The Crook Factory

by Dan Simmons

  “I made several swings to the south, between the key and the mainland, but didn’t find anything,” I said, my voice sounding strange to me again. “She must have started swimming.”

  “I thought she couldn’t swim,” he called from his high perch.

  I glared up at him and said nothing.

  “Maybe a shark snatched her right off the reef top,” he suggested.

  I drank some water from the canteen I had found bobbing half a mile south of the key. I wished I had some whiskey aboard.

  “Do you think last night’s U-boat might have picked her up?” asked Hemingway.

  I thought about that. It had its humorous dimensions. The U-boat captain would not have known that she was a German agent, of course, as he peered through his periscope at this naked woman apparently standing on water twenty miles from land. If she had been picked up by a submarine whose crew had been away from land for several months, whatever was happening to her now would be far beyond anything I might have planned to make her talk. Of course, she could have explained her situation and identity in rapid-fire German, but I did not think that would have changed the outcome.

  “Not a chance in hell,” I said. “She either swam for it or was knocked off the key by a wave and drowned.”

  Hemingway looked to the east and nodded. “Before I left, Saxon said that he’d checked the radio.”

  “And?”

  “She broke one of the tubes. He doesn’t have a replacement, so we can’t send or receive until we get back and order another fucking vacuum tube.”

  I said nothing. The chop and the sight of the Pilar bobbing up and down were making me sick to my stomach. But then, I had felt sick to my stomach before that.

  “All right,” I called up to him, “we get the kids and your pals and head home.”

  “What do we say happened to Miss Maria?”

  “We tell them that she got homesick and I took her to the mainland so she could go home to her village,” I said. I looked back to the southeast. Palmarito, near La Prueba, was in that general direction.

  “We won’t have another chance to talk in private,” said Hemingway. He had put the battered sombrero back on, and tiny trapezoids of sunlight illuminated his face. “What happens when we get back but don’t deliver the courier packet as planned?”

  I sipped from the canteen again and then capped it and strung it over the back of the driver’s seat. I wiped my mouth. Sunlight dancing on the wavetops and chrome was making me dizzy. “When we don’t do our part, they’ll either call off their operation and go away or…”

  “Or?” called Hemingway.

  “Or send the other member of their assassination team after us.”

  “After me, you mean,” said Hemingway.

  I shrugged.

  “Can’t we do anything to preempt them?” he said. “Go after this fucking Hauptsturmführer Becker, maybe?”

  “We can try,” I said. “But my guess is that Becker’s dived deep. He’ll get word to his agents to do what they have to do and he’ll be on the next boat to Brazil or back to Germany. He may already be gone.”

  “You think he was the one with the lantern last night? I think that our dead German boys saw the man before the one in hiding killed them. They thought they were home safe. Do you think it was Becker acting as a Judas goat?”

  “Yeah. Maybe. How the fuck should I know?”

  “Don’t get testy, Lucas.” He looked back to the east. “This is inconvenient.”

  “What is?”

  The big man stood easily, legs apart to balance himself against the rocking of the Pilar, and grinned down at me. “Now we have to rename that disappearing little key for our charts. How does Cayo Puta Perdida sound?”

  I shook my head, thumbed the engine to life, and pointed the bow west by northwest.

  26

  I HAD NEVER BEEN QUITE sure why they called them safe houses. Some very unsafe things took place in safe houses.

  I arrived on time and walked in without caution or preamble. Delgado was in his usual chair opposite the door, straddling it in his usual manner, with his usual contemptuous half-smile hovering around his mouth. He looked tanned and bored. His white snap-brim fedora was on the table next to a bottle of Mexican beer. From time to time he took a sip of beer. He did not offer me any. I sat and placed both my hands on the tabletop.

  “So? Did you all enjoy your cruise?” His voice was as self-amused and sarcastic as ever.

  “Sure.”

  “You’re bringing the women and children along these days,” said Delgado, his pale eyes looking through me. “Has Hemingway given up any semblance of using our taxpayers’ gasoline for government service?”

  I shrugged.

  Delgado sighed and set the bottle back on the table. “All right, where’s the report?”

  I held out my empty hands. “Nothing to report,” I said. “Nothing sighted. Nothing found. Even the radio got broken, so nothing heard.”

