The Rhinemann Exchange (27 page)

Swanson picked up the telephone. His hand shook.

The guilt was becoming unbearable.

“Marshall was killed several miles from a place called Valdero’s. In the Basque province. It was an ambush.”

“That’s horseshit! Marsh never went into the north country! He wasn’t trained, he wouldn’t know what to do!” David was out of the chair, confronting Barden.

“Rules change. You’re not the man in Lisbon now.… He went, he was killed.”

“Source?”

“The ambassador himself.”

“
His
source?”

“Your normal channels, I assume. He said it was confirmed. Identification was brought back.”

“Meaningless!”

“What do you want? A body?”

“This may surprise you, Barden, but a hand or a finger isn’t out of the question.
That’s
identification.… Any photographs? Close shots, wounds, the eyes? Even those can be doctored.”

“He didn’t indicate any. What the hell’s eating you? This is
confirmed.
”

“Really?” David stared at Barden.

“For Christ’s sake, Spaulding! What the hell is … ‘Tortugas’? If it killed Ed Pace, I want to know! And I’m
going to goddamned well find out! I don’t give a shit about Lisbon cryps!”

The telephone rang on Barden’s desk; the colonel looked briefly at it, then pulled his eyes back to Spaulding.

“Answer it,” said David. “One of those calls is going to be Casualty. Pace has a family.… Had.”

“Don’t complicate my life any more than you have.” Barden crossed to his desk. “Ed was due for an escort leave this Friday. I’m putting off calling—till morning.… Yes?” The colonel listened to the phone for several seconds, then looked at Spaulding. “It’s the trip-line operator in New York; the one we’ve got covering you. This General Swanson’s been trying to reach you. He’s got him holding now. Do you want him to put the old man through?”

David remembered Pace’s appraisal of the nervous brigadier. “Do you have to tell him I’m here?”

“Hell, no.”

“Then put him through.”

Barden walked from behind the desk as Spaulding took the phone and repeated the phrase “Yes, sir” a number of times. Finally he replaced the instrument. “Swanson wants me in his office this morning.”

“I want to know why the hell they ripped you out of Lisbon,” Barden said.

David sat down in the chair without at first answering. When he spoke he tried not to sound military or officious. “I’m not sure it had anything to do with … anything. I don’t want to duck; on the other hand, in a way I have to. But I want to keep a couple of options open. Call it instinct, I don’t know.… There’s a man named Altmüller. Franz Altmüller.… Who he is, where he is—I have no idea. German, Swiss, I don’t know.… Find out what you can on a four-zero basis. Call me at the Hotel Montgomery in New York. I’ll be there for at least the rest of the week. Then I go to Buenos Aires.”

“I will if you flex the clearances … tell me what the hell is going on.”

“You won’t like it. Because if I do, and if it
is
connected, it’ll mean Fairfax has open code lines in Berlin.”

The commercial passenger plane began its descent toward La Guardia Airport. David looked at his watch. It was a little past noon. It had all happened in twelve hours: Cindy Bonner, the stranger on Fifty-second Street, Marshall, Pace’s murder, Barden, the news from Valdero’s … and finally the awkward conference with the amateur source control, Brigadier General Alan Swanson, DW.

Twelve hours.

He hadn’t slept in nearly forty-eight. He needed sleep to find some kind of perspective, to piece together the elusive pattern. Not the one that was clear.

Erich Rhinemann was to be killed.

Of
course
he had to be killed. The only surprise for David was the bumbling manner in which the brigadier had given the order. It didn’t require elaboration or apology. And it—at
last
—explained his transfer from Lisbon. It filled in the gaping hole of
why.
He was no gyroscope specialist; it hadn’t made sense. But now it did. He was a good selection; Pace had made a thoroughly professional choice. It was a job for which he was suited—in addition to being a bilingual liaison between the mute gyroscopic scientist, Eugene Lyons, and Rhinemann’s blueprint man.

That
picture was clear; he was relieved to see it come into focus.

What bothered him was the unfocused picture.

