The Talbot Odyssey (22 page)

Allerton nodded. “Yes. That was the last we heard of Henry. There was some suspicion, of course, that it was the Russians who got to our agents, not the Gestapo. We feared that Henry was going to suffer the same fate.”

O’Brien said, “Henry signed that radio message with his code name, Diamond. If we suppose he was sending under Russian control, then he should have used the signature Blackboard, which was a distress signal meaning ‘I am captured.’”

Thorpe said, “Why would you suppose he was sending under Russian control?”

O’Brien answered, “We’ll get to that. But if Henry was captured and yet signed his encoded message Diamond, that told us that the Russians knew that Diamond was his code name, and therefore he could not use the distress code name Blackboard. The OSS operator who received his message recognized Henry’s wrist—his style of telegraphing—so we can assume it was he who was sending, but with a gun to his head.”

Allerton interjected, “It was frightening to think that the Russians knew Henry’s code name, which was picked just ten minutes before he crossed the Russian lines. And that they knew code names like Grocer and Pixie.”

O’Brien nodded, then added, “We thought the Russians might be persuaded to let him go. A strong note was personally delivered to Red Army headquarters in Berlin. The reply said, ‘Major Kimberly unknown here.’” O’Brien spoke directly to Katherine. “I hitched a ride on one of the first American flights into Berlin. By the time I arrived, there was another message from Red Army headquarters saying that Major Kimberly and the three officers with him had been killed when their jeep hit an undiscovered German land mine—a very common accident that we and the British also used, to dispose of unwanted people. Anyway, I claimed the bodies . . . the ashes, I should say. The Russians cremated for reasons of expediency and sanitation. . . .” He looked into Katherine’s eyes. “I never gave you all the details. . . .”

For the first time Katherine knew that the grave in Arlington contained an urn filled with ashes. She said, “How do you know it was my father?”

O’Brien shook his head. “We hope it was, that he didn’t die in the Gulag.”

She nodded. She knew that the Russians at that time usually sent healthy males to the Soviet Union to repair the devastation resulting from the war. She tried to imagine this man who was her father, young, proud, daring, reduced to a slave in a strange land, for no reason other than he’d gone on a mission of mercy. With each passing week and month he’d feel the life leaving his body. And he’d know, of course, that he’d never go home. She looked up and spoke in a barely controlled voice. “Please go on.”

It was West who spoke. “Major Kimberly had undoubtedly dropped the quartermaster cover in order to inquire about his agents. But under no circumstances would he have revealed to the Russians the Alsos mission or Karl Roth’s connection with it. Therefore, those last two radio messages, which were sent under duress and which mentioned these facts, were his way of saying the Russians already knew about Alsos and Roth, just as they knew our codes.”

Thorpe spoke. “I think you’re making too much of this highlevel-mole theory. I don’t have the facts you have, but it seems to me that the mission was blown by the field agents. It’s fairly obvious that Karl Roth, for one, blew the whistle. That’s where the leaks were. Not in London or Washington.”

West looked at Thorpe closely. “Good analysis. In fact, that was the official conclusion at the time. . . . However, if you assume that Major Kimberly’s message was sent under the direction of the helpful Red Army, then you should look at the message more closely. He was, after all, a trained intelligence officer, and from all accounts a brave and resourceful man. So you try to read a code within the encoded ciphers—you look for non sequiturs, clumsy sentence structure, that sort of thing.” West paused, then said, “‘Trace and locate bodies of them.’ That’s not even good radio English—”

Thorpe sat up straight. “Talbot.”

West nodded. “Nowhere does the code word
Talbot
exist in my research, but it existed in the private conversations of Henry Kimberly, Mr. O’Brien, Mr. Allerton, and a few others. Major Kimberly, in the course of his interrogation at the hands of the Russians, was told or deduced from the extensiveness of the questions that there was a highly placed traitor in the OSS. Any good agent could conclude that. The radio message gave him one last chance to reach and to warn his friends.”

Allerton rubbed his face. “I saw that radio message, and I knew of Talbot . . . but, by God, I never made the connection. . . . I was a lousy spy.”

