Citadel (8 page)

He awakened before dawn. He tried his best to
make himself presentable and slipped out, locking
the padlock behind himself. The early-morning
streets were surprisingly well populated, as workingmen
hastened to a first meal and then a day at
the job. He melded easily, another anonymous
French clerk with a day-old scrub of beard and a
somewhat dowdy dark suit under a dark overcoat.
He found a café and had a
café au lait
and a large
piece of buttered toast, sitting in the rear as the
place filled up.

He listened to the gossip and quickly picked up
that
les boches
were everywhere today; no one had
seen them out in such force before. It seemed that
most were plainclothesmen, simply standing
around or walking a small patrol beat. They preformed
no services other than looking at people,
so it was clear that they were on some sort of stakeout
duty. Perhaps a prominent Resistance figure—
this brought a laugh always, as most regarded the
Resistance as a joke—had come in for a meet-up
with Sartre at Les Deux Magots, or a British agent
was here to assassinate Dietrich von Choltitz, the
garrison commander of Paris and a man as objectionable
as a summer moth. But everyone knew
the British weren't big on killing, as it was the
Czechs who'd bumped off Heydrich.

After a few hours Basil went for his reconnaissance.
He saw them almost immediately, chalkfaced
men wearing either the tight faces of hunters
or the slack faces of time-servers. Of the two, he
chose the latter, since a loafer was less apt to pay
attention and wouldn't notice things and further-
more would go off duty exactly when his shift was
over.

The man stood, shifting weight from one foot
to the other, blowing into his hands to keep them
warm, occasionally rubbing the small of his back,
where strain accumulated when he who does not
stand or move much suddenly has to stand and
move.

It was time to hunt the hunters.

A few days ago (cont'd.)

“It's the trust issue again,” said General Cavendish,
in a tone suggesting he was addressing the scullery
mice. “In his rat-infested brain, the fellow still believes
the war might be a trap, meant to destroy
Russia and Communism. He thinks that we may
be feeding him information on Operation Citadel,
about this attack on the Kursk salient, as a way of
manipulating him into overcommitting to defending
against that attack. He wastes men, equipment,
and treasure building up the Kursk bulge on our
say-so, then, come July, Hitler's panzer troops
make a feint in that direction but drive en masse
into some area of the line that has been weakened
because all the troops have been moved down to
the Kursk bulge. Hitler breaks through, envelops,
takes, and razes Moscow, then pivots, heavy with
triumph, to deal with the moribund Kursk salient.
Why, he needn't even attack. He can do to those
men what was done to Paulus's Sixth Army at Stalingrad,
simply shell and starve them into submission. At that point the war in the East is over and
Communism is destroyed.”

“I see what where you're going with this, gentlemen,”
said Basil. “We must convince Stalin that
we are telling the truth. We must verify the authenticity
of Operation Citadel, so that he believes in it
and acts accordingly. If he doesn't, Operation
Citadel will succeed, those 300,000 men will die,
and the war will continue for another year or two.
The soldiers now say ‘Home alive in '45,' but the
bloody reality will be ‘Dead in heaven in '47.' Yet
more millions will die. We cannot allow that to
happen.”

“Do you see it yet, Basil?” asked Sir Colin. “It
would be so helpful if you saw it for yourself, if you
realized what has to be done, that no matter how
long the shot, we have to play it. Because yours is
the part that depends on faith. Only faith will get
you through the ordeal that lies ahead.”

“Yes, I do see it,” said Basil. “The only way of
verifying the Operation Citadel intercepts is to
have them discovered and transmitted quite innocent
of any other influence by Stalin's most secret
and trusted spy. That fellow has to come across
them and get them to Moscow. And the route by
which he encounters them must be unimpeachable,
as it will be vigorously counterchecked by the
NKVD. That is why the traitorous librarian at
Cambridge cannot be arrested, and that is why no
tricky subterfuge of cracking into the Cambridge
rare books vault can be employed. The sanctity of
the Cambridge copy of
The Path to Jesus
must be
protected at all costs.”

