by Dan Simmons
The last touch in the Pilar’s conversion to Q-boat status was the installation of a quickly removable sign which read AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. “That ought to confuse the kraut skipper as he peers through his periscope at us,” growled Hemingway on the day he went to the shipyard to bring the Pilar home. “Maybe he’ll be so curious that he’ll surface close by to send a boarding party over to see what the hell we’re all about and we’ll use the submachine guns on the boarders and the antitank guns and bazookas on the U-boat.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Or maybe all the German captain will be able to read is the word American and he’ll stand off half a mile while sinking us with one shot from his hundred-and-five-millimeter cannon.”
Hemingway folded his arms and glowered at me. “Seven-forty-class German boats don’t have hundred-and-five-millimeter guns,” he said disdainfully. “Just one eighty-eight-millimeter with some twenty-millimeter jobs for antiaircraft work.”
“The new Class IX model has a hundred-and-five-millimeter cannon,” I said. “And its fifty-caliber machine guns would cut the Pilar to pieces before you could ever get a bazooka or antitank gun on deck, much less loaded.”
Hemingway gave me a long look and then grinned. “In that case, Lucas, my mysterious friend, we are—as I told the good colonel—well and truly fucked. But you’ll be well and truly fucked along with us.”
THE DAY AFTER THE FIREWORKS show, I knew that I was well and truly fucked. I’d put myself in a position where I could choose to report my evening’s activities—breaking and entering a U.S.-registered yacht owned and operated by a legitimate U.S.-registered nonprofit organization, not to mention being an accomplice in setting fire to said yacht—and almost certainly lose my job, or choose not to report the unorthodox black bag job, have Delgado or someone else report my involvement when they discovered it, and certainly lose my job. Plus there was the problem of the missing codebook and the missing whore. I had put off reporting both of these minor facts, and the longer I waited, the more obvious my incompetence and/or disingenuousness would look when they did come to light. But if I did all this, it would seem that I had been failing in my role as a spy on Hemingway’s operation while doing the writer’s bidding at the expense of the Bureau.
I put it all in a report the day after the yacht business and stopped by the safe house to deliver it to Delgado while running around Havana on Crook Factory business.
Delgado arrived a few minutes after our arranged meeting time, wearing a clean guayabera and a straw hat pulled low. He tore open the seal of my report in his usual insolent manner, read it, and looked across the table at me.
“Lucas, Lucas, Lucas.” He sounded amused and disgusted.
“Just send it on,” I snapped. “And see if you can get the Bureau to identify the woman and bald guy on the yacht. I’ll get photos of them and fingerprints if necessary, so we can send for their dossiers, if they have any.”
Delgado tapped my report. “If I send this to Mr. Hoover, you won’t be on this mission or in the SIS long enough to read those dossiers.”
I stared at him. Not for the first or tenth time, I thought of how I would go at his gut and face with my fists if it came to a match. It would not be easy. Delgado would use his hands to try to kill me, I knew, not to box. “What do you mean?” I said. “It’s not the first black bag job I’ve had to do.”
“It’s the first one you did without authorization,” said Delgado with his infuriating curl of a smile. “Unless you count Hemingway’s orders as authorization.”
“I was told to obey his orders in order to earn his trust,” I said. “I can’t do my job if Hemingway doesn’t trust me.”
“What makes you think he trusts you?” said Delgado. “And do you really think the director wants one of his SIS boys hiding whores from the legally constituted Cuban police? A murder suspect, no less.”
“She didn’t kill Kohler,” I said.
Delgado shrugged. “Don’t be too sure, Lucas. Anything is possible in this business.”
“Just send the report.”
The lean man shook his head and tossed the manila envelope onto my side of the table. “No,” he said.
I blinked.
“Rewrite the report so that it’s vague about how you got the codebook and the names of Kohler’s reference books,” said Delgado. “Make it sound ambiguous—as if Hemingway’s clowns are stumbling across this stuff. Leave the whore out of it altogether. That way you’ll keep your job and we won’t have to restart this mission from scratch.”
