The Rhinemann Exchange (10 page)

“How do you mean … substantiate?” asked Jonathan Craft, his stomach in agony.

“Are there any memorandums floating around,” Kendall tapped the pages in his hand, “that bear on any of this?”

“Well …” Craft hesitated; he couldn’t stand the pain in his stomach. “When personnel transfers were expedited, they were put into interoffice.…”

“The answer’s yes,” interrupted Oliver in disgust, pouring himself a drink.

“What about financial cutbacks?”

Oliver once again replied. “We obscured those. Spinelli’s requisitions just got lost in the paper shuffle.”

“Didn’t he scream? Didn’t
he
shoot off memos?”

“That’s Craft’s department,” answered Oliver, drinking most of his whisky in one swallow. “Spinelli was his little guinea boy.”

“Well?” Kendall looked at Craft.

“Well … he sent numerous communications.” Craft leaned forward in the chair, as much to relieve the pain as to appear confidential. “I removed everything from the files,” he said softly.

“
Christ
,” exploded Kendall quietly. “I don’t give a
shit
what
you
removed. He’s got copies. Dates.”

“Well, I couldn’t say.…”

“He didn’t type the goddamned things
himself
, did he? You didn’t take away the fucking secretaries,
too
, did you?”

“There’s no call to be offensive.…”

“
Offensive!
You’re a funny man! Maybe they’ve got fancy stripes for you in Leavenworth.” The accountant snorted and turned his attention to Howard Oliver. “Swanson’s got a case; he’ll hang you. Nobody has to be a lawyer to see that. You held back.
You figured to use the existing guidance systems.
”

“Only because the new gyroscopes couldn’t be developed! Because that guinea bastard fell so far behind he couldn’t catch up!”

“Also it saved you a couple of hundred million.… You should have primed the pumps, not cut off the water. You’re big ducks in a short gallery; a blind man could knock you off.”

Oliver put his glass down and spoke slowly. “We don’t pay you for that kind of judgment, Walter. You’d better have something else.”

Kendall crushed out his mutilated cigarette, his dirty fingernails covered with ash. “I do,” he said. “You need company; you’re in the middle of a very emotional issue. It’ll cost you but you don’t have a choice. You’ve got to make deals; ring in everybody. Get hold of Sperry Rand, GM, Chrysler, Lockheed, Douglas, Rolls-Royce, if you have to … every son of a bitch with an engineering laboratory. A patriotic crash program. Cross-reference your data, open up everything you’ve got.”

“They’ll steal us blind!” roared Oliver. “Millions!”

“Cost you more if you don’t.… I’ll prepare supplementary financial stats. I’ll pack the sheets with so much ice, it’ll take ten years to thaw. That’ll cost you, too.” Kendall smirked, baring soiled teeth.

Howard Oliver stared at the unkempt accountant. “It’s crazy,” he said quietly. “We’ll be giving away fortunes for something that can’t be bought because it doesn’t exist.”

“But you said it
did
exist. You told Swanson it existed—at least a hell of a lot more confidently than anybody else. You sold your great industrial know-how, and when you couldn’t deliver, you covered up. Swanson’s right. You’re a menace to the war effort. Maybe you
should
be shot.”

Jonathan Craft watched the filthy, grinning bookkeeper with bad teeth and wanted to vomit. But he was their only hope.

Wilhelm Zangen stood by the window overlooking Stuttgart’s Reichssieg Platz, holding a handkerchief against his inflamed, perspiring chin. This outlying section of the city had been spared the bombing; it was residential, even peaceful. The Neckar River could be seen in the distance, its waters rolling calmly, oblivious to the destruction that had been wrought on the other side of the city.

Zangen realized he was expected to speak, to answer von Schnitzler, who spoke for all of I. G. Farben. The two other men were as anxious to hear his words as was von Schnitzler. There was no point in procrastinating. He had to carry out Altmüller’s orders.

“The Krupp laboratories have failed. No matter what Essen says, there is no time for experimentation. The Ministry of Armaments has made that clear; Altmüller is resolute. He speaks for Speer.” Zangen turned and looked at the three men. “He holds you responsible.”

