by Joel N. Ross
So Bloomgaard figured Tom for a Commie because he’d enlisted with the Canadians. That’s why he was stalling—at least why he was stalling like this. But if Earl wasn’t here, why stonewall at all?
“Mr. Bloomgaard,” Tom said. “All I want is Earl.”
“You’ve been told he’s not in.”
“I’ve been told a lot of things.”
“As have I, Mr. Wall.”
“He’s attached to your department. He’s not in, you know where to reach him.”
A flicker in Bloomgaard’s eyes told Tom that Earl was there. In an office, down the hall? Had he been warned of Tom’s visit? It didn’t matter. Five seconds.
Tom stood. “I’ll get him myself.”
“Don’t you dare—”
Tom reached over the desk and grabbed the front of Bloomgaard’s shirt, a fistful of collar and tie. He yanked him against the desk, bent close, and couldn’t think of a word to say. He shoved Bloomgaard back into his chair and left the room.
The girl was at her desk. She didn’t look up when he entered. She was talking into the phone. “He’s leaving right now. Yes, he—”
Tom went into the hallway and opened the next door down. It was a file room, and the one after that was Earl’s office. It was half the size of Bloomgaard’s. There was an uncluttered desk. A blotter. A paper cutter. A bookshelf with a handful of reference books. A lamp, a phone, a cigar box. A picture of Earl and his wife. But no ash in the tray, no jacket behind the door. A fine film of dust on the desktop.
Earl was gone.
DAVIES-FRANK EXCHANGED the governor’s rooms for the humbler facilities of the goundsmen. The staff would be more forthcoming if he questioned them in a less formal setting. He wanted gossip, not obedience. There was a tap on the door and the nurse, Mrs. Harper, entered. Davies-Frank stood from behind the cramped desk, gestured toward a chair, and invited her to be seated.
“It’s disgraceful,” she said by way of greeting. “Putting you in Kirrage’s room.”
“The move was my own request, Mrs. Harper,” he said as the nurse perched on the edge of the chair. “I have questions about Sergeant Wall and was told you were the person to ask.”
“Well, his doctors would know better than I about anything clinical. But it’s true Mr. Wall and I enjoy each other’s company. Always a gentleman—ready with a smile and a joke, and no harm in him.”
“Mr. MacGovern might disagree.”
“Mr. MacGovern is disagreeable.”
He inclined his head. “I need to know about the sergeant’s health—mentally, physically. I’ve read the reports, but events seem to be outpacing them. He’s having a relapse?”
“All I have is my opinion, Mr. Davies-Frank. There are no fancy degrees on my wall, if you’d care to look. Still, some might say my opinion is based on more than air and notions.”
“Yes—I’d like to hear it.”
She met his eyes, then nodded in decision. “Mr. Wall isn’t suffering combat fatigue—not now, not as his primary complaint.”
“Combat fatigue—shell shock?”
She tsked. “You’re a war late, Mr. Davies-Frank.”
“A war and four hours, it seems.”
“I’ll not apologize,” she said, bristling. “I hope I know my duty. Interrupting a patient in the small hours of—”
“Please, Mrs. Harper. There’s no question you acted correctly. Combat fatigue isn’t his primary complaint?”
She paused, considering. “I’m not saying that Mr. Wall doesn’t have the symptoms—insomnia, paranoia, grief, and anger. . . . Well, I’m speaking psychology, and I shouldn’t. I hope I know my place.” The suggestion of a smile played on her lips. “Mr. Wall calls me his ‘bedpan commando.’”
“Always ready with a smile and a joke,” Davies-Frank said. “He has the symptoms, then, but his primary complaint is . . .”
“Had the symptoms. When he arrived, he had what I’d call a broad and shallow combat fatigue. But in my opinion, he was—”
“Recovering?”
“Recovered.”
“Judging from today’s behavior, Mrs. Harper, that’s a trifle optimistic.”
“You’re not unlike him,” she said. “You can say anything, can’t you? But he’d rallied. He’d recovered. Until the recent surgery.”
