She pressed a buzzer. A peephole cover slid open, then the door itself opened slowly on squeaking hinges. She entered a room that was badly lit and musty.
The room was stacked high with oak file cabinets of a type not seen in many years. At the end of an aisle of cabinets there was a single window, which was grimy, as windows tend to become when they are crisscrossed with steel bars. Raindrops beat against the window of the overheated room. She heard the door close behind her and turned.
“Hello, miss.”
“Good afternoon, Arnold.” She regarded the elderly Englishman as her eyes became accustomed to the bad light.
“Just making tea, miss.”
“Fine.” Not to accept tea was to get off on the wrong foot with Arnold, as she had discovered.
Arnold busied himself with the china tea service that was laid on a khaki-painted camp table.
“Do you know a Colonel Randolph Carbury?”
Arnold nodded. He switched on an electric hot plate on which sat a copper kettle. He motioned to a shelf lined with colored tins of Twining’s. “What’s your pleasure? I’ve got a bit of Earl Grey left.”
“Fine. Is there a file on him?”
“The Earl?” He laughed at his own joke. “Oh, Carbury. Indeed there is.” He pulled up a chair, and she sat.
She watched as he spooned the loose tea into the china pot. No, she thought, it was no accident that the firm of O’Brien, Kimberly and Rose had moved from Wall Street to this building in Rockefeller Center after the war. The wartime American intelligence organization where Patrick O’Brien had worked, the Office of Strategic Services, had kept offices in this building. And, as Carbury had reminisced, so had British Security Coordination, which had been headquartered in what was now the suite of the O’Brien firm. Nostalgia, karma, perhaps something else.
When the British had vacated their space on the forty-fourth floor, they had retained the lease on this one room. They had also left behind a good number of files and a caretaker staff, including their archivist, Sergeant Arnold Brin, who was now the sole remaining person. This room, and Arnold himself, were part of the flotsam and jetsam of a once farflung empire, left aground in the ebb tide of the realm.
Katherine once remarked to O’Brien about the expenditure for an intelligence facility that had seemingly been defunct for nearly forty years. He had replied, “It was a gift from them to us.”
“But who pays for it?”
“The monarch is given a discretionary fund by Parliament for royal functions. Some of this money finds its way into other types of functions.”
“Intelligence functions?”
“Yes.” O’Brien had smiled. “If you want to know a secret, Congress, during the Second War, set a similar precedent. They voted tens of millions of dollars in unvouchered funds to be used by General Donovan at his discretion. I’ll tell you about that some day.”
The copper kettle whistled, and Arnold poured the boiling water into the china pot. “Like it strong, do you? Give it a good five minutes.”
Katherine looked down the center aisle of the file cabinets. According to O’Brien, British intelligence occasionally paid a visit to the archives. But General Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, with whom it was intended to be shared, had been unexpectedly disbanded after the war. Nearly two years later the OSS was reborn as the Central Intelligence Agency; but lacking the continuity of the British intelligence services, the CIA had apparently overlooked this facility, or asset, as they termed it. Patrick O’Brien and his OSS veteran friends, however, had not forgotten the British legacy and had inherited it by default—or by design. She was not certain which.
She also knew that many of the OSS’s own files had never passed to the CIA but were still in this building some floors below.
Arnold set a large teacup on the camp table. He produced a napkin and a teaspoon. “No sugar, no cream.” He poured the tea through a strainer.
“Thank you.”
Arnold disappeared into the gloom of the file stacks and returned shortly with a buff-colored folder. “Carbury, Randolph, Major. Same man, new rank, I should think.” He switched on a dusty green-shaded reading lamp, then extracted from the folder a small ID photograph. “Is that the man?”
Katherine stared at the old photograph. “I have no way of identifying him.” Why, she thought, would he assume she could, unless he also assumed that she had met Carbury? She looked at Arnold, and he seemed somewhat embarrassed.
“What I meant, miss, is have you ever seen a picture of him?”
