Whilst Hunter waited for his father’s elderly computer to boot up he removed one of the USB cables from the printer. Taking the Sabatier his father had fetched from the kitchen he pried off the printer pin and began exposing its wires. With the tip of the knife he undid two screws at the base of his phone. Hunter teased out the battery, inserted the bare cable where the electric contacts came in and then replaced the battery. His father’s computer was finally on and he plugged in the USB to a free port. A quick waggle of the cables and the phone began to charge. Then he went online and directly to his dropbox account. Thank God, Alec had left the algorithm in place and not dragged it to his desktop. He ran the programme and began the laborious task of inputting the second code Wiseman had left him hidden in his manuscript. His phone gave a bleep and started to reboot.
✽✽✽
With his free hand David found the light switch. He’d brought a torch this time and went straight for the second and smaller cardboard box. Without thinking he shone the torch inside but then hesitated, suddenly anxious he was doing the right thing. A long beat, then David Hunter nodded to himself, picked up the box, turned off the light and folded away the ladders.
Hunter was bent over his father’s computer when his phone burst into life. There were texts from his service provider instructing him to pick up messages and more from concerned friends enquiring after his whereabouts and wellbeing. He dialled 121 and started retrieving and discarding the twelve messages which had built up over the previous few days. There were several from both the Cambridge and Metropolitan police requiring him to get in touch urgently and leaving numbers for him to ring and then a voice that made his blood run cold. There was a message from Alec.
‘Hello mate, thanks for the email. I ran your programme and got a bunch of names. Nothing to write home about, although I did recognise one of them. Dietrich Metzger. I read about him a couple of years ago for a paper I was writing. Big-time German physicist before the war. Studied at Heidelberg but then just disappeared. I thought about trying to find out what happened to him but well… that’s more your kind of thing? Anyway, hope you’re okay. Love to Ames.’
’
Hunter put down the iPhone, still connected and charging, and stared at it. So, Metzger had been a physicist and one with enough of a reputation to catch Alec’s eye. His father appeared with a grubby looking old shoe box and laid it down on the table next to the clock. The PC sprang to life and code started pouring down the screen. Hunter tapped a few keys and a second list began to appear.
J Whitehead
D Butcher
P Drake
H Honeycutt
Four names and then the programme crashed, frozen, too much for his father’s antiquated machine to deal with. Hunter pointed to the screen. He’d been right, there had been a second list, but who were these people? He found the photograph taken from Wiseman’s flat and flicked it over. The initials of the Christian names were the same. He went into the guts of the programme, located the problem and re-ran it, leaving his father to look through the dusty old box.
J Whitehead
D Butcher
P Drake
H Honeycutt
The next name on the back of Wiseman’s photograph was J A Seidel. Hunter prayed his father’s computer would co-operate just a little while longer and then, to his relief, a fifth name was added to the list before the programme stalled again.
J Sinclair.
Sinclair. What the hell was Sinclair’s name doing there? Admittedly this was J Sinclair but then hadn’t Wiseman mentioned a Josef Sinclair? Coincidence? Scott looked at his father but was only struck by how unsurprised he appeared.
‘There’s one last name, but I can’t get the bloody programme to work and your computer isn’t exactly helping much either.’
‘There’s no need,’ his father said, ‘I can tell you the last name on your list.’
Hunter realised that whilst they had been talking his father had been holding a small black and white photograph. David placed it on the computer desk in front of his son. It was the same photograph Hunter had first seen cropped in Wiseman’s book at the library in Trinity College. It was the same photograph he had taken from the dead man’s apartment. A photograph of George Wiseman and his father sat rather smartly behind a table and a Second World War Lorenz machine, behind them, in a line, five men and one woman. It was the same photograph Hunter still held in his hand and was convinced contained all the answers. So, what the hell was his father doing with a copy?
‘He,’ David said pointing to a stern looking young man in his late twenties, ‘was Friedrich Ritthaler. In 1948, with some help from George Wiseman and his father, he became Frank Richards. Your mother’s father. Your grandfather.’
Hunter didn’t understand. This was a picture of, well who was it a picture of exactly? He’d never properly known had he, that had been the problem. Suddenly he realised just how little he knew about the maternal side of his family.
David was pointing at the other members of the line.
‘There’s Metzger and that’s Seidel. The woman was called Schmid, she became Honeycutt. These two men are Utkin and Borkowski although I’m afraid I can’t recall which one is which now.’
‘How do you know all this? Who were they and why did they have their names changed?’
‘One thing at a time, Scott. It was chaos at the end of the Second World War. America had just demonstrated the bomb and only ten years later the Russians started the space race and in the intervening time the East and West plunged headlong into the Cold War.’
‘Metzger was a physicist.’
‘Of a sort, yes. After the war there was a huge sweep up. The allies called it Operation Paperclip. Wernher von Braun went to The States to help start NASA and their race for the moon, Doctors Hoch and Blazig went the other way to Russia and their space programme, along with tonnes of salvaged rocket parts from Peenemünde. But there were many more. Many who, for one reason or another, simply disappeared, either of their own volition or because the governments of the countries they were helping thought it expedient.’
