The Rhinemann Exchange (29 page)

He spun around the edge of the wall and raced down the corridor toward the staircase. He didn’t look back; he didn’t bother to muffle his steps—it would have reduced his speed. His only concern was to get down those steps and out of the building. He leaped down the right-angled staircase to the in-between landing and whipped around the corner.

And then he stopped.

Below him, leaning against the railing, was the third man. He
knew
he’d heard more than two sets of feet racing up the staircase minutes ago. The man was startled, his eyes widened in shocked recognition and his right hand jerked backwards toward his coat pocket. Spaulding didn’t have to be told what he was reaching for.

David sprang off the landing straight down at the man, making contact in midair, his hands clawing for the man’s throat and right arm. He gripped the skin on the neck below the left ear and tore at it, slamming the man’s head into the concrete wall as he did so. David’s heavier body crushed into the would-be sentry’s chest; he twisted the right arm nearly out of its shoulder socket.

The man screamed and collapsed; the scalp was lacerated, blood flowing out of the section of his skull that had crashed into the wall.

David could hear the sounds of a door being thrown open and men running. Above him, of course; one floor above him.

He freed his entangled legs from the unconscious body and raced down the remaining flight of stairs to the lobby. The elevator had, moments ago, let out its cargo of passengers; the last few were going out the front entrance. If any had heard the prolonged scream from the battered man sixty feet away up the staircase, none acknowledged it.

David rushed into the stragglers, elbowing his way through the wide double doors and onto the sidewalk. He turned east and ran as fast as he could.

He had walked over forty city blocks—some two miles in Basque country, but here infinitely less pleasant.

He had come to several decisions. The problem was how to implement them.

He could not stay in New York; not without facing risks, palpably unacceptable. And he had to get to Buenos Aires at once, before any of those hunting him in New York knew he was gone.

For they were hunting him now; that much was clear.

It would be suicide to return to the Montgomery. Or for that matter, to the unmarked Meridian offices in the morning. He could handle both with telephone calls. He would tell the hotel that he had been suddenly transferred to Pennsylvania; could the Montgomery management pack and hold his things? He’d call later about his bill.…

Kendall was on his way to Argentina. It wouldn’t make any difference what the Meridian office was told.

Suddenly, he thought of Eugene Lyons.

He was a little sad about Lyons. Not the man (of course the man, he reconsidered quickly, but not the man’s affliction, in this instance), but the fact that he would have little chance to develop any sense of rapport before Buenos Aires. Lyons might take his sudden absence as one more rejection in a long series. And the scientist might really need his help in Buenos Aires, at least in the area of German translation. David decided that he had to have the books Lyons selected for him; he had to have as solid a grasp of Lyons’s language as was possible.

And then David realized where his thoughts were leading him.

For the next few hours the safest places in New York were the Meridian offices and St. Luke’s Hospital.

After his visits to both locations he’d get out to Mitchell Field and telephone Brigadier General Swanson.

The answer to the violent enigma of the past seven days—from the Azores to a staircase on Thirty-eighth Street and everything in between—was in Buenos Aires.

Swanson did not know it and could not help; Fairfax was infiltrated and could not be told. And
that
told
him
something.

He was on his own. A man had two choices in such a dilemma: take himself out of strategy, or dig for identities and blow the covers off.

The first choice would be denied him. The brigadier, Swanson, was paranoid on the subject of the gyroscopic designs. And Rhinemann. There’d be no out of strategy.

That left the second: the identity of those behind the enigma.

A feeling swept over him, one he had not experienced in several years: the fear of sudden inadequacy. He was confronted with an extraordinary problem for which there was no pat—or complicated—solution in the north country. No unraveling that came with moves or countermoves whose strategies he had mastered in Basque and Navarre.

He was suddenly in another war. One he was not familiar with; one that raised doubts about himself.

He saw an unoccupied taxi, its roof light dimly lit, as if embarrassed to announce its emptiness. He looked up at the street sign; he was on Sheridan Square—it accounted for the muted sounds of jazz that floated up from cellars and surged down crowded side streets. The Village was warming up for another evening.

