Agents of Treachery

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  By the second paragraph I learned that Parker had been considered a probable spy almost from the moment he had boarded the train. By the fourth paragraph I learned they had grilled him for twelve hours, off and on. The details were scanty—they always were in these reports when the Gestapo was pulling out all the stops—but I was familiar with enough eyewitness accounts of their usual tactics to fill in the blanks: Force them to stand for hours on end. Let them pee in their pants while they waited. Beat them, perhaps, and, if that didn’t work, beat them harder, or threaten them with a firing squad.

  Spy was the word the report kept using, over and over. Twelve hours of this, yet Parker, the veteran of only a single combat mission over Germany, held out. Flagg’s judgment proved correct. He had hidden reserves. In fact, he had done us all one better. Lieutenant Parker had tried to escape.

  It happened early on the following morning, the report said, right after the sentry left the room for a smoke. The officer in charge okayed the break because the subject had been at his lowest ebb. And at this point in the report, perhaps to cover his ass, the officer allowed himself the luxury of a detailed description of the subject’s physical state: one eye swollen shut, bruises about the face and chest, shins bleeding, apparent exhaustion due to sleep deprivation. Yet no sooner had the sentry made himself scarce than Parker had somehow managed to overcome the interrogating officer and throw open the door.

  He made it about twenty yards before the gunshots caught him. He then survived another two hours before dying of his wounds. The reporting officer seemed resigned to the idea of being reprimanded for his lapse in judgment, which had led to the loss of a potentially valuable prisoner before any useful information had been extracted.

  By then my hands were cold, my feet as well. I sighed deeply, shut the folder, and looked up at the clock. It was an hour past our usual closing time, and my assistant was eyeing me curiously from his desk. He was anxious to leave. What I needed was a stiff drink, although this time a pitcher of gimlets wasn’t going to be enough. But first I had one more bit of business here to take care of.

  I carried the folder to a table next to my assistant’s desk. For a moment I hovered over the burn box. As I prepared to drop in the report for destruction, I like to believe that I was not guided chiefly by an instinct of self-preservation. I was thinking as well of Parker’s parents, perhaps still on their farm near Emporia. Having a son of my own now, I wondered what it would be like to hear that your only child had died while protecting secrets that he wasn’t supposed to protect, that he had failed in his mission by being too brave and too strong.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to let go of the folder.

  “Sir?” my assistant asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “This one belongs with the OSS stuff.”

  “Classified?”

  I paused, still hovering.

  “No. In fact, I’d like it to get some circulation. You go on. I’ll prepare the translation and a distribution list and have it ready for you to send out copies in the morning.”

  He was gone within seconds, and I settled back at my desk with the folder still in hand. The list came immediately to mind. Colonel Gill and Butchart, wherever they might be, would receive copies. Dulles, too, down at his big desk in the director’s office of the agency we now called the CIA. Or perhaps each of them already knew, and always had. In that case, they needed to know that others had also found out.

  But what about Parker’s parents? I would spare them the gory details, of course, but they at least deserved the gist of the story, beginning with that first meeting aboard the train. The most important part, however, would be the summation, and I already had one in mind: Your son didn’t tell the Germans a word. Not one. In fact, he did exactly as we asked, even if not at all as we had planned. The ball never left his mitt.

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  * * * *

  HEDGED IN

  Stella Rimington

  Ron Haddock usually knew what he wanted to do. Just now, he wanted to put a bullet through the rear tires of the ancient Bentley convertible sitting on the drive in front of his living room window. But he couldn’t, any more than he could grind his teeth. He couldn’t grind his teeth because he’d got the chewing gum habit during his years as an armed policeman, standing out in the rain guarding embassies or waiting for criminals to make their next move, and he was chewing now to keep calm. And he couldn’t shoot up the Bentley’s tires because the car belonged to his next-door neighbor, and it had every right to be there. The drive that led from Haddock’s gate to his front door didn’t belong to him, due to some ridiculous property rights that went back to the time of William the Conqueror. The bastard next door actually had the right to park his car there, which made Haddock angry.

  Everything about his next-door neighbor made Haddock angry. It made him angry that the bastard had planted a hedge of conifers fifteen feet high between his house and Haddock’s bungalow, a hedge that took all Haddock’s light at front and back and incidentally blocked the best track out into the fields when Haddock wanted to go rabbit-shooting.

  Perhaps his neighbor shouldn’t have made him quite so angry, because after all, the man was away on business more than a third of the time. But that made him angry, too, because Haddock didn’t like people who came and went; it was shifty and unreliable. Criminals, the lot of them, deserved to be shot. The bastard had even woken him up one day in the early morning to get him to unjam his garden gate to let the Bentley in. And he wouldn’t sell the drive. When Haddock had approached him about that, he’d said he needed the space for his second car. His number-one car was an Audi that he kept outside his own house, invisible behind the conifers. Evidently he liked to have a second exit when he needed it. Something very fishy about that, in Haddock’s opinion.

