Flowers From Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  "Laura, it's you who have the information. I've never met your husband."

  "I want to know why his family was on your list," she said.

  Whiteside held her gaze with his.

  "The Fowlers are a prominent family," Whiteside said. "That's all. Influential. That's what all the names on your list are. Influential American families. That's all you were reporting to me. Very simple, very white intelligence."

  "Peter, you're lying to me." She felt his uneasiness.

  "There's really nothing I can tell you, Laura."

  "You didn't deny that you're lying to me," she said. "Is that because you don't wish to lie a second time?"

  "Laura, there's nothing for me to say. Listen to me carefully. There's nothing I can say. I'm certain that you're a much better judge of Stephen Fowler than I. He's your husband."

  "I want to know why his family was on your list," she said again.

  "I'm sorry, Laura. I have nothing to tell you."

  "You're such a bore, Peter," she snapped. "All right, then. I'm going back to America in a week. When I arrive I intend to tell my husband that British Secret Service was investigating his family."

  She turned and felt his hand on her arm. It was very firm and very insistent, much stronger than she had imagined it could be.

  "Laura, you'll do no such thing!" he said.

  "And why not, Peter? You tell me! Why not?"

  "You insist you don't know?" His anger rose to equal hers.

  "I know nothing!"

  "Very well, then," he snapped back, accepting her challenge. "The man you married happens to be an agent of the Soviet Union. Hence, the so-called humanist Christian ruminations which we've all been treated to in print. And hence, if you'll forgive my liberties, his secretive nature and his day-to-day ramblings from one American city to another."

  For a moment entire new panoramas of deceit opened to Laura: her husband was a wealthy rebel who did nurture a suspiciously Marxist heart; he had traveled the world a bit in the years before she knew him and sometime must have turned his eyes eastward to the "Russian experiment." Her mind rambled: he had women, or worse, one woman, somewhere else, and them, or her, he truly loved; and there was no wonder that he did not sleep with her anymore-the passion had never really been there in the first place. His marriage, like everything else, was a deceit.

  Then she rejected all of it. "That's the most monstrous lie I've ever heard in my life," she said.

  "Think so?"

  “Yes.”

  "Then prove me wrong." He bit off the words. A cloud covered the sun and Peter Whiteside stolidly held forth on Salisbury Plain, quoting from memory his file on the Fowler family.

  Stephen Fowler had been pink, Whiteside insisted, as long ago as his undergraduate days at Princeton. "It was during the Depression, don't forget," Whiteside said, "and that brought a lot of bright young men to some rather radical conclusions."

  Capitalism had failed both the nation and the Fowler family, Whiteside clipped along, and young Stephen sought an explanation. A student of history and political science, he wished symmetry in his solution. Marxism offered it in generous doses. There was further the romanticism of the era as well as the intellectualism. Stephen obviously thrived upon both as an undergraduate of Princeton and a divinity student at Yale.

  "He traveled abroad and would have you believe he was in England and France," Whiteside concluded. "Which he was, for a while. But we suspect he made the pilgrimage. The pilgrimage," Whiteside repeated for emphasis. "All the way to the Kremlin wall and mother Russia itself. At that time he offered his services to Stalin's government and the offer was accepted. What he's doing in America now, I don't know, Laura. Whether he's an active agent or simply a pulpit propaganda pusher is another question, too. I don't know. We don't know. I'd wager even money that the American authorities themselves haven't the faintest clue as to what Stephen Fowler is up to. And to some degree it might not even matter. It doesn't even mean the man is evil or even any more dishonest than the rest of us. God knows, if Hitler steps another inch in any direction, we'll all be praying for the blood-thirsty Bolshevik army to step in and pin down fifty panzer divisions along the Vistula. Stephen's your husband and I hope you're happy. But you wanted to know, Laura. So I've told you."

  Peter Whiteside gently released her arm. He wore an expression that begged her forgiveness. Her own thoughts conflicted in more ways than they came together. And there was something very awkward and very terrible about the whole moment. For several seconds she lived and breathed in limbo. She was terribly shaken and knew it.

