The Accidental Agent

by Andrew Rosenheim

  THE

  ACCIDENTAL

  AGENT

  A Jimmy Nessheim Novel

  ANDREW

  ROSENHEIM

  In this gripping third book in Andrew Rosenheim’s critically acclaimed Jimmy Nessheim series, the fate of America’s fledgling nuclear program and the outcome of World War II itself are at stake.

  Fall, 1942. Special Agent James Nessheim has quit the FBI and enrolled as a law student at the University of Chicago. It isn’t long before his former boss, Assistant Director Harry Guttman, comes to call, determined to persuade Nessheim to accept a new and exceedingly dangerous assignment.

  Deep under the stands of the University’s unused football stadium, legendary physicist Enrico Fermi and a team of scientists are working round the clock on what will come to be known as the Manhattan Project. This top-secret work could change not only the course of the war but the very face of war itself. The White House has learned that a Nazi agent may have infiltrated Fermi’s staff. It falls to Nessheim to find the spy before the secrets of nuclear weapons are lost to the Germans.

  Nessheim’s mission is complicated by the return of an old flame, Stacey Madison. As his personal and professional lives collide, Nessheim uncovers an unexpected conspiracy that threatens to sabotage America’s efforts to win the war. It is a race against time, as the world stands on the threshold of mankind’s most lethal weapon.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  AVAILABLE FROM THE OVERLOOK PRESS

  Fear Itself

  The Little Tokyo Informant

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2016 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact sales@overlookny.com,

  or write us at the above address.

  Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Rosenheim

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Hutchinson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN US: 978-1-4683-1238-6

  Contents

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Part Two

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Part Three

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Four

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part Five

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part Six

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For Clare

  Part One

  1

  IT WAS THE third week of Torts, and America was at war at last – though Nessheim knew his own war was over. He sat near the back of the large lecture room in Stuart Hall at the University of Chicago, trying not to yawn. The room was only sparsely filled, for enrolment in the college had declined dramatically since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the year before.

  The few law students remaining consisted of what Winograd, who sat beside Nessheim now, called ‘cripples, COs, and girls’. A charmless description which Winograd told Nessheim he felt entitled to make since he was himself classed 4-F and exempted on medical grounds. A beefy Minnesotan, he looked like perfect cannon fodder until he took an awkward step or two, and you saw that his foot was encased in a thick boot that had a specially built four-inch heel. ‘A run-in with a tractor,’ he’d explained. ‘They ought to call me 1-F since I’ve only got two feet and just one of them is fucked up.’

  ‘Mr Nessheim.’ The voice broke through Nessheim’s thoughts, and he looked up to find Professor Fielding staring at him.

  After war had been declared the previous year, half the faculty had decamped to bear arms or serve the burgeoning needs of the government in Washington. Fielding was one of those emeritus professors persuaded to come out of retirement to fill these vacancies, but unlike others who were keen to step into their old shoes, he clearly resented the lame ducks he was now teaching. He had served in the final months of the last war with the American Expeditionary Force in France and had mentioned this in the very first class, as if to distance himself from his non-combatant audience. Not that he looked like any kind of soldier: he was a dapper figure, smartly dressed today in a three-piece suit of sage-coloured tweed that had been tailored in a more luxurious peacetime era. He had a thick greying moustache that he stroked tenderly on the rare occasions he listened to a student.

  Now Fielding went on, his tone a mix of insincere optimism and authentic impatience. ‘You looked a million miles away, Mr Nessheim. Where were you, I wonder? Guadalcanal perhaps, or North Africa?’

  Pearl Harbor actually, thought Nessheim, though he wouldn’t have dreamed of saying so – his presence there, on the day the Japanese attacked, wouldn’t have been believed.

  But Fielding was happy to continue on his own. ‘I acknowledge that the conflicts we engage in here may seem pallid by comparison, but this is the theatre of operations we have all been assigned to. So would it help, Mr Nessheim, if I repeated the question?’

  It wouldn’t help at all, thought Nessheim, wondering how this was going to unravel. His written work so far had been well received, but in class he found his mind wandering. Fortunately Fielding was distracted by a new arrival. A young woman walked confidently down the far aisle of the lecture hall, heading for the seats at the front. Usually students who were late entered quietly, slinking into the back rows of the lecture room. But this woman made no effort to disguise her entrance, and her heels clicked like match strikes on the parquet floor.

  She was a breath of fresh air in this stuffy balloon of a room, and somehow familiar too, although her face was shielded by the angle from which Nessheim viewed her, and by thick glossy hair that fell back upon her shoulders – it was the colour of burnt honey. She wore an elegant overcoat the same colour as Fielding’s tweed suit, but of softer-looking, finer material. As she slowed down Nessheim caught a glimpse of her charcoal stockings and of well-shaped legs he was pretty sure he’d seen before. Winograd nudged him with an elbow, and said in a whisper that could have carried downtown to the Loop, ‘Catch a gander of that.’

