Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  Then the army chief of staff went in, the four-star general who headed the active-duty army. An army one-star accompanied him, along with more aides and staff. They all ignored Jeffrey’s group, which seemed very rude behavior. The army chief of staff was known to be well practiced at being hard to read, opaque.

  The director of the FBI appeared, gave Jeffrey a dirty look, and went into the conference room. The FBI man projected a thinly veiled mean streak, almost sadistic, and Jeffrey smelled trouble ahead, though he had no idea what might be brewing.

  Hodgkiss and Wilson went back to talking privately in their easy chairs. To Jeffrey, judging from their stern expressions and stiff body language, the dialogue wasn’t relaxed.

  On the couch, Parker slid over to Jeffrey. “That aide and the guards are cleared for anything they might overhear. That’s why they draw this duty.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “I am now going to brief you on something else you need to know. It will come up in this meeting and you wouldn’t want to look completely out of the loop.”

  Jeffrey had to bite his tongue. “I’m listening.”

  Parker spoke to Jeffrey in an undertone. His manner was condescending, impatient, as if he resented needing to fill in a tyro on something in which he possessed vast expertise. The gist was that a German in the enemy’s consulate in Istanbul wanted to defect to America. The German, assigned the code name “Peapod” by the CIA, was a bureaucrat in his country’s trade mission to Turkey. Peapod claimed to have vital information about impending dire German intentions in the Middle East, and he asked to be extracted immediately, but refused to give more details on whatever information he had.

  “How did he make contact?”

  “We initiated it. Through someone who works for us at a brothel.”

  “Prostitute?”

  Parker nodded.

  “How did you know he wanted to defect?”

  “We didn’t. We sometimes recruit married men by extortion, after illicit sex. We wanted more knowledge on Turkish industrial dealings with Germany. Thought we’d made a mildly useful catch, but this guy held out a whole new game plan.”

  Jeffrey thought about this. “In Istanbul?”

  Parker nodded again.

  “Are you trying to say that Peapod originated the other items we just looked at?” Beck’s reports.

  “We don’t know. That’s part of what this next meeting is about. If the subjects under discussion are in fact that closely related, Peapod has to tantalize us while being very careful to keep his HumInt contact via the prostitute, and the TOUCHSTONE Alfa SigInt transmission, looking totally separate to save his neck at his end. The Germans stationed numerous seasoned espionage men in Turkey before the war. A lot of that strength is ex-Stasi.”

  “Former East German secret police?”

  “Very nasty people. They’ve been rolling up our network of in-country agents as if it were child’s play. Peapod will not want to get nabbed because Berlin realizes too much is suddenly coming our way out of Istanbul, and he won’t want to leave an obvious big finger pointing straight back at him. Then, when we’re ready, assuming we’re interested enough to act at all, he and we will have to move rather rapidly on his extraction.”

  “How could a trade attaché have all that other expertise and access?”

  “His job at the consulate might be a cover for entirely different work the Germans have him doing there.”

  “This is what you meant before about the Mata Hari stuff?”

  Parker glanced at his watch. “We’ll see how much longer before they call us in.” He gestured at the conference-room door. “The more you know, the more you can help assess the situation. . . . Istanbul is a big seaport. Neutral merchant-ship crews get ashore, then soon sail away somewhere else. Good business for the legal red-light district. That’s how our agent in the brothel relays short messages from Peapod to us.”

  “Microdots?”

  “Too easy to detect. Peapod pays her in cash, in many small bills, with pen and pencil marks and stains in particular places in the stack to indicate particular words. The seamen in our employ get the money from her as change, and then at their next port of call they phone home, or to a friend in Russia, Yemen, wherever. Relayed on, using different people as cutouts, more phones, it gets to the U.S. roundabout, by word of mouth in cipher phrases.”

  “Clever.”

