Authors: Daniel Silva
The Unlikely Spy (16 page)
Vicary was flipping through the file again.
"You have a theory?" Harry asked.
"Three theories, actually."
"Let's hear them."
"Number one, Canaris has lost faith in the British networks and has commissioned Vogel to undertake an investigation. A man with Vogel's background and training is the perfect officer to sift through all the files and all the agent reports to look for inconsistencies. We've been damned careful, Harry, but maintaining Double Cross is an enormously complex task. I bet we've made a couple of mistakes along the way. And if the right person were looking for them--an intelligent man like Kurt Vogel, for instance--he might be able to spot them."
"Theory two?"
"Theory two, Canaris has commissioned Vogel to construct a new network. It's very late in the game for something like that. Agents would have to be discovered, recruited, trained, and inserted into the country. That usually takes months to do the right way. I doubt that's what they're up to, but it can't be totally discounted."
"Theory three?"
"Theory three is that Kurt Vogel is the control officer of a network we don't know about."
"An entire network of agents that we haven't uncovered--is that possible?"
"We have to assume it is."
"Then all our doubles would be at risk."
"It's a house of cards, Harry. All it takes is one good agent, and the entire thing comes crashing down."
Vicary lit a cigarette. The tobacco took the aftertaste of the broth out of his mouth.
"Canaris must be under enormous pressure to deliver. He'd want the best to handle the operation."
"So that means Kurt Vogel is a man operating in a pressure cooker."
"Right."
"That could make him dangerous."
"It could also make him careless. He has to make a move. He has to use his radio or send an agent into the country. And when he does, we'll be on to him."
They sat in silence for a moment, Vicary smoking, Harry thumbing his way through Vogel's file. Then Vicary told him about what had happened in Registry.
"Lots of files go missing now and again, Alfred."
"Yes, but why
this
file? And more important, why
now?
"
this
file? And more important, why
now?
"
"Good questions, but I suspect the answers are very simple. When you're in the middle of an investigation it's best to stay focused, not get sidetracked."
"I know, Harry," Vicary said, frowning. "But it's driving me to distraction."
Harry said, "I know one or two of the Registry Queens."
Vicary looked up. "I'm sure you do."
"I'll poke around, ask a few questions."
"Do it quietly."
"There's no other way to do it, Alfred."
"Jago's lying--he's hiding something."
"Why would he lie?"
"I don't know," Vicary said, crushing out his cigarette, "but I'm paid to think wicked thoughts."
10
BLETCHLEY PARK, ENGLAND
Officially it was called the Government Code and Cipher School. However, it was not a school at all. It looked as though it
might
be a school of some kind--a large ugly Victorian mansion surrounded by a high fence--but most people in the narrow-streeted railway town of Bletchley understood that something portentous was going on there. The great lawns were covered with dozens of makeshift huts. The remaining space had been trampled into pathways of frozen mud. The gardens were overgrown and shabby, like tiny jungles. The staff was an odd collection--the country's brightest mathematicians, chess champions, crossword-puzzle wizards--all assembled for one purpose: cracking German codes.
might
be a school of some kind--a large ugly Victorian mansion surrounded by a high fence--but most people in the narrow-streeted railway town of Bletchley understood that something portentous was going on there. The great lawns were covered with dozens of makeshift huts. The remaining space had been trampled into pathways of frozen mud. The gardens were overgrown and shabby, like tiny jungles. The staff was an odd collection--the country's brightest mathematicians, chess champions, crossword-puzzle wizards--all assembled for one purpose: cracking German codes.
Even in the notoriously eccentric world of Bletchley Park, Denholm Saunders was considered an oddball. Before the war he had been a top mathematician at Cambridge. Now he was among the best cryptanalysts in the world. He also lived in a hamlet outside Bletchley with his mother and his Siamese cats, Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas.
It was late afternoon. Saunders was seated at his desk in the mansion, working over a pair of messages sent by the Abwehr in Hamburg to German agents inside Britain. The messages had been intercepted by the Radio Security Service, flagged as suspicious, and forwarded to Bletchley Park for decoding.
Saunders whistled tunelessly while his pencil scraped across his pad, a habit that irritated his colleagues no end. He worked in the hand cipher section of the park. His work space was crowded and cramped, but it was relatively warm. Better to be here than outside in one of the huts, where cryptanalysts slaved over German army and naval ciphers like Eskimos in an igloo.