  Delgado smiled and stared. “How did it get broken, Lucas?”

  “Clumsy Marine,” I said. “Then people got tired and sunburned and sick, so we came home.”

  “With no report?”

  “With no report.”

  Delgado shook his head slowly. “Lucas, Lucas, Lucas.”

  I waited.

  Delgado drank the last of his beer. It looked warm. He belched. “Well,” he said softly, “I don’t have to tell you what a disappointment this operation… and you… have been to Mr. Ladd and Director Hoover and the others.”

  I said nothing.

  Delgado gestured with his thumb. “You carrying that .357 in your belt for a reason?”

  “Havana’s a dangerous city,” I said.

  Delgado nodded. “Are you blowing your cover with Hemingway, or don’t you give a shit anymore?”

  “It’s Hemingway who doesn’t give a shit anymore,” I said. “He doesn’t care who I am or who the opposition is. He’s getting bored with his Crook Factory game and of chasing phantom submarines.”

  “So are we,” said Delgado, his gaze flat and cold.

  “Who is we?” I said, returning that gaze.

  “The Bureau,” said Delgado. “Your employers. The people who pay your salary.”

  “The taxpayers are getting bored with the Crook Factory?” I said.

  Delgado did not smile. Or, rather, his curled half-smile did not change. “You realize, don’t you, Lucas, that it’s just a matter of days before you get pulled off this assignment and dragged back to Washington to be held accountable?”

  I shrugged. “Fine with me.”

  “It won’t be fine with you when it’s over,” said Delgado, his voice finally carrying a message other than sarcasm. Threat. He sighed again and stood up. I noticed for the fiftieth time that he sometimes carried his weapon in a shoulder holster under his left arm and at other times wore it in a holster on his belt, on the left side, just as I preferred. I wondered how he decided which way he would dress when he got up in the morning.

  “Okay,” he said, smiling broadly now. “I think that does it with us down here, Lucas. This was bullshit from the start, and you turned it into even deeper bullshit. A total waste of my time as well as the Bureau’s. I’ll fly back today or tomorrow to report in person. I’m sure you’ll be hearing from Mr. Ladd or the Director through regular channels.”

  I nodded and watched his hands. He held one out.

  “No hard feelings, Lucas? Whatever happens.”

  I shook the hand.

  Delgado left his empty beer bottle on the table and walked to the door, squinting out at the brilliant sunlight. “I hope my next assignment is in someplace cool.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He started to go and then paused, leaning back in with his hand on the door frame. “Hey, how is your little whore doing? I didn’t see her when you guys docked last night.”

  I smiled politely. “She’s doing fine. She was below deck, sleeping.”

  “Sound sleeper if
she can snooze through all that banging around and shouting.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Delgado put on his white hat, snapped down the brim, and tapped a one-finger salute against it. “Good luck with whatever they send you next, Lucas.” Then he was gone.

  “Yeah,” I said to the empty safe house.

  ON SUNDAY, August 16, knowing that he might very well be the target of a ruthless Sicherheitsdienst assassin, Hemingway had one of his weekend pool parties. Most of the usual suspects were there—Ambassador Braden and his lovely wife and their two daughters; Bob Joyce and his wife, Jane; Mr. and Mrs. Ellis Briggs and their two kids; Winston Guest, wearing an expensive blue blazer and looking completely different with his hair combed and slicked back; Patchi; Sinsky; the Kangaroo; the Black Priest; a bunch of the writer’s other Basque and athlete friends; the Herrera brothers; some of his Club de Cazadores Cuban shooting pals such as Rodrigo Diáz, Mungo Peréz, and Cucu Kohly; Patrick and Gregory and half a dozen of their baseball-playing buddies—and even Helga Sonneman showed up, announcing that the Southern Cross had finished its work in these waters and was ready to head for Peru.

  I did not have time for the party, which is just as well since I was not invited. The previous evening, I had tailed Delgado to his hotel, waited across the street through the night, and followed him to the airport in the morning. He left on the eleven A.M. flight to Miami. The woman at the ticket counter said that he had purchased a connecting flight to Washington, D.C.

  This meant nothing, of course. If he was the other Todt assassin, his departure could have been for my benefit. Or he might be a double agent but was leaving the country much as Schlegel had. Or he might be the loyal FBI agent he appeared to be, returning to the Justice Building to report on his success in whatever operation he had been running to turn Becker at the same time he was reporting on my failure.

