Spy Who Read Latin: And Other Stories

by Edward D. Hoch

  “Yes,” Rand mumbled to himself. “Before.” He got to his feet and motioned to the guard. “I’m finished. You can take him back.”

  Rand left the building and drove back to his office. He phoned the Foreign Office to check once more on the code books; all were safe. He had to face the fact that Barton O’Neill had been killed by the Russians at the very moment he was about to perform an important and vital mission for them.

  There seemed only one possible explanation—that they had feared a trap and killed O’Neill to keep him from talking. But what could the actor tell? He was not a regular Communist agent—more of a freelance operator who sold his secrets to the highest bidder. It was doubtful that he would know any more about the secret workings of the Soviet espionage network in England than was already on file at British Intelligence.

  Sitting alone in his office, Rand had almost decided to drop the investigation. After all, the code was safe, the spy was dead, the assassin was in prison. What more was there to do? Did it really matter why they’d had him killed?

  Parkinson came in with a report. “This man from the Russian Embassy,” he began, eager to deliver his news. “British Intelligence has a constant watch on him. His name is Barsky, and he’s a known agent.”

  “That’s the one who visited Ivar Kaden on Wednesday morning?”

  Parkinson nodded. “But more important, a man believed to be O’Neill was seen in a pub with Barsky on Monday. Does that help?”

  “It only confirms what we already suspected,” Rand told him. O’Neill must have got the idea of going after a code book when he landed the part in this television play being filmed in the lobby of the Foreign Office. He must have already known there was a man in the Message Center whom he could impersonate. And once he got that impression of the lock on Sunday, he knew the last obstacle to a code book was removed. So on Monday he made his offer to the Russian contact man.”

  “The Embassy sent the word to Moscow—to Taz, probably—and the word came back to kill O’Neill. Does that make any sense, sir?”

  Yes, Rand conceded to himself, they were back to the same puzzle. “Many things don’t make sense in this business, Parkinson,” he replied weakly.

  “Perhaps they thought he already had one of the code books. Using the key and his disguise, he could have entered the building at any time.”

  Rand shook his head. “One thing we failed to find in his attaché case was any sort of false identification. He apparently was unable to forge the necessary pass to get him past the guard in the lobby. He could only work his plan when he was already inside the lobby with the television crew. Since he had to have time to make the duplicate key, he couldn’t try for a code book until Wednesday night.”

  “Without identification, how could he have gotten by the second guard, at the Message Center door?”

  “You know how those things are, Parkinson. The first guard would have been a lot more careful than a guard checking on only a half dozen people he sees every day. Once through that locked door, O’Neill was apparently sure he could bring off the rest of it by using his makeup and his acting abilities.”

  “So what have we got, sir?”

  Rand closed his eyes. “We have an agent with a better-than-even chance of stealing one of our diplomatic code books and getting away with it. Although it would be tremendously important to the Russians to get their hands on it, they have the man killed just before his mission is accomplished. Why?”

  Why? The question remained, even after Parkinson had left the office. Rand sat brooding about it in silence, knowing that he could never drop the case until he knew the answer. He thought of talking to the girl at the Foreign Office again, but somehow he knew the answer didn’t rest there.

  He went to the window and pressed his forehead against the cold glass, staring out at the muddy Thames, trying to put himself in the place of a man in Moscow whom he’d never met.

  Why did they kill him? Because he knew too much? No.

  Because he knew too little?

  Rand’s head came away from the window and he snatched up the telephone. “This is an emergency! Get me the Foreign Secretary!”

  “Too little?” Hastings repeated later, not sure he understood.

  Rand nodded from behind a cloud of relaxed cigarette smoke. “O’Neill was killed because he knew too little, not too much. I knew the code book had to be involved somehow, and then I remembered an incident in World War II. A team of American and British cryptanalysts broke the code used by Japanese military attachés. But the OSS wasn’t informed of this, and they managed to steal a copy of the code book in Lisbon. Of course the Japanese immediately stopped using the stolen code—and the cryptanalysts had to start all over again!”

  “You mean the Reds…?”

  Rand nodded and poured some brandy. “I’m sure of it. Remember, we’ve been using that same diplomatic code for five years. Sometime in those five years Taz’s people broke it. Now, what would you do, Hastings, if you were sitting in Moscow with our secret diplomatic code broken, reading our messages every week, and some free-lance agent you couldn’t control said he was going to steal that very code for you?”

  Hastings nodded, seeing it all clearly. “Even if he got away with it, we’d have discovered the theft in a couple of hours or days and promptly changed the code. And they couldn’t just order him not to steal the book, because he’d have done it anyway and sold it to another government. All they could do is what they did—kill him before he stole it.”

  “A dirty business,” Rand said, staring out at the lights of the London night. “Dirty.”

  “What will you do now?”

  Rand took a sip of brandy. “I’ve already done it. Our embassies switched to an emergency code book this afternoon. Taz is in for a surprise when he tries to decode the next message.”

  The Spy Who Read Latin

  BY THE FIRST LIGHT of the new day the airport at Tirana presented a grubby appearance from above. The patchwork runways had been lengthened to accommodate the regular jet nights from Phnompenh and Shanghai, but otherwise little had been done to improve facilities since the last time Father Howard had passed through. That had been so many years ago, and now he was going home—to Paris and then to London.

