Rip the Angels from Heaven

by David Krugler

  As if he were reading my thoughts, Latham nodded. “Lieutenant Dahlen, take Lieutenant Voigt back to his quarters.” To me he said, “Voigt, I appreciate you making the identification. I’ll let General Groves know how helpful you were, and I’m sure he’ll let your commander know that as well. We’ll make arrangements for your return to Washington as soon as possible, but until then, I’m instructing you to remain in your quarters or the officers’ mess until you leave. Is that understood?”

  “Yessir. I’m glad to have been of service.” I kept my gaze trained on him, but Slater’s smirk was still visible.

  What had just happened? Somehow, I’d deflected the Bureau’s charges and dodged detention for meeting with Mara; I’d kept secret my shame, my treason, my betrayal; I’d identified the Russians’ top spy. But the other half of my meticulous plan had just crumbled before my eyes. All I needed was for Mason Adams Brode to be locked up, with no contact with the outside world—that’s all! Even Slater wanted him locked up tight. Only then could I complete my deception of the Russians and, at long last, redeem myself.

  Why was Mason Adams Brode indispensable? What, exactly, was Trinity? Would Latham ever arrest Brode? My mind whirred with questions, but the one that stood out was the hardest one of all to answer: How would I convince Latham to not send me back to Washington?

  CHAPTER 32

  IDUTIFULLY FOLLOWED DAHLEN OUT OF THE INTERROGATION ROOM, lighting up a long-awaited Lucky. Neither of us spoke as we trudged down a hard, baked road. Ahead of us, a small pond. To our left was a high wire fence topped by angled barbed wire encircling a compound of two-story wooden buildings painted olive drab. A dozen or so dusty cars were parked haphazardly on a gravel lot alongside the road. The Technical Area, I guessed—the heart of Site Y, the workplace of our spy Mason Adams Brode. We turned in the opposite direction, passing a cluster of small wooden dwellings with porches. Some had laundry hanging from lines; others had been screened in. The tree-dotted mountains on the horizon looked like the background in a nineteenth-century landscape, the colors soft.

  Dahlen clearly wasn’t going to speak. Should I? I wondered. But I was caught in the suspect’s enduring dilemma. Silence and protest alike hint at guilt. My only play, I decided, was to make one simple statement, and leave it at that. So we continued in silence until we reached the officers’ quarters.

  “Here we are,” Dahlen said awkwardly.

  “Quarters and mess only, got it—I won’t stray,” I reassured him.

  “It’s not like you’re under arrest, it’s just, well, it’ll be easier for all’a us if—”

  “I don’t cause trouble, I know.”

  He looked relieved.

  “Dahlen.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t forget, the chessboard has more than one pawn.”

  “Right,” he said uneasily. After a pause, “Well, then, you can expect more information about your departure tomorrow. Wait, sorry, not tomorrow, the day after, probably.”

  I didn’t ask what was happening the next day, and with that he left.

  I WAS RAVENOUS BUT I NEEDED TO THINK BEFORE I ATE. THINK, AND plan. Took a long shower, put on comfortable civvies: dungarees, T-shirt. Stretched out on the bed, closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and tried to focus. But my eyelids drooped, and I couldn’t stay awake. I slept a couple of hours, yet even refreshed my mind wandered, memories rolling over me like summer storm clouds. All the treasonous acts I’d committed since I gave myself over to the Reds.

  The tiny camera they gave me, my courier “Geoffrey” showing me how to use it, his lesson terse, his demonstration swift. Point, press, advance; repeat … keep the lens parallel to the documents. He was an American, Geoffrey, red-haired and freckled, a burly build. Looked like a longshoreman, not a spy, but disguise was our stock-in-trade, right? Masks, covers, deceptions.

  A humid, sweltering Washington night, July 1943, my face slick with sweat, one drop, then two plunking and blotting the onionskin papers I was photographing furtively. They looked like oversized asterisks, the stains, and for a panicky moment I envisioned a rebuke from my courier, now a middle-aged man named Henry. They want to know the meaning of these marks … There I was, in Paslett’s office, photographing a memorandum of understanding between O.N.I. and the O.S.S. regarding an intelligence source in Istanbul—and I was imagining the N.K.V.D. grumbling about the sweat of my brow?