  Yet, beneath this all, there was Stephen. Her Stephen. What right did these men like Peter, with the agencies of government behind them, have prying into the beliefs of a New Jersey minister?

  “Do you have any proof as to what you’re saying, Peter?” she asked.

  “Proof?” he repeated. “Sadly, no. Just theory, and we know an American fitting his description --

  Laura rallied and interrupted. "I curse you and all those like you, Peter," she said in remarkably civil tones. "Whatever my husband believes, it is his right to believe it. He's done nothing to you or anyone else, has he?"

  Whiteside answered softly. "Not that we know."

  "Then stay away from him. Let him live his life. For all I know, people like you are the reason he has to behave as he does."

  She turned to walk away from him, but his hand was on her arm again. "Just one condition, Laura," Peter Whiteside said.

  She looked at him and waited.

  "We spoke in confidence," he said. "You must respect that much. We spoke in strict confidence!"

  "I'll give you that much, Peter," she answered. "But no more. I cherish you as a family friend. But don't come to me with any of your bloody cloak-and-dagger stuff ever again. It's a dishonorable, dirty activity. I don't like it. I refuse to take part in it."

  She turned away.

  "Laura…?" he called as she left. "Good luck to you, Laura. I mean it. Good luck to you."

  But she never looked back. She felt Peter Whiteside's eyes boring into her for several hundred yards as she hiked. Only once did she look over her shoulder and that was from a considerable distance. Peter was just a distant figure in black by then. Very small, he was, and very undistinguished and unimportant from that perspective. She was angry with herself for ever allowing him to get her so upset. What kind of world was it, after all, where grown men played such games?

  *

  She took the bus from High Street. When she arrived home there were raindrops again. She pushed through the iron gate before her father's home and, once indoors, saw the day's post waiting for her.

  The letter from Stephen was on top. She set down her book and opened it. She began to read as she walked upstairs, thinking her father might be napping.

  At the top of the stairs she stopped. She reread, as if Stephen's handwriting made no sense. But it did make sense. And her old Stephen had emerged from his year-and-a-half rumination.

  …There is nothing in the world more precious than you, Laura… my own fault that you left me… more than anything else, I pray for your safe and early return… darling, Laura…

  The phrases leaped out at her. It was as if a prayer had been answered. Laura yelled with joy. She ran from room to room looking for her father.

  He was not in his bedroom, nor the sitting room. Her concern grew as she rushed downstairs, the letter still in her hand, and moved to his study where he often fell asleep on the couch. She still did not see him. She ran to the music room, the conservatory, and the library.

  "Papa?… Papa!" No answer. She returned to the front door, where he often left a note if he had been called away suddenly. No note. And his raincoat was still on its hanger in the closet.

  Frantic, she turned and looked in the kitchen in the rear of the main floor.

  Then she saw her father. She stared in horror through the kitchen window and saw her father on the lawn behind the house. He was slumped in
a frightful angle against one of his prized pear trees. From the distance, his face seemed ashen and lifeless, his arms at his side like those of a marionette with severed strings.

  Then Laura was moving faster than she had ever moved in her life, She was down the back stairs to the pantry, out the back door, and across twenty yards of garden.

  "No! No!" she shrieked, tears flowing down her cheeks now, mingling with the raindrops that failed to rouse her father.

  Nigel Worthington did not move.

  She slid to her knees beside him, embraced him, and yelled again, shaking him as if to raise him from the dead, and for half of a tormented moment, she thought that was exactly what she had done.

  Dr. Worthington's eyes flickered dumbly, failed to focus, wandered, then zeroed in on his daughter.

  "Papa!" she cried, half a gasp, half a plea.

  "What the…?" he asked. He raised his arm and put it around Laura's shoulder.

  "Can't a man take a nap without scaring his daughter half to death?" he asked.

  She was crying so hard she was laughing now, or maybe it was the other way. "No!" she said. "Not under a tree in the rain!"

  He looked around. He heard the rustle of raindrops on his fruit trees.