  “Necessary. With Germans on one border and Russia in their rear, Turkey has to make a big show of preserving her neutrality. Our operatives with diplomatic cover, when the Turks have the least suspicion they’re CIA, are expelled as personae non grata. Then Turkey refuses to accept credentials of any replacements. That’s another reason we’re so thin on the ground over there, and our agent’s comm links need to be transient sailors.”

  Jeffrey thought about this unpleasantness, digesting it.

  Zeno was a German code name intercepted by the Allies. The fact that the U.S. even know of that name was top secret. And Peapod was the CIA’s internal code name for a German who wanted to defect. The name Peapod, and his desires, were also top secret. TOUCHSTONE Alfa was the CIA’s code name for material someone in Istanbul sent the U.S. . . . If Peapod had sent TOUCHSTONE Alfa, and a whiff of this leaked to the Axis, America could lose a golden opportunity to shorten the war.

  And if Peapod could do all the technical things involved in obtaining and transmitting the TOUCHSTONE Alfa documents, then was Peapod the same as this mysterious Zeno person?

  Jeffrey’s head was spinning. “If Peapod is for real, why won’t he give us more of what he knows?”

  “To make us come and get him.”

  Jeffrey frowned. “I don’t like where this is leading.”

  “Nobody does.”

  The CNO’s aide came out and asked Hodgkiss’s group to go into the conference room; they entered. The head of the table held two empty chairs. One long side was occupied by the army people and the dour FBI director. The other side was taken by the navy and the CIA director. Parker sat next to his boss. Hodgkiss, Wilson, and Jeffrey took seats farther down the same side. Aides and staffers sat on less opulent chairs against the walls, behind the top brass they supported. Since the foot of the table was also empty, the whole thing looked to Jeffrey like a face-off between two adversarial parties. The atmosphere in the room reinforced this impression.

  Everyone rose when the president of the United States walked in, followed by the national security advisor. Jeffrey had had a back-channel private talk with the president before his most recent undersea mission, the one for which he’d gotten the Defense Distinguished Service Medal; the commander in chief was a retired army general who’d presented Jeffrey’s Medal of Honor at a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House—for the mission previous to that. The national security advisor, Jeffrey knew, was a retired U.S. Air Force four-star general. She’d been the most senior woman in the armed forces, and had a severe and no-nonsense manner. The president was more laid back, most of the time, and his smile was warm when he did smile. But now he looked tired.

  An aide checked names on a personal-data assistant, then turned to the director of the CIA. “Everyone present is cleared for Peapod and TOUCHSTONE Alfa, sir.”

  The meeting resumed. Hodgkiss gave a summary of Jeffrey’s assessment of the two documents. The president peered at Jeffrey from far across the table. “Are you absolutely positive, Captain?”

  “Yes, sir. Those have to be Beck’s own reports.”

  “No doubts in your mind whatsoever?”

  “None, Mr. President. They were definitely written by someone who was there.”

  The FBI director butted in at once. “I take strong exception to that.”

  The president furrowed his eyebrows, but gestured to go on.

  “Is it not true, Captain Fuller, that that ‘someone,’ as you put it, might have ‘been there’ by being on your ship repeatedly, knowing you extremely well?”

  Jeffrey was staggered, and speechle
ss.

  “Well?” The FBI head was very hostile.

  “You mean someone who was in battles on Challenger, as some sort of spy, and helped the Germans reverse-engineer reports that were the mirror image of what I saw and did? So that the reports would be believable to me?”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

  “My crew are loyal. We’ve been in nuclear combat together. They all passed thorough security checks.”

  “Answer my question. Is it not possible those reports were prepared as counterfeits of Beck’s real ideas and tactical style and the lessons he learned, with help from a well-informed plant on the Allied side?”

  “I suppose in theory it’s possible. . . . But only in theory.”

  The FBI man was visibly exasperated. “I’ll take a tack you’re more familiar with. . . . What do you think of mutineers, Captain?”