The embassy’s Marshall, the cryp who five days ago picked him up at a rain-soaked airfield outside of Lisbon. The man he
had
seen looking at him through the automobile window on Fifty-second Street; the man supposedly killed in an ambush in the north country, into which he never had ventured. Or would venture.

Leslie Jenner Hawkwood. The resourceful ex-lover who had lied and kept him away from his hotel room, who foolishly used the ploy of Cindy Bonner and the exchange of gifts for a dead husband she had stolen. Leslie was not an idiot. She
was
telling him something.

But what?

And Pace. Poor, humorless Ed Pace cut down within the most security-conscious enclosure in the United States.

The
lesson of Fairfax
, predicted with incredible accuracy—nearly to the moment—by a tall, sad-eyed man in shadows on Fifty-second Street.

That … 
they
were the figures in the unfocused picture.

David had been harsh with the brigadier. He had demanded—professionally, of course—to know the exact date the decision had been reached to eliminate Erich Rhinemann. Who had arrived at it? How was the order transmitted? Did the general know a cryptographer named Marshall? Had Pace ever mentioned him? Had
anyone
ever mentioned him? And a man named Altmüller. Franz Altmüller. Did that name mean anything?

The answers were no help. And God knew Swanson wasn’t lying. He wasn’t pro enough to get away with it.

The names Marshall and Altmüller were unknown to him. The decision to execute Rhinemann was made within hours. There was absolutely no way Ed Pace could have known; he was not consulted, nor was anyone at Fairfax. It was a decision emanating from the cellars of the White House; no one at Fairfax or Lisbon could have been involved. For David that absence of involvement was the important factor. It meant simply that the whole unfocused picture had nothing to do with Erich Rhinemann. And thus, as far as could be determined, was unrelated to Buenos Aires. David made the quick decision not to confide in the nervous brigadier. Pace had been right: the man couldn’t take any more complications. He’d use Fairfax, source control be damned.

The plane landed; Spaulding walked into the passenger terminal and looked for the signs that read Taxis. He went through the double doors to the platform and heard the porters shouting the various destinations of the unfilled cabs. It was funny, but the shared taxis were the only things that caused him to think La Guardia Airport knew there was a war going on somewhere.

Simultaneously he recognized the foolishness of his thoughts. And the pretentiousness of them.

A soldier with no legs was being helped into a cab. Porters and civilians were touched, helpful.

The soldier was drunk. What was left of him, unstable.

Spaulding shared a taxi with three other men, and they
talked of little but the latest reports out of Italy. David decided to forget his cover in case the inevitable questions came up. He wasn’t about to discuss any mythical combat in Salerno. But the questions did not arise. And then he saw why.

The man next to him was blind; the man shifted his weight and the afternoon sun caused a reflection in his lapel. It was a tiny metal replica of a ribbon: South Pacific.

David considered again that he was terribly tired. He was about the most unobservant agent ever to have been given an operation, he thought.

He got out of the cab on Fifth Avenue, three blocks north of the Montgomery. He had overpaid his share; he hoped the other two men would apply it to the blind veteran whose clothes were one hell of a long way from Leslie Jenner’s Rogers Peet.

Leslie Jenner … Hawkwood.

A cryptographer named Marshall.

The unfocused picture.

He had to put it all out of his mind. He had to sleep, forget; let everything settle before he thought again. Tomorrow morning he would meet Eugene Lyons and begin … again. He had to be ready for the man who’d burned his throat out with raw alcohol and had not had a conversation in ten years.

The elevator stopped at the sixth floor. His was the seventh. He was about to tell the elevator operator when he realized the doors were not opening.

Instead, the operator turned in place. In his hand he gripped a short-barreled Smith & Wesson revolver. He reached behind him to the lever control and pushed it to the left, the enclosed box jerked and edged itself up between floors.

“The lobby lights go out this way, Colonel Spaulding. We may hear buzzers, but there’s a second elevator used in emergencies. We won’t be disturbed.”

The accent was the same, thought David. British overlay, Middle Europe. “I’m glad of that. I mean, Jesus, it’s been so long.”

“I don’t find you amusing.”

“Nor I, you … obviously.”