“No.” She began to wonder if Carbury had been in this room before his meeting with her. But even if that were so, there was nothing inherently suspicious about that. He could have access to the files, assuming his credentials were in order. That, according to O’Brien, was a stipulation of the legacy.
Katherine leafed through the loose pages of the thin file. It was basically a personal file, very informally arranged, unlike the thick brown dossiers on Fascist agents who had worked in America. There were no details of operations, but there were code-numbered references to those operations on which Carbury had worked. Randolph Carbury, it appeared, was no whisky warrior; he had been highly regarded and highly decorated.
Katherine came upon an encoded Western Union telegram with the decoded text written in pencil below. The decoded signature caught her eye, and she read the message, dated 12 February 1945.
To Major R. Carbury: Again, I must press you for more specif ics regarding the light shed by the Hunter’s Moon. It is due to rise this year on 16 October, by which time Mars will have set, decreasing the favourable conditions which now obtain for the hunt. A martini is needed quickly. Churchill.
Katherine reread the message. Even en clair it was obtuse, a further guard against unauthorized eyes. Hunter’s Moon, she assumed, was the name of an operation. After reading enough oblique wartime communications, one got the hang of it. She looked back at the wrinkled telegram. Light shed—a status report was required. Mars will have set—the war will have ended. Decreasing the favourable conditions—wartime powers will also end, making the hunt more difficult, or something like that. So far, so good.
A martini is needed quickly. Katherine ran her hand through her long hair and thought. The leitmotif was hunting and therefore followed throughout. Hunting and moon, with a mythological reference to Mars. Vintage Churchill.
She thought back to the Wingate letter, to Colonel Carbury’s acknowledgment that the letter had something to do with Wolfbane—the American wartime intelligence operation to expose a Soviet double agent highly placed in the OSS. It was just possible that Hunter’s Moon was the British code name for the American operation Wolfbane.
If this was true, then the last line became clearer. A martini is needed quickly was not an offhand cry of frustration, which in any case Mr. Churchill handled with brandy. It was Churchill changing metaphors based on the word Wolfbane. American slang for a martini was a silver bullet. Who was to be the recipient of the quickly needed silver bullet? It was the mythological werewolf.
Katherine took it to the next logical step: The most infamous werewolf, portrayed by Lon Chaney, Jr., in the wartime classic motion picture, was Lawrence Talbot. And Talbot was the code name for the unknown Soviet double agent who was the object of the hunt named Operation Wolfbane, or Hunter’s Moon. She nodded.
So, assuming the last line was meant literally, Churchill was giving the order to kill Talbot—if he could be found. They were not to arrest him, not to attempt to turn him, not to bring him to trial, but to kill him outright, as you would kill a wild creature. And she thought she knew why. It wasn’t petty revenge. It was because Talbot was believed to be so highly placed that his open exposure would cause irreparable damage to public confidence and morale. It was also because espionage trials of Soviet agents were not politically or diplomatically prudent in those days of the wartime alliance with Russia.
Katherine sat back and sipped her tea. Talbot had never received tha
t silver bullet. For years after the war he had prowled the collective memories and psyches of American and British intelligence; occasionally his bloody work had been discovered: a fresh kill lying at the bottom of a ravine. Then silence. There were theories: He had died a natural death, he’d finally been killed, or perhaps he’d simply retired. Or a more unsettling theory: He had ceased taking the normal risks of the double agent and become a sleeper agent, in order to insure his continued rise in whatever career he had chosen for himself. A well-known man who is close to your President. A man who controlled his appetite for treason until he was in a position to satiate that appetite to the fullest. Grave and foreboding.
Katherine turned her attention back to the file. She leafed quickly through the thin sheaf of memos, telegrams, and notes. She saw a long memo to Carbury from William Stephenson, the head of British Security Coordination in America, the man known as Intrepid and Carbury’s wartime boss. The memo seemed pertinent, and she made a mental note to read it later.