Abrams wondered. His experience with codes was almost nil, but that particular line had struck him when West first read it. First-letter codes were rudimentary, the sort of thing children or lovers do in letters. It was hard to believe that neither Allerton nor O’Brien had picked it up forty years ago. Abrams concluded that they had but neither had mentioned it to the other. Interesting.

West produced a briar pipe and a pouch of tobacco. He said, “None of this is what we would call most immediate intelligence, except that”—he lit his pipe and recited from Eleanor Wingate’s letter—“‘the diary, which names people who may still be with your government or who are highly placed in American society . . . At least one of those named is a well-known man who is close to your President.’” West looked up.

O’Brien turned to Abrams. “What do you think up to this point?”

Abrams thought the clues were old, the trail cold, the evidence circumstantial, and the theories stretched; as a criminal case, it was a bust. The culprit had escaped detection at the time and, even if he were exposed, would never be tried. But as a personal vendetta, it had possibilities, though this group would not use the word
ven
detta.
That was a word whose meaning and substance he had come to appreciate in Bensonhurst and on the force. Long memories, long grudges. But O’Brien and Allerton would put it more delicately. The result, however, was the same. He remembered the silver bullet.

“Mr. Abrams?”

“I think you will find your man this time.”

O’Brien leaned forward. “Why?”

“Because he knows you’ve picked up the scent again and he’s running. He’s killed Carbury. To use the favored analogy, the forest is smaller and thinner than it was forty years ago. The number of animals inhabiting it are diminished. The wolf—the werewolf—leaves a clear trail now. I think, too, he will kill again.”

O’Brien stared off into the darkness of the huge room. The fire caused shadows to leap around the walls intermittently, illuminating the running frieze, giving the warriors the impression of movement. O’Brien said, “Yes, he will kill again. He has to.”

The long limousine pulled away from the darkened armory, made a U-turn, and headed south on Park Avenue. Peter Thorpe, sitting in a jump seat, lit a cigarette and said to West, “I have the impression, Nick, you’ve been working on this problem for some time. Long before the appearance—and disappearance—of Colonel Carbury. However, I don’t recall your mentioning it in any previous conversations of our group.”

West, in the second jump seat, fidgeted with his pipe. “The nature of the problem . . . the implications of the Talbot profile . . . would suggest that any of the old OSS hands, in or out of the CIA, or the government, could be . . . the wrong person with whom to discuss this. . . .”

Thorpe smiled at O’Brien and Allerton sitting facing him at the left end of the long wraparound seat in the rear. He said to West, “Present company excluded, of course.”

West avoided everyone’s eyes. “Included, of course.” He nodded toward Abrams and Katherine sitting on the right end of the wraparound seat. “Except you, Kate, and Mr. Abrams.”

Thorpe smiled slowly. “Why do we always underestimate you, Nick?”

West continued, “Ann is the only one I’ve discussed it with. In fact . . . it was how we met.” He relit his pipe.

Tony Abrams watched him closely. West, he thought, was a man who could easily be underestimated. His size, his manner, his whole being, judged by the primitive instincts of his fellow man, signaled a non-threat. But by the standards of late-twentieth-century cerebral man, West’s mind was a danger; a danger to traitors and bullshitters, and to people with nerve and flair but with average minds, like Peter Thorpe. Intuitively, Abrams knew that Thorpe was afraid of West.

The limousine moved slowly through the Friday-night traffic. There was a silence until O’Brien said, “It’s totally impossible that the American government, intelligence services, and military, which are the three highest targets of the KGB in that order, have not been penetrated. Damn it, half the people in the armory tonight, including two past CIA directors and the present director, could conceivably fit Eleanor Wingate’s description.” O’Brien looked around. “Do I sound paranoid?”

Katherine marveled at how O’Brien could manufacture evidence, then agonize over it as though it were real. But, she thought, though the evidence was fake, the actions and reactions of the people whom O’Brien was studying would be real. Carbury’s death or disappearance was real, and the deaths at Brompton Hall were real. O’Brien was a master of illusion, and she regarded him with equal parts of admiration and anxiety.

West said, “The important questions are, how high up do these Soviet penetrations go, and what would be the
objective
of these penetrations . . . if they existed?”