“On his hand?”
She nodded. “It hadn’t knit together properly. His chest and leg healed, but his hand . . . The first operation was not a success. So back to the surgeon’s table. The anesthesia, the operation—set him back terribly. He’s not much better than when he first arrived.”
When it had taken months for him to heal. Well, the Twenty Committee couldn’t wait months—they couldn’t wait until tomorrow afternoon. Davies-Frank felt for the American, fighting on the front lines, watching his men die. But Davies-Frank bore his own burden. His days didn’t determine the life or death of a squad, a platoon, or a company—but a battle, a convoy, a city. It was less personal: He’d never see the faces of the people he lost, but still his burden drove him. Drove him to pity this poor bastard Wall, and drove him to care nothing for him except as a tool.
“How much better is ‘not much’?” he asked.
“On the surface, very little indeed. Underneath? He’s far stronger than he was. If he could get a single night’s rest . . .”
“He’d snap to?”
“In my opinion.” She brushed an imaginary crumb from her lap. “But you won’t allow him that one night, will you, Mr. Davies-Frank?”
“If Sergeant Wall had not decamped, I’d have—”
“Decamped? If he’d not decamped?”
“The governor’s word,” Davies-Frank said, and smiled at her expression. “I promise you, once we find Wall, I’ll see that he returns here as soon as practically possible.”
This seemed to reassure her, though it meant nothing. Practically possible. He was on a fool’s errand. All the hopes pinned on Thomas Wall were foolish hopes. Insomnia, paranoia, a broad and shallow combat fatigue. Thomas Wall against Dietrich Sondegger was grain against the scythe.
Still, it was that or face the possibility—the practical possibility—of losing the Twenty Committee.
CHAPTER
FOUR
THE TWENTY COMMITTEE started with “Sleet,” a mechanical engineer in the employ of an Admiralty subcontractor. During the early thirties, Sleet traveled frequently to Germany on business, returning occasionally with technical information for the Admiralty and MI6. He was a casual spy, undemanding and hardly profitable. Still, standard procedure was followed: His information was inspected, his access was controlled, and his daily routines were surreptitiously investigated.
In 1936, the standard procedure bore fruit. Military intelligence intercepted a letter Sleet had written to a German agent in Hamburg; it became clear the mechanical engineer was buttering his bread on both sides. There was talk of detaining Sleet, but to what purpose? Under what pretext? He’d merely sent letters to a private citizen of a country with which England was not at war.
Patience paid off. Within months, Sleet contacted MI6 and told them he’d been approached by the German Secret Service, the Abwehr. He’d agreed to work for the Nazis, he said, in order to penetrate the Abwehr as an agent of the British. And so from 1936 to 1939, Sleet played the double game. Or was it a triple game? That was a question without an answer—and Davies-Frank imagined it was a question nobody asked. Sleet had hardly been considered an agent of world-shaking importance.
Still, he plodded steadily along. He passed information to the British: false names impossible to corroborate, scraps of gossip, glimpses of tradecraft when he met his contacts. He provided his German masters with notes on British naval manufacturing, on popular sentiment. And, at the bidding of his Abwehr contact, he approached Sir Oswald Mosley’s increasingly popular British Union of Fascist
s.
He was instructed to investigate the BUF in order to determine which members had sufficient influence, or access, to warrant a direct approach. He was instructed to arrange with the BUF for the establishment and operation of four wireless transmitters in England. Reports were filed. Information was assembled. Minutes were written. And Sleet continued to operate, under the somewhat-lackadaisical direction of both the British and the Germans, doing little good, little harm.
In January 1939, a bored junior operative, having exhausted the patience of his superior, was told to shadow Sleet. He spent two days tailing him from office to home and back again. On the third day, Sleet traveled to Victoria Station, where, in the cloakroom, he took receipt of a yellow houndstooth suitcase. Inside was a wireless transmitter disguised as a gramophone. Sleet installed the transmitter in his attic and established communication with Hamburg.
Another report was filed. It resulted in raised eyebrows but little else. Then war was declared—and Sleet taken into custody.