“How can that be?” asked von Schnitzler, his guttural lisp pronounced, his voice angry. “How can we be responsible for something we know nothing about? It’s illogical. Ridiculous!”

“Would you wish me to convey that judgment to the ministry?”

“I’ll convey it myself, thank you,” replied von Schnitzler. “Farben is not involved.”

“We are all involved,” said Zangen quietly.

“How can
our
company be?” asked Heinrich Krepps, Direktor of Schreibwaren, the largest printing complex in
Germany. “Our work with Peenemünde has been practically nothing; and what there was, obscured to the point of foolishness. Secrecy is one thing; lying to ourselves, something else again. Do not include us, Herr Zangen.”

“You
are
included.”

“I reject your conclusion. I’ve studied our communications with Peenemünde.”

“Perhaps you were not cleared for all the facts.”

“Asinine!”

“Quite possibly. Nevertheless …”

“Such a condition would hardly apply to
me
, Herr Reich official,” said Johann Dietricht, the middle-aged, effeminate son of the Dietricht Fabriken empire. Dietricht’s family had contributed heavily to Hitler’s National Socialist coffers; when the father and uncle had died, Johann Dietricht was allowed to continue the management—more in name than in fact. “Nothing occurs at Dietricht of which I am unaware. We’ve had nothing to do with Peenemünde!”

Johann Dietricht smiled, his fat lips curling, his blinking eyes betraying an excess of alcohol, his partially plucked eyebrows his sexual proclivity—excess, again. Zangen couldn’t stand Dietricht; the man—although no man—was a disgrace, his life-style an insult to German industry. Again, felt Zangen, there was no point in procrastinating. The information would come as no surprise to von Schnitzler and Krepps.

“There are many aspects of the Dietricht Fabriken of which you know
nothing.
Your own laboratories have worked consistently with Peenemünde in the field of chemical detonation.”

Dietricht blanched; Krepps interrupted.

“What is your purpose, Herr Reich official? You call us here only to insult us? You tell us, directors, that we are not the masters of our own companies? I don’t know Herr Dietricht so well, but I can assure you that von Schnitzler and myself are not puppets.”

Von Schnitzler had been watching Zangen closely, observing the Reich official’s use of his handkerchief. Zangen kept blotting his chin nervously. “I presume you have specific information—such as you’ve just delivered to Herr Dietricht—that will confirm your statements.”

“I have.”

“Then you’re saying that isolated operations—within our own factories—were withheld from us.”

“I am.”

“Then how can we be held responsible? These are insane accusations.”

“They are made for practical reasons.”

“Now you’re talking in circles!” shouted Dietricht, barely recovered from Zangen’s insult.

“I must agree,” said Krepps, as if agreement with the obvious homosexual was distasteful, yet mandatory.

“Come, gentlemen. Must I draw pictures? These are
your companies.
Farben has supplied eighty-three per cent of all chemicals for the rockets; Schreibwaren has processed every blueprint; Dietricht, the majority of detonating compounds for the casing explosives. We’re in a crisis. If we don’t overcome that crisis, no protestations of ignorance will serve you. I might go so far as to say that there are those in the ministry and elsewhere who will deny that anything was withheld. You simply buried your collective heads. I’m not even sure myself that such a judgment is in error.”

“Lies!” screamed Dietricht.

“Absurd!” added Krepps.

“But obscenely practical,” concluded von Schnitzler slowly, staring at Zangen. “So this is what you’re telling us, isn’t it? What Altmüller tells us. We either employ our resources to find a solution—to come to the aid of our industrial
Schwachling
—or we face equilateral disposition in the eyes of the ministry.”

“And in the eyes of the Führer; the judgment of the Reich itself.”

“But
how
?” asked the frightened Johann Dietricht.

Zangen remembered Altmüller’s words precisely. “Your companies have long histories that go back many years. Corporate and individual. From the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from New York to Rio de Janeiro, from Saudi Arabia to Johannesburg.”

“And from Shanghai down through Malaysia to the ports in Australia and the Tasman Sea,” said von Schnitzler quietly.

“They don’t concern us.”

“I thought not.”

