they returned to Hyde Park. Crown turned the car into the driveway of the Shoreland Hotel, where Heather was staying, and parked under the awning. He walked her to the hotel door.

"When will I see you again?" she asked as she turned to him.

"Tomorrow, when you and I take Hess to his interview with Fermi."

"And when will I see you again without the Germans and Italians?"

"I'll call you tomorrow afternoon about it," he said.

"Be more definite. I don't have a phone in my room."

"Let's go out tomorrow night, then."

"Good. When you see me breathlessly jotting down every technical word the deputy führer utters tomorrow, you'll know I'll be thinking about tomorrow night and not about atoms."

There was nothing left to say that night, and Crown felt awkward as she looked up at him. She was a business acquaintance, and now a friend. Maybe more than a friend. The Priest had strictures against getting close to co-agents. "Don't stick your pen into the company inkwell," he liked to say, and he had good reason. Lovers could not be relied on to make the sacrifice plays. When the Priest suspected two agents were falling for each other, he quickly assigned them to missions half the globe apart. Heather wasn't really an operative, though, Crown thought. She's here for this one assignment, and then will return to England. Judas, I don't have time to worry about this.

As if reading his mind, Heather put her hand behind his neck and drew him near. He looked into her kelly-green eyes, and his breath caught. She kissed him lightly on his mouth and said softly, "I'm not something you have figured
into your life, am I?" Crown couldn't answer, so she whispered, "Think of me and tomorrow night." She kissed him again and turned into the lobby. Crown stared after her for several seconds, then walked to his car.

Five minutes after Crown's car pulled away, Heather reentered the lobby and walked past the check-in counter to the lobby phone booth. She inserted a nickel, dialed, and waited.

"This is Heather McMillan. John Crown just left the Shoreland Hotel to go back to his apartment. . . . Yes, we have the appointment with Fermi tomorrow. Hess and the interrogators will also be there. I'll be seeing Crown again tomorrow night. . . . No, I don't know where we're going . . . . All right, I'll call you again, then. Good-bye."

Heather stared at the receiver for a long moment before slowly hanging it up. She left the phone booth and entered the elevator cage.

John Crown emerged from a doorway near the phone booth, where he had heard Heather's every word. His face was tight and flushed, and his jaws were clamped shut. The lobby's dim lighting gave his face an even more gaunt look. He fought back the sadness. The Priest was right here, too. Extend yourself, and get burned. He closed his eyes for several seconds and forced the evening from his mind. His eyes opened and were now dangerous. I'm one step closer to Miguel's killers, he thought. And she's in it. Well, they're pros. But so am I. And I play hardball in a dirtier league.

IX

"O
H,
G
OD, MY STOMACH HURTS.
These cramps. Shooting pains." Rudolf Hess clasped his stomach and convulsed forward. "Please," he gasped, "I need water. Someone get me water."

John Crown poured water from a stainless-steel pitcher into a glass and passed it to Hess. His face contorting in agony, Hess fumbled with his vials from the shaving kit he always carried, swallowed a dozen pills, and washed them down with water. He groaned and rocked back and forth in his chair as if to assist their passage to his stomach.

"When did the pains begin this morning, Rudolf?" asked Professor Ludendorf, his voice that of a kindly family doctor consoling his terminally ill patient.

"When I woke up. Even before I woke. I dreamed I had them last night. There's no hope. They're getting worse every day," Hess croaked in misery.

Hess had begun complaining of severe stomach cramps six months ago in England. He had been examined by
Britain's leading diagnosticians, who had concluded they were psychosomatic. The pains usually were most severe at 7:00 in the evening, when the German war news was received on Hess's radio.

"Knock it off, Hess, for Christ's sake. You and your pains. I'm sick of them," Peter Kohler growled. He sat across from Ludendorf at the immense oak conference table at the Metallurgical Laboratory. Hess was at one end of the table, facing Enrico Fermi. Heather and her note pads were across from Crown.

The physicist was uncomfortable and concerned. Although Crown had briefed him on Hess's erratic behavior during interviews, the sight of the German twisting his face with pain, shaking uncontrollably, and whining like a spoiled child was unnerving. This was not the precise, technical interview Fermi had prepared for. Nor was it probable this burnt-out shell of a man could understand complex nuclear physics. The Italian yearned to be back at his experiment, preparing for the self-sustained reaction.

Hess scrounged in his shirt pocket and stood to feel his pants. He continued to search his clothes until Ludendorf asked, "What is it, Rudolf?"

"I need a handkerchief," he muttered plaintively.

Crown handed Hess his, feeling like a baby-sitter. Hess loudly trumpeted his nose and handed the handkerchief back. Was Crown imagining, or did he catch the faintest glimpse of humor in Hess's eyes as the German asked, "Do you think it might be possible for me to go to the bathroom?"

"God damn it, Hess."

Ludendorf put his hand on Kohler's arm to restrain him, and said gently, "Now, Rudolf, you just went to the rest room a moment ago, and we can go again in a few minutes. Mr. Fermi here has some things he wants to talk to you about first."

