A Gathering of Spies

by John Altman

  “At which point—”

  “At which point you’ll tell them exactly what we’ve told you to tell them. A bit of truth, a bit of lies, and a lot in between. And in the meantime you’ll keep your eyes open, Harry. You’ll see how the Abwehr works—from the inside. With luck, you’ll discover how much they know, or how much they suspect, about Double Cross. You’ll learn whatever you can about their plans, both past and future. You’ll remember every question they ask you, and the tone of voice when they ask it. Then you’ll come back and you’ll tell us everything. Everything.”

  Taylor leaned forward, elbows on table. “I don’t have to tell you how sensitive this is,” he said. “If they guess what you’re there for, Harry, they’ll kill you. But there’s more to it than that. If they manage to get you talking—”

  “The whole operation is compromised,” Winterbotham finished.

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s a risk you’re willing to take?”

  “Risk is an essential element of our game. For the chance to see the inner workings of an enemy intelligence organization, while they’re actually at war with us … for that, old chap, we’re willing to risk a lot.”

  “Everything.”

  “Yes. Everything.”

  “Hm,” Winterbotham said.

  “Problems may arise. Schroeder may prove less cooperative than we hope. Or Canaris more suspicious.”

  “Yes.”

  “But if it works, old chap … if we dangle you as the bait, and they bite …” He trailed off again, and arched an eyebrow inquisitively.

  “Do I have a choice?” Winterbotham asked.

  “Of course. This is dangerous, Harry. I think I’ve made that clear. And if you choose not to take part in it, nobody will blame you. We would invite you to remain here, at Latchmere, as our guest, for the duration of the war. But we wouldn’t blame you for an instant.”

  “Hm,” Winterbotham said.

  “So?”

  Winterbotham took a moment before answering. He made two more smoke rings, a large one and a small one, and sent the small one floating through the large one. Then he looked up at Taylor. Later, when he thought back on it, Taylor would remember Winterbotham’s eyes at that moment. They were small and sharp and hot, like twin smoldering coals. They were the eyes of the young Winterbotham—the wildcat.

  Looking back, Taylor realized that those eyes should have warned him. He should have known, at that instant, that Winterbotham had ideas of his own about working for MI-5.

  Winterbotham smiled, a rather morbid smile.

  “Where do I sign?” he said.

  LOS ALAMOS, NEW MEXICO

  APRIL 1943

  Catherine Danielson Carter couldn’t believe her eyes.

  She read the letter again, certain that she would find some indication that it was not what it seemed to be—it was a prank, a mistake, a gag. When she reached the end, her eyes skipped immediately back up to the first line. She was extremely conscious of the fact that she should really get the hell out of there, get away before somebody noticed she was missing from the party and came looking for her. But the letter in her hand was so incredible, so impossible, that she felt compelled to read it again, and then again, and then still again, although she had memorized it the first time through.

  Finally, after finishing it for the fifth time, she tore her eyes from the page. She felt loose and shaky inside; she steadied herself against the desk with one hand. She had known that something was going on, of course. You didn’t bring a hundred scientists and engineers and military personnel into the middle of the desert if something wasn’t going on. You didn’t build a hospital and a dormitory and a laboratory and an entire town if something wasn’t going on. But she had never suspected …

  She realized that she was going to throw up.

  She couldn’t do that, not there. She began to modulate her breathing the way Hagen had shown her so many years before, during her training. Panic is your worst enemy, Hagen had said. It comes from inside. You cannot kill it, and that makes it dangerous. The secret is not to let the panic control you. You control the panic.

  She focused on her breathing. Shallow, rhythmic. Soon enough, the nausea was slipping away. It left her feeling hollow. What had she stumbled onto? The thought brought the panic back all over again. Her breathing accelerated; her heart thudded violently in her chest. She would throw up, she thought, any second now, vomiting all over the makeshift office of General Leslie Groves. And then she would be lost. They would know she had been there—and they would find …

  No.

  She controlled the panic again.

  Steady breathing, shallow, in and out.

  Better.

  After a moment, she began to move. She returned the letter to the file, put the file back into the desk, closed the drawer, and jiggled the handle until she heard the tumblers fall home. The lock was a standard double wafer—more secure than a conventional wafer tumbler lock, but just barely.

  Catherine straightened. She looked around to make sure she hadn’t left any evidence of her visit. The office was faintly illuminated by a slab of light coming through a pane in the door. The room looked much as it had fifteen minutes before, when she had allowed herself entrance by picking the lock with a bobby pin. Security at Los Alamos, to somebody with her training, was a joke. Each Friday night for the past two months, she had slipped away and explored the camp, secret documents and all, almost at her leisure.

  She crossed the room and listened at the door. She knew from experience that two guards patrolled the hallway outside Groves’s office. But they were responsible for the entire building, which meant that one passed by only every ten minutes. She waited until she heard footsteps rapping down the corridor. She kept waiting until they had passed. Then she slipped out, closed the door behind herself, checked to make sure the lock had taken, and walked quickly and quietly toward the rear exit.