I leaned back in my straight-backed chair and looked at the other agent. Why the hell are you doing this, Delgado… whatever your real name is?
As if reading my thoughts, Delgado curled his smile, took off his hat, and wiped the brim with a handkerchief from his trouser pocket. “What hidden motives can I have in ordering you to do this, Lucas?”
“You can’t order me to do anything,” I said flatly. “You’re my liaison, not my controller in this. I was told to report through you directly to Mr. Hoover.”
Delgado kept his smile, but his gaze was flat and cold. “And as your liaison to Mr. Hoover, I’m telling you to rewrite that fucking report, asshole. Keep the facts. Downplay your involvement. If the director thinks that you’re jumping to Hemingway’s tune, he’ll pull you out of here so fucking fast that your beaner head will swim. And then what? Hemingway’s not going to accept another ‘liaison’ person. I’ll be doing ten times the amount of surveillance from outside the Crook Factory with those fuck-heads from the Havana branch of the Bureau breathing down my neck.”
I looked at my typed report and said nothing. I wondered who had been more competently trained in lethal hand-to-hand combat—Delgado or me? It would be interesting to find out.
Delgado reached into his bag, pulled out two thin dossiers, and set them on the table. “I thought you might be wanting these.” He stood and stretched. “I’m going to walk down the street to get a drink. Read ’em and leave them on the table. I’ll pick them up when I get back.”
I knew that he did not mean that I should leave classified material sitting in the empty safe house. He would be outside somewhere, waiting for me to leave.
I opened the thinner file first. This was not one of Hoover’s O/C files—merely a basic Bureau dossier. I saw from the first-page synopsis that there would be no surveillance reports or transcripts, no chamfering photostats or agent analyses; this woman had an FBI file similar to the files of millions of other American citizens—a result of isolated contacts with other subjects or groups under Bureau surveillance, or because of anonymous tips, or simply because this person’s name had come up somewhere, sometime, and a file had been begun.
Helga Sonneman had been born Helga Bischoff, in Düsseldorf, Germany, in August 1911. Her father had died serving the Kaiser in 1916, gassed during the Battle of the Somme. Helga’s mother had remarried in 1921, this time to Karl Friedrich Sonneman. Herr Sonneman had two daughters and three sons by a previous marriage; one of those half sisters to young Helga was Emmy Sonneman, the future wife of Hermann Goering.
Helga had met Inga Arvad in 1936 through her half sister Emmy. Arvad was in Berlin as a correspondent and had contacted the future Mrs. Goering for an interview. The women had gotten along so famously that Emmy Sonneman invited Inga Arvad first to her country home—where she met the twenty-five-year-old Helga, who was visiting Germany to view the glories of the Third Reich—and then to the private wedding itself.
According to the brief report, Helga Sonneman had moved to the United States in 1929, shortly after the stock market crash, first as a student at Wellesley College—where she had majored in both anthropology and archaeology—then briefly as the wife of an American surgeon from Boston, then—through the second half of the 1930s—as a U.S. citizen in her own right, divorced from the surgeon, living in New York, once again under her own name. Helga Sonneman had made her living for the past decade as an independent authenticator of ancient artifacts—spe
cifically, Mayan, Incan, and Aztec carvings and pottery. She had worked for several top American universities and was currently on retainer by the New York Museum of Natural History.
The report noted the connection to Goering and other top Nazi officials—the Sonnemans were especially friendly with Rudolf Hess, it seemed—but Helga’s trips back to Germany during the ’30s had been infrequent and apparently uneventful. It seemed that the attractive blonde had no interest in politics. Her travel over the past ten years had taken her to Europe occasionally, but much more frequently to Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and other parts of South and Central America.
References to Inga Arvad appeared in the dossier, of course. Besides knowing her from Germany and several trips to Denmark, Helga had been one of the people Inga had looked up after arriving in the United States in 1940. Indeed, Arvad had stayed at Sonneman’s New York apartment for some weeks until Dr. Paul Fejos had arrived from Europe. Cross-reference notes in Helga Sonneman’s file referred to comments in surveillance of Arvad at restaurants or parties with Axel Wenner-Gren, mentioning only “Miss Helga Sonneman, a friend of Mrs. Fejos, was also in attendance.”