‘What did he do?’ Hunter asked pointing at the man in the photograph. His father thought for a moment.
‘He was a chemist. I didn’t really understand a great deal about the work he was involved in, but I was lead to believe that he possessed an...’ again David struggled to find the correct word, ‘an unusual talent.’
‘And what was Wiseman’s role in all of this?’
‘When they arrived, mostly from Germany, but Utkin and Borkowski both came from Russia via Vienna, there was an initial quite lengthy period of incarceration and questioning. We had to be absolutely certain these people were who they said they were. By the time that photograph was taken Wiseman and his father had created whole new identities for them. You see it wasn’t just important for them to blend into British society. We were always on the guard against the Americans and the Russians. They would have spirited them away at the drop of a hat had they found out who they were.’
David went back to the shoe box and took out an oily mass, wrapped in a large black rag. He found some newspaper and covered a portion of the table. Whatever was in the rag was heavy and metallic. He carefully removed it and to Hunter’s horror placed it on the newspaper in front of him. A Super-Star semi-automatic pistol.
‘These were given to all of the people in that photograph, including your grandfather.’ David picked it up, pressed the magazine release button, removed and checked it, then swiftly pushed the magazine firmly back into the pistol and locked the catch. He quickly checked the safety and placed it back on the table. ‘It’s never been fired.’ David rubbed his oily hands on his trousers. Hunter had never seen his father handle a gun before. He looked closely at the man standing next to him, the man who had brought him up. Where had a lowly accounts exec. who’d taken early retirement and a considerable golden handshake learnt how to strip a gun? Hunter realised for the first time how little he kne
w about the man who was his father.
‘Is this the only picture you have of him?’
‘No, your mother left papers for you.’
‘I don’t understand. Why have I never seen any of them before?’ But David was leaving the room. Hunter turned to the table and the oily black gun that lay there. Tentatively he picked it up, weighing it in his hand. It felt cold and foreign. There was the safety catch, it was on he assumed. He rubbed the excess oil from its grip onto his already filthy clothes and quickly slipped it into the front pocket of his hoodie. He could hear his father returning.
David had an envelope containing no more than a dozen photographs. Hunter noted that in each of the pictures his grandfather stood alone. There were no wedding photographs, no pictures of him with Hunter’s mother, yet in each picture there was that same stern expression. There was something unrepentant in the man’s eyes, something challenging and confrontational. Something which Hunter found deeply disturbing. He couldn’t deny his grandfather had been a handsome man, tall but not thin, his hair pushed back and brylcreamed in place in the style of the time. But there was something else. An arrogance. It gave him no pleasure to think that he was related to the man who stared so aggressively back at him. Added to which, Scott couldn’t help but notice just how little interest his father expressed in any of the photographs.
‘How well did you know him?’
‘Well enough,’ David said with expedience.
‘And where are the pictures of his family? His wife? Mum?’
‘Listen Scott, when your mother died a lot of things got thrown away. This is all that’s left. I’m sorry.’
Hunter took a sip from his glass. So, the lists were a relocation programme for Second World War scientists. That went some way to explain the secrecy and George’s reluctance to speak of them. His own grandfather had been a chemist called Ritthaler who the Wisemans had spirited out of Germany in 1945. He’d been given a new identity and a gun. After the war and now called Frank Richards he’d met Hunter’s grandmother and started a family. However none of this explained why a six foot something ape covered in tattoos and sporting a menacing biker’s ring had killed three people and chased Hunter halfway across London in an effort to kill him too. Nor did it shed any light on his new found friend who besides having expensive tastes in both clothes and cars, was clearly, and somewhat unsuccessfully, trying to quit smoking. Scott held up his glass for a top up and to get his father out of the way.
✽✽✽
‘We need to talk.’
The voice on the other end of the line agreed, suggesting a meeting place.
Hunter knew it and could be there in an hour and a half. ‘Yes, I know what time it is, but I’ve seen the second list.’ Without waiting for a reaction he replaced the receiver, his iPhone still charging. In the bottom of his bag he found a mobile number casually scrawled on a scrappy piece of paper. He flicked his iPhone on, opened the contacts list and entered the details before sending a brief text message. His father had returned with a large scotch and some bread and butter which Hunter devoured greedily, pushing the drink to one side. Then he was up and out of his seat, throwing everything into the messenger bag, everything except Wiseman’s manuscript.
‘What are we going to do with this?’
Whilst his father considered, Hunter moved across the room and stood next to the small open fireplace at its heart. He looked at his father, implicitly seeking permission.
‘Do it.’
On top of the mantlepiece, amongst the candles and tea lights, a small box of matches. Hunter tore out Wiseman’s cryptic apology and page after page followed as he and his father watched them smoulder and burn until the hearth danced with flames.
‘Will I make up the spare bed?’
‘I’m not staying.’
‘Scott, let’s talk about this.’
‘It’s not that.’
‘You’re exhausted, you need to sleep. We can pick this up in the morning, go and see the police.’
‘No.’
‘Try and explain you’ve done nothing wrong.’ David was terrified he was about to lose his son for a second time.
‘There’s someone I have to see first.’