He raised his hand for the taxi; the driver did not see him. He started running as the cab proceeded up the street to the corner traffic light. Suddenly he realized that someone else on the other side of the square was rushing toward the empty taxi; the man was closer to it than Spaulding, his right hand was gesturing.

It was now terribly important to David that he reach the car first. He gathered speed and ran into the street, dodging pedestrians, momentarily blocked by two automobiles that were bumper to bumper. He spread his hands from hood to trunk and jumped over into the middle of the street and continued racing toward his objective.

Objective.

He reached the taxi no more than half a second after the other man.

Goddamn it! It was the obstruction of the two automobiles!

Obstruction.

He slammed his hand on the door panel, preventing the other man from pulling it open. The man looked up at Spaulding’s face, at Spaulding’s eyes.

“Christ, fella. I’ll wait for another one,” the man said quickly.

David was embarrassed. What the hell was he
doing?

The doubts? The goddamned doubts.

“No, really, I’m terribly sorry.” He mumbled the words, smiling apologetically. “You take it. I’m in no hurry.… Sorry again.”

He turned and walked rapidly across the street into the crowds of Sheridan Square.

He could have had the taxi. That was the important thing.

Jesus! The treadmill never let up.

The Pan American Clipper left Tampa at eight in the morning, with scheduled coastline stops at Caracas, São Luís, Salvador, and Rio de Janeiro before the final twelve hundred miles to Buenos Aires. David was listed on the passenger invoice as Mr. Donald Scanlan of Cincinnati, Ohio; occupation: mining surveyor. It was a temporary cover for the journey only. “Donald Scanlan” would disappear after the clipper landed at the Aeroparque in Buenos Aires. The initials were the same as his own for the simple reason that it was so easy to forget a monogrammed gift or the first letter of a hastily written signature. Especially if one was preoccupied or tired … or afraid.

Swanson had been close to panic when David reached him from the Mitchell Field Operations Room in New York. As a source control, Swanson was about as decisive as a bewildered bird dog. Any deviation from Kendall’s schedule—Kendall’s instructions, really—was abhorrent to him. And Kendall wasn’t even
leaving
for Buenos Aires until the following morning.

David had not wasted complicated explanations on the general. As far as he was concerned, three attempts had been made on his life—at least, they could be so interpreted—and if the general wanted his “services” in Buenos Aires, he’d better get down there while he was still in one piece and functioning.

Were the attempts—the attacks—related to Buenos Aires? Swanson had asked the question as though he were afraid to name the Argentine city.

David was honest: there was no way to tell. The answer
was in Buenos Aires. It was reasonable to consider the possibility, but not to assume it.

“That’s what Pace said,” had been Swanson’s reply. “Consider, don’t assume.”

“Ed was generally right about such things.”

“He said when you operated in Lisbon, you were often involved in messy situations in the field.”

“True. I doubt that Ed knew the particulars, though. But he was right in what he was trying to tell you. There are a lot of people in Portugal and Spain who’d rather see me dead than alive. Or at least they think they would. They could never be sure. Standard procedure, general.”

There had been a prolonged pause on the Washington line. Finally, Swanson had said the words. “You realize, Spaulding, that we may have to replace you.”

“Of course. You can do so right now, if you like.” David had been sincere. He wanted very much to return to Lisbon. To go into the north country. To Valdero’s. To find out about a cryp named Marshall.

“No.… No, everything’s too far along. The designs. They’re the important thing. Nothing else matters.”

The remainder of the conversation concerned the details of transportation, American and Argentine currency, replenishing of a basic wardrobe, and luggage. Logistics which were not in the general’s frame of reference and for which David took responsibility. The final command—request—was delivered, not by the general, but by Spaulding.

Fairfax was not to be informed of his whereabouts. Nor was anyone else for that matter, except the embassy in Buenos Aires; but make every effort to keep the information from Fairfax.

