A Gathering of Spies

by John Altman

  What else? What else could he have that Taylor would think made him valuable?

  His pipe was empty. He repacked it, tamped it down, and lit it. The library was heavy with the stillness of early morning. There wasn’t so much as an air-raid siren to distract him … and he still couldn’t figure it out.

  I’m taking quite a risk just by meeting with you.

  That was understandable. Winterbotham had become the enemy when he hadn’t been paying attention. His arguments for peace had made him a villain in his own country. So why would Taylor risk his peers’ disapproval by making contact? Why him?

  Because of Ruth, he thought suddenly.

  He’s hoping I’ll feel guilty enough about Ruth to want to throw myself into harm’s way.

  The thought enraged him, not least because it smacked of truth. It wasn’t his fault that Ruth had demanded to go to Poland, of course; he had tried to dissuade her. But perhaps he hadn’t tried hard enough. Perhaps …

  “Nonsense,” he said aloud.

  Perhaps, perhaps not. In any case, it still didn’t explain things. There were better chess players than Winterbotham; there were men with better politics than Winterbotham; and there was no shortage of men who had lost loved ones in the war and would be hungry for revenge.

  He sighed. He couldn’t sleep, but he was tired … so tired.

  It was 1943, and the war raged on. The war would keep raging on, regardless of his participation, for the foreseeable future. Things didn’t look as bleak as they had looked a few months before, that was true, but the outcome of the conflict was still far from certain. Hitler’s Wehrmacht had overreached in Russia, caught unawares by the devastating winter, and had suffered losses. There was no way to know how bad these losses had been, but Winterbotham thought they might have been very bad, very bad indeed, for the little Austrian corporal. At roughly the same time, Rommel had foundered in Africa. But these German setbacks were by no means enough to finish the war. At some point, before the end, the Allies would have to cross the pond and set foot in France.…

  It has nothing to do with me, Winterbotham thought.

  He sat and smoked pipe after pipe, and he kept thinking, It has nothing to do with me, nothing to do with me.

  When the sun came up, he found Taylor’s card and made a call.

  2

  HAM COMMON, SURREY

  JANUARY 1943

  The road meandered past St. Andrew’s Church, wandering through gently rolling hills, over a landscape glitter-bright with pinpricks of frost. Winterbotham, gazing out his window, found himself appreciating the view. The trees were skeletal but lovely in a rather bleak way that appealed to him. One forgot the small pleasures of nature, he reflected, when one spent all one’s time in the city. She was bleak and she was harsh, but she was also beautiful. And she would outlast them all—the war, the generals, the games, the bombs, the madmen, the soldiers, all of it.

  Taylor, sitting beside him, noticed the appreciative look on his face.

  “It’s pretty,” he said, “isn’t it?”

  Winterbotham nodded. “The war seems very far away,” he murmured.

  “It does indeed. But that’s deceptive, old chap. The real war is being fought—and won—not very far from here. Not very far at all.”

  “The real war?” Winterbotham said.

  “Well, some might take exception with that. The ones doing the fighting, for instance.” Taylor was watching him with bright, eager eyes. “But it’s true nonetheless. Our boys in the field would be doing a lot worse if we weren’t doing what we’re doing here. Take my word for it.”

  Now the car was moving alongside a low stone wall, approaching a gate festooned with barbed wire. Winterbotham could see two guards, machine guns in hand, coming forward to meet them.

  “What, exactly, are we doing here?” he asked.

  Taylor smiled. “That’s what you’re about to find out, old chap. And if you’re having second thoughts, now’s the time. Once we go through that gate, there’s no turning back.”

  They pulled up to the gate.

  Winterbotham held his tongue.

  “Good afternoon,” Taylor said politely, handing his papers to the stone-faced guard outside his window.

  Latchmere House, behind the low walls, behind the curls of barbed wire, between the spill of hastily constructed barracks, was a pale-green monstrosity.