She scanned the remainder of the file, then looked at her watch. There was more here, much more, and she’d have to spend several days with it. She finished her tea and looked at Arnold over the rim of her cup. Arnold was reading a week-old copy of the London Daily Mirror. She closed the file. “Did you know Randolph Carbury personally?”
Arnold put down his newspaper. “Knew them all. Carbury stands out because he was more interested in Reds than Nazis. Had a different sort of job, if you know what I mean.” He winked in a way meant to underscore that meaning.
Katherine regarded Arnold in the dim light. The man was more than a vestige, more than an anachronism; he was a specimen forever imprisoned in the amber of the records room. Despite forty years in America, he retained an accent and manner that she imagined was that of a British noncommissioned officer of the war years. In the past he had spoken of a wife and grown child living in New York, but he hadn’t mentioned them in some time.
The man seemed relatively simple and open on the surface, but there was a complexity and furtiveness about him. And there were moments, she thought, when he revealed a presence, a bearing, and a refinement of speech that were more the officer than the sergeant. She remembered a line spoken by an actor in an old British spy movie: “My name is Sergeant Williams. Sergeant is not my rank, Williams is not my name.”
She said, “Is there anything against Carbury?”
“Not that I know of.” His tone was suddenly sharp. “Then again, we’ve been taken in by a good damned lot of bloody traitors, haven’t we?” He pulled the folder toward him and spoke apropos of nothing. “We won’t microfilm these—or computerize them. At least not while I’m alive. Do you know why? Well, miss, there is a special sort of feeling to old dossiers—odd scraps of paper, notes scribbled here and there, underlinings and dog-ears, even coffee stains. That sort of thing. The file develops a character of its own. It tells you things that aren’t plainly written. You understand.”
Katherine nodded. “The shadow outline on some of these pages, for instance, indicating where a smaller slip of paper lay for many years—yet the paper that made the shadow is missing. . . .”
Arnold nodded enthusiastically. “That’s just it. You do see what I mean.”
There was a silence, and Katherine realized that nothing further was forthcoming.
Arnold picked up the folder. “Is that it, then?”
“No. Wingate. Eleanor Wingate.”
Arnold concentrated on the name.
“Brompton Hall?”
“Ah! Yes, yes . . . Lady Eleanor Wingate—wife . . . widow of a Major Lesley Wingate. Brompton Hall . . . American intelligence billet . . .” He stood and carried the file into the murkiness of the far aisles, then returned with another folder and laid it on the table.
Katherine said, “How would it be possible for someone to remove something from a folder?”
“Someone would have to authorize that.”
“Who?”
Arnold sat down and poured himself more tea. “Well, that’s very complex, miss. Very complex. You see, these are not active files, as you know. These are only historical archives, kept for purposes of scholarly research—such as you do. But on occasion a bit of something becomes of interest again, and it’s whisked off to London. Mine is not to reason why. . . .”
“I see. And are you certain no one could actually steal something from these files?”
“Oh, I’d be a liar if I said that. It’s just not humanly possible to avoid that here. I’m all alone, and my senses are not what they used to be.”
Katherine opened the folder marked Brompton Hall. There was a brief description of the hall and the grounds, including a reproduction of an old print. Someone had put a tick mark beside a sentence that read, “The south tower holds an unusual and interesting muniment room.”
There was also a short biography of the Wingates and the cabled result of a security check on them that seemed to consist mainly of statements of good character from their peers. Very much, Katherine thought, like the letters one needs to join a good suburban country club. And in fact, she noticed, there was a listing of the clubs to which Major Wingate had belonged.
The British system of vetting was, she reflected, still rather quixotic to most American intelligence people. She looked up. “It’s simply not possible, is it, Arnold, for a man to be concurrently a member of Boodle’s and the Communist party?”
Arnold laughed. “Ah, miss, now you’re having a bit of fun with us.”
