The Rhinemann Exchange (3 page)

“Oh, come. David spent a great many years in Germany; you might say he almost grew up there.”

“His application … as a matter of fact his passport information, also includes family residences in London and a place called Costa del Santiago in Portugal.”

“I said almost. He converses easily in the German language.”

“Also Portuguese, I understand.”

“Equally so. And its sister tongue, Spanish.… I wasn’t aware that a man’s enlistment in the army engineers called for a full colonel’s interest. And passport research.” Mandel, the flesh creased around his eyes, smiled.

“I wasn’t prepared for you.” The colonel’s reply had been stated simply. “Most people take this sort of thing as routine. Or they convince themselves it’s routine … with a little help.”

“Most people did not live as Jews in tsarist Kiev.… What do you want from me?”

“To begin with, did you tell Spaulding you expected us? Or someone.…”

“Of course not,” Mandel interrupted gently. “I told you, he is as a son to me. I wouldn’t care to give him such ideas.”

“I’m relieved. Nothing may come of it anyway.”

“However, you hope it will.”

“Frankly, yes. But there are questions we need answered. His background isn’t just unusual, it seems filled with contradictions. To begin with, you don’t expect the son of well-known musicians … I mean …”

“Concert artists.” Mandel had supplied the term Pace sought.

“Yes, concert artists. You don’t expect the children of such people to become engineers. Or accountants, if you know what I mean. And then—and I’m sure you’ll understand this—it seems highly illogical that once that fact is accepted, the son
is
an engineer, we find that the major portion of his income is currently earned as a … as a
radio performer. The pattern indicates a degree of instability. Perhaps more than a degree.”

“You suffer from the American mania for consistency. I don’t say this unkindly. I would be less than adequate as a neurosurgeon; you may play the piano quite well, but I doubt that I’d represent you at Covent Garden.… The questions you raise are easily answered. And, perhaps, the word
stability
can be found at the core.… Have you any idea, any
conception
, of what the world of the concert stage is like?
Madness.
… David lived in this world for nearly twenty years; I suspect … no, I don’t suspect, I know … he found it quite distasteful.… And so often people overlook certain fundamental characteristics of musicianship. Characteristics easily inherited. A great musician is often, in his own way, an exceptional mathematician. Take Bach. A genius at mathematics.…”

According to Aaron Mandel. David Spaulding found his future profession while in his second year in college. The solidity, the permanence of structural creation combined with the precision of engineering detail were at once his answer to and escape from the mercurial world of the “concert stage.” But there were other inherited characteristics equally at work inside him. Spaulding had an ego, a sense of independence. He needed approval, wanted recognition. And such rewards were not easily come by for a junior engineer, just out of graduate school, in a large New York firm during the late thirties. There simply wasn’t that much to do; or the capital to do it with.

“He left the New York firm,” Mandel continued, “to accept a number of individual construction projects where he believed the money would grow faster, the jobs be his own. He had no ties; he could travel. Several in the Midwest, one … no, two, in Central America; four in Canada, I think. He got the first few right out of the newspapers; they led to the others. He returned to New York about eighteen months ago. The money didn’t really grow, as I told him it wouldn’t. The projects were not his own; provincial … local interference.”

“And somehow this led to the radio work?”

Mandel had laughed and leaned back in his chair. “As you may know, Colonel Pace, I’ve diversified. The concert stage and a European war—soon to reach these shores, as we all realize—do not go well together. These last
few years my clients have gone into other performing areas, including the highly paid radio field. David quickly saw opportunities for himself and I agreed. He’s done extremely well, you know.”

“But he’s not a trained professional.”