  But first there was the stop at Tirana, a sleepy little city set among the Albanian hills. It was the capital of the country, but somehow from the airport it reminded him more of the Chinese villages he’d known so well.

  He’d expected the ring of alert soldiers that surrounded the big jet as it coasted to a stop. Things were like that in Albania today. Watching them now with their carbines poised, Father Howard reflected on the vagaries of a political climate that could ally two such nations as little Albania and giant Communist China.

  Presently a gloomy little man in a long leather coat boarded the aircraft and followed the stewardess quickly down the aisle to his seat. “Your passport, please,” he said in thickly accented English.

  Father Howard looked up at him, trying to smile. “I’m traveling from Shanghai to Paris,” he said. “My passport is not valid in Albania.”

  “I must ask you to come with me to the Administration Building,” the gloomy man said.

  “But—”

  “Only a formality.”

  Father Howard glanced out again at the grim circle of soldiers. Then he sighed, shrugged slightly to his traveling companion, and followed the man in the leather coat down the aisle. The dampness of the Albanian weather cut through him as soon as they stepped outside. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “You were a missionary priest in China?” the man asked as they crossed the long stretch of patchwork asphalt in the direction of the Administration Building.

  Father Howard avoided a shiny puddle. “A long time ago. Things have not been easy for us in recent years.”

  The man grunted and kept walking. It was then that Father Howard happened to glance back at the waiting plane and saw his battered old carpetbags being lifted f
rom the luggage compartment. “You’re taking my baggage!” he gasped, and turned to retrace his steps.

  He was striding purposefully toward the big jet when the two bullets hit him in the back of the head, and then he knew no more…

  The meeting which had brought Rand to the divided city of Berlin was one of the strangest in his career as head of Concealed Communications. He’d hardly believed the first messages when they’d been decoded, and even now as he crossed into East Berlin in an unmarked sedan, he knew he might be heading into a well-baited trap.

  It was April in the city, and the misty rains of springtime sent a shiver down his spine. He left the car not far past the checkpoint and went the rest of the way on foot, as instructed.

  Finally he reached the corner and stopped to light one of his American cigarettes, wondering vaguely if the sudden pale circle of sun meant that the rain was nearly ended. Berlin had always seemed damper than London to Rand, though he knew it was not the case. Perhaps it was only the mood of the place, with its great gray wall splitting the face of the city’s daily existence.

  “Mr. Rand, please?” a young boy asked at his elbow. “Follow me, sir.”

  Rand followed without a word as the tassel-haired youth led him into a shabby structure halfway down the next block. It was a store of sorts, selling tobacco and magazines, in a dank building that still bore visible scars of a war a generation past. The boy motioned to a back room and departed.

  Rand stepped carefully through the doorway, trying to still the throbbing of his heart. There was only one man in the room, seated at a low table facing him. “Ah! And you would be Mr. Rand!”

  “Taz?” Rand seated himself and studied the face of the man who had asked to meet him here. It was a face that British Intelligence would once have paid a fortune to see, the face of a Russian named Taz who headed up the Moscow equivalent of London’s Department of Concealed Communications.

  It was a thin face, with a pointed jaw and deep blue eyes, and Rand judged the man to be about his own age—in his early forties, perhaps a bit older. He had thin smooth fingers to match the face, and graying hair that swept back from his forehead. When he spoke, his English was accented but quite intelligible.

  “I had never thought we would some day meet, Mr. Rand.”

  “Nor I. You’ve given me many sleepless nights.”

  “I have tried,” Taz admitted with a slight smile. “We have great admiration for the Double-C Man.”

  “I had trouble getting here,” he told the Russian, because it was true. “They were certain your message was a trap of some sort.”

  “And yet you came?” Taz asked, his blue eyes flashing in the room’s dim light. Rand could imagine the man bent over a cryptogram, studying frequency tables or captured code books.

  “I came. I told them I could be killed or kidnaped on the streets of London, if that was what you wanted.”

  Taz nodded. “You are a wise man—the man I expected you to be. I too had difficulties. There are many in the Kremlin who oppose this meeting.”

  “And just what is the reason for it?” Rand asked.

  “Our interests lie along parallel lines.”

  “In what way?”

  “You know of Father Howard, the English missionary priest who was killed last week in Tirana?”

  Rand knew. “He was returning to England after twenty years in China. They took him off the plane and murdered him.”

  Taz nodded slightly. “Albania is a close ally of China. Someone in Peking ordered his murder after he’d left the country.”

  Rand decided he could admit to a little knowledge. “The word is he was carrying an important document.”

  The blue eyes flashed again. “He was carrying a report he had prepared on the inner workings of China’s Communist Party hierarchy. It is said to outline the current power struggle and to give an indication of which leaders will probably emerge triumphant. It also contains a great deal on the future course of Sino-Soviet relations, as well as some information of a highly personal nature concerning certain key Chinese leaders.”

  Rand ground out his cigarette. “You know a great deal. That report would have made interesting reading.”

