The Cold War Swap

by Ross Thomas

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He doesn’t say much. Are you hurt?”

  “No, we’re not hurt,” he said, and sat down next to Burchwood. The man who had driven our car walked up to the bow and got behind the wheel. He started the engine. It caught and burbled in neutral through its underwater exhausts. We sat there for five minutes. We seemed to be waiting for something. I followed the gaze of the man at the wheel. A light across the Rhine flashed three times. He picked up a flashlight that had been clamped to the dash, aimed it across the river, and flicked it on and off three times. It was a signal, clever McCorkle decided. The interior light of the green Cadillac flashed on as the back door opened and a man got out and started down the stairs to the dock. He was short and stocky and waddled a bit as he walked across the dock to the boat. It was growing too dark to see his face clearly, but I didn’t have to. It was Maas all right.

  CHAPTER 20

  Maas waved at me cheerfully from the dock and climbed into the launch. One of the drivers let go of the stern line and the launch headed out into the Rhine, taking an oblique course upriver. I nudged Padillo in the ribs with my elbows. “Company’s here,” I said. He lifted his head and regarded Maas, who smiled cheerfully at us from his seat near the stern.

  “Christ,” Padillo said, and dropped his head back down on arms folded across his knees.

  Maas talked quietly with one of the men who had driven the Humbers. The other two men sat across the launch from us and smoked cigarettes. Each held a gun casually in his lap, pointing at nothing in particular. I decided that they could keep them. Burchwood and Symmes sat next to me and stared straight ahead. It was dark now.

  The boat driver reduced his speed and angled the launch sharply to the left. Down river, a half-mile away, I could see the lights of the U.S. Embassy. They looked warm, inviting and safe, but they didn’t get any closer. I hadn’t really expected them to. The dark outline of a self-powered barge loomed ahead of us. It was anchored in the channel about fifty feet from the riverbank and sat low in the water as if heavily loaded. It was the kind of barge that you see plowing up and down the Rhine from Amsterdam to Basel, the family wash snapping merrily in the breeze. They are almost always family owned and operated. Children get born on them and old men die on them. The occupants sleep and eat and make love below decks in compact quarters located near the stern that are about the size of a smallish American house trailer. The barge we approached was about 150 feet long. The pilot of the launch cut the engine and we drifted, stern first, toward its bow.

  Somebody shined a light on us and threw a rope, and the man in the stern next to Maas caught it and pulled us up snug to a rope ladder and wooden rungs. Maas was first up the ladder and he had trouble with one of the rungs. I hoped he would fall, but someone on the barge caught him and pulled him up. The two men with the guns were on their feet and one of them waved negligently at Symmes and Burchwood. They got the idea and went up the ladder after Maas. Padillo had raised his head from his arms and watched Symmes and Burchwood climb the ladder.

  “Think you can make it?” I asked.

  “No, but I will,” he said.

  We got up and I let Padillo precede me to the ladder. He grabbed a rung and started to pull himself up. I boosted him from behind and some hands reached down and caught him under the arms and pulled. I started up and the strain knotted and twisted my stomach where the Chevrolet’s seat belt had cut into it. Some more hands, not particularly gentle, fastened on and helped me. The barge had its parking lights on for navigational safety and the only other light was from the flash that somebody kept shining around.

  “Straight ahead,” a voice muttered in my ear, and I put my hands out and started to take some small careful steps in that general direction. A light suddenly appeared from an open door that led down into the living quarters. I could see Maas backing his way down the stairs, holding onto the rails. Burchwood and Symmes followed, then Padillo and I. I heard the launch pulling away. Only the two men with the guns remained, and they motioned for me to follow Padillo.

  I turned into the doorway and started feeling for the steps below. I moved down slowly in the narrow passage until there weren’t any more steps. I turned around. We were in a room about seven by ten. The ceiling was barely tall enough for me to stand erect. There were two built-in bunks with brightly quilted covers along one side. Padillo stood slumped and listless beside them. I noticed that he was rid of most of the make-up devices and the hair piece. His face was back to normal except for the pallor of his skin. Burchwood and Symmes stood next to him.