  “Not counting refusal to obey an illegal order?” Illegal orders included being told to violate important safety procedures unnecessarily, or to massacre civilians. “Real mutineers are traitors.”

  “And are not defectors traitors too?”

  “I—”

  “Forget your sympathy because they come from the other side over to us. Are they not traitors to their country?”

  “Yes. But—”

  “And are you not aware that many defectors turn out to be double agents, really working for our enemies all along? Or change their minds and want to go home? Or are actually working both sides against each other for their own selfish interests?”

  “Counterespionage is outside my expertise, sir.”

  “Well, it’s not outside the FBI’s expertise. So, now that I have opened your eyes to the reality that lies beyond your expertise, Captain Fuller, is there not a traitor among your people?”

  Jeffrey shook his head. “It’s impossible.”

  “You forgot something. I’m not surprised, considering.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’m glad to see you’ve distanced yourself from her lately. The situation was becoming outrageous enough as it was.”

  Hodgkiss jumped in. “That’s unfair, Director, and frankly, I think it’s in bad taste.”

  “There’s nothing fair about spy hunting, Admiral. Every angle must be examined with a complete lack of emotion. Ilse Reebeck is a defector to the Allies. Therefore, to the Axis she is a traitor. Traitors are traitors, period. She had a close personal relationship with you, an intimate one, which you ended, did you not, Captain?”

  “Yes.” Jeffrey was getting angry.

  “Can you prove that Ilse Reebeck has not changed loyalties again, or that she was not a double agent all along?”

  “But she helped the Allies in ways that no one else could. She risked her life for us.”

  “Spies risk their lives every day. That proves nothing. Those previous missions of yours could have gone ahead had she never existed. They would probably have been successful too, by reaching deeper into American personnel resources to assist you and your SEALs.”

  “I can’t deny that possibility.”

  “I consider Reebeck hopelessly compromised. We’ve had mounting suspicions about her the past few weeks. Odd messages being left for her on the phone. Brush bys from strangers who then evade our best trackers.”

  “You’ve had Ilse under surveillance?”

  “As I said, she’s a turncoat. We’re narrowing in now on solid evidence that she works for the enemy.”

  “I can’t believe it. It must be some sort of Axis scheme to discredit her, ruin her usefulness to us.”

  “That’s what they’d want us to think, isn’t it? So they can work her hard as a source for them while we dismiss it as a ruse?”

  “Er—”

  “This ridiculous transmission from Istanbul only reemphasizes our doubts. It gives us a concrete thing she’s done to help the other side.” The FBI director turned to the president. “It is my categorical recommendation that Reebeck’s security clearance be pulled, and that these patrol reports from Beck be dismissed as frauds sent by the Axis as part of some monumental deception gambit.”

  “But you weren’t there,” Jeffrey said. “You don’t know what she did for us. And with all due respect, you’re not a submariner, sir. Those reports read like the real thing. I was there.”

  “No, Captain. I was given clearance to read your most recent reports. I do know what went on. The Germans have plenty of cause to feed you phony information, to fool you about a particular adversary’s thought processes.”

  “You mean give me the wrong impression of Ernst Beck? But he’s in South Africa now. His ship is undergoing repairs in the hardened underground dry dock in Durban.”

  “Just so. His superiors thus have a paramount motive for misleading you.”

  Yeah, it makes it easier for Beck to break out past the Allied naval cordon there. That would strongly motivate anyone, Jeffrey thought.

  Jeffrey was positive Ilse wasn’t a spy. But he barely had a chance to open his mouth.

  “And don’t stick up for your ex-lover. You let her get much too close to you, you let her get into your mind to learn all your preconceptions and blind spots and other vulnerabilities. She knows exactly what things you’re willing to risk your life for, and what you’d fall for in falsified reports. She fed that to the Axis, and they’re feeding it back and you swallowed it whole.”

  Jeffrey sat there, confused.