  It worried me, being away from Hemingway, but I had set Delgado at the top of my threat assessment checklist. The writer was so busy preparing for his Sunday soirée that he did not notice that I had the Crook Factory agents—at least those not drinking his whiskey at the party—coming and going through his hedges and flower gardens like gophers.

  Lieutenant Maldonado was my second most serious worry, but he had been seen in Havana during the previous few days, and I had some of the waiters and wharf rats downtown keeping a watch on the policeman. I posted boys in San Francisco de Paula to cut across country to the finca with a warning if they saw Maldonado’s car coming down the Central Highway. I had all of the Crook Factory’s remaining operatives keep a watch for Haupsturmführer Johann Siegfried Becker in Old Havana, Cojímar, the dock areas, the coastal areas, and wherever German sympathizers lived or hung out. I paid two of the best young operatives twenty-five dollars each—a fortune—to stay at the airport and keep watch for Delgado’s return. They were warned repeatedly not to let him spot them, but to telephone the finca or rush there on their motorbikes if they saw him.

  Finally, I ordered Don Saxon to alternate shifts in the Pilar’s radio room with me, around the clock. He was sullen to the point of rebellion about this, and it was incredibly inconvenient for me, since it took almost as long to drive to Cojímar from the finca as it did to drive to Havana, but I had little choice. The only sophisticated radio available to us on this part of the Cuban coast was in Hemingway’s boat.

  Odds were that we would not catch a transmission in Cojímar anyway, but the Southern Cross was in Havana Harbor just down the coast, there had been reports of submarine sightings as close as Key Paraíso, and I had a hunch that messages would come to Columbia via local broadcasts. Also, I had no other choice.

  All that day, Monday, August 17, there was an excess of normalcy. Lieutenant Maldonado went about his police business; Hauptsturmführer Becker continued to be absent or invisible; there was no sight of or word from Delgado; no one tried to kill Hemingway or his boys at the end-of-the-summer shooting competition at the Club de Cazadores; the radio hissed and popped through the afternoon or carried coded naval chatter that meant nothing to us or occasionally snarled in static-lashed German from the real U-boat war many hundreds and hundreds of miles to the north.

  Then a little after one A.M. on the morning of Tuesday, August 18, I snapped awake as the familiar keying of shortwave beeped in my earphones. I was taking notes before I was awake. A minute later, using just the flashlight to read my notes and trying to drown out Saxon’s snores from the forward compartment, I realized that this was a book code—based on Geopolitík, page 198. The signal had been strong, probably coming from less than twenty miles away. It was my hunch that it was being broadcast from a powerful transmitter from land near Havana, or from a boat nearby.

  It took me only a few minutes to block the grid and translate.

  OPERATION RAVEN SHUT DOWN REPEAT SHUTDOWN

  But this was in the compromised book code. We were meant to know what was transmitted via this code. Twenty minutes later, another strong signal came through, apparently from the same local transmitter. But this time, it was in the numerical code I had bullied from Schlegel. It took longer to record and decrypt this and then translate it from the German:

  COLUMBIATO U296ANDADLHAMBURG

  AUGUST29BRITSC122DEPARTSNYHARBOR

  SEPT3BRITHX229DEPARTSNY

  SC122[51VESSELS13COLUMNS]

  HX229[38VESSELS11COLUMNS]

  POINTALPHASC122STEER67DTHEN49DNORTH40DEAST

  POINTALPHAHX229STEER58DTHEN41DNORTH28DEAST

  This was hard intelligence being transmitted from Cuba to a submarine in the Caribbean and to Hamburg. On August 29, a British convoy—SC122—with fifty-one vessels sailing in thirteen columns was to depart New York Harbor. Equivalent information was given for British Convoy HX229, departing September 3 with thirty-eight vessels. The data in the last two lines were specific sailing instructions for the convoy at “Point Alpha”—a predetermined point in the North Atlantic obviously known by the German U-boat wolf packs.

  Agent Columbia was still in Cuba and was now transmitting hard information to the waiting subs.