  "It doesn't rain under trees," he protested mildly. "It only rains on trees." He paused, rallied, wakened some more, and added, "What's Stephen got to say?" he asked. "The good-for-nothing parson wrote to you, did he?"

  “He loves me, Papa!" she said. "He still loves me! I'm booking passage. I'm going home!"

  Nigel Worthington hugged his daughter as hard as he could. He laughed with her in a way in which he had once laughed with her mother. Then he reminded her of something that he had always believed; that sometimes things work out on their own.

  Laura laughed with him, grinned, and nodded, now comfortable in the fact that, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, two men loved her and there were no silly rumors about the devil's tale beneath her skirts.

  Or none, at least, that she had heard. She booked passage on a ship back to New York the next morning. On a whim, she choose the French Line over Cunard.

  NINETEEN

  On Monday, August 28, the German ambassadors to Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg announced that the Third Reich would respect the sovereignty and neutrality of those countries. On Wednesday, Hitler received from Britain a warning not to attack Poland, and on Thursday, Hitler published the terms of a peace plan which he claimed Poland had rejected. In reality, the terms had never been presented.

  On the same evening, Siegfried transmitted triumphantly at eleven o'clock. He no longer used the German language. Instead, he switched to the German naval code, a complex five-digit cipher system drawing upon a code book given him that morning by Duquaine. The book contained several thousand numerical five-digit code groups, each one representing a different word, letter, or phrase.

  The complete code book would have been of extreme interest to either the F.B.I. or M.I. 6-they had been able to capture only a partial one. The entire code book might have revealed, for example, that the five-digit group for ship was 54734. But the book would not reveal the key to the German High Command's system of super-encipherment. This was the additive, a second five-digit group known only to the particular spy and his spymaster. The additive might be 12121. With the additive, in such an enciphered message the word ship would appear as 54734 plus 12121, or 66855. Since each spy might use a different additive, the result was a virtual infinity of codes.

  Siegfried prepared his message in advance. His hand was diligent upon the telegraph key. He reminded Hamburg that some handsome flowers had been planted aboard the Adriana. Then he added that the Adriana had pulled out of port the preceding evening. She was unescorted and would develop severe engine problems as soon as she reached the continental shelf. The German Navy could then pursue the matter.

  Hamburg asked Siegfried if he wanted a new assignment. The spy answered that he already had given himself a grand one and added-to a long silence from the other end-that this would be his final assignment.

  Hamburg replied with a clarification request. Siegfried shot back: CLARIFICATION IN DUE COURSE. YOUR SIGNAL AS HOPELESS AS YOU ARE. END. CQDXVW-2

  Then Siegfried shut down, his total transmission time being ninety-seven seconds. He congratulated himself. Short and to the point. The way it should be done. Siegfried loathed unnecessary risks.

  "Crap!" an irate Bluebird said to another. "He's gone."

  The blips had disappeared so quickly that the Bluebirds had fumbled the opportunity. The first sixty-two seconds of Siegfried's transmission had been lost while a Bluebird groped for the wire recorder. The rest had been recorded. Wheeler and Cochrane were telephoned at their homes.

  "We picked up the man who discusses flowers in German," a Bluebird told Cochrane over the telephone. "Or, what I mean is, sir, that we picked up his signal. Just his signal, sir."

  Cochrane started to Bureau headquarters, as did Wheeler. They met on the marble steps and charged into Deciphering and Cryptology to find Hope See Ming and Lanny Slotkin furiously working cipher combinations.

  "No good!" said Lanny, a stall away from Mrs. Ming. “No good at all!”

  Lanny was used to having his way with formulas. Not tonight, though.

  "Numbers!" he raged. "He's gone on a complicated numerical code. This is going to be tougher than a bull's ass!"

  Hope See Ming worked calmly but with equal futility. Her command of English, Cochrane noted, was highly selective, particularly when Lanny spoke.

  "You're the resident genius, Lanny," Wheeler said with a sudden tension that Cochrane had not seen before. "Why can't you figure it?"

  "Weren't you listening? It's a code!"

  "Well, why do we pay you, you smart the little Yid? Crack it anyway."

  "Give me time. Give me time," Lanny Slotkin fumed. "I've never seen a scramble like this before."