  When she came out into the night, the cold air was bracing. She moved back toward the canteen, where the party sounded as if it was gaining momentum. She could hear music, conversation, and much drunken laughter. It was always the same. There was a lot of steam to be blown off at Los Alamos. Before tonight, she had wondered why. Now she understood.

  My God, she thought again, what have I stumbled onto?

  Before going back inside the canteen, she took a moment to check herself. Her hair was fine; her clothes were fine, or as fine as they got, considering the shortage of good material; but her face, surely, would show something. Her face would reveal that she had discovered the secret. Her face would betray her.

  No.

  Her body was an instrument, and she was its master.

  She smiled—quite convincingly—then climbed the wooden steps and went to rejoin the party.

  That night she woke with a scream rising in her throat.

  She bolted up in bed. Richard was sleeping beside her, his chest rising and falling almost imperceptibly. Catherine sat with one hand clamped over her mouth, not looking at him, trembling. From not far away came the sounds of generators humming and, below that, the eerie whistle of desert wind.

  After a few minutes, the shakes began to subside. She let out her breath slowly, wiping a hand across her brow. The hand came away clammy.

  It had been a variation of the nightmare she had dreamed on and off for more than ten years, now. But this had been the worst in a long while—perhaps the worst ever. They all were gathered around her, everybody she knew from this life and the last, pointing and laughing. Hagen was there, barking orders in hoarse German, and Richard, her husband, looking at her with his imploring and somehow pathetic eyes. And Fritz was there, naked, as he had been the last time she had seen him, standing at the rail of a balcony in a hotel in Hamburg, tall and lean and fair. And behind them all was the gallows, swinging back and forth, creaking in a cold wind.…

  Just a dream, she thought.

  She got out of bed and padded into the bathroom. They shared the bat
hroom with another couple, who lived in the next apartment in the dormitory. She checked cursorily to make sure their door was closed. The bathroom had no running water at night, but a bucket by the sink was filled with an already drawn supply. She splashed two handfuls onto her face—freezing, no surprise—and then went back to bed.

  The letter. The goddamn letter.

  Why did she have to find the letter?

  It meant, of course, the end of Catherine Danielson Carter. And in one way that was a terrific relief. She hadn’t let Richard touch her in an intimate way for years now, and yet the fact of being his wife was trying enough. He was old, and he smelled old—his smell was probably what bothered her most about him. But there was more to it than that. There was the hurt look that lurked eternally in his eyes, and the eager-to-please way he carried himself around her. Pandering. It made her feel guilty and disgusted all at once.

  But there was more to it, even, than that. The fact was, she was still a young woman, or at least fairly young. She still had hopes of falling in love during her lifetime. And her relationship with Richard—even if it had not been founded on a lie—would never really give her any satisfaction. Every day she spent with him was another day she wasn’t spending falling in love with somebody else.

  That was the worst of it.

  Perhaps, she sometimes thought, perhaps it was even possible that Fritz would still think of her in that way. Ten years had passed, a third of their lives, and yet …

  She settled her head down on the pillow, gently. But she couldn’t fool herself into thinking that sleep would come again that night.

  The end of Catherine Danielson Carter, she thought again.

  It would be a relief in other ways as well. Catherine Danielson Carter was an immensely boring person who lived an immensely boring life. The reason she had gotten into this game in the first place, so many years before, was that she was precisely the opposite of an immensely boring person. She required adventure, risk, intrigue. She would relish the opportunity to stop playing the role of mousy little Catherine Carter …

  Except …

  Except that her chances of living long enough to play any other role were not very good.

  There. She had thought it.

  It was the end of Catherine Danielson Carter, but it was probably also the end of Katarina Heinrich.

  She didn’t want to die. But when she thought about the task that lay before her, now that she had found the letter, she realized that her chances were poor.

  The letter, in a way, was her death sentence.

  The night dragged on, and she thought about what had to happen next.

  She would have to report the contents of the letter to Germany. Not just the letter, of course, but the blueprints and the technical data and everything else she had found during her months snooping around Los Alamos—she had learned it all, using the photographic memory techniques Hagen had taught her. But the letter was the most important part, the part that proved the significance of the rest. She had perused the blueprints over and over again during the previous few months, absorbing every detail without ever understanding just what they meant; but there was no mistaking the letter.

  How would she get to Germany?

  She didn’t have her AFU—not that the AFU had the kind of range she would need to make contact with Hamburg from Los Alamos. Nor did she have a weapon. She had left it all behind when she had assumed the role of Catherine Danielson.

  She did not even have a network to help her, not one worth mentioning. Most German agents in America had been rounded up, condemned in the trial of 1941, and summarily executed. No, she would have to get the information to Germany herself, somehow, without depending on any help from anyone.…

  Except, perhaps, from Fritz.

  She thought about Fritz. He was stationed in England; she knew his address there. She had wrangled it from Hagen shortly after arriving in New York. Hagen, she knew, had bent his own rules by giving her the information; but then, Hagen had always been fond of her. He had sent the address along with an admonishment: not to contact Fritz unless she could contrive no other method of reaching her spymasters.