“No, he’s not. He has something else, however.… Think. Most children of well-known performers, or leading politicians, or the immensely rich, for that matter, have it. It’s a public confidence, an assurance, if you will; no matter their private insecurities. After all, they’ve generally been on display since the time they could walk and talk. David certainly has it. And he has a good ear; as do both of his parents, obviously. An aural memory for musical or linguistic rhythms.… He doesn’t act, he
reads.
Almost exclusively in the dialects or the foreign languages he knows fluently.…”

David Spaulding’s excursion into the “highly paid radio field” was solely motivated by money; he was used to living well. At a time when owners of engineering companies found it difficult to guarantee themselves a hundred dollars a week, Spaulding was earning three or four hundred from his “radio work” alone.

“As you may have surmised,” said Mandel, “David’s immediate objective is to bank sufficient monies to start his own company. Immediate, that is, unless otherwise shaped by world or national conditions. He’s not blind; anyone who can read a newspaper sees that we are being drawn into the war.”

“Do you think we should be?”

“I’m a Jew. As far as I’m concerned, we’re late.”

“This Spaulding. You’ve described what seems to me a very resourceful man.”

“I’ve described only what you could have found out from any number of sources. And
you
have described the conclusion you have drawn from that surface information. It’s not the whole picture.” At this point, Pace recalled, Mandel had gotten out of his chair, avoiding any eye contact, and walked about his office. He was searching for negatives; he was trying to find the words that would disqualify “his son” from the government’s interests. And Pace had been aware of it. “What certainly must have struck you—from what I’ve told you—is David’s preoccupation with himself, with his comforts, if
you wish. Now, in a business sense this might be applauded; therefore, I disabused you of your concerns for stability. However, I would not be candid if I didn’t tell you that David is abnormally headstrong. He operates—I think—quite poorly under authority. In a word, he’s a selfish man, not given to discipline. It pains me to say this; I love him dearly.…”

And the more Mandel had talked, the more indelibly did Pace imprint the word
affirmative
on Spaulding’s file. Not that he believed for a minute the extremes of behavior Mandel suddenly ascribed to David Spaulding—no man could function as “stably” as Spaulding had if it were true. But if it were only half true, it was no detriment; it was an asset.

The last of the requirements.

For if there were any soldier in the United States Army—in or out of uniform—who would be called upon to operate solely on his own, without the comfort of the chain of command, without the knowledge that difficult decisions could be made by his superiors, it was the Intelligence officer in Portugal.

The man in Lisbon.

There were no names.

Only numbers and letters.

Numbers followed by letters.

Two-Six-B. Three-Five-Y. Five-One-C.

There were no personal histories, no individual backgrounds … no references to wives, children, fathers, mothers … no countries, cities, hometowns, schools, universities; there were only bodies and minds and separate, specific, reacting intelligences.

The location was deep in the Virginia hunt country, 220 acres of fields and hills and mountain streams. There were sections of dense forest bordering stretches of flat grasslands. Swamps—dangerous with body-sucking earth and hostile inhabitants, reptile and insect—were but feet from sudden masses of Virginia boulders fronting abrupt inclines.

The area had been selected with care, with precision.
It was bordered by a fifteen-foot-high hurricane fence through which a paralyzing—not lethal—electrical current flowed continuously; and every twelve feet there was a forbidding sign that warned observers that this particular section of the land … forest, swamp, grassland and hill … was the exclusive property of the United States government. Trespassers were duly informed that entry was not only prohibited, it was exceedingly dangerous. Titles and sections of the specific laws pertaining to the exclusivity were spelled out along with the voltage in the fence.

The terrain was as diverse as could be found within a reasonable distance from Washington. In one way or another—one place or another—it conformed remarkably to the topography of the locations projected for those training inside the enormous compound.

The numbers followed by the letters.

No names.

There was a single gate at the center of the north perimeter, reached by a back country road. Over the gate, between the opposing guard houses, was a metal sign. In block letters it read:

FIELD DIVISON HEADQUARTERS—FAIRFAX.

No other description was given, no purpose identified.

On the front of each guard house were identical signs, duplicates of the warnings placed every twelve feet in the fence, proclaiming the exclusivity, the laws and the voltage.