“Exactly, Basil. Very good.”

“You have to get these intercepts to this spy.
However—here's the rub—you have no idea who
or where he is.”

“We know where he is,” said the admiral. “The
trouble is, it's not a small place. It's a good-sized
village, in fact, or an industrial complex.”

“This Bletchley, whose name I was not supposed
to hear—is that it?”

“Professor, perhaps you could explain it to Captain
St. Florian.”

“Of course. Captain, as I spilled the beans before,
I'll now spill some more. We have Jerry solved
to a remarkable degree, via higher mathematical
concepts as guidelines for the construction of electronic
‘thinking machines,' if you will …”

“Turing engines, they're called,” said Sir Colin.
“Basil, you are honored by hearing this from the
prime mover himself. It's like a chat with God.”

“Please continue, your Supreme Beingness,”
said Basil.

Embarrassed, the professor seemed to lose his
place, then came back to it. “ … thinking machines
that are able to function at high speed, test possibilities,
and locate patterns which cut down on the
possible combinations. I'll spare you details, but
it's quite remarkable. However, one result of this
breakthrough is that our location—Bletchley Park,
about fifty kilometers out of London, an old Victorian estate in perfectly abominable taste—has
grown from a small team operation into a huge
bureaucracy. It now employs over eight hundred
people, gathered from all over the empire for their
specific skills in extremely arcane subject matters.

“As a consequence, we have many streams of
communication, many units, many subunits,
many sub-subunits, many huts, temporary quarters,
recreational facilities, kitchens, bathrooms, a
complex social life complete with gossip, romance,
scandal, treachery, and remorse, our own slang,
our own customs. Of course the inhabitants are all
very smart, and when they're not working they get
bored and to amuse themselves conspire, plot, criticize,
repeat, twist, engineer coups and countercoups,
all of which further muddies the water and
makes any sort of objective ‘truth' impossible to
verify. One of the people in this monstrous human
beehive, we know for sure from the Finland code,
reports to Joseph Stalin. We have no idea who it
is—it could be an Oxbridge genius, a lance corporal
with Enfield standing guard, a lady mathematician
from Australia, a telegraph operator, a
translator from the old country, an American liaison,
a Polish consultant, and on and on. I suppose
it could even be me. All, of course, were vetted beforehand
by our intelligence service, but he or she
slipped by.

“So now it is important that we find him. It is
in fact mandatory that we find him. A big security
shakeout is no answer at all. Time-consuming,
clumsy, prone to error, gossip, and resentment, as
well as colossally interruptive and destructive to
our actual task, but worst of all a clear indicator to
the NKVD that we know they've placed a bug in
our rug. If that is the conclusion they reach, then
Stalin will not trust us, will not fortify Kursk, et
cetera, et cetera.”

“So breaking the book code is the key.”

“It is. I will leave it to historians to ponder the
irony that in the most successful and sophisticated
cryptoanalytic operation in history, a simple book
code stands between us and a desperately important
goal. We are too busy for irony.”

Basil responded, “The problem then refines itself
more acutely: it is that you have no practical
access to the book upon which the code that contains
the name for this chap's new handler is
based.”

“That is it, in a nutshell,” said Professor Turing.

“A sticky wicket, I must say. But where on earth
do I fit in? I don't see that there's any room for a
boy of my most peculiar expertise. Am I supposed
to—well, I cannot even conjure an end to that sentence.
You have me …”

He paused.

“I think he's got it,” said the admiral.

“Of course I have,” said Basil. “There has to be
another book.”

The Fourth Day

It had to happen sooner or later, and it happened
sooner. The first man caught up in the Abwehr observe-and-apprehend operation was Maurice
Chevalier.

The French star was in transit between mistresses
on the Left Bank, and who could possibly
blame Unterscharführer Ganz for blowing the
whistle on him? He was tall and gloriously handsome,
he was exquisitely dressed, and he radiated
such warmth, grace, confidence, and glamour that
to see him was to love him. The sergeant was
merely acting on the guidance given the squad by
Macht: if you want him to be your best friend,
that's probably the spy. The sergeant had no idea
who Chevalier was; he thought he was doing his
duty.