  Where was Phyllis? Haddock asked himself, looking at his watch. It was past noon, and she was supposed to be back from the gym by now to get his lunch. That was the arrangement between them. Three times a week she went to the gym, came back, and made lunch. Then it was his turn—down for the afternoon to the gun club.

  With guns, any kind of gun, Haddock was an artist, because he really loved them. Guns were straight. They did as you told them and didn’t argue. They were facts, powerful facts, things you could hold, things you could fondle without any comeback, with no complications. He specialized in veteran guns, Lee-Enfields, Webleys, Mausers, Colts. None of that modern arty-farty Russian stuff, or modern anything for that matter. Except for just one gun, his pride and joy, his Barrett sniper rifle, the one gun he really possessed because no one knew he had it. His unlicensed gun, the gun he could only ever use outside, at night, with its wonderful night sight, and then not often. Not just unlicensed—it had never been registered in England at all, because Haddock had picked it out of the hold of a small boat that was running guns to the IRA when he had been on antiterror duty, all of fifteen years ago. Yes, he’d taken a risk, a big one. He’d have been out of the force the day they found out that he’d retained any criminal property, never mind an unlicensed, unregistered firearm.

  Haddock grinned to himself. He’d outsmarted his own people and got away with it. Then he stopped grinning. After all, they had thrown him out. Thrown him out of Armed Response, anyway, and that to him was out of everything. So he had retired, about five years ago, married Phyllis, and started chicken farming. She’d been some kind of policewoman herself, but she had inherited money and was prepared to settle down. The chicken farming hadn’t worked out, so they’d moved here, living mostly on Phyllis’s capital and pension in a down-market bungalow in rural Norfolk.

  His dismissal from Armed Response had been a bad time— all other people’s fault, of course. He’d been at an anti-Iraq War demonstration, part of an Armed Response team. They’d been sitting quietly on the edges of the action, just waiting for something to happen, never thinking they’d be needed. Then this bloke had come along—well, he was being shoved along by about a dozen of the demonstrato
rs, waving their placards and yelling their slogans, with him in front. He was carrying what was obviously a gun, wrapped in brown paper. He waved it at some of the uniformed guys, threatening them. Had he heard Haddock’s challenge? Of course he had, they all had, but the Enquiry didn’t think it had been properly made. The Enquiry— he snorted to himself—a gang of snooty bastards who’d never seen police action in the raw, never faced a screaming crowd, thought it was all as easy as policing a church garden party. Well, Haddock had shot him, and when they’d ripped off the brown paper, it had turned out to be a wooden chair leg he’d been carving. Served the idiot right for trying to deceive the police. What had the fool thought he was doing, brandishing an offensive weapon that looked like a gun? How many people had he been going to hit over the head with it?

  Haddock looked in the fridge for a can of beer that he wasn’t supposed to have before Phyllis got back, and, as he did so, a noise outside the window caused him to turn around and look out. The door of the Bentley was open and there was Mr. Next-Door leaning in, fiddling with the passenger light. Haddock hadn’t even known he was at home, and now there he was, off again. He’d already opened the drive gate. Haddock watched him climb into the car. The car rolled slowly down the drive, turned left at the road, and drove away. And he didn’t get out to shut the gate. The bastard never did.

  Haddock watched him go. How much did he know about the man? Only that he came and went more than was good for him. Foreign sort of name, Lukas, spelled with a “k.” There were immigrants all over the place nowadays. He was an average-looking sort of guy, medium build, rather sharp-faced, nothing noticeable, one of those people you could describe in twenty seconds or else it took you half an hour. He wasn’t British—not English anyway. Maybe he was Welsh. Unreliable people, the Welsh. Haddock had known a Pole with a German accent who had turned out to be a Welshman from Caernarvon.

  Whatever way you looked at it, he wasn’t a local, not a Norfolk man. He was some kind of a radio buff, too. He had every kind of gadget in there; you could see some of them from the bridle track that went past his place. Aerials on the chimney. They didn’t fit with a thought that Haddock had often had, that he might be one of those secret womanizers, covering up his antics with girls behind a conifer hedge. If he was burying bodies in the garden, Haddock wouldn’t be able to see him at it.

  A sudden thought struck Haddock. Given that the bloke was certainly dodgy, probably a criminal, did he carry a gun? It was something that had been part of his life’s business to recognize, something that could cost you your life if you got it wrong. It was axiomatic with him to run the rule over any stranger, even one in a top hat at a wedding. He hadn’t noticed any of the usual slight bulges or the absence of them, for that matter. But that in itself was interesting; maybe the bloke did carry, but made it his business to conceal the fact. That made him a professional. There were ways of moving, ways of not standing still, that kept even an expert guessing. Haddock knew them all, but he still didn’t know whether the guy carried a gun, and that was starting to worry him.