Two hours later the scraping and the whistling stopped. Saunders was aware only of the sound of melting snow gurgling through the gutters of the old house. The work that afternoon had been far from challenging; the messages had been transmitted in a variation of a code Saunders unbuttoned himself in 1940.
"My goodness, but they are getting a bit boring, aren't they?" Saunders said, to no one in particular.
His superior was a Scot named Richardson. Saunders knocked, stepped inside, and laid the pair of decodes on the desk. Richardson read them and frowned. An officer at MI5 named Alfred Vicary had put out a red flag for this kind of thing just yesterday.
Richardson called for a motorcycle courier.
"There's one other thing," Saunders said.
"What's that?"
"The first message--the agent seemed to have some difficulty with the Morse. In fact he asked for the keyer to send it twice. They get testy about things like that. Could be nothing. There might have been some interference. But it might be a good idea to tell the boys at MI5 about it."
Richardson thought, Good idea indeed.
When Saunders was gone he typed out a brief memo describing how the agent
appeared
to struggle with the Morse. Five minutes later the decodes and Richardson's note were tucked inside a leather pouch for the forty-two-mile ride to London.
appeared
to struggle with the Morse. Five minutes later the decodes and Richardson's note were tucked inside a leather pouch for the forty-two-mile ride to London.
11
SELSEY, ENGLAND
"It was the oddest thing I've ever seen," Arthur Barnes told his wife over breakfast that morning. Barnes, as he did every morning, had walked his beloved corgi Fionna along the waterfront. Part of it still was open to civilians; most of it had been sealed off and designated a restricted military zone. Everyone wondered what the military was doing there. No one talked about it. Dawn was late that morning--a gray overcast sky, rain now and again. Fionna was off her leash, scampering up and down the docks.
Fionna spotted the thing first, then Barnes did.
"A bloody giant concrete monster, Mabel. Like a block of flats lying on its side." Two tugs were pulling it out to sea. Barnes carried a pair of field glasses inside his coat--a friend once spotted the conning tower of a German U-BOAT and Barnes was dying to catch a glimpse of one too. He removed the glasses and raised them to his eyes.
The concrete monster had a boat attached to it with a broad, flat prow pushing through the choppy seas. Barnes scanned off its port side--"Hard to tell the port side from the starboard side, mind you"--and he spotted a small vessel with a bunch of military types on deck.
"I couldn't believe it, Mabel," he recounted, finishing the last of his toast. "They were clapping and cheering, giving each other hugs and pats on the back." He shook his head. "Imagine that. Hitler's got the world by the short hairs, and our boys get excited because they can make a giant hunk of concrete float."
The giant floating concrete structure spotted by Arthur Barnes that dreary January morning was code-named Phoenix. It was 200 feet long, 50 feet wide, and displaced more than 6,000 tons of water. More than two hundred were scheduled to be built. Its interior--invisible from Barnes's vantage point on the harbor front--was a labyrinth of hollow chambers and scuttling valves, for the Phoenix was not designed to remain on the surface for long. It was designed to be towed across the English Channel and sunk off the coast of Normandy. The Phoenixes were just one component of a massive Allied project to construct an artificial harbor in England and drag it to France on D-Day. The overall code name for the project was Operation Mulberry.
It was Dieppe that taught them their lesson, Dieppe and the amphibious landings in the Mediterranean. At Dieppe, site of the disastrous Allied raid on France in August 1942, the Germans denied the Allies use of a port for as long as possible. In the Mediterranean they destroyed ports before abandoning them, rendering them useless for long periods. The invasion planners determined that attempting to capture a port intact was hopeless. They decided the men and supplies would come ashore the same way--on the beaches of Normandy.
The problem was the weather. Studies of weather patterns along the French coast showed that periods of fair conditions could be expected to last no more than four consecutive days. Therefore, the invasion planners had to assume that supplies would have to be brought ashore in a storm.
In July 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and a delegation of three hundred officials sailed for Canada aboard the
Queen Mary.