O’Brien shook his head. “I can only tell you that something ominous is in the air. I believe the Russians have discovered a way to achieve their ultimate objective.”

Thorpe said, “You mean a nuclear strike?”

“No.” O’Brien waved his hand in a motion of dismissal. “That is not and never was one of their options any more than it is one of ours.”

“Then what?” asked Katherine. “Biological? Chemical?”

O’Brien did not respond.

Katherine said, “How do Colonel Carbury and the Wingate letter relate to any of that?”

O’Brien replied, “As it relates at all, it would have to be that the person or persons revealed in the diary as possible moles are somehow necessary to the Soviet plan.” O’Brien shrugged. “We need more facts. Let’s table it for now.”

Abrams could not help making the comparison between O’Brien’s heavy-handed hints at Armageddon and the police game of telling a suspect they knew all about him and his accomplices, then letting the guy walk so they could see where he went. It followed that O’Brien really suspected that someone in this car was a conduit whose opening flowed into Moscow. Yet Abrams couldn’t help thinking that Patrick O’Brien was a little too good to be true. Too glib. Too many answers to unasked questions. Too unruffled by the suggestion that he might be Talbot.

Incredible, Abrams thought. This was really happening. Abrams felt he’d walked into a tornado that afternoon and landed in Oz. He thought if he went home and slept, when he awoke, the tuxedo wouldn’t be on the floor beside his bed. There’d be no hangover, and he’d go to work Tuesday and Katherine Kimberly would hand him a summons to serve on some poor schnook who had run afoul of an O’Brien client, and life would go on in its slightly tedious way. That’s what he thought, except it wasn’t true.

What was true was that he was involved in ways he could not even have imagined at lunchtime. What was also true was that the car reeked of conspiracy, suspicion, and fear. Professionally, one might speak of fear for the life of one’s country, but, notwithstanding this low-key, genteel conversation, Abrams sensed the more fundamental fear these people had for their own lives.

Abrams could almost hear his father’s voice. “Don’t join anything. Don’t carry anybody’s card. It’s nothing but misery. I know.”

Or his mother’s more basic advice. “When you see people whispering, run the other way. Only you and God should whisper to each other.”

Expected advice from Communists turned Zionists, he thought. Good advice. It was too bad, he reflected, he never listened to it. He was, after all, the son of famous conspirators. They didn’t take their own advice until they were in their fifties. He had some years to go. Unless O’Brien was right, in which case he and everyone might only have weeks or months.

The limousine crept along in the heavy traffic. James Allerton was asking who knew of Carbury’s mission; a good, basic question, thought Abrams.

Katherine said, “I told Mr. O’Brien. Then I told Peter.” She looked around the car.

Allerton said kindly, but pointedly, “No one else?”

She hesitated. “No. . . . Well . . . Arnold in archives . . . I mean, I asked him for Colonel Carbury’s file. But I had the impression he knew Carbury was in New York.”

Thorpe looked at Abrams. “How much did you know?”

“I knew I had to follow a man named Carbury.”

Thorpe rubbed his chin. “All in all, Kate, you could have shown better judgment.”

She flushed angrily. “Don’t be absurd. I showed damned fine judgment.”

“But you didn’t have to tell
anyone,
including me, until after you had the diary. Now you’ve tainted us.”

She stared at him defiantly. “Carbury himself or Lady Wingate could have been the cause of the security breach. Information progresses geometrically, and we have no way to check on who was told, here or in England. So let’s keep the paranoia among us down to a minimum.”

Thorpe seemed chastised. He took Katherine’s hand. “I apologize.”

The limousine stopped in front of the Lombardy. Thorpe raised Katherine’s hand to his lips and kissed it. He climbed out of the car and said to Allerton, “Are you staying here?”

Allerton shook his head. “You know I dislike that apartment. I’ve taken a room at the United Nations Plaza.”

Abrams watched Katherine, but she made no move to leave with Thorpe. Thorpe turned away without a farewell and entered the Lombardy.

The limousine drove off and a few minutes later stopped at the UN Plaza Hotel. Allerton reached into his pocket and pulled out the medal he’d received. He stared at it, then looked at O’Brien. “This should have been yours.”