Hess teetered back in his chair and stared at the clock behind Fermi. His jaw was slack and he repeatedly licked his lips. He began to hum monotonously.

Fermi hesitated, thinking it perhaps impolite to interrupt the drone, but at Ludendorf's signal, said, "Uh, Mr. Hess, can you hear me?"

"Of course he can hear you. This is just another play for sympathy. I've seen it a hundred times," Kohler fumed.

"Mr. Hess," Fermi began, "you were in charge of the German heavy-water experiments, is that correct?"

Hess slowly lowered his gaze and stopped humming. He blinked under his ponderous black eyebrows and then glanced at Ludendorf as if to scold him. He whispered, "I thought that was to be our secret, Professor. You told me that would be our secret. I can't have everyone knowing about heavy water, you know." A petulant third-grader.

"Mr. Fermi is one of us, Rudolf. You can tell him about the experiments," Ludendorf confided. "He's a scientist."

Hess suspiciously squinted at Fermi, who gamely endeavored to appear benign and fatherly. Crown admired the Italian's supreme effort to control his loathing of all things Nazi. Here sat a monster, once the third-ranking man in the Nazi realm and Hitler's closest adviser on war and race policies. Only Hermann Göring had outranked Hess, but despite Göring's marshal's baton and pounds of medals and swagger, Hess had had the Führer's ear day after day, decision after decision.

"You know about heavy water, Herr Fermi?" asked Hess, a triumphant smile creasing his face.

"Of course. I'm just seeing if you know about it."

Do these childish games work on Hess? Crown asked himself. He can't be that vacant.

"You know, Herr Fermi, the Führer personally appointed me to guide the Reich's production of heavy water."

"When was this?"

"I took charge in 1938, and was still overseeing the heavy-water experiments when I flew to Scotland."

Ludendorf whirled his fingers at Fermi, indicating this was the time to press with questions before Hess's mind relapsed.

"What is your heavy water used for?"

"What else? To slow the escape of neutrons and to bounce them back into the reaction. Otherwise, the neutrons move too fast to react with the uranium." Hess playfully zigzagged his hands, imitating atoms, and looked to Ludendorf for approval.

Crown remembered his tour of the graphite pile in the squash court under the Stagg Field stands. Apparently Fermi was using graphite, and the Nazis were using heavy water for the same purposes.

"I know what heavy water is, Herr Reischsmarshal. Do you?"

"You're insulting me, Herr Fermi. Heavy water is just what the name implies. We pass an electric charge through normal water for many weeks. This reduces many gallons of water to a minute amount."

"How does the electric charge make the water heavy?"

"And you are a Nobel Prize winner? Come, come, Herr Fermi. Atoms of hydrogen in the water are replaced with atoms of 'heavy hydrogen,' or deuterium, which makes the water eleven percent heavier than normal," Hess lectured, enjoying his new role.

"How much heavy water was Germany producing when you took over the experiments in 1938?" Fermi tried to keep his voice conversational, but his new curiosity gave it an anxious edge.

"None."

"How much in 1939?"

"None."

"In 1940?"

"None."

Fermi paused, puzzled. "Well, where did you get your heavy water?"

Hess smiled narrowly and showed a glimpse of the old Hess, the Reischsfuhrer of power and prestige. "We politely asked the Norwegian Hydroelectric Company at Vemork if we could have their supply of heavy water. They produce it as a byproduct of their hydrogen electrolysis process, and they're the only place in the world where it is made."

"Did they sell it to you?"

"No, they refused for political reasons." Hess's grin spread in anticipation. Crown grimaced, knowing the cruel and true punchline Hess was baiting Fermi for.

"Well, how did you get the heavy water?"

Hess leaned forward and stabbed out the words. "We invaded Norway in April 1940 and captured the plant, along with the rest of the country. Now the dumb Norwegians do exactly what we tell them to."

Hess shrieked with laughter as Fermi's face dropped. What Hess didn't mention was that Vemork and the Norwegian Hydro plant were the last bastions to fall to the Nazis in southern Norway. Kongsberg, the nearest large town, had been overrun on April 13, just three days after the invasion was launched. Norwegian troops at Vemork had been ordered to fight to the last shell. Resistance was fanatical. Vemork held out until May 3 and set the Germans three weeks behind schedule.

Fermi sipped water to compose himself. He looked at Crown, and his eyes said he would walk out of the conference room if Hess's information wasn't so vital.

"Mr. Hess, if we can continue," Fermi said, and paused for Hess to subside. The German gulped water as if to quench his laughter, gagged, and spewed water over the table, still cackling. Heather brushed drops from her note pad and arm. Hess quieted, but still wore his victory grin.

"Now, what other elements are used in the experiments?"

"Uranium."

"Where does the uranium come from?"

"From Belgium. We asked Belgium to supply us—"

Doubting Fermi would sit through another setup, Crown interrupted, "As you know, Germany invaded Belgium, and I assume they just steal whatever uranium they need. Right, Hess?"

Hess sulked at having his joke diffused. "Not stealing. We have incorporated Belgium into the Reich. So we just transfer the uranium from one part of the Reich to another."