The Talbot Odyssey

by Nelson DeMille

  West paused, out of the historian’s habit, Abrams imagined, of ending a thought with a date. West continued, “Major Kimberly’s cover was that of a quartermaster officer in search of accommodations for the coming American occupying staff. In fact, he was there to retrieve about a dozen agents he’d had parachuted into the Berlin area. He was concerned about their welfare, especially in regard to the Russians.”

  Patrick O’Brien nodded and added, “It was a dangerous mission. Berlin had fallen, but the surrender of Germany hadn’t been signed, and there were still roaming bands of SS fanatics plying their murderous trade along the highways and among the ruins. There was also the possibility, as we were discovering, of being detained by our Red Army allies.” O’Brien stared into the fire for some time, then said, “I told Henry to be careful. I mean, my God, we knew the war had less than a week to run. No one wanted the distinction of being the last casualty. I suggested the quartermaster cover. No use waving the OSS insignia in front of the Russians’ noses. Henry, too, was wary of the Russians.”

  James Allerton spoke for the first time. “In that respect, he was not so naive as many of us in those days, myself included.” He looked at Katherine. “But he felt a deep obligation to his agents . . . hence the fateful mission to Berlin.” Allerton nodded to West.

  Nicholas West continued, “There was, according to the mission report on file, one agent in particular whom Major Kimberly wanted to recover—Karl Roth, a German Jewish refugee and a Communist who was working for the OSS. Another agent had radioed that Roth had been picked up by the Russians, then released. When Roth was queried by radio, he explained his release by saying he convinced the Russians he was a Communist. Roth’s radio apparently was still under his control. His message went on to say that the Russians had asked him to work for them as a double within the OSS. He agreed, he said, in order to get out of their clutches.”

  O’Brien interjected, “This was not the first indication we had that the Russians were trying to turn our agents who had Communist backgrounds. Henry thought this was ominous in regard to any postwar intelligence service we might establish.”

  West finished his coffee and said, “There is one last radio message on file from Karl Roth. In it he reports that he’s sick and starving. He asks, ‘When are you coming?’ He gave his location—a railroad shed near Hennigsdorf. Roth had been assigned to the Alsos mission. He said he’d located two German scientists but needed help in bringing them out. Roth had two strikes against his credibility by this time: his Communist background and the fact that he had failed to report his contact with the Russians and had to be queried about it. On the other hand, he had reported that the Russians tried to turn him, but that’s something he’d expect the OSS to assume anyway.”

  O’Brien interjected, “No one in OSS London felt confident in deciding Roth’s fate: come to his aid or cut him loose? We radioed all the details to Henry and told him to make the decision but to proceed with caution.”

  Abrams listened as West and O’Brien continued the background briefing. Already he could see where it was leading. It was leading to the here and now. It was a story rooted in a turbulent past, a time when the world was in shambles, a time when forces were set in motion that would culminate in a final Armageddon that these people obviously felt was close at hand.

  West said, “Karl Roth was not heard from after that message, until he surfaced again in 1948. He reported to the American occupation forces in Berlin stating he’d been rearrested by the Russians and held prisoner for three years. He claimed his back pay and benefits, but his original hiring contract with the OSS had been lost, and no one knew quite what to do with him. His bona fides were established by ex-OSS men, and he was given some money. He was never properly debriefed, however, and his three-year disappearance was never satisfactorily explained.”

  Abrams glanced slowly around the room again, which he had come to think of as some sort of celestial chamber. His eyes passed from Allerton to O’Brien and he was reminded of two ancient priests guarding the nearly forgotten secrets of an arcane religion.

  West added, “Roth applied for intelligence work with the American and British occupation authorities in their respective zones, but was turned down. Roth then went to England, found his war bride—a girl he’d married when he lived in London running a green grocer business—and eventually was allowed to emigrate to America, again claiming this was promised to him by the OSS.”

  Thorpe smiled. “And now Karl Roth is assistant to the President on matters of nuclear strategy.”