Naturally, the star was not amused. He threatened
to call his good friend Herr General von
Choltitz and have them
all
sent to the Russian
front, and it's a good thing Macht still had some
diplomatic skills left, for he managed to talk the elegant
man out of that course of action by supplying
endless amounts of unction and flattery. His
dignity ruffled, the star left huffily and went on his
way, at least secure in the knowledge that in twenty
minutes he would be making love to a beautiful
woman and these German peasants would still be
standing around out in the cold, waiting for something
to happen. By eight p.m. he had forgotten
entirely about it, and on his account no German
boy serving in Paris would find himself on that
frozen antitank gun.

As for SS Hauptsturmführer Otto Boch, that
was another story. He was a man of action. He was
not one for the patience, the persistence, the professionalism
of police work. He preferred more direct
approaches, such as hanging around the Left
Bank hotel where Macht had set up his headquarters
and threatening in a loud voice to send them
all to Russia if they didn't produce the enemy agent
quickly. Thus the Abwehr men took to calling him
the Black Pigeon behind his back, for the name
took into account his pigeonlike strut, breast
puffed, dignity formidable, self-importance manifest,
while accomplishing nothing tangible whatsoever
except to leave small piles of shit wherever
he went.

His SS staff got with the drill, as they were, fanatics
or not, at least security professionals, and it
seemed that even after a bit they were calling him
the Black Pigeon as well. But on the whole, they,
the Abwehr fellows, and the 11th Battalion
feldpolizei
people meshed well and produced such results
as could be produced. The possibles they
netted were not so spectacular as a regal movie
star, but the theory behind each apprehension was
sound. There were a number of handsome men,
some gangsters, some actors, one poet, and a homosexual
hairdresser. Macht and Abel raised their
eyebrows at the homosexual hairdresser, for it occurred
to them that the officer who had whistled
him down had perhaps revealed more about himself
than he meant to.

Eventually the first shift went off and the second
came on. These actually were the sharper fellows,
as Macht assumed that the British agent would be more likely to conduct his business during
the evening, whatever that business might be.
And indeed the results were, if not better, more responsible.
In fact one man brought in revealed
himself to be not who he claimed he was, and that
he was a wanted jewel thief who still plied his
trade, Occupation or no. It took a shrewd eye to
detect the vitality and fearlessness this fellow wore
behind shoddy clothes and darkened teeth and an
old man's hobble, but the SS man who made the
catch turned out to be highly regarded in his own
unit. Macht made a note to get him close to any
potential arrest situations, as he wanted his best
people near the action. He also threatened to turn
the jewel thief over to the French police but instead
recruited him as an informant for future use. He
was not one for wasting much.

Another arrestee was clearly a Jew, even if his
papers said otherwise, even if he had no possible
connection to British Intelligence. Macht examined
the papers carefully, showed them to a bunco
expert on the team, and confirmed that they were
fraudulent. He took the fellow aside and said,
“Look, friend, if I were you I'd get myself and my
family out of Paris as quickly as possible. If I can
see through your charade in five seconds, sooner
or later the SS will too, and it's off to the East for
all of you. These bastards have the upper hand for
now, so my best advice to you is, no matter what it
costs, get the hell out of Paris. Get out of France.
No matter what you think, you cannot wait them
out, because the one thing they absolutely will do before they're either chased out of town or put
against a wall and shot is get all the Jews. That's
what they live for. That's what they'll die for, if it
comes to that. Consider this fair warning and
probably the only one you'll get.”

Maybe the man would believe him, maybe not.
There was nothing he could do about it. He got
back to the telephone, as, along with his other detectives,
he spent most of the time monitoring his
various snitches, informants, sympathizers, and
sycophants, of course turning up nothing. If the
agent was on the Left Bank, he hadn't moved an
inch.