  February 1944: a dead drop in McPherson Square, an impression of a key I’d made in clay, per my instructions. A low gray sky, a stiff breeze, my ears red, lips chapped. Thinking how reckless the drop was—nobody was lingering outside on this winter day. The urge to look around to see if I was being watched was maddening, like an itch you can’t reach. Here the memory fades. Like a photograph I could see myself on that bench, blowing on my hands to warm them up; but after the drop, where did I go? Probably to a diner for coffee, maybe even a tavern for a whiskey.

  All this, the incomplete docket of my crimes, my autobiographical bill of attainder. Not so neatly presented, of course; memory is not a finicky file clerk. Instead, a montage, a drift of images and details as crisp and colorful as autumn leaves falling in no particular order. And leaves yet to drop.

  When did I realize nothing I was doing would ever alter the conditions, the circumstances, the powers, the system that had caused Delphine’s murder? Funny how I could recall with clarity these crimes against country but I couldn’t envision the moment and place I “woke up.” Maybe it was an accretion of uncomfortable questions, a creeping awareness. How does giving the Soviets the January 17, 1944, report of the O.N.I. liaison in Lisbon punish the owners of Republic Steel? Why am I giving a foreign power a coastal survey of the Faroe Islands? A moribund conscience stirred, getting restive, resisting suppression.

  Focus, dammit, focus! Had to push the memories back into the box and deal with the present. What was being built here at Site Y, what was this weapon, what was the big, big bang Brode had spoken of? Several times I’d studied the diagram he had brought to Washington, which I’d so carefully hidden. Brode had told Himmel to give it to Soviet physicists, that they’d know what it meant. I was no physicist, no scientist; I’d passed high school chemistry, that was it. How could I possibly guess what the diagram showed?

  External signs—the money, the resources, the secrecy, the determination of the Russians to get this diagram—pointed to some kind of super weapon. Our version of the V-2 rockets the Germans had desperately launched late in the European war? The V-2s were remarkable—unmanned, directed bombs—but for all the terror and destruction they’d caused, the rockets were but a tactical diversion. They hadn’t slowed, let alone stopped, an Allied victory; they’d not saved the Nazis. I sensed the Site Y project was much bigger than the V-2. From one bomb, one building to one bomb, one city. Destroyed, leveled, pulverized—and buried in the rubble and ashes, the bones of fifty thousand people, maybe even more. The stuff of comic books and science fiction, I realized, a phenomenon that beggared the imagination and defied the laws of nature.

  But what if? What if that big, big bang could burst from just one bomb? What would that take? I did possess part of that answer: Uranium-235. Brode had referred to this element in the conversation I’d overheard in Washington. He’d also explained a process involving uranium hexafluoride. Here, at Site Y, they were diffusing uranium hexafluoride—the reason why, he hadn’t said. But he was proud of what he was helping to build: in a coupla months, maybe less, the whole world’s gonna find out what a big, big bang of a success we’ve pulled off. That was on May 9; it was now July 15. Just over two months since his prediction. They had to be close.

  I closed my eyes, took a long drag of my umpteenth cigarette. Tried to picture the periodic table that my chemistry teacher had drilled into us. Uranium was at the bottom, in the 90s, down there with mythological-sounding elements like neptunium, plutonium, thorium. All part of the same series—was it lanthanide? Actinide? But what could be done with those elements, how could they be
weaponized? Bombs require energy, which must be kept stable until detonation. Atoms, I muttered, dredging that word from the muck where so much of my high school learning had settled. Was it possible to obtain energy for a weapon from atoms, the tiniest bits of matter in the universe? That made no natural sense, though—in a Newtonian world, you couldn’t create energy from next to nothing.

  Flash: What if the atoms weren’t the source, what if they were the carrier? Wherever the energy came from, what if the atoms delivered it, spread it? Atoms are everywhere—if Mason Adams Brode, Gary Ackerly, Klaus Fuchs, and all the other eggheads had hit upon a way to use atoms to carry TNT or some other explosive, where would that end? One bomb, one city—Jesus H. Christ. But with something so new, so unworldly, how would they know if it could work?

  I jumped up from the bed, ash falling everywhere. Not tomorrow, the day after, probably, Dahlen had said about my departure. I couldn’t leave tomorrow because they were testing the weapon tomorrow. I had to see Latham immediately, I had to convince him to let me remain on Site Y.