  "No one else has, either," Cochrane said.

  Which included the Virgin Mary the next morning.

  "Doesn't even follow the format of the previous transmissions, does it?" Mary said. "Are you sure Monitoring transcribed it right before you brought it in here to Mary?"

  Cochrane referred her directly to a wire recording. She sat, listened, nodded her white head, and tapped along with her fingers.

  "Are you sure our Bluebirds had the right frequency?" she asked next.

  "Too sure," Cochrane answered. Monitoring Division, he explained, knew how to monitor, after all.

  Wheeler snarled angrily. "He was off the air so fast that they didn't even have time to say 'triangulation detection,' much less attempt it." Wheeler shrouded himself in white smoke from his pipe. "Think he's our bomber?" he asked.

  "It's worth a try, isn't it?" Cochrane answered. "Same precision and secrecy on the air as with bombs. How many pros could be working this area, anyway?"

  "Maybe a lot," Wheeler said.

  "Maybe only one," Cochrane answered.

  The two men stood by a sixth-floor window which overlooked the Washington Mall. City lights were long since out, but the slender Washington Monument rose like a gray giant in the reflection of the quarter moon.

  "Our Siegfried's been busy lately, Bill," mused Wheeler in a low, brooding rumination. "Lots of dots and dashes. Lots of numbers that mean nothing to us and everything to him. All of Europe's going to hell and our Siegfried-boy is busy as a rooster in a chicken coop and he’s doing to us exactly what he’s doing to the chickens." A long cone of white smoke, then: "What's he doing next, Bill? Got a guess?”

  Bill Cochrane answered with a frustrated shrug. "I don't know," he admitted. “What I know is that all hell is going to break out soon.”

  “How do you know that?” Wheeler asked.

  “Instinct,” Cochrane said, barely thinking about it. “It’s in the air. Same as those blips. I can feel it coming.”

  *

  Friday, September 1. German armies invaded Poland from the west. Chamberlain's Government dem
anded that they withdraw. Luftwaffe bombers attacked Warsaw day and night while the British and French armies mobilized.

  Six hundred seventy nautical miles southeast of Nantucket an enormous explosion ripped through the engine room of the HMS Adriana. Seven crew members, all boiler and furnace men, died in the blast. Another five were critically injured. Part of the ship was aflame for four hours, but the blaze was eventually quelled. But there was a greater problem now. There was a fissure in the center of the hull and The Adriana was taking on water. There was a red alert on board, and help from the nearest American port remained two days away in choppy seas.

  On – Saturday, September 2, a civilian evacuation of London began. And on Sunday, September 3, England and France declared war on Nazi Germany. So when dawn broke in the northwest Atlantic Ocean that same morning, the Adriana was officially a ship of a combatant nation.

  A German U-boat lined her up from a distance of two miles. The Adriana 's sonar had picked up the submarine since ten hours out of Red Bank. But now the frigate was helpless and the U-boat advanced for the kill. Audaciously, the German submarine commander pulled to within a half mile of his prey, knowing the British vessel had no defense.

  Six torpedoes were launched.

  The first hit the Adriana in the stern, almost squarely in the rudder. It blew out the entire screw propeller and rocked the ship mercilessly with the subsequent explosion. The Adriana convulsed first with fire, then with water. The panic among the crew would have spread in all directions, except it did not have time.

  A second of the six torpedoes found its mark, blasting The Adriana at the midpoint on the port side, thirty feet below the waterline. The explosion blew the ship sideways in the water and left a wound as wide as ten trucks in the frigate's side. The damage would have been enough to sink The Adriana by itself, but the weakened hull was in no condition to withstand the vibrations of the hit, either. Thus the second torpedo broke the ship in two, as the entire hull began to go. Fuel leaked into the fires left by the dual explosions and then there were further smaller explosions. Then there was black smoke everywhere, and suddenly the bow of the ship was raising itself toward the lightening morning sky, and then there was one final shattering explosion brought on by another torpedo. The ship blew into more pieces than anyone aboard would ever be able to comprehend.