His wireless transmitter followed him to Wandsworth Prison and was installed in his cell. From the prison, he reestablished contact with Hamburg and began receiving orders and requests for information. Those, with the guidance of his British hosts, he contrived to answer.
THE TWENTY COMMITTEE hadn’t been formed at that time, when the entire network of Abwehr spies under English control had simply been Sleet. But even then, during those first uncertain days, the overriding concern was the same: the truth.
The truth was the foundation of the entire framework of lies. It was the grain of sand around which the priceless pearl grew—and like a grain of sand, the truth was an irritant. It could be managed but not entirely controlled.
Still, the Abwehr inspected this cultured pearl and proclaimed it genuine. They believed Sleet was loyal; they acted on his reports. The double cross was successful—for the moment. The turning of an agent was delicate business. In the best cases, it was seduction: intimate, tentative, and impassioned. In the worst, it was rape.
Sleet, seduced and deemed loyal, was sent to Antwerp with an MI6 agent who was pretending to be a member of the Welsh Nationalist Party. They were given contact information for “Thrush,” a German-born photographer living in Britain, who would aid with the development of microphotographs—pictures the size of a postage stamp or smaller, used for passing information. Thrush, despite being blackmailed by threats to her nephews in Germany, proved easy to turn. Next came “Bitters”—an ex–dope smuggler and confidence man whom Sleet recruited as an agent for training in Germany. Bitters took to espionage like a worm to mud, and he soon learned of three additional German agents to be parachuted into England. Two of them turned, and lived. One did not, and was hanged.
So it went. One agent led to another, to another, to another. As of late 1941, the Abwehr’s entire organization in England was being run by the British.
It was a double cross of monumental proportions. A double cross: XX. The Twenty Committee, whose members were charged with designing a fabric of lies so consistent and convincing that the Nazis would never realize they were not the masters of their own spy network.
CHAPTER
FIVE
MORNING, DECEMBER 1, 1941
EARL WAS GONE.
Tom lifted the framed picture from the desk. Earl had sandy-blond hair, light eyes, a satisfied smile on his face. He stood with one arm wrapped tight around his wife and the other thrown wide in welcome. And his wife, her head turned slightly away, slightly down, the shadowed line of her jaw sharp against her pale face.
The picture crashed against the wall; glass splintered to the floor.
Tom heard men in the hall, coming for him. There was only the one door, and the window had bars. There was no time. Earl was gone.
He stepped into the hall. Two men on his right, three men twenty feet to his left. He opened the door to Bloomgaard’s office. The girl was behind her desk; Bloomgaard was beside her. Bloomgaard said something and Tom raised his arm and Bloomgaard flinched.
Tom went into the inner office, with the bloodred flower and the green glass vase. He locked the door and surveyed the room. There was the phone. There was the desk and the chair. The window was barred. Tom heard the men entering the outer office, speaking with Bloomgaard. He had to get away, had to get Earl. He couldn’t think. He had to try Burnham Chase. He paced between the door and the desk. There was the bookshelf, the high ceilings—
“Mr. Wall?” A man’s voice came through the door. He said his name was Knudson. He said he had the key. He said there was no harm done and he was opening the door and Tom shouldn’t worry. Soon it’d be over, and all would be apples and plums.
The lock snicked open and the men burst inside, a solid mass.
NEXT IN DAVIES-FRANK’S dingy room was an old pensioner for whom Wall apparently had a fondness. Captain Bayliss was toothless and shrunken, his mind fogged and his speech nearly indecipherable. Davies-Frank warmed to Wall for befriending this broken old man, but he hadn’t the luxury of indulging the captain. He dismissed him in favor of one of Wall’s doctors, who was twice as voluble as Mrs. Harper, and nearly as well informed. He offered a discourse on insomnia, nightmares, postsurgical excitation, and Tom’s reaction to morphia.
“Morphia poisoning?” Davies-Frank asked.