  The building, three rambling stories of damp and mildew, had been built as a mental hospital after the Great War. The army had found euphemisms to disguise Latchmere’s true purpose; they had called it a “home”—so much nicer than “hospital”—for “victims of shell shock”—so much nicer than “mental patients.” But the architecture screamed “lunatic asylum,” and there was no mistaking it. The windows were narrow slits, far too small for a man to slip through. The rooms were bare, dark, drafty, and draconian.

  Taylor ushered him into a small chamber furnished with one small table and two rickety chairs. Grayish sunshine filtered in. The air smelled sour and earthy, like the air in a fruit cellar.

  “Have a seat,” Taylor said grandly, “and I’ll tell you the greatest secret of the war.”

  More dramatics, Winterbotham thought. But he sat, settling his bulk carefully into an unsteady chair, and took out his pipe.

  A small suitcase was resting on the table. Winterbotham looked it over curiously as he packed his orange-flavored tobacco. The case was tarnished metal, compact and nondescript. It was slightly too squat for a chessboard. He considered asking about it, and then decided that Taylor would explain in due time. This was Taylor’s show, after all, and he had to let Taylor go ahead as he liked—unnecessary drama and all.

  Taylor sat in the other chair, produced a cigarette, and waited until Winterbotham had his pipe going before lighting it. Then he leaned back, crossed his pudgy legs at the ankles, and said, “It’s rather a lot to digest, what I’m about to tell you. Stop me if I go too fast.”

  “Never fear,” Winterbotham said.

  “You remember what I said the last time we met—about playing games?”

  Winterbotham nodded. “Playing games is what you do.”

  “Not just us. Hitler, too. He and his friend Canaris.”

  Winterbotham nodded again. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was one of Hitler’s more infamous cronies—the head of the Nazi intelligence service, the Abwehr.

  “Would you care to guess, Harry, how many spies the Abwehr has sent to England since the early thirties?”

  “I wouldn’t have any idea.”

  “Well, we would, thank God. About a hundred. And that doesn’t include the Brits who sold us out to the Nazis—there are a few of those, too.”

  He waited to see what impact this revelation would have on Winterbotham. Winterbotham waited to see how long Taylor would wait. Finally, Taylor cleared his throat, disappointed, and continued.

  “Now, here’s the good part,” he said. “Of those hundred-odd agents, Harry, we’ve captured … How many would you guess?”

  “I wouldn’t have any idea.”

  “All of them,” Taylor said, and grinned.

  This time Winterbotham couldn’t help himself. He blinked with surprise. “All of them?”

  “Every last one.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “We weren’t, at first. But as time went on … Suffice it to say that if we had missed even one, Harry, we would know about it by now—for reasons that will become clear in a moment. We got most of them right at the start of the war. In September of thirty-nine, we rounded up all the enemy aliens in the country. We went over each case individually. If there was any doubt, we interned them. They’re not made of terribly stern stuff, these Abwehr agents, and few of them have any training worth mentioning. They cracked quickly. And then … What do you think we did then?”

  “You hanged them, no doubt.”

  “Some of them, yes. But some of them, we realized, could be of more value to us alive … and so we started Double Cross.”<
br />
  “Double Cross?”

  “That’s what this place is,” Taylor said. He made an expansive gesture with the hand holding the cigarette. “The headquarters of Operation Double Cross. The greatest misinformation campaign ever conducted in war or in peace. We have dozens of Abwehr agents here, Harry, and they’re all working for us. They use these”—he tapped the suitcase on the table—“these radios to send intelligence back to Hamburg. But in reality, everything they say is coming from us. Do you see?”

  Winterbotham nodded slowly. “You’re feeding them worthless information.”

  “Not …” Taylor trailed off.

  Winterbotham read his face in an instant. Taylor may have had his talents in this world, but concealing his thoughts was not among them.

  “Andrew,” Winterbotham said mildly, “if we’re going to be working together, it goes without saying that I’ll require your full confidence.”