  He heard the side door opening. That would be Phyllis. It was Phyllis, still in her tracksuit and trainers, with her clothes in a duffel bag over her shoulder. Haddock forced a smile, wrenching his mind away from his neighbor and the fact that he was hungry, and she’d want to have a shower before she did anything about lunch. Why was she so late? His sessions at the gun club were only three hours, and he was in line for losing half an hour already. But it didn’t do to shout at Phyllis. She had her ways of getting back.

  “Something kept you, darling?”

  She clicked her tongue. One of her irritating habits. “Did you remember to empty the kitchen bin? Something’s smelling,” she said.

  “I forgot. Sorry.”

  “Well, do it now. I’ll be down when I’ve powdered my nose.”

  It was true that her face was red and her nose looked as though it needed powdering. And for that matter her hair looked as though she’d been pulled through a bush backward.

  “Tough routine at the gym today?”

  She gave him a glance and disappeared around the corner and down the corridor to the bathroom.

  He stored it away in his mind, where it collided with an identical thought that had been lying there since Monday, her last gym session. Same sequence. Just after Lukas had gone out, Phyllis appeared, twenty-five minutes late, looking as though she’d been through the mangle.

  Phyllis. Cool, cool Phyllis. Twenty years younger than himself. Not yet forty. Maybe it was best not to say too much, just try to take it easy. Damage limitation, that was the mode with Phyllis. One thing that never went down well with her was curiosity. Any kind of inquiry about what she had been doing or who she’d seen, and she took offense.

  He could hear Phyllis in the bathroom now, and it came to him in a flood that he was jealous—dead, mad jealous, angry jealous. Of course it was rubbish; of course Phyllis had been at the gym; of course she wasn’t having it off with that Czecho-Hungarian sod who lived next door. But what if she was? By God, if he found she had been, he’d flog her with his police belt, studs and all. Come to think of it, he’d always wanted to do that. He’d flog her to death, and then go out and kill the bastard and then turn the gun on himself. He stopped, suddenly, almost choking, breathing fast, eyes watering, and tried to get a grip on himself.

  “Something the matter, dear?”

  Cool, ironic Phyllis. He said nothing.

  “Well, I mean, you look such an idiot standing there panting with that smelly plastic bag in your hand. Look, give it to me. I’ll put it in the bin. Lunch is in that carrier bag. I got it from Marks and Spencer. Your favorite chocolate pudding. Two for one offer today.”

  “I don’t want lunch. I’m going for a walk.”

  “Relax, Ron, and just sit down. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. They don’t come in daylight, you know.”

  He sat down, ate his lunch, and thought. The gun club was off. While Phyllis had her afternoon nap, he was going to look around next door. Now that it occurred to him, he was amazed that he had never thought to do it before.

  The bedroom door closed. He looked at his watch. Half past two. He slipped his mobile into his pocket.

  “Bye, darling.”

  “Bye. Have a good time. Don’t shoot anybody you shouldn’t.”

  He made a face at the bedroom door and set off down the drive. Police training kicked in. There was no question of making a frontal approach. At the end of the drive, he turned to the right. Forty yards up the road, he vaulted a gate, walked across the field up to the corner of the forest plantation, and turned right toward the hay barn that now lay between him and the two properties. There was no need for concealment—Phyllis couldn’t see him from the bedroom and Lukas was out—but he was still glad of the sunken lane that connected the barn to his objective. Leaning against the barn, he took out his mobile and dialed a number.

  “Gemini Health Club.”

  “Is Mrs. Haddock there? I had been expecting to meet her for lunch.”

  “Who’s speaking?”

  “My name’s Ron Morley. A friend.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Morley. I can’t help. Mrs. Haddock didn’t come in this morning. Can we give her a message if she does come in?”

  Haddock depressed the call button and slipped the mobile into his pocket. He was thinking clearly now. If not the Czecho bastard, then someone else. Her story had better be good.

  He walked down the hill. It was early May. The apple trees were covered with blossoms; the countryside looked beautiful, but Haddock didn’t notice it; he didn’t do beauty. He reached the bridle path past Lukas’s place.

  This house was much older than Haddock’s bungalow. It was originally a farmhouse, maybe a couple of hundred years old, but small, not more than five rooms. All the land had once belonged to the farm, but at some point a piece had been sold off for the bungalow, hence the problem of the ownership of the drive. The farm outhouses and barns were still standing
around the yard, cleaned up now, but you could faintly smell cows and hay. No sign of life.

  Haddock walked across the yard and gently tried the house door. Locked. The lower windows were closed, but one on the top floor was open a bit. He needed a ladder. He walked across to the bigger of two outbuildings and pushed the door. A scurry, then silence. A rat. The place was an empty double-story barn. He climbed the wooden ladder that led to the top floor. There was a range of openings in the front wall flush with the floor, windows once perhaps, that looked directly across to the house. At the back of the barn, a door with a wooden beam above it gave onto the bridle path, presumably once used to hoist in hay from a piled cart. He opened the door and looked out onto the path, then closed it again. He walked back to the front and, squatting down, peered across at the house through one of the openings.