  At the lectern, Fielding looked suspiciously at this new arrival, for he didn’t like to be upstaged. ‘And you are, miss?’

  ‘Very late, Professor.’ Her voice was smoky and low. ‘Three weeks la
te, I know. But I couldn’t get a train from the Coast for love or money – all the soldier boys have priority. Heavens knows why. There ought to be a law against it.’

  Even Fielding smiled at this, though briefly. ‘You’re going to have a lot of catching up to do, Miss …?’

  She ignored the question. ‘I know – I usually do, Professor.’ She sat down, having spread her coat out on the chair behind her and taken off her neat black gloves, then used both hands to push her hair back. Suddenly Nessheim could see her profile, and understood with a sudden awful clarity why she seemed familiar. She said, ‘Don’t worry. I always seem to get there in the end.’

  When class ended Nessheim left quickly, ignoring Winograd’s entreaties to stick around. ‘Don’t you want to say hello to the new gal? You can’t leave her with Hobson the CO – he’ll bore her to death with tales of Quaker persecution.’

  ‘Got to run,’ said Nessheim tersely. From the rear doors he turned and saw the late arrival talking to Professor Fielding. Remarkably, Fielding seemed to be chuckling. He looked beguiled.

  Outside, Nessheim took a deep breath, walking out into a sky of surprising blue after days of lint-grey haze had seemed to portend an early winter. He was glad to get out of the stale air of the lecture room, where cigarette smoke drifted like low-level clouds beneath the high ceiling of the room. It had been unseasonably mild and the trees of the Quadrangle had been slow to turn, with only the faintest streaks of scarlet and yellow among their leaves despite it being the very end of October.

  At the east end of the Quadrangle the street ran through pairs of tennis courts on either side. They were net-less now, requisitioned by the navy for drills. A small group of sailors stood at the street end of the high fence surrounding the courts, taking a break from preparations for the next day’s navy parade along State Street – it was billed as the largest parade since the war began, with over 6,000 uniformed men and women expected. Fresh-faced, absurdly young, wearing their dress blues and white Dixie cup hats, they looked like the cast of a maritime musical.

  As Nessheim passed them, a cigarette stub came sailing through the hooped wire of the fence and landed at his feet. He stopped walking and turned to face the court, where the sailor closest to the fence stared at him without affection.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Nessheim, kicking the cigarette butt into the street gutter with the toe of his shoe.

  ‘What’s your excuse?’ the sailor said. He was short and pug-faced, with shoulders suggesting a former wrestler who worked with dumb-bells to keep his shoulders wide.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You 4-F or something?’

  ‘You could call it “something”,’ said Nessheim.

  One of the sailor’s pals began to sing, clutching his heart mockingly: ‘He’s 1-A in the Army and He’s A-1 in My Heart.’

  Nessheim started to move on but the sailor said sharply, ‘You’re 4-F, I bet. Four is for ’fraidy cat and F is for fairy.’

  Nessheim stopped and sighed. ‘Now there we were, getting along so well, and you have to go and spoil it.’

  One of the other sailors laughed. Nessheim gestured at the separating fence. ‘Let me know if you’re ever allowed out of your cage. Then we could continue the conversation in private.’

  ‘You’d like that, I bet,’ the sailor sneered. ‘The private bit.’ This time Nessheim’s sigh was heartfelt. I am thirty years old, he told himself, not a school kid reacting to a playground insult. He stared hard at Pug Nose nonetheless.

  ‘Come on, Willy,’ one of the other sailors said. ‘The lieutenant’s calling. Break’s over.’

  Pug-nosed Willy made a show of stepping back reluctantly from the fence. He said to Nessheim, ‘I’ll see you again.’ And then he gave a chicken-like squawk before turning to join his colleagues.

  Nessheim walked away, trying to clear his head of the sailor’s taunts.

  Being called a fairy didn’t bother him as much as being called a coward. He wasn’t avoiding military service; it was avoiding him. He had tried to enlist twice. The first time a phone call came in from Washington alerting the local Wisconsin draft board to his ropey medical history. His second attempt, made the previous spring before he left Los Angeles, had also foundered, though this time because halfway through his physical his old concussion-caused dizziness had struck out of the blue. When they’d taken his blood pressure the systolic number had been over two hundred.