Why? Did Spaulding think …

“There’s a leak in Fairfax, general. You might pass that on to the White House cellars.”

“That’s impossible!”

“Tell that to Ed Pace’s widow.”

David looked out the Clipper window. The pilot, moments ago, had informed the passengers that they were passing over the huge coastal lake of Mirim in Uruguay. Soon they’d be over Montevideo, forty minutes from Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires. The unfocused picture, the blurred figures
of Leslie Jenner Hawkwood, the cryptographer Marshall, a man named Franz Altmüller; strange but committed men on Fifty-second and Thirty-eighth streets—in a darkened doorway, in a building after office hours, on a staircase. A man in an elevator who was so unafraid to die. An enemy who displayed enormous courage … or misguided zealousness. A maniac.

The answer to the enigma was in Buenos Aires, less than an hour away. The city was an hour away, the answer much longer. But no more than three weeks if his instincts were right. By the time the gyroscopic designs were delivered.

He would begin slowly, as he always did with a new field problem. Trying first to melt into the surroundings, absorb his cover; be comfortable, facile in his relationships. It shouldn’t be difficult. His cover was merely an extension of Lisbon’s: the wealthy trilingual attaché whose background, parents, and prewar associations in the fashionable centers of Europe made him a desirable social buffer for any ambassador’s dinner table. He was an attractive addition to the delicate world of a neutral capital; and if there were those who thought someone, somewhere, had used money and influence to secure him such combat-exempt employment, so be it. It was denied emphatically, but not vehemently; there was a difference.

The “extension” for Buenos Aires was direct and afforded him top-secret classification. He was acting as a liaison between New York-London banking circles and the German expatriate Erich Rhinemann. Washington approved, of course; postwar financing in areas of reconstruction and industrial rebuilding were going to be international problems. Rhinemann could not be overlooked, not in the civilized marble halls of Berne and Geneva.

David’s thoughts returned to the book on his lap. It was the second of six volumes Eugene Lyons had chosen for him.

“Donald Scanlan” went through the Aeroparque customs without difficulty. Even the embassy liaison, who checked in all Americans, seemed unaware of his identity.

His single suitcase in hand, David walked to the taxi station and stood on the cement platform looking at the drivers standing beside their vehicles. He wasn’t prepared
to assume the name of Spaulding or to be taken directly to the embassy just yet. He wanted to assure himself that “Donald Scanlan” was accepted for what he was—a mining surveyor, nothing more; that there was no unusual interest in such a man. For if there were, it would point to David Spaulding, Military Intelligence, Fairfax and Lisbon graduate.

He selected an obese, pleasant-looking driver in the fourth cab from the front of the line. There were protests from those in front, but David pretended not to understand. “Donald Scanlan” might know a smattering of Spanish, but certainly not the epithets employed by the disgruntled drivers cheated out of a fare.

Once inside he settled back and gave instructions to the unctuous driver. He told the man he had nearly an hour to waste before he was to be met—the meeting place not mentioned—and asked if the driver would give him a short tour of the city. The tour would serve two purposes: he could position himself so that he could constantly check for surveillance, and he would learn the main points of the city.

The driver, impressed by David’s educated, grammatical Spanish, assumed the role of tour director and drove out of the airport’s winding lanes to the exit of the huge Parque 3 de Febrero in which the field was centered.

Thirty minutes later David had filled a dozen pages with notes. The city was like a European insert on the southern continent. It was a strange mixture of Paris, Rome and middle Spain. The streets were not city streets, they were boulevards: wide, lined with color. Fountains and statuary everywhere. The Avenida 9 de Julio might have been a larger Via Veneto or Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The sidewalk cafes, profuse with brightly decorated awnings and greenery from hundreds of planter boxes, were doing a brisk summer afternoon business. The fact that it
was
summer in Argentina was emphasized for David by the perspiration on his neck and shirt front. The driver admitted that the day was inordinately warm, in the high seventies.