  I PUT MY UNIFORM BACK ON AND RUSHED FROM THE BUILDING. DIDN’T GET far—a lanky MP jumped to his feet from a wooden chair on the porch of the officers’ quarters. I wasn’t surprised. If I were Latham, I would have posted a guard to keep an eye on me. Question was, how detailed were the MP’s orders?

  “Ready for dinner, Lieutenant Voigt?” he asked.

  “After a quick detour, Corporal,” I said. HUGHLEY, his nameplate read.

  “Um, no detours, sir.”

  “Lieutenant Dahlen forgot to collect this,” I said, holding up the security badge I’d been issued.

  “Well, I can give it to him for you.” He didn’t look more than nineteen, acne still dotting his cheeks. His helmet was askew, casting a shadow across his sharp chin.

  “But who’ll mind me, then?” I asked with a disarming smile.

  He frowned and took the badge, studied it, as if he expected the man in the photograph to give him an answer. I’d never had an I.D. card with my photograph on it. Hadn’t smiled for the camera, my expression a bit stern. Head slightly tilted, close-cropped brown hair riffled from being awakened abruptly. Was the twenty-five-year-old man in that picture handsome, or just an average-looking joe? Who was I to say? It was my face, I’d seen it in a mirror almost every day of my adult life, the image no longer had meaning or uniqueness; its features were neither attractive nor unpleasant. Just a man’s face concealing secrets tamped down deep.

  “I’ll just give it to him later,” Hughley said brightly.

  “How are you gonna explain to him how you got it?”

  “Can’t I just tell him you gave it to me?”

  I shook my head solemnly. “Better if I give it to him directly, Corporal. Let’s just pop over to his office together, then I’ll go to the mess.”

  “I don’t know about that, sir, my orders are to, well, I’m supposed to just make sure—”

  “You got your orders from Lieutenant Dahlen, right?” I took a guess.

  “Yes.”

  “Nice enough fella?”

  His nod was uneasy—an officer asking an enlisted man about another officer usually wasn’t a promising conversation from the subordinate’s point of view.

  “Well, we don’t want him to get in trouble with Colonel Latham, do we? What if the Colonel asks for the badge before you get a chance to give it to Lieutenant Dahlen? If we go over there now, that won’t happen.”

  He looked unhappy but agreed. “Well, all right, I guess.”

  WE WALKED IN SILENCE. WHAT WAS THERE TO SAY? think they’re building a bomb here, Corporal? Or, Pleasant evening, huh? Which it was, the evening air cool, the sky a purplish and dark blue, stars bright and proliferate—no ambient light here to dull their pinpoint brilliance. Early in the war, while the blackout was still in force in Washington, it was also possible to glimpse the galaxy beyond the undiluted sky. My work for the Russians sometimes caused insomnia, and on those sleepless nights, I’d slip outside to gaze at the stars. One night, I saw Mars, a red-washed orb burning a hole in the dark sky. I’d held the ember of my cigarette, struck at how the glow resembled the mottled surface of the planet. Is Mars pleased with what he sees down here? I remembered thinking.

  “Well, I’ll just be back in a jif, sir,” Hughley told me when we’d reached the administration building.

  “I’ll wait right here, Corporal.” I made a show of lighting a cigarette and leaned against a wooden post supporting the porch roof.

  He nodded approvingly and hurried into the entrance. I gave him a beat, flicked my smoke into the air, and beelined to Latham’s office. If he wasn’t there, I’d have just enough time to scurry back to the entrance before Hughley returned to escort me to the officers’ mess, where I’d figure out another way to find the colonel. But if my hunch was right, if the test was tomorrow, Latham would be burning the midnight oil.

  His door was shut, but I heard the murmur of voices. I knocked, waited.

  “Who is it?” Latham called.

  I checked my sigh of relief—finding the colonel was only the first challenge.

  “Lieutenant Voigt, sir—it’s urgent that we speak.”

  No reply. He spoke rapidly but quietly to the other person, and I couldn’t make out any words. Open up, goddammit! I thought nervously. Dahlen’s office was close; Hughley might see me any minute. My head jerked at the sound of a door opening down the corridor. Just as I decided to barge in, Latham opened his door.