  He liked Chicago, a grey city which sat on the shoreline of Lake Michigan but otherwise had no natural physical advantages; it had to build its own beauty and had done so in only seventy years or so, after Mrs O’Leary’s apocryphal cow had knocked over a lantern and burnt most of the city down. He thought now of going over to Jackson Park by the Lake, six blocks away. But along the Midway, mile-long lengths of lawn sandwiched by boulevards that had been created during the 1893 World’s Fair, he would see soldiers in drill formation, and feel again the inadequacy of his own civilian status. He had always had the advantage in life of sticking out – in a good way. In his football days he had even briefly been semi-famous. But now he stood out for the wrong reason – he wasn’t in uniform, when every other able-bodied man his age was.

  He turned at Kimbark and walked up to 57th Street, passing the large houses that lined both leafy sides of the street. The only local material had been prairie sod, so these residences were built in a bewildering variety of brick, stone and white pine lumber. At 57th a row of stores extended to Kenwood Avenue. They were busy these days, after more than a decade of Depression-era struggle, and outside the grocery store there was a line of customers; sugar had been rationed at the beginning of May and many were waiting to buy it, their ration books in hand. People had cash to spend, now that anyone could get a job, especially if they were willing to move – to California, where the airplane manufacturers were struggling to fill newly launched assembly lines with anything on two legs; or to Detroit, where, as part of Roosevelt’s ‘great arsenal of democracy’, the motor-car companies had rejigged their factories to produce weapons of every conceivable description.

  Nessheim wondered how long the new exuberance would last. Until the year before, America had fought the war solely through its imagination; now the battles were real and bodies would soon be coming back. And although people felt flush, there wasn’t a lot to spend it on – it was as if they had been given a windfall on condition they spend it all in a dime store. You could buy a new suit, as long as it was a single-breasted number without a vest and had fly buttons instead of a zipper (the metal saved could make casings for ammunition shells). But new cars weren’t being made, and it was virtually impossible to find tyres for the old ones. Rationing of gasoline would start on December 1 in the state of Illinois, with coupon books to be issued, allowing four gallons per week. Daily advertisements in newspapers reminded the public that cars and tyres were national assets, exhorting people to contribute to victory by conserving vital rubber and metal to provide for tanks and planes. There were neighbourhood scrap campaigns and posters everywhere encouraging citizens to buy US Victory bonds.

  A car drove past which he noticed right away – a new Packard Eight deluxe convertible the colour of late-picked cherries. The driver had the top up, a curving mogul of cream-coloured canvas. It must have snuck in under the wire before all of Detroit’s car-making capacity was turned to military purposes. When Nessheim cut diagonally across the street he saw the red Packard slow down and stop. It sat double-parked for a moment, ignoring the soft toot of a car waiting behind it. As Nessheim moved north on Kimbark he heard it suddenly accelerate away.

  He passed Ray School where the kids were all in class, and the sports field was empty. There were the remains of a Victory garden laid out in one patch of ground, littered by flattened vegetable leaves and loose string which had demarcated the rows that had been picked clean. At the corner he came to the small complex of four-storey buildings where he had his apartment. He was crossing the street, looking right, when he saw the sam
e convertible cross 56th Street a block away, heading north on Kenwood. This time the top was down, but his view was blocked by the row of elms bordering the sidewalk and he couldn’t see the driver.

  Probably nothing, he told himself, though he remembered his drive east from California the previous spring. He had left LA after uncovering a web of Russian intrigue, fronted by an alluring but ultimately poisonous woman named Elizaveta Mukasei; he had been forced in self-defence to kill one of her henchman. Mr Mukasei was the vice consul for the Russian mission in LA, and now that the Russians were allies, Nessheim couldn’t lay a finger on either of them – despite ample evidence to convict the pair of espionage and murder in more normal times.

  There had been a night he spent en route at a motel in Nebraska; the following morning, twenty miles east of there, he realised he’d left behind a pair of shoes and had doubled back to fetch them. The motel clerk had said, ‘Your friend catch up to you?’

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘Skinny guy with a fedora. He sounded foreign to me.’

  ‘He must have been looking for someone else.’

  ‘He described you good enough.’

  ‘Did he know my name?’

  ‘He didn’t mention it and I couldn’t have helped him there anyway – the register wasn’t much help.’ He laughed and passed the big bound book across the shelf of desk. Nessheim had scrawled his usual illegible autograph – his name might have been Nussbaum for all the ink blur said. The incident had been unsettling enough for Nessheim to detour off Route 40 for a day, then take an extra day driving to Chicago. Since then there had been no reason to worry. He might have stood out, but the only people who seemed to notice were – like Pug Nose – men in uniform.

  His apartment sat at the base of a long U formed by two flanking wings of brick. He turned into this small recessed courtyard and saw two men waiting by the entrance to his own tier, a good fifty yards from the street. One of the men, powerfully built and looming in army uniform, was pacing back and forth; the other, dressed in a black raincoat that had seen better days, sat huddled with his hands in his pockets on one of two low piers that jutted out at knee height from either side of the entranceway.