No room for error.

David Spaulding was assigned an identity—his Fairfax identity. He was Two-Five-L.

No name. Only a number followed by a letter.

Two—Five—L.

Translation: his training was to be completed by the fifth day of the second month. His destination: Lisbon.

It was incredible. In the space of four months a new way of life—of
living
—was to be absorbed with such totality that it strained acceptance.

“You probably won’t make it,” said Colonel Edmund Pace.

“I’m not sure I want to,” had been Spaulding’s reply.

But part of the training was motivation. Deep, solid, ingrained beyond doubt … but not beyond the psychological reality as perceived by the candidate.

With Two-Five-L, the United States government did not wave flags and roar espousals of patriotic causes. Such methods would not be meaningful; the candidate had spent his formative years outside the country in a sophisticated, international environment. He spoke the language of the enemy-to-be; he knew them as people—taxi drivers, grocers, bankers, lawyers—and the vast majority of those he knew were not the Germans fictionalized by the propaganda machines. Instead—and this was Fairfax’s legitimate hook—they were goddamned fools being led by psychopathic criminals. The leaders were, indeed, fanatics, and the overwhelming evidence clearly established their crimes beyond doubt. Those crimes included wanton, indiscriminate murder, torture and genocide.

Beyond doubt.

Criminals.

Psychopaths.

Too, there was Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler killed Jews. By the thousands—soon to be millions if his
final solutions
were read accurately.

Aaron Mandel was a Jew. His other “father” was a Jew; the “father” he loved more than the parent. And the goddamned fools tolerated an exclamation point after the word
Juden!

David Spaulding could bring himself to hate the goddamned fools—the taxi drivers, the grocers, the bankers, the lawyers—without much compunction under the circumstances.

Beyond this very rational approach, Fairfax utilized a secondary psychological “weapon” that was standard in the compound; for some more than others, but it was never absent.

The trainees at Fairfax had a common gift—or flaw—depending on one’s approach. None was accepted without it.

A highly developed sense of competition; a thrust to win.

There was no question about it; arrogance was not a despised commodity at Fairfax.

With David Spaulding’s psychological profile—a dossier increasingly accepted by the Intelligence Division—the Fairfax commanders recognized that the candidate-in-training for Lisbon had a soft core which the field might harden—undoubtedly
would
harden if he lived that long—but whatever advances could be made in the compound, so much the better. Especially for the subject.

Spaulding was confident, independent, extremely versatile in his surroundings … all to the very good; but Two-Five-L had a weakness. There was within his psyche a slowness to take immediate advantage, a hesitancy to spring to the kill when the odds were his. Both verbally and physically.

Colonel Edmund Pace saw this inadequacy by the third week of training. Two-Five-L’s abstract code of fairness would never do in Lisbon. And Colonel Pace knew the answer.

The mental adjustment would be made through the physical processes.

“Seizures, Holds and Releases” was the insipid title of the course. It disguised the most arduous physical training at Fairfax: hand-to-hand combat. Knife, chain, wire, needle, rope, fingers, knees, elbows … never a gun.

Reaction, reaction, reaction.

Except when one initiated the assault.

Two-Five-L had progressed nicely. He was a large man but possessed the quick coordination usually associated with a more compact person. Therefore his progress had to be stymied; the man himself humiliated. He would learn the practical advantages of the odds.

From smaller, more arrogant men.

Colonel Edmund Pace “borrowed” from the British commando units the best they had in uniform. They were flown over by the Bomber Ferry Command; three bewildered “specialists” who were subtly introduced to the Fairfax compound and given their instructions.

“Kick the shit out of Two-Five-L.”

They did. For many weeks of sessions.

And then they could not do so with impunity any longer.

David Spaulding would not accept the humiliation; he was becoming as good as the “specialists.”

The man for Lisbon was progressing.

Colonel Edmund Pace received the reports in his War Department office.

Everything was on schedule.