  Taylor frowned. “Of course,” he said, but he didn’t look pleased. He cleared his throat. “Not exactly worthless,” he said. “And that’s where it gets tricky. We can’t simply feed them worthless information, or they’d realize that their spies have been compromised. No, Harry, the intelligence has to be true, at least for the most part. If Canaris loses faith in his spies, the jig is up, as they say—and we’ll need the operation to be in good working order as the war goes on. Whenever we send troops back to the mainland, next year or the year after, we’ll use Double Cross as our ace in the hole. We’ll make sure Hitler expects the landing to be exactly where it won’t be.”

  “So you’re sending true information?”

  Again, he could see Taylor hesitate.

  “It’s extremely delicate,” Taylor said then. “Yes, the bulk of the information is true. But of course, we don’t want to help our friend Canaris too much, or he might just win the war. We walk a very fine line here, Harry. Sometimes we provide intelligence of some value—it’s a sacrifice that has to be made. Sometimes we put a bit of a spin on the truth. If there’s an accident at an airfield, we’ll let one of their spies take credit for it, claiming sabotage. Sometimes we’ll manufacture something out of whole cloth that will seem, to reconnaissance planes, to be real. We have all sorts of people working for Double Cross. All sorts. Chess champions. Musicians. Crossword puzzle enthusiasts. Illusionists—magicians. Once we used mirrors to make one tank look like thirty. And they believed it.”

  Winterbotham whistled.

  Taylor nodded, finally satisfied with the effect he had created.

  “But you must appreciate the fragility of our situation,” he went on. “We have all sorts of fictions, mixed in with the truth, going out over these little suitcase radios. All it would take to raise suspicion is one Abwehr agent that we missed—just one—sending a report that goes against everything else. If one single agent slips through our trap, Harry, the whole operation could be compromised.”

  “It sounds dicey.”

  “It is. So you can see why I needed a total commitment from you. As I said, this is the best-kept secret of the war, and, if I may allow myself the conceit, the most important.”

  “Yes, I can see.”

  “So, you’ll forgive me my theatrics?”

  Winterbotham made a loose gesture.

  Taylor frowned. He took a long drag from his cigarette. The paper crackled. He exhaled a rafter of smoke toward the ceiling, then said, “Those are only the basics of Operation Double Cross. There’s more to it, of course. In fact, it’s phenomenally complicated. We need our intelligence to seem real, Harry, and we go to great lengths to create that impression. We try to keep our pet agents here at Latchmere for as little time as possible. Once we’re convinced they can be trusted, we put them back out into England, doing whatever it is Canaris thinks they’re doing. They live with their case officer, who conducts the surveillance that they are supposed to be conducting. Then, together, they go over what intelligence will be sent, what will be held back, what will be spun.”

  “What if they don’t prove as trustworthy as you think?”

  “Then they hang,” Taylor said.

  He looked at Winterbotham levelly.

  “Hm,” Winterbotham said.

  “I won’t keep anything from you, Harry. It’s a bloody business. Sometimes they go bad, and sometimes they need some extra convincing to turn in the first place. We try to keep everything friendly, for obvious reasons. We want them to be satisfied in their work for us. In fact, we damn near pamper them, trying to keep them happy. But it doesn’t always work out.”

  Winterbotham said nothing.

  “Our hands are far from clean,” Taylor said. “In our effort to keep Canaris in the dark about Double Cross, we’ve had to make sacrifices. We’ve had to pretend not to know about enemy operations that we did know about. There have been difficult decisions, and there have been casualties. Civilian casualties. Casualties that could have been avoided … but at the cost of the entire operation.”

  Winterbotham nodded shortly.

  “It’s not pleasant,” Taylor said.

  “No.”

  “But it must be done.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Don’t suppose. It’s a fact.”

  “Mm.”

  Taylor looked at him for a moment. He bit his lower lip. Then he nodded in agreement with some secret thought. “Somebody has to take the responsibility,” he said softly. “It’s not easy, Harry. But it must be done.”

  Winterbotham set his pipe down on the table. “What do you want from me?” he asked.