  “Why aren’t you in quarters?” he asked with a scowl.

  My answer really had to zing, it had to fly high and take the colonel soaring—if it flopped, I was finished. So:

  “Brode’s got a contact on the base, sir, and he’s gonna use him tonight to send more materials to the Russians.”

  “What? Who’s his contact?”

  “Me.”

  CHAPTER 33

  AS LATHAM GAPED, I DARTED INTO HIS OFFICE.

  “Sir, I can explain everything.”

  “I’ll bet,” the other man said. I couldn’t tell if he was being ironic. He was on the gaunt side of thin, a belt cinching his baggy trousers, his shirt collar slack at the neck. Drawn cheeks, long nose, deep shadows under his eyes. His thinning, dark hair was cut short but somehow was still mussed, tufts that wouldn’t stay combed. He looked like a man recovering from a long illness, pneumonia or tuberculosis, but his eyes were bright and lively, studying me. Sprawled in a wooden chair, his bony knees and elbows jutted in all directions. He reached to stub a cigarette in an ashtray perched precariously on the edge of Latham’s desk and immediately took another from a packet of Chesterfields. So much for the colonel’s allergy to tobacco.

  Latham pushed the door shut, glaring at me.

  “Sit,” pointing at a chair in the corner. I obeyed, feeling like a miscreant schoolboy sent to the principal’s office. If only my troubles were so trifling.

  “I don’t know if you need to hear this, Oppie,” Latham said to his visitor.

  He laughed. “Know how long that list is, all the things I don’t need to hear but do? I take it our interloper is the visitor the Navy’s been kind enough to send us?”

  Latham nodded. “Maybe you want to get a little sleep before we head to the site?”

  “Sleep remains an impossible dream, Jim, you know that. Besides, Kitty’s all but banished me from the house until this is finished. Apparently I’m no longer convivial company.”

  Jim? Whoever this “Oppie” was, he knew Latham pretty well to speak to him with such familiarity, not to mention to smoke in the colonel’s presence.

  “Anyway, I’d better just get all the bad news about our enfant terrible at once,” he added.

  I took that to be a reference to Brode. If Latham had already told him about Brode being a Russian spy, then Oppie had to be important to the project. Another scientist? I wondered.

  Latham sighed. “And I thought being department chair was a burden.”

  Oppie shot me a sly smile
. “Did you know the intrepid Colonel Latham is professor of Eastern religions and cultures at the University of California?”

  I shook my head, feeling light-headed. The moment was becoming surreal. Was I actually in my quarters, fitfully dreaming of a mysterious encounter between Latham and a skinny stranger named Oppie? Had a talking cat strolled in, I don’t think I would have blinked.

  “All right, Voigt, let’s hear it.” Latham returned to his chair, wrinkling his nose at the smoke drifting over his desk. He caught me looking longingly at the cigarette dangling from Oppie’s long fingers and shook his head fiercely. “No, you can’t smoke too, Lieutenant!”

  “Yessir.” I waited for him to introduce Oppie, but he gave no indication he wanted me to know who exactly his visitor was.

  So I took a deep breath, pretended it was a long drag on a cigarette, and began.

  “The N.K.V.D. believes I’m working for them, sir. In Washington, Commander Paslett and I worked up an operation. I contacted two known Soviet agents and convinced them I would come here and get another copy of what Brode delivered in May.”

  Latham held up his hand to pause me and glanced at Oppie, who nodded. Which meant the colonel had already briefed him about Brode’s trip to Washington and the diagram that everyone believed was missing along with Henry Himmel.

  “And the N.K.V.D. didn’t smell a plant?” Latham asked.

  I pulled down my collar and displayed the still-healing burn on my neck.

  “This is my souvenir from them seeing if I was lying.”

  “Electric shocks?” Oppie asked.

  I nodded slightly. Just thinking about the experience set my hands trembling, my heart pounding; I gripped my thighs to hide the tremor.

  “And you didn’t crack?” This from Latham.

  “Nossir.”

  He looked doubtful.

  “Colonel, believe me, I’m not trying to sound like some kinda hero. I passed out, I wept like a baby, I pissed myself. I even begged them to shoot me to get it over with, the pain was so bad. But never once did I admit I was a plant.