  When she had started spying again, after taking work at the Kearny plant, she had sent her intelligence directly to Fritz so he could wire it on to Berlin. She trusted Fritz. They had trained together under Hagen, in Hamburg, so long before. They also had been lovers, but at this point that was incidental. They both were Hagen’s agents, and so both had nothing to do with the incompetent Abwehr—that was what mattered now.

  If she could get to Fritz, he could get in touch with Hamburg.

  But getting to Fritz would not be easy.

  Still, the thought made her feel a bit more at peace. The odds were against her, but she was not completely alone. She would find Fritz, and then they would be in this together.

  She decided, eventually, that it was a great blessing, finding the letter. Yes, it might get her killed. But it would also force her to find courage. It would allow her to break the pattern she had fallen into, the safe but dull pattern of domestic life.

  There had been some black days spent as Catherine Danielson Carter. Days filled with monotony, self-doubt, and—until she had put her foot down—unwanted attentions.

  She had gone so deeply undercover, so suddenly, that she had not even informed her own spymasters of her plans. Hagen, she realized, would have no way of knowing about the opportunity onto which she had stumbled; and she, ironically, could not risk losing the opportunity by informing him of it—she never knew for certain that the American censors had not discovered her.

  Or perhaps that was only a rationalization.

  Who was to say, she’d begun to wonder with the passage of years, that she hadn’t simply lost her nerve?

  She’d watched the unfolding drama in Europe playing out from a safe distance, after all, in banner newspaper headlines. The coup of the Rhineland; the Anschluss of Austria; the invasion of Poland, and war; then Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into the conflict. When the Abwehr agents in New York had been rounded up and executed in 1941, Katarina had felt equal measures of regret and relief—for she, and precious few others, had been spared.

  She had tried to gather her courage, to reenter the fray. She had taken the job at Kearny. But the blueprints she’d found there were of limited value, and she was no ordinary agent, no collector of trivia. She would not jeopardize herself for mere trifles.

  Now she had found something worthy of her skills. The letter made the point irrefutable.

  Catherine Danielson Carter was dead. But in her death, Katarina Heinrich would find life.

  For a few days, anyway.

  She began to think about routes; a crease of concentration appeared between her eyes. There was a fantastic distance to be covered, and they would, of course, be looking for her the moment she left. A train to New York; a boat to England. Or perhaps a boat to Lisbon, or Madrid … from there to England … to Fritz … comforting, really, to fall back into the old ways of thinking, like coming home …

  When Richard Carter woke up with the sun, he was pleased to find his wife sleeping soundly.

  BENDLERSTRASSE, BERLIN

  Hagen was nervous.

  He climbed the steps of 72-76 Tirpitz Ufer, a drab five-story building made of colorless granite situated by the similarly drab waters of the Landwehrkanal. He told himself, as he climbed, that there was no reason to be nervous. Canaris had nothing on him. He, on the other hand, had plenty on Canaris. Much of it was speculative, but if push came to shove he would have ammunition readily at hand.

  There was no doubt in Hagen’s mind that Canaris was part of the sloppy conspiracy against der Führer, a conspiracy made up of military men left over from the toppled Weimar Republic. These men were crippled by their loyalty to the old ways, the Christian ways, the weak ways. Their conspiracy was doomed to failure. But so far the conspirators had not made any serious mistakes. They had covered their tracks well; and since Canaris had
not made any serious mistakes, few in Germany today were willing to speak out against him.

  But in the coming months, Hagen knew, more and more people from all through the Reich would be willing to levy accusations against Canaris. The war was going badly. The Russians were pushing back German forces every day, recapturing cities with terrible speed; and when the war went badly, people looked for somebody to blame. If one had given reason to be singled out for this blame, one was in trouble. Canaris was living on borrowed time—and if Hagen knew it, then Canaris knew it, too.

  So there was no reason to be nervous. Whatever questions Canaris had called him there to ask, Hagen could answer or not answer as he saw fit. The man would not dare push too hard, not at this precarious moment in his career.

  And yet he was nervous. Canaris, all appearances to the contrary, was a devious man. He was also a capable one. He had escaped from a prison camp in Genoa, during the first war, by killing the prison chaplain, putting on his clothes, and walking out past the guards. And this, they said, had been the second prison Canaris had escaped from. The first had come two years earlier, in Argentina; Canaris had escaped by rowboat and horseback. He was a resourceful man, and it would not pay to underestimate him.

  Hagen, who had killed his fair share of men himself, reached the top step of 72-76 Tirpitz Ufer. He took a moment to reassure himself again that there was no need to be nervous, then stepped into the shadowed foyer and received a security check from the guard in the booth on his left. The elevator was out of order. He was forced to clamber up the five flights of stairs. By the time he reached the high-ceilinged top floor, he was out of breath. He paused for a moment before proceeding through the great double doors at the end of the corridor. To be out of breath would reveal weakness.

  After a few moments, he felt ready to proceed. He stood up straight, tugged the wrinkles out of his dark suit, and went to his meeting with Canaris.

  Canaris, like Hagen, did not like to wear military regalia. Like Hagen, he wore an ordinary dark business suit. These men operated in a strata both above and to the side of standard military business. Like most spies, they tried to avoid calling attention to themselves.