In the late autumn of 1941, shortly after Inga’s lover, Wenner-Gren, had donated the Southern Cross to the Viking Fund, Dr. Fejos and the fund’s board of directors had hired Helga Sonneman as the expedition archaeologist and curator of discovered antiquities. A hastily typed note mentioned that she had flown to the Bahamas on April 15 of the current year, presumably to join the Viking Fund ship, the Southern Cross, which had been observed refueling there on April 17, 1942. End of file. There was no mention of Teddy Shell.
Teddy Shell’s dossier was much more substantial than Helga Sonneman’s.
According to photographs and fingerprints sent to the Bureau this week from Special Agent in Charge R. G. Leddy (Havana Office), the bald businessman known on the Southern Cross as Mr. Teddy Shell was definitely one Theodor Schlegel, an Abwehr agent wanted by the Brazilian federal police, by DOPS (the Delegacia Especial de Ordem Politica e Social—the Brazilian political police, specializing in counterintelligence)—and the FBI (SIS), for espionage activities in Brazil.
Theodor Schlegel had been born in Berlin in 1892. A soldier in World War I, Schlegel had been discharged as a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant in 1918 and had begun a successful career in business, becoming an executive in a major German steel firm based in Krefeld. In 1936, the steel company had sent Schlegel to Rio de Janeiro to dissolve a money-losing branch firm there. He had quickly completed that assignment and then set up a new affiliate—Companhia de Acos Marathon—henceforth referred to in the dossier as “the Marathon Steel Company.” During the years that the Third Reich lurched toward war and domination of Europe, Schlegel remained stationed in Brazil, running the Marathon Steel Company from its headquarters in Rio de Janeiro with frequent trips to its branch office in São Paulo. He also made frequent trips home to Germany, as well as trips to the United States to tour steel companies there. By 1941, Schlegel frequently visited New York under the passport name of Theodore Shell—a Dutch-German businessman and philanthropist. One of the U.S.-based nonprofit organizations to which Mr. Shell contributed, an IRS statement showed, was the Delaware-based Viking Fund. The social circles in New York knew the bald, bow-tied Mr. Shell as “Teddy.” There was a photograph in the dossier of “Teddy Shell” posing, drinks in hand, with a grinning Nelson Rockefeller.
The report could not state exactly when Theodor Schlegel, aka Teddy Shell, had been recruited by the Abwehr, but best estimates suggested as late as his annual trip to Germany in 1939. By 1940, DOPS and its American FBI advisers suspected that Schlegel was the German agent known as “Salama,” who reported on Allied shipping via a secret transmitter in or near Rio. At the same time, funds and coded messages were traveling to and from Salama by way of the German company Deutsch Edelstahlwerke, a firm which did business with steel executive Schlegel by day and transferred his bulkier messages to the Abwehr in Berlin by night.
Schlegel had come under initial suspicion because of reported contacts with a German engineer named Albrecht Gustav Engels, an Abwehr master spy and radio expert known to South and Central American counterespionage experts as code name “Alfredo.”
I did not have to read the intelligence summaries on Schlegel’s friend Engels. My work in Mexico, Colombia, and elsewhere had made me all too familiar with Alfredo.
Engels, theoretically Theodor Schlegel’s radio contact in Brazil, had been so successful in setting up his Nazi intelligence operation that by 1941 his central transmitter in Rio de Janeiro—code-named “Bolivar” by the SIS—was the hub of Abwehr information being sent from New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Mexico City/Quito, Valparaiso, and Buenos Aires. More than that, Alfredo—Herr Albrecht Gustav Engels—controlled several hundred agents operating without hindrance in all of those cities and a dozen more.
I knew from my own experience that in October of the previous year, 1941, Dusko Popov—the same “Tricycle” whom Ian Fleming had enjoyed trailing through Portuguese casinos the previous August—had flown to Rio to confer with Engels about the possibility of setting up a major clandestine radio station in the United States. According to the notes in this dossier, Theodor Schlegel had been present at that meeting and had flown back to New York with Popov under his alias of Teddy Shell.