Katherine turned the page of the file and came upon a typed list of American intelligence officers billeted at Brompton Hall. Among the names, some of them familiar, she found her father’s. A handwritten annotation read: KIA—5/?/45. REF: Alsos Mission; REF: Hunter’s Moon.
She had heard of the Alsos mission—the joint American and British mission to recover German atomic scientists. Hunter’s Moon, she was certain now, was Wolfbane. She closed the file and looked at Arnold. “Do you have anything on Alsos or Hunter’s Moon?”
“Not anymore, miss. That’s long gone.”
“Where would I find information on those subjects?”
Arnold looked around the room as though trying to recall if he had a file lying about. “Don’t know. Moscow, I suspect.”
Katherine studied Arnold’s face but could not tell if he was being facetious. She stood. “Can you be here tomorrow and Sunday?”
Arnold stood also. “If you require it.”
“Fine.”
“What will you be needing, miss?”
“I don’t know yet. One thing seems to lead to another, doesn’t it?”
“It’s always that way with archives, miss. You can read a file a dozen times and nothing signifies. These files have been read a hundred times each. But then a month later you read another file—or someone says something innocentlike and”—he held out his hands and brought his fingers together dovetail fashion—“it fits.”
She stared at him for some time but didn’t speak.
Arnold raised his teacup and looked thoughtfully into the dark liquid. He spoke as though to himself. “It’s the sequence of the thing more often than not. Dates, especially. Always look at dates. A man can’t be in two places at the same time, can he? And background. Pay very special attention to a man’s background. I mean his youth. A person reveals himself early on. People seem to have these conversions from one kind of politics to another, but that’s a bit of nonsense, because the boy is father to the man, if you know what I mean.”
Katherine moved toward the door. “You understand generally what I’m looking for. Gather what you can.”
Arnold stood and followed her, carrying a large black book. “Miss?”
Katherine turned and faced the open book, a blind register with strips of paper covering the preceding names. Arnold’s fingers were positioned to prevent an accidental uncovering of the signatures. She noticed that two loops of the previous signature extended onto her line and could have been the loops of the signature
of Randolph Carbury. She signed the open line without making the same mistake, then added the date and time.
Arnold closed the book. “Have a good evening, miss. Bring me the guest list, if you think of it. I always enjoy reading the old names.”
He unbolted the door and opened it. “The list gets shorter each year. That’s a bit sad. Heroes shouldn’t die a natural death, should they? In hospital and all that. Nurses and doctors, and no one knowing they’re watching a hero die.”
He blinked in the brighter light of the hallway, and Katherine noticed for the first time how incredibly aged he was. Arnold was lost in thought, then said, softly, “But they weren’t all heroes, were they? A good number of traitors there were, who died natural deaths and got a good piece in the Times, military funerals, and all that. Those men and women should have ended their days on the gallows forty years ago.” He rubbed his thin hair. “There’s no statute of limitations for treason, is there?”
Katherine realized the question was rhetorical. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She turned and walked down the corridor. After what seemed a long time, she heard the door shut behind her. Arnold’s cryptic musings, his metaphors, and his philosophy of life were a bit heavy at times. Yet, she supposed, they came with the territory. Also, they were not entirely beside the point.
She strode down the long, empty corridor. She was more concerned, she told herself, with an ongoing act of treason than with something that had happened forty years ago. On the other hand, from what O’Brien had told her about Talbot, it was known that Talbot had sent dozens of agents to their deaths. One of those agents may have been her father.
She reached an unmarked door, the rear entrance to Patrick O’Brien’s suite, which opened directly into his private office. She stopped and raised her hand to knock, but hesitated. Security, discretion, and extreme personal caution. . . . Everyone from that time is suspect. . . . Distribute the information as you see fit. But be cautious. She turned and kept walking.
The seeds of distrust, sown even before she was born, grew and bore the tainted fruit of suspicion, and the fruit fell rotten to the earth and reseeded itself again and again.
The Talbot Odyssey Page 7