  “Three weeks ago—when I first got in touch with you—we received a new crop. Four agents, straight from Hamburg. Two of them parachuted in. One came on a U-boat and then paddled ashore in a dinghy. One came in under a false passport—Swiss. We got all of them, of course. As soon as they arrived, they got in touch with their contacts here. And their contacts work for us.”

  “They’re here now, at Latchmere?”

  “Three of them are, yes.”

  “Where’s the fourth?”

  “She chose not to cooperate,” Taylor said, and left it at that.

  Winterbotham picked up his pipe again. It had gone out. He held it without relighting it.

  “Of the remaining three,” Taylor continued after a moment, “there is one of particular interest to us here at Double Cross. His name is Rudolf Schroeder, although his papers call him Russell Webb. His assignment is to find work in a pub in the vicinity of the War Office. He’s to listen to the conversation, get a feeling for the atmosphere, and keep his eyes open for a possible convert. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “He’s looking for someone to turn.”

  “Precisely. Men come into the pub after a hard day of work and have a few pints, and their tongues loosen. Perhaps they talk about what they’re working on, or perhaps they complain about their bosses. If anybody complains too much, Schroeder moves in. He makes an offer. Straight forward—quid for service. And of course, a place of honor in their magnificent thousand-year Reich when this is all over.”

  “Hm.”

  “As far as the Abwehr knows,” Taylor said, “Schroeder is doing remarkably well. He’s already found work in a pub, and he’s settled into a boardinghouse that doesn’t suspect him. He’s sent back his first few reports. Nothing very earth-shaking: weather data, a few words about British morale, some demands for more spending money. But sometime soon, within the next few weeks, Schroeder is going to accomplish something far more impressive. He’s going to find the perfect candidate for turning. He’s going to make contact, and he’s going to have spectacular success.”

  “I see.”

  “All fabricated, you understand. But the appearance of truth is vital.”

  “Yes.”

  “To create the appearance of truth, Harry, we need to cleave very close to the actual truth.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why you’re our man.”

  Winterbotham lit his pipe again, and puffed on it
thoughtfully.

  “Harris Winterbotham,” Taylor said. “Professor of classics, war widower, and known dissembler. You don’t like Churchill, Harry. You don’t like his way of doing things, and you’ve made no secret of it. If Canaris checks on you, he won’t have to dig very deep to find out about your past.”

  “But I don’t work for the War Office.”

  “Ah! That’s where you’re wrong. For the past five months you’ve been working in the code-breaking division of Military Intelligence. Very hush-hush. Your expertise at chess, not to mention your all-around acumen”—the slightest edge of sarcasm crept into his voice—“makes you a valued member of our team. Of course, we’re aware of the … sensitive … nature of your politics, and so you don’t know as much as you might. We’ve kept you fairly isolated. But you know enough. You’ll be irresistible to Canaris.”

  “I see.”

  “Schroeder will mention in tonight’s report that he’s found a valuable lead. But for the time being, we’ll leave it at that. We want the Abwehr to be hungry for you, Harry. We’ll take our time on this. In two weeks, or four, or six, Schroeder will feel comfortable enough to approach you with an offer. He’ll find you willing. And at some point after that—”

  “At some point after that, I’ll begin spying for the Nazis.”

  “You’ll likely begin by telling them what you already know. And for that, Harry, God willing, they’ll want to meet with you face-to-face. They’ll want their own code-breakers working on you. They’ll want their information direct, not coming through Schroeder.”

  Winterbotham sent a ring of smoke floating toward the ceiling.

  “How will I meet them?” he asked.

  “We’re hoping they’ll arrange a treff—a clandestine meeting between Abwehr agents. It may be in a neutral place, like Portugal, or they may wish to bring you directly to the center of their operations: the headquarters of the Abwehr, in Berlin; their training facilities in Hamburg; or possibly, if Canaris thinks you’re important enough, all the way to the top—to Hitler himself. Into the Wolfsschanze. The Wolf’s Lair.”