And it had been Engels who had passed along the queries from Berlin to Popov—queries from the Japanese about the defenses at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
I thumbed to the end of Schlegel’s dossier.
In the spring of the current year, U.S. military authorities had been pushing the Brazilians to crack down on German espionage activities centered in their country. U.S. Chief of Staff George Marshall had sent a personal letter to General Goes Monteiro of the Brazilian army, begging and demanding that the Brazilian police and military take action. General Marshall had included excerpts of classified ONI and BSC—intercepted transmissions from Engels’s “Bolivar” transmitter—broadcasts which had sent the position and sailing times for the Queen Mary, then traveling without escort and carrying nine thousand American troops to the Far East.
The FBI had intercepted and copied General Marshall’s letter. One of the closing paragraphs read: “Had this boat been sunk with the inevitable loss of thousands of our soldiers, the incident would have imperiled the historic friendship between our countries had any suspicion of the manner of the betrayal of the vessel to its enemies reached the public….”
Translation: If the Queen Mary had been torpedoed due to the “Bolivar” transmissions and because of Brazilian inaction and incompetence, U.S. aid, military support, and goodwill would have been flushed down the crapper.
In response, the reports went on, DOPS and the Brazilian federal police—guided by ONI, BSC, SIS, FBI, and U.S. Army monitoring units and surveillance information—had lethargically begun making arrests in the Rio and São Paulo areas.
Theodor Schlegel had not been one of those picked up. The arrests had begun in mid-March and continued to the end of April. On April 4, according to the last report in the dossier, Theodor Schlegel—traveling as Teddy Shell and evidently ignorant of the roundup of his colleagues—had flown to the Bahamas and thence to New York. In Nassau, he had met with his friend Axel Wenner-Gren. In New York, he had met with Dr. Fejos and the board of directors of the Viking Fund, who had—in response to another philanthropical contribution from businessman Shell—appointed the bald, bow-tied German as director of the first expedition of the Viking Fund exploration vehicle, the Southern Cross.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, wiping the sweat from my forehead. This stuff made the fabled Gideon knot look like a Boy Scout’s simple sheepshank.
I left the dossiers on the table and went out into the heat and sunlight.
THE DEAD MAN’S CODEBOOK was driving me crazy with frustration.
I confess that cryptography had never been my strong suit, either at Quantico or at Camp X. I had sounded smug enough explaining the A
bwehr system to Hemingway earlier, but the truth was that although I had encountered German code often enough in Mexico and elsewhere, usually all I had to do with it was to send it along to the SIS experts in the field or back at the Bureau in Washington. Actually, the FBI was no great shakes at breaking code either, often farming out the job to ONI or Army G-2 or even State Department Intelligence, that nebulous branch of security for which Hemingway thought I was working.
My basic premises were correct, I was almost sure of that. The grids in Kohler’s personal codebook were in the standard format. One thing about the Germans: once they found an elegant system they stuck with it even though that was idiocy in a world where even the best code could be beaten by opposition experts. Although I had never confirmed it in my spying at the BSC camp in Canada, rumors were rife that the British had already broken the most difficult German codes and that many of the Brits’ cleverest commando raids and sea victories were based on that fact. On the other hand, German victories at sea and on the Continent continued to multiply, so if the British had actually shattered the German master codes and coding devices—especially for the Nazi submarine fleet—then the British high command was paying a huge price in lost ships and lives to keep that fact secret.
Meanwhile, all I had was the most basic Abwehr Funker (operator) code in front of me.
The basis for it was, I was certain, as simple as I had described to Hemingway. One or more of the books in Kohler’s berth almost certainly held the key word or phrase that was the basis for each encrypted transmission. The grids were all preset for twenty-six squares across and five down, so it would be the first twenty-six letters on the appointed page of the appointed book. But frequently only parts of the twenty-six grid spaces across were used, the first word on the appointed page of the appointed book determining the number.