  Maas was seated at one end of a table that could fold up against the wall. He smiled and nodded at me and his knees knocked together nervously like those of a fat little boy at a party who has to go to the bathroom but is afraid he’ll miss the ice cream and cake. At the other end of the table was another chair, and behind that was a door.

  “Hello, Maas,” I said.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, and giggled and nodded his head some more. “We meet again, it seems.”

  “lust one question?” I said.

  “Of course, my dear McCorkle: as many as you wish.”

  “You had a two-way radio working out of that Cadillac into the H umbers—right?”

  “Correct. We merely chased you up the Autobahn into our little trap. Simple, but effective, you will admit?”

  I nodded. “Mind if we smoke?”

  Maas shrugged elaborately. I took out a package of cigarettes and gave one to Padillo and lighted them both from a pack of matches. The small door opened and a man in a gray-and-black hound’s-tooth jacket and gray trousers backed out of it. He was talking in Dutch to someone still in the other room. The back of his head was covered with long black shiny hair that almost but not quite met in a ducktail. He closed the door and turned around and his horn-rimmed glasses flinted in the light. He could have been fifty or forty or younger, but there was one thing certain: he was Chinese.

  He stood before the closed door for several long moments, staring at Padillo. Finally he said, “Hello, Mike.”

  “Hello, Jimmy,” Padillo said.

  Maas had bounced out of his seat and was dancing attendance to the Chinese. “It went very smoothly, Mr. Ku,” he said in English. “There was no unexpected trouble. This is Symmes and this is Burchwood. The other is McCorkle, who is the business partner of Padillo.”

  “Sit down and shut up, Maas,” the Chinese said without looking at him. Maas retreated to his chair and his knees started knocking together again. The Chinese sat down in the chair at the other end of the table, took out a package of Kents, and lighted one with a gold Ronson.

  “It’s been a long time, Mike,” he said.

  “Twenty-three years,” Padillo said. “And you’re calling yourself Ku now.”

  “It was in Washington at the old Willard, wasn’t it—that last time?” Ku said.

  “You were Jimmy Lee then and you liked Gibsons.”

  The Chinese nodded absently. “We’ll have to talk about the old days in the Oh, So Secret one of these times. I’ve been out of touch. I understand, though, that you’re still working.”

  “Not really,” Padillo said. “Just an odd job now and then.”

  “Like in Bucharest in 1959—March?”

  “I don’t remember,” Padillo said politely.

  Ku smiled. “They say it was you.”

  “You must have had an interesting wait these last few days,” Padillo said. “But it’s pleasant along the Rhine this time of year.”

  “A few anxious moments,” Ku said. “And it’s been a little rich. I’m going to have a hell of a time with the expense account.”

  “But you’ve got what you came after,” Padillo said.

  “You mean these two,” Ku said, jerking a thumb at Burchwood and Symmes.

  Padillo nodded.

  “It’s not every day that we turn up a couple of defectors from NSA.”

  “Maybe it’s your Peiping climate.”

  “You
learn to like it,” Ku said. “After a while.”

  “Don’t bother; I’ve got a place fixed up for you. It’s through that other door there.” Ku got up and walked over to a door next to the stairs. He unlocked it with a key and held it open. “It’s not big, but it’s quiet. You can get some rest.” One of the men with guns had come halfway down the stairs. He was sitting on a step, the gun pointed nowhere and everywhere. He waved it at the door that Ku held open. I led the way; the rest followed.

  Ku reached into a cupboard and brought out a bottle and handed it to Padillo. “Dutch gin,” he said. “Have one for me.” We went through the door into a room with two bunks along the walls and heard the lock click behind us. A red light shielded by a metal network burned overhead. It didn’t give off a cheery glow.

  “That horrid little fat man is here again,” Symmes said to nobody in particular. Maybe we were all speaking again.