“I’d not say poisoning,” the doctor said. “Sensitivity is perhaps more accurate. It seems Sergeant Wall had been dosed too highly in a field hospital, and the morphia given him here during last week’s operation—”
Davies-Frank had read that in the file. “I heard that a night’s rest could heal him.”
“You’ve been speaking to the nurses,” the doctor said. “Did they claim Mr. Wall has ‘the screaming abdabs’? They often develop notions beyond their expertise.”
So sleep would not knit up the raveled sleeve of care—not that it mattered, as Wall couldn’t sleep. “I need the sergeant clearheaded, Doctor. For one day, maybe two. Is there anything you can give him?”
The doctor steepled his fingers. “Nothing.”
“No drugs? No emergency actions?” Davies-Frank leaned forward. “Theoretically speaking, is there no way to ensure Wall’s competence temporarily—at whatever cost?”
“There is not.”
Davies-Frank quizzed him another ten unhelpful minutes before being called to the phone. He picked up in the governor’s office, gazing over the placid front lawn. It was Highcastle, his gruff voice undermining the serenity of the view.
“He’s caught,” Highcastle said. “American embassy.”
“The Yanks handed him over?”
“Happy to be rid of him. He’s en route to Rowansea now.”
“Good.” Davies-Frank checked his watch. There was still time.
“Learned anything?”
“Nothing heartening. He’s allergic to morphine, having a relapse of shell shock—”
Highcastle snorted. Highcastle didn’t accept shell shock. In his fifty-nine years, Highcastle had never found reason to believe in the ills of the mind. Most likely didn’t believe in ills of the body, either.
“Keep that opinion to yourself,” Davies-Frank said, though Highcastle outranked him. He allowed himself this liberty because Highcastle had no use for men who didn’t speak their minds, and because Davies-Frank would not have been such a man in any event.
“I can keep silent,” Highcastle said.
“Despite being such a chatterbox.” Davies-Frank glanced unnecessarily at his notes. “Wall’s relapse is possibly temporary, possibly not. He’s an insomniac—definitely exhausted and probably delusional.”
“Why’d he join?”
“The Canadians? He’s an idealist, I suppose. Antifascist.”
“Bolshie?”
“I’ve no idea. Nothing in the file—” He watched a white van pull into the long circular drive. “Ah, the prodigal son
returns.”
TOM GLANCED at the guard sitting next to him in the back of the van. They’d called the man “Ginger”—he looked like he’d been chiseled from a block of gray stone, his red hair an afterthought. On his best day, Tom could’ve taken him.
“Don’t even wish it, mate,” Ginger said.
“Not today.”
Ginger inspected him more closely. “Fought in France, did you?”
“Greece and Crete.”
“Mussolini, then.”
“And after Mussolini,” Tom said. “We fought with the Greeks until the politics went bughouse.”
“Didn’t know we had men there till Jerry stepped up.”
“RAF and an interservice mission were all. We were dug into the Aliakmon Line. The Nazi Fortieth wiped up the Yugos, outflanked the line, and caught the Greeks shitting cinders.”
“And you fell back, eh? I hear you mauled Jerry all the way.”
Tom almost smiled. “Fuckin’ Kiwis. Where’d they learn to fight like that?”
“You were evaced to Crete? Against the paratroopers?”
“The airborne Fliegerkorps.” The Máleme airfield. Earl’s betrayal. “A long time ago.”
“Six months. Give it a chance, mate.” Ginger’s voice turned hearty. “You follow rugby? St. Mary’s beat Oxford forty to three, you hear that? And what’s Oxford supposed to do, with Colson’s knee troubled like it is?”
The van stopped and the door opened. They were back at the Rowansea Royal Hospital. MacGovern was waiting outside, a plaster on his forehead and his eyes tinted pink. He greeted the redhead with an obsequious smile.
“Our wayward lad,” Mac said, helping Tom from his seat. “Our beamish boy. You’ve a reception order to sign, sir?”
Ginger shook his head. “Not worth the paperwork.”
“Whitehall, are you?”
“Mr. Wall is to be brought to the governor’s office.”