“You’ve been to Fairfax, Virginia. Did you have a pleasant journey?”

“You’ve got an extraordinary pipeline.” Spaulding wasn’t only buying time with conversation. He and Ira Barden had taken the required precautions. Even if the Montgomery switchboard reported everything he said, there was no evidence that he had flown to Virginia. The arrangements were made from telephone booths, the flight from Mitchell to Andrews under an assumed name on a crew sheet. Even the Manhattan number he had left with the Montgomery desk had a New York address under constant surveillance. And
in
the Fairfax compound, only the security gate had his name; he had been seen by only four, perhaps five men.

“We have reliable sources of information.… Now you have learned firsthand the lesson of Fairfax, no?”

“I’ve learned that a good man was murdered. I imagine his wife and children have been told by now.”

“There is no murder in war, colonel. A misapplication of the word. And don’t speak to us.…”

A buzzer interrupted the man. It was short, a polite ring.

“Who is ‘us’?” asked David.

“You’ll know in time, if you cooperate. If you don’t cooperate, it will make no difference; you’ll be killed.… We don’t make idle threats. Witness Fairfax.”

The buzzer sounded again. This time prolonged, not quite polite.

“How am I supposed to cooperate? What about?”

“We must know the precise location of Tortugas.”

Spaulding’s mind raced back to five o’clock that morning. In Fairfax. Ira Barden had said that the name “Tortugas” was the single word opposite his transfer specification. No other data, nothing but the word “Tortugas.” And it had been buried in Pace’s “vaults.” Cabinets kept behind steel doors, accessible only to the highest echelon Intelligence personnel.

“Tortugas is part of an island complex off the coast of Florida. It’s usually referred to as the Dry Tortugas. It’s on any map.”

The buzzer again. Now repeated; in short, angry spurts.

“Don’t be foolish, colonel.”

“I’m not being anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The man stared at Spaulding. David saw that he was unsure, controlling his anger. The elevator buzzer was incessant now; voices could be heard from above and below.

“I’d prefer not to have to kill you but I will.
Where is Tortugas?
”

Suddenly a loud male voice, no more than ten feet from the enclosure, on the sixth floor, shouted:

“
It’s up here! It’s stuck!
Are you all
right
up there?”

The man blinked, the shouting had unnerved him. It was the instant David was waiting for. He lashed his right hand out in a diagonal thrust and gripped the man’s forearm, hammering it against the metal door. He slammed his body into the man’s chest and brought his knee up in a single, crushing assault against the groin. The man screamed in agony; Spaulding grabbed the arched throat with his left hand and tore at the veins around the larynx. He hammered the man twice more in the groin, until the pain was so excruciating that no more screams could emerge, only low, wailing moans of anguish. The body went limp, the revolver fell to the floor, and the man slid downward against the wall.

Spaulding kicked the weapon away and gripped the man’s neck with both hands, shaking the head back and forth to keep him conscious.

“Now, you tell
me
, you son of a bitch! What
is
‘Tortugas’?”

The shouting outside the elevator was now deafening. There was a cacophony of hysteria brought on by the screams of the battered operator. There were cries for the hotel management. For the police.

The man looked up at David, tears of terrible pain streaming from his eyes. “Why not kill me, pig,” he said between agonizing chokes of breath. “… You’ve tried before.”

David was bewildered. He’d never
seen
the man. The north country? Basque? Navarre?

There was no time to think.

“What is
‘Tortugas’
?”

“Altmüller, pig. The pig Altmüller …” The man fell into unconsciousness.

There was the name again.

Altmüller.

Spaulding rose from the unconscious body and grabbed the control lever of the elevator. He swung it to the far left, accelerating the speed as fast as possible. There were ten floors in the Montgomery; the panel lights indicated that the first-, third-, and sixth-floor buttons had been activated. If he could reach the tenth before the hysterical voices followed him up the stairs, it was possible that he could get out of the elevator, race down the corridor to one of the corners, then double back into the crowd which surely would gather around the open elevator doors.

Around the unconscious man on the floor.

It
had
to be possible! This was no time for him to be involved with the New York police.