  “You are now on what may very well turn out to be a slow barge to China,” Padillo said. “Sorry,” he added; “I couldn’t resist.”

  “I take it that the lad with the almond eyes is not of the Chancre Jack persuasion,” I said.

  Padillo and I had taken the floor and Burchwood and Symmes were on the lower bunk. We had done it automatically, as if we somehow owed them a favor. Padillo held up the bottle to the red light and examined it critically. “No, he’s one of the mainland types and has probably mixed this gin with some strange new truth serum. In which case I’ll volunteer as chief guinea pig.” He unscrewed the top, took a long swallow, and handed the bottle to me. “No ill effects,” he said.

  I took a drink and offered the bottle to Burchwood and Symmes. They looked at each other and Burchwood finally accepted it. He wiped off the neck with his sleeve and took a delicate sip. Symmes did the same and handed it back to Padillo.

  “The wily oriental in there is a former classmate of mine from World War Two. We trained at the same funny factory in Maryland. I heard later somewhere that he was sent on some kind of do with Mao’s outfit and never came home. He’s probably the equivalent of a buck general in their intelligence setup.”

  “Hard work and dedication to duty have often been known to pay off,” I said.

  “He is also one bright cooky. He graduated from Stanford at nineteen. And you two,” he continued, looking at Symmes and Burchwood, “are probably curious why he happens to be on this Dutch barge on the Rhine.”

  “Why?” Symmes asked.

  Padillo took another swallow of the gin and lighted a cigarette. “Mr. Ku is the key piece in this week’s jigsaw. Everything else that’s happened falls into place around him. It’s been a very slick operation. And it’s cost somebody a packet.”

  “Us, for example,” I said.

  “We may not have to worry about that. But let’s take it from the first, when Maas met you on the plane from Berlin. He had you tagged and he was trying to get to me on the pretense of selling me the information on the trade: me for Burchwood and Symmes here. But he really wasn’t supposed to sell me the information. Ku just wanted him to tip me off. But Maas was greedy and he decided to sell it, and before he did he had another small piece of business to conduct with the dark little Coca-Cola drinker that got shot in our place.”

  Padillo paused and drew on his cigarette. “Ku wanted Burchwood and Symmes. Somehow he had found out about the proposed swap between the Russians and us. He probably got the information from his Moscow source, but that’s not important. When he found out that I was part of the swap he got the great idea: Why not tip me off and let me worry about getting Burchwood and Symmes out of East Berlin and back to Bonn? And when we got to a convenient spot, like near Bonn, he could arrange a snatch-and-grab, load us onto a barge, and chug down the Rhine to Amsterdam. There it would be simple to load us onto a ship. Except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “I don’t think that you and I are going to make the entire trip. Just Burchwood and Symmes.”

  “We’re not Communists,” Burchwood said. “I’ve told you two men that again and again. We’re certainly not Chinese Communists.”

  “That’s what makes you such plums,” Padillo said. “The Chinese haven’t been able to get their hands on anyone good since the Korean thing, and most of the ones they got then have turned out to be stumblebums. They’ve been recruiting quietly all over the Iron Curtain territory, trying to latch on to some defectors. And they don’t want them for just propaganda reasons. They need them to teach English, to do broadcasts, to check translations—all the little onerous tasks that need the attention of the native-born American.

  “Now suppose they see the chance to pick up a couple of well-educated guys who have defected to Russia, whose defection has been kept under wraps by both Moscow and Washington, and who just happen to have worked in one of the code sections of the National Security Agency.