“Are you suggesting, Herr Reich official, that the solution
for Peenemünde lies in our past associations?” Von Schnitzler leaned forward in his chair, his hands and eyes on the table.

“It’s a crisis. No avenues can be overlooked. Communications can be expedited.”

“No doubt. What makes you think they’d be exchanged?” continued the head of I. G. Farben.

“Profits,” replied Zangen.

“Difficult to spend facing a firing squad.” Von Schnitzler shifted his large bulk and looked up at the window, his expression pensive.

“You assume the commission of specific transactions. I refer more to acts of
omission.
”

“Clarify that, please,” Krepps’s eyes remained on the tabletop.

“There are perhaps twenty-five acceptable sources for the bortz and carbonado diamonds—acceptable in the sense that sufficient quantities can be obtained in a single purchase. Africa and South America; one or two locations in Central America. These mines are run by companies under fiat security conditions: British, American, Free French, Belgian … you know them. Shipments are controlled, destinations cleared.… We are suggesting that shipments can be sidetracked, destinations altered in neutral territories. By the expedient of omitting normal security precautions. Acts of incompetence, if you will; human error, not betrayal.”

“Extraordinarily profitable mistakes,” summed up von Schnitzler.

“Precisely,” said Wilhelm Zangen.

“Where do you find such men?” asked Johann Dietricht in his high-pitched voice.

“Everywhere,” replied Heinrich Krepps.

Zangen blotted his chin with his handkerchief.

Spaulding raced across the foot of the hill until he saw the converging limbs of the two trees. They were the mark. He turned right and started up the steep incline, counting off an approximate 125 yards; the second mark. He turned left and walked slowly around to the west slope, his body low, his eyes darting constantly in all directions; he gripped his pistol firmly.

On the west slope he looked for a single rock—one among so many on the rock-strewn Galician hill—that had been chipped on its downward side. Chipped carefully with three indentations. It was the third and final mark.

He found it, spotting first the bent reeds of the stiff hill grass. He knelt down and looked at his watch: two forty-five.

He was fifteen minutes early, as he had planned to be. In fifteen minutes he would walk down the west slope, directly in front of the chipped rock. There he would find a pile of branches. Underneath the branches would be a short-walled cave; in that cave—if all went as planned—would be three men. One was a member of an infiltration team. The other two were
Wissenschaftler
—German scientists who had been attached to the Kindorf laboratories in the Ruhr Valley. Their defections—escape—had been an objective of long planning.

The obstacles were always the same.

Gestapo.

The Gestapo had broken an underground agent and
was on to the
Wissenschaftler.
But, typical of the SS elite, it kept its knowledge to itself, looking for bigger game than two disaffected laboratory men. Gestapo
Agenten
had given the scientists wide latitude; surveillance dismissed, laboratory patrols relaxed to the point of inefficiency, routine interrogation disregarded.

Contradictions.

The Gestapo was neither inefficient nor careless. The SS was setting a trap.

Spaulding’s instructions to the underground had been terse, simple: let the trap be sprung. With no quarry in its net.

Word was leaked that the scientists, granted a weekend leave to Stuttgart, were in reality heading due north through underground routing to Bremerhaven. There contact was being made with a high-ranking defecting German naval officer who had commandeered a small craft and would make a dramatic run to the Allies. It was common knowledge that the German navy was rife with unrest. It was a recruiting ground for the anti-Hitler factions springing up throughout the Reich.

The
word
would give everyone something to think about, reasoned Spaulding. And the Gestapo would be following two men it assumed were the
Wissenschaftler
from Kindorf, when actually they were two middle-aged Wehrmacht security patrols sent on a false surveillance.

Games and countergames.

So much, so alien. The expanded interests of the man in Lisbon.

This afternoon was a concession. Demanded by the German underground. He was to make the final contact alone. The underground claimed the man in Lisbon had created too many complications; there was too much room for error and counterinfiltration. There wasn’t, thought David, but if a solo run would calm the nervous stomachs of the anti-Reichists, it was little enough to grant them.

He had his own Valdero team a half mile away in the upper hills. Two shots and they would come to his help on the fastest horses Castilian money could buy.

It was time. He could start toward the cave for the final contact.