  A little after three A.M., an even longer message from Columbia came through, encrypted in the “secure” numerical code and directed to the RSHA control in Hamburg and Berlin:

  PRIORITY. HAVE AUTHENTICATED PREVIOUS REPORTS OF FORTHCOMING ALLIED LANDING IN FRANCE. NATURE OF OPERATION: LIMITED TO ONE DIVISION STRENGTH. NOT REPEAT NOT FULL SCALE INVASION. TARGET: DIEPPE AND WEHRMACHT FIELD HQ AT QUIBERVILLE. TROOPS 2ND CANADIAN DIVISION. COMMANDER GENERAL CRERAR. CODE NAME: OPERATION RUTTER. DATE OF OPERATION: WAS SET FOR MIDSUMMERS DAY. DELAYED BECAUSE OF WEATHER. NOW SET FOR PERIOD AUGUST 19–AUGUST 21. CHECK WITH AFUS IN GB RE RADIO TRAFFIC. UPON CONFIRMATION ALERT WEHRMACHT. FOR YOUR INFORMATION PANAMA DISAPPEARED. DO NOT REPEAT DO NOT INFORM ABWEHR. COLUMBIA.

  I could only stare at the notepad and wipe the cold sweat from my forehead. The “Check with AFUS in GB re radio traffic” must refer to having other Agentenfunkgerät, or agents with secret radio transmitters in Great Britain, check British military radio traffic. Which meant that the Germans had broken at least some of the British army or naval code.

  A little after four A.M., Saxon came in to relieve me. I told him to go back to sleep. At 4:52 A.M., this message came in weak but clear from German shortwave relayed from a U-boat somewhere in the Caribbean:

  CONTROL TO COLUMBIA. OKM SAY RN SIGNALS HAVE BEEN MENTIONING OPERATION JUBILEE SINCE MAY. WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT JUBILEE?

  This confirmed my suspicions. “OKM” stood for Oberkommando der Marine, the German navy. “RN” had to be the Royal Navy. The Nazis had definitely broken the Royal Navy’s code. At 5:22 A.M. this arrived strong and clear, obviously from a transmitter not many miles away from the Pilar:

  JUBILEE DEFINITELY SECURITY COVER NAME FOR OPERATION RUTTER. ORDER OF BATTLE INCLUDED IN NEXT TRANSMISSION. AWAITING ORDERS. COLUMBIA.

  Twenty minutes later, another, shorter, message came through in SD numerical code:

  COLUMBIA GO
OD WORK. CONTINUE TRANSMISSIONS AS INFORMATION ARRIVES. PART ONE OF OPERATION RAVEN COMPLETED. YOU ARE AUTHORIZED TO KILL GOETHE. GOOD LUCK AND HEIL HITLER.

  “TELL ME AGAIN,” said Hemingway later that same Tuesday morning. “Why do you think it’s me they want to kill?”

  “ ‘Goethe,’ ” I said. “It’s a lazy man’s code for ‘writer’… and you’re the only writer I can think of in all this mess.”

  “Marty’s a writer,” said Hemingway. “And her former last name begins with g.”

  “And she’s safely… where?” I said. “Dutch Guiana?”

  “Why would they use such an obvious code?” grumbled Hemingway.

  I shook my head. “You’re forgetting… this was in their onetime SD AMT VI numerical code. Schlegel hasn’t yet admitted that he spilled the beans. In fact, Schlegel was probably arrested as soon as he returned to Brazil. He might have had a fair trial and been executed by now.”

  Hemingway looked skeptical.

  “Besides,” I said, “we’ll know in a few days if this information on the upcoming British-Canadian Dieppe raid is accurate.”

  “If it is,” said Hemingway, touching his swollen ear, “it will be one hell of a slaughter.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But more importantly, it will tell us that they’re not aware that this code has been compromised. They’d never risk our turning this over to the FBI or OSS or ONI if it’s real.”

  “Are we going to turn it over to the FBI, OSS, or ONI?” said Hemingway.

  I shook my head again. “I don’t think it would help if we did. If these possible invasion dates are accurate, we’d only have three days at the most to try to stop the raid. Something that big doesn’t grind to a halt that quickly.”

  “But if those Canadians go ashore with the Wehrmacht knowing they’re coming and waiting for them…” said Hemingway, and stopped, his eyes focused on something not in the finca’s living room.