  “It still could,” Taz said. He picked up a pencil and tapped it nervously against the table. “They removed Father Howard’s luggage from the plane, but they did not find the report. You see, he had a traveling companion aboard that jet—a former news correspondent named Kane Mander.”

  Rand nodded. “And Mander landed in Paris with the report intact. We’ve heard rumors that a man of that name has been offering it for sale.”

  “Exactly.” Taz cleared his throat. “You would be willing to act with us against the common Chinese enemy?”

  “That would be a matter for London to decide.”

  “There is no need for a policy decision,” Taz insisted. “We would be willing to share the contents of the report with your government.”

  “Why do you need me?” Rand asked. “Why can’t you just contact Mander and buy it from him?”

  “The report was dictated to Father Howard by a highly placed government official shortly before his execution on charges of deviation from party policy. The priest wrote it all down—in Latin.”

  Rand thought about that for a moment. “Interesting, but I still don’t see why you need me.”

  “The report is for sale in Paris, before the week’s end. My government is more than willing to purchase it, but my assignment is to make certain we get the true report and not twenty or thirty pages of Latin prayers.” He sighed a little. “And that is the problem. Latin is not taught in Russian schools. There is no one in my department who can read it.”

  “You must have doctors and lawyers in the government who understand the language.”

  The Russian shook his head. “Fewer than you’d think, and no one I could trust.” He smiled lightly. “These days it would be difficult to find a priest who could read it. Father Howard’s skill with the language was somewhat remarkable.”

  “So you want me to furnish an agent who can read Latin?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’d trust the British before your own people?”

  “I would trust you, since it would be to your government’s advantage to have a copy of the report.” He paused and began tapping the pencil again. “The question is, do you have an agent you could trust?”

  “I think so,” Rand said. He was remembering a young man named Harry Truce. “Yes.”

  “Could you have him in Paris the day after tomorrow? Saturday?”

  “Yes,” Rand said. At this point he had nothing to lose and possibly a great deal to gain.

  Taz smiled and held out his hand. “Then we are partners?”

  “Of a sort,” Rand agreed. “For the present.”

  He found to his surprise that he liked the man, and he wondered if he could trust him as well.

  Harry Truce had been educated at the best universities to enter the diplomatic corps. It was an occupation his father and grandfather had followed before him, and it was an honorable one. He’d been born of an English father and an Irish mother, brought up partly in London and partly in an unlikely area of Ireland called Macgillycuddy’s Reeks.

  Rand never learned at what juncture in Truce’s career the diplomatic service had become subordinated to intelligence work, but he did know that young Truce had shown special skills on a number of recent assignments. He was handsome, unmarried, still in his late twenties, with a vigor that Rand secretly admired. And best of all, he could read Latin.

  “It would be a privilege to work with Concealed Communications,” he told Rand the following morning back in London.

  Rand smiled and offered one of his American cigarettes. “Glad to have you aboard, as they say. We need you to fly to Paris and read some Latin. Can you do it?”

  “Is that all?”

  Rand stared hard at the curl of smoke from his own cigarette. “We’ll be working with the Russians,” he said
quietly. “It may work out and it may not. In any event, we have to be on our toes every minute.” He ran quickly over the information Taz had given him in Berlin.

  “You believe what he told you?” Harry Truce asked. “About not having anybody in Russia who could read Latin?”

  “Not entirely. But I’ll play along with him, just to see what he’s up to.” Rand stood up. “Let’s go, Harry. We leave for Paris tonight.”

  Paris was a sea of glittering April lights as their plane came in for a landing. It was the sort of warm spring night that brought out the lovers along the Champs Elysées, the sort that made Rand forget the dampness of London and Berlin. They had a room at a medium-priced tourist hotel just across the Seine from the Palais de Justice, and it was still a little before ten when they reached it.

  Rand phoned the telephone number that Taz had given him, and heard an unfamiliar male voice say, “Kane Mander is staying at number 17, Rue de Varenne. He is expecting you at noon tomorrow.”

  “What about the money?” Rand asked. “He’s not likely to give up anything for free.”

  “You will be contacted tonight,” the voice said, and hung up. Rand sighed and reached for a cigarette.

  “What do you think?” Harry Truce asked.

  “I don’t know,” Rand admitted. He began to pace the floor, trying to complete in his mind a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. He was trusting a Russian, doing a job for him, when every instinct cried out against such trust. Surely Taz would have got the report first and then worried about reading it. Surely the translating of it was a minor problem at best. And Father Howard’s companion would have no reason for substituting a fake report. “Harry—”

  “What?”

  “Take a ride over to 17 Rue de Varenne. It’s not far from here. See if there’s a Kane Mander staying there.”

  “Right.”

  “But be careful. Don’t make contact with him directly. I’ll be waiting for you here, down in the bar.”

  It was just after midnight when Harry Truce returned. Rand had passed the time lingering over two weak drinks served by an indifferent bartender in the dimly lit lounge, and he was just about to go upstairs to bed when Harry walked through the swinging doors. His left arm was around the waist of a smartly dressed young lady with shoulder-length blonde hair. He was smiling like a college boy on a big date.