  “You can almost see the ‘tilt’ sign light up in their minds. One: they can parade them around as real live defectors who’ve seen the true Holy Grail rising out of the mists of the Yangtze. It might take a little therapy, but that they’ve proved they can do. Two: they get all the code stuff that Burchwood and Symmes know. It might be a little out of date, a little old, but it’s better than nothing, and you can bet that there’s been no trade-off between Moscow and Peiping. Third—and this is the real gem: they’ve got a two-edged propaganda device going for them. Two National Security Agency employees get fed up with the U.S. and defect to China. If the Moscow flacks send up the cry that they had them first, then the Chinese come back with the charge that it’s a double defection: first from the home-grown imperialism of the U.S. and then from the deviationist brand of the backsliding Muscovites. After they’ve milked Burchwood and Symmes dry of their propaganda value and their knowledge of NSA, they can put them to work teaching English to an advanced kindergarten or being Shanghai Sam, disc jockey for the Marines in Vietnam.”

  “You draw a nice clear picture in the center,” I said, “but it’s fuzzy around the edges. For instance, how did Cooky get on stage?”

  “Cook was a KGB patsy. No money, no beliefs, just blackmail. Maas knew this, and when he missed out on me he went to Cook and sold him the information about the trade. Cook checked in with his resident in Bonn and told him what he had. The resident told him to tag along through you. The problem then came up about how to get you to get Cook to Berlin. The KGB called in Maas and he came up with the tunnel and the idea of five thousand dollars cash ante. So Maas was double-agenting. His main job was to get me to spirit Symmes and Burchwood over the wall for Jimmy Ku. But the KGB called him in to work on you so that you’d call Cook to Berlin with the five grand. Where else would you get that much money on short notice? The Russians were depending on Cook and his fast draw to keep the thing from going too far. Then they’d have Burchwood and Symmes and me and they could thumb their nose at any deal they’d previously cooked up with our side.”

  “When did you figure all this out?” I asked.

  “When I saw Jimmy come through that door a few minutes ago. Most of it anyway.”

  “Pass the bottle,” I said. He passed it and I took a swallow and offered the bottle to Burchwood and Symmes, but they declined. Politely this time.

  “Wasn’t the KGB a trifle suspicious of Maas since he had sold the information about you and the trade to Cooky?”

  “They would have been—if Cook had told them where he’d bought it. But he didn’t. Or they’d have never used Maas. Cook was being threatened. He hadn’t been producing anything; he’d been drinking too much. This was a chance for him to play big shot. So he paid Maas for the information that Maas wanted him to have anyway. And from there on you and I and Max and poor old Weatherby started raking the chestnuts out of the coals.”

  “I wonder if Ku knows about Maas and his various deals. Our fat friend could very well hand us over and then trot up the road aways and blow the whistle on Ku to the Russians.”

  “I seriously doubt that Jimm
y’s going to let Maas off the barge until it’s tied up alongside some freighter in Amsterdam. Like I said, Jimmy’s no dope.”

  “You don’t figure Maas has worked for our side yet—providing we still have a side left?”

  Padillo frowned. “That’s what was bothering me at Frankfurt. I thought they’d have met us there. In fact, I was toying with the idea of just driving on down to the I.G. Farben building and dumping the whole thing in their laps. Maybe the uniforms and the make-up really did fool them. Maybe they still think we’re in East Berlin and they’re waiting for us to come back through Checkpoint Charlie. Don’t forget: we came under the wall at five o'clock this morning. The only people who know we made it are the guy who owned the house and the tunnel—and he’s dead—plus Wolgemuth’s people—and they’re not saying anything. I owe them too much money.”

  I lighted another cigarette and leaned back against the wall. My stomach still hurt, but the Dutch gin was helping. “I hate to give up so close to home,” I said. “If we could find a taxi we could be sitting at the bar in fifteen minutes with a couple of tall cold ones while we counted the day’s receipts.”

  “That’s a nice thought.”

  “It’s the only one I’ve had lately. You have a plan, of course.”

  Padillo rubbed a palm across his forehead wearily. He held his hand out straight in front of him and looked at it carefully. It shook. “I’m in lousy shape. I think a couple of ribs are cracked. But you’re wrong. I haven’t any plan—just an idea or two—and we’ll need some help.”

  He looked at Symmes and Burchwood. “How does China sound to you two?”