  The chief of naval operations spoke up. “Director, you’ve laid out one scenario. Everything you say is circumstantial. Ilse Reebeck was very thoroughly vetted in the beginning. At the moment she’s an indispensable member of Admiral Hodgkiss’s staff. Her whole family was executed on TV for resisting the Boer coup, for God’s sake.”

  “Peoples’ feelings and allegiances change,” the FBI director retorted. “For all we know, deep down, she hated her family, and was glad to see them hang. Many agents are borderline sociopaths. Do you have any incontrovertible proof that she hasn’t turned, or been turned, since you cleared her?”

  “No. Do you have any incontrovertible proof she’s a spy?”

  “Not yet. Soon. And in the meantime, circumstantial is good enough for me. In counterespionage, circumstantial is sometimes all you get.”

  The president cleared his throat. “Miss Reebeck’s current security status is not the main focus today, nor are Captain Fuller’s dating habits decisive to the agenda. His opinion that those two transmitted documents are real can’t just be ignored. . . . However, I emphasize that stronger verification is needed before any action would be justified.”

  “The clincher,” the CNO said, “is that they were sent to us in one of our own most important naval codes. That was an invaluable tip-off for us, completely separate from the issue of Beck’s reports and Reebeck’s loyalty.”

  The FBI director shook his head vehemently. “The Germans might have suspected that we’d soon realize the code was broken. They might fear we have moles planted in their intelligence apparatus. They could easily have passed on something seemingly priceless to us, which from their own point of view they believed we’d find out about quickly in any case.” He turned to the head of the CIA. “Am I not right?”

  “Well, hypothetically. I can’t say too much about who we do or don’t have working for us where, for very obvious reasons. But we definitely have to remember that the Germans are seeing everything from a perspective that differs from ours. So yes, it’s possible that the feeding back of one of our own codes, to warn us it had been broken, could be a red herring.”

  “In that case,” the FBI head declared, “the entire transmission is valueless.”

  This point hung heavily in the air.

  The president leaned forward. Everyone was immediately attentive. “To my mind, the scenario that the message is valid has still been neither proved nor disproved. What we’ve achieved is to put the different scenarios clearly out on the table.”

  Everybody nodded, including the FBI director.

  �
�All right,” the president said. “Let’s move on. The question of Peapod.”

  The FBI director started in again, aggressively. “Wannabe defectors in time of war are a dime a dozen. All we really know about this guy is that he goes with whores.”

  “He would still be useful to us,” the CIA director said. “We like to have our agents by the short hairs.”

  The president chuckled at the unintentional play on words—sex and short hairs—and everyone else laughed. Jeffrey thought some of it sounded forced.

  The national security advisor talked for the first time during the meeting—she was well regarded as a woman of few words. “I’m going to pose the question that has begged to be asked and answered since we came into this room. Is Peapod the same person who sent that transmission? . . . This then raises another question. Is Peapod then so priceless that, whatever it takes, we have to extract him, or is the transmission bait to help the Germans place a double agent in our midst?”

  At first no one spoke. Those are the two big questions, all right, Jeffrey told himself.

  “If he did have such high access,” the CNO thought out loud, “we’d want to keep him in place so he could give us even more. He says he knows important things about the upcoming German offensive, but insists on telling us in person. Only in person. That does seem a little odd.”

  “What else do we know about Peapod?” the president asked the CIA director.

  The DCI glanced at the people seated away from the table. “Aides, staffers, all of you out of here please.” The junior men and women left; the inner door was locked behind them.

  “To answer your question, Mr. President, not much, except by logical inference and informed speculation. That plus the age-old spy-craft rule that it’s safest to assume things that seem connected aren’t coincidence. . . . If Peapod, who, on the understanding that this stays inside this room, uses the name Klaus Mohr, has truly done everything he seems to have done, he’s an exquisitely talented technologist. Klaus Mohr might not be his original name.”