  West looked around the darkened room, then glanced at O’Brien and Allerton. He said, “As it turns out”—he looked at Thorpe—“Roth and his wife own a delicatessen on Long Island.”

  Thorpe smiled again. “Well, that’s not exactly what I thought you were leading up to, Nick.” Thorpe reflected a moment. “Maybe he would be interested in my section. Sort of a shaky and shady background, though. . . .”

  Katherine said, “This man should be debriefed.”

  O’Brien poured himself more coffee. “I’ll see to it.” He plucked absently at his black bow tie, then said, “The Alsos mission had some successes, but the Russian equivalent of Alsos was doing even better. They seemed to be one step ahead of us in locating and snatching German nuclear physicists. If you consider that most of these scientists were trying to reach us and not them, then it’s odd that the Russians were doing so well. And since Alsos had the absolute highest priority and security, Henry and I, and others, concluded that someone—perhaps more than one person—very highly placed either in Eisenhower’s headquarters, in Alsos itself, or in the OSS, was telling the Russians what, where, when, how, and who.” O’Brien leaned forward. “Eventually we became fairly certain that the main leak was in the OSS. It was one of us. Someone we saw every day, with whom we ate and drank. . . .”

  Allerton seemed to come out of a deep reverie. “Yes . . . that was when we came up with the fanciful code name for this double agent: Talbot. Lawrence Talbot—you know, the fellow who turned into a werewolf by the light of the moon . . . . Popular movie at that time.” Allerton smiled. “For the intellectuals among us, talbot is also the old Anglo-Saxon word for a ravaging wolf. So, then, we began an operation to expose him and . . . eliminate him. We called it Silver Bullet—”

  O’Brien cleared his throat. “Actually, it was called Wolfbane.”

  “Yes, that was it, Patrick.” Allerton stroked his long nose. “Time dims things that seemed so important once.”

  “Silver Bullet,” said O’Brien, “was the joint British/American name for the termination of the operation.” O’Brien took something from his pocket. “One of our more flamboyant officers had this fashioned by a London silversmith.” He held up a gleaming .45-caliber silver bullet. “This was to be fired into Talbot’s brain.”

  No one spoke for some time, then O’Brien added, “Talbot was the worst sort of traitor. He didn’t confine his treachery to stealing and passing on secrets like the majority of traitors. He actively sent men and women to their deaths. I picture him sometimes on an airstrip in England, striding around the tarmac at dusk, patting agents on the back, embracing the women, adjusting parachute harnesses, wishing them luck . . . and all the while knowing . . .” O’Brien looked at Allerton.

  James Allerton said softly, “You would think a man like that . . . a man who had lost his soul . . . could be easily spotted . . . his eyes should reveal the corruption in his heart.”

  Abrams listened. He had become to them as unobtrusive as a trusted servant; they knew he was listening, but they didn’t expect him to talk back until they addressed him. It was, he thought, not unlike a detective’s brainstorming session. He glanced at Katherine, wondering if the mention of her father was painful.

  West picked up the story again. “Henry Kimberly reported in by radio twice a day for a week, then radioed what was to be his next to last encoded message, which is still in the file. It said”—West recited with no hesitation—“‘
Most important: Re Alsos: Have made contact with grocer’—that was Karl Roth—‘Grocer has reported the location of two pixies’—that was the atomic scientists. ‘Will recover same.’” West paused, then said, “Henry Kimberly’s last message, a day later, reported that he’d established contact with the Russian authorities for the purpose of searching Gestapo files and interrogating captured Gestapo officers who might have information about missing OSS agents. The last lines of his message read, ‘Red Army helpful. Gestapo has revealed the arrest and execution of most of our mission. Names to follow. Trace and locate bodies of them. Will continue recovery operation.’” West looked at Allerton. “Do you remember that, sir?”

  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 high-level-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 vendetta. 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.”

  24

  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 thi
s. . . .”

  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.