Churchill and Roosevelt were meeting in Quebec in August to approve plans for the Normandy invasion. During the journey, Professor J. D. Bernal, a distinguished physicist, gave a dramatic demonstration in one of the vessel's luxurious staterooms. He filled the bath with a few inches of water, the shallow end representing the Normandy beaches, the deep end the Baie de la Seine. Bernal placed twenty paper ships in the bath and used a back brush to simulate stormy conditions. The boats immediately sank. Bernal then inflated a Mae West life belt and laid it across the bath as a breakwater. The back brush was again used to create a storm, but this time the vessels survived. Bernal explained that the same thing would happen at Normandy. A storm would create havoc; an artificial harbor was needed.
Queen Mary.
Churchill and Roosevelt were meeting in Quebec in August to approve plans for the Normandy invasion. During the journey, Professor J. D. Bernal, a distinguished physicist, gave a dramatic demonstration in one of the vessel's luxurious staterooms. He filled the bath with a few inches of water, the shallow end representing the Normandy beaches, the deep end the Baie de la Seine. Bernal placed twenty paper ships in the bath and used a back brush to simulate stormy conditions. The boats immediately sank. Bernal then inflated a Mae West life belt and laid it across the bath as a breakwater. The back brush was again used to create a storm, but this time the vessels survived. Bernal explained that the same thing would happen at Normandy. A storm would create havoc; an artificial harbor was needed.
At Quebec, the British and the Americans agreed to build two artificial harbors for the Normandy invasion, each with the capacity of the great port of Dover. Dover took seven years to build; the British and Americans had roughly eight months. It was a task of unimaginable proportions. Each Mulberry cost $96 million. The British economy, crippled by four years of war, would have to supply four million tons of concrete and steel. Hundreds of topflight engineers would be needed, as well as tens of thousands of skilled construction workers. To get the Mulberries from England to France on D-Day would require every available tug in Britain and on the eastern seaboard of the United States.
The only assignment equal to the task of building the Mulberries would be keeping them secret--proved by the fact that Arthur Barnes and his corgi Fionna were still standing on the waterfront when the coaster carrying the team of British and American Mulberry engineers nosed against the dock. The team disembarked and walked toward a waiting bus. One of the men broke away toward a staff car waiting to return him to London. The driver stepped out and crisply opened the rear door, and Commander Peter Jordan climbed inside.
NEW YORK CITY: OCTOBER 1943
They came for him on a Friday. He would always remember them as Laurel and Hardy: the thick, stubby American who smelled of bargain aftershave and his lunchtime beer and sausage; the thin smooth Englishman who shook Jordan's hand as though searching for a pulse. In reality their names were Leamann and Broome--or at least that's what it said on the identification cards they waved past him. Leamann said he was with the War Department; Broome, the angular Englishman, murmured something about being attached to the War Office. Neither man wore a
uniform--Leamann
a shabby brown suit that pulled across his corpulent stomach and rode up his crotch, Broome an elegantly cut suit of charcoal gray, a little too heavy for the American fall weather.
uniform--Leamann
a shabby brown suit that pulled across his corpulent stomach and rode up his crotch, Broome an elegantly cut suit of charcoal gray, a little too heavy for the American fall weather.
Jordan received them in his magnificent lower Manhattan office. Leamann suppressed little belches while admiring Jordan's spectacular view of the East River bridges: the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Williamsburg. Broome, who allowed almost no interest in things man-made, commented on the weather--a perfect autumn day, a crystalline blue sky, brilliant orange sunshine. An afternoon to make you believe Manhattan is the most spectacular place on earth. They walked to the south window and chatted while watching freighters move in and out of New York Harbor.
"Tell us about the work you're doing now, Mr. Jordan," Leamann said, a trace of South Boston in his voice.
It was a sore subject. He was still the chief engineer of the Northeast Bridge Company and it was still the largest bridge construction firm on the East Coast. But his dream of starting his own engineering firm had died with the war, just as he feared.
Leamann, it seemed, had memorized his resume, and he recited it now as if Jordan had been nominated for an award. "First in your class at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Engineer of the Year in 1938.
Scientific American
says you're the greatest thing since the guy who invented the wheel. You're hot stuff, Mr. Jordan."
Scientific American
says you're the greatest thing since the guy who invented the wheel. You're hot stuff, Mr. Jordan."
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