David Hunter looked down and away, all his fears realised in that one sentence, the years of deceit all for nothing.
‘Are they where they usually are?’ Hunter was by the front door, going through his father’s jacket pockets. ‘No police. I’m not ready to explain anything yet. Something’s still not right.’ He held up the keys to his father’s aged Volvo.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Steeling your car, father,’ Hunter said opening the door. ‘Don’t forget, I’m a fugitive wanted by the police.’
David was quickly behind him. ‘Scott. Scott!’ His son turned to face him. ‘The car’s one thing but that,’ he said, pointing to the heavy bulge in his son’s top, ‘is quite another. No father should see his son going off god knows where with a loaded gun.’ He held out his hand as only a father can to his son.
Reluctantly Scott took the pistol from his hoodie and laid it in David Hunter’s open palm.
David flicked the safety off, racked the slide allowing it to spring forward into the closed position and flicked the safety back.
‘There’s a round in the chamber and the safety’s on. So, where are we going?’ he asked slipping on a pair of comfortable shoes.
‘Cambridge.’
11
They drove in an uneasy silence, as is often the way with fathers and their sons, Hunter sitting grimly behind the wheel, struggling to come to terms with what he had just learnt. Whilst he was closer to understanding the two lists, now something else preoccupied him, something, or rather someone, significantly closer to home. The man sitting to his left, the man who, through the years he had blamed for so much. There was clearly another side to his father. A side which, like the clock, he had taken great care to hide from his son. Why had George Wiseman called him in the middle of the night and how did his father know the erstwhile author-cum-spy, and where had he learnt to handle a gun like that? How many more broken clocks were there, how many more secret-laden dusty old cardboard boxes sat rotting in David Hunter’s attic? With every passing minute, as the awkward silence settled and established itself, the questions which burnt so fiercely inside Scott Hunter, only became more difficult to ask.
David by contrast was feeling quietly content. He’d wanted to unburden himself for so long and yet even now, as the end drew near, he knew the story was far from told. His son would certainly have many more questions, but at least the impasse had been broken and they had arrived at an uneasy truce. David Hunter felt that for the first time in years they were bonding, he allowed himself to dream a little, like a family. He was no fool though. When Scott knew everything, when he saw the whole dark horrible truth, well then they’d see.
The motorway was clear. Hunter passed the occasional lorry but his father’s Volvo wasn’t capable of any great turn of speed and so he contented himself with the slow lane. The man he was going to meet would wait for him, he was confident of that if nothing else. The dull glint of gun metal caught his eye. His father had put the semi-automatic on the floor next to his feet where it skittered around in the footwell. What the hell were they doing? Hunter wasn’t sure, but he was certain that he wouldn’t go into another confrontation without some way of defending himself.
✽✽✽
David followed his son into the boathouse which perched so easily on the banks of the Cam, the handle of the Super-Star pistol poking out of the top of his trousers, concealed by his undulating cardigan.
Hunter took it all in. He’d been here many times before with Alec. Hanging from their cradles the carbon-fibre eights, along the walls ranks of sweep oars and delicate individual sculls. Two rowing boats neatly stowed away in one corner. Triumphant caps and pendants displayed exultantly from every spare inch of wall. And then, from the shadows stepped Professor Frederick Sincla
ir, his normally impeccable hair a touch out of place due to the hour, his quasi sailing shoes suddenly starkly inappropriate in the surroundings.
‘Scott. I’m so pleased to see you. Whatever have you been up to? I’ve had the police asking all sorts of questions,’ he began awkwardly, fiddling with his poorly knotted tie, and then seeing Scott was not alone, ‘and who’s this you’ve brought with you?’
‘My father.’
Sinclair stepped closer, peering over his spectacles to examine David in the gloom of the boathouse before extending a cordial hand.
‘How very pleasant to meet you,’ he said, ‘although I feel I know so very much about you already,’ he added with a sickly smile.
‘Do you?’
Sinclair withdrew his hand but not his gaze.
‘Scott, am I to take it you have had more success with that computer programme of yours?’
Hunter nodded.
‘I’ve seen both lists if that’s what you mean?’
Sinclair inclined his head, musing quietly to himself.
‘You left me that code. Why?’ Hunter asked.
Sinclair seemed surprised by the intrusion into his private thoughts.
‘No. No I did not actually. I genuinely have no idea as to the origins of that message, although I do have my suspicions,’ he continued raising an eyebrow in David Hunter’s direction. ‘No, like you I should very much like to know exactly where that has been hiding all these years. And you came by the second list how?’
‘George Wiseman.’
‘George. Of course, I should have known he’d have kept a copy. How is the interfering old fool?’
‘Dead.’ Again Sinclair nodded his understanding. ‘Suicide,’ Hunter added, causing his professor to smile.
‘Ah, what a grand gesture, how terribly theatrical of old George,’ Sinclair said never once taking his eyes from David’s. ‘He always was one for a spot of melodrama. I put it down to all those years mucking about with poofs and pinkoes. And you have the lists with you I take it, otherwise there would be no need for this clandestine little tête-à-tête?’ Sinclair extended his hand ready to receive the information.
Birth of a Spy Page 18
