Dead Secret
Page 7
Hawn said, ‘There could be more to come, if you’re patient.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m not banking on anything in the future. I want the money now.’
‘All right. Let’s hear what you’ve got.’
Norman French took his time dissecting the last of his chicken Kiev. ‘As you know, I recently spent a year down in Central America — though I was based in Texas. It’s a small part of the world — even Texas. And oil men not only gossip — they’ve got long memories. Tom, you’ve got to have worked in the oil industry to know what it’s really like. Each company is a cut-throat fraternity where everyone’s trying to scramble to the top and steal the apples.’
‘You don’t seem to have climbed down with much to show for it.’
‘That was uncalled for.’
‘If you want to earn that first two-fifty, you’re going to have to come up with something hard. Perhaps I could start you off by jogging your memory. You’ve heard of Toby Shanklin?’
‘I have. Gets on wonderfully with Arabs. They say he still never travels anywhere without his jar of petroleum jelly.’ French laughed heartily at his little joke.
‘You know he was in the Caribbean in the last two years of the war?’ said Hawn.
Norman French took off his glasses and wiped them on a silk handkerchief. His naked eyes were small and lustreless. ‘What do you want to know about him?’
‘For a start, what he was doing out there — officially and unofficially. Then how he made his money. He came out of the war with a small fortune — which wasn’t unusual if you were in munitions, or even big-time black-market. What about oil?’
French’s face took on a closed look. ‘There was one thing I heard — when I was down in Vera Cruz, in Mexico. Alan Rice, I think the name was. I remember, because he was half English, with a German passport — Austrian on his mother’s side and had studied in Germany before the war. He was caught up there when war broke out, and soon became one of their top petro-chemical scientists. He appears to have been a bit of a mystery. He still had dual nationality when he turned up in Colombia in 1943, where the Germans still hoped they could sniff out some oil and get the concession.
‘The next thing I heard, he’d flown up to the States and asked for political asylum. He got it — presumably partly on account of his half-British nationality, but mostly because he was known to be a first-rate scientist in the oil racket. ABCO snapped him up and he continued to work for them, officially, until the last two months of the war. Then he disappeared. There were all kinds of rumours — that he was working under an alias for a rival company, that Nazi agents had kidnapped him, that he was working under cover for US Intelligence who had always taken a close interest in him, particularly in his knowledge of Nazi synthetic fuel processes.
‘Then in late 1946 his world blew up in his face. Rice — or R-E-I-S-S, as he was now known — had been a top Nazi agent all the time. The stuff he’d given the Americans was mostly phoney — except what could be checked on — while he was feeding all ABCO’s secrets straight back to the Abwehr. But it appears he wasn’t just a secret agent.
‘The Allies in Germany were going through the archives and found that Rice had been top-dog in a petro-chemical firm employing slave-labour. The Americans wanted him as a war criminal, and the British — on account of his British passport — wanted him for treason. Quite a combination. There were plenty of war criminals around, and quite a few traitors. But there weren’t many people who qualified for both, in the first degree. Alan Rice, alias Reiss, must have been practically unique.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Vanished into thin air. I’ve heard a lot of rumours — that he went East, where his professional skills would have been well appreciated. He was a master of espionage, as well as a top scientist, remember. But there was also talk that ABCO had been using their muscle — that for some reason they weren’t over-anxious to have Rice brought to trial. There were even strong suggestions that they’d had him knocked off.’
‘Why?’
‘If I knew that, it would be worth a lot more than five hundred pounds.’
‘Not if Rice disappeared over thirty years ago. Not unless you can tie him in with someone who’s around today — alive and well and working for ABCO.’
French looked up at him with a simpering smile. ‘Would Toby Shanklin do?’
‘He might. What was his tie-up with Rice?’
‘They were in the same department — even shared the same office for a time.’
‘How do you know all this, Norman?’
‘I peeked at the files. I’m rather keen on files. All that dead paper, then you light on something really interesting.’
For a gruesome moment Hawn compared French’s enthusiasm with that of Anna, and hastily put it out of mind. ‘Presumably you thought that some of the dirt on Rice would have rubbed off on to Shanklin? But sharing the same department, the same office, with a traitor, doesn’t necessarily make you a traitor yourself. Christ, I know dozens of journalists who shared offices with Philby when he worked in Fleet Street — I even know one who used to lend him a typewriter.’
‘You say Shanklin had made a lot of money by the end of the war. There were lots of ways of making money in Central America in those days. One of them was selling secrets to the enemy.’
‘That’s speculation. I need facts. I need something definite to link Shanklin to Rice — more than just an office desk.’
Norman French took his time answering. He ordered coffee and a cigar. ‘There was one incident. Or rather, a memo I spotted that caught my fancy. In late 1943 Shanklin and Rice killed the Vice-Consul in Vera Cruz.’
‘Killed?’
‘In a car accident. At night, just outside the city. Rice and Shanklin were in the car — it didn’t say who was driving — and the Vice-Consul was knocked down and fatally injured on an empty bit of road. Funny business, really. There was talk of an inquiry, but it was hushed up. The Vice-Consul was a young chap with a posh name — de Vere Frisby, I think it was — and he hadn’t been in Mexico long. But the fact that he wasn’t in the Services, and the minor role of vice-consul in a strategic port like Vera Cruz, suggests that he was Intelligence.’
‘And he’d found something out that Rice, or Shanklin, or both of them, didn’t like? Was that all that was in the file?’
‘For five hundred pounds it is. If I stretch my memory back, I might come up with something later.’
Hawn took out his cheque book and pen. Without looking at Norman French, he said, ‘I’d like more details about Rice. Where he was born, date of birth, father’s name, previous jobs, universities, etc.’
French watched as he wrote; he said, as though afraid that Hawn might change his mind before signing: ‘I think he was born in Wales and may have studied at Heidelberg. And I’ve heard that he was extremely tall, with a hunchback.’
‘Christ, he and Shanklin must have made a handsome pair.’ Hawn signed the cheque and pushed it across to French. ‘Thanks, Norman. That ought to make your landlady happy. And if you get anything else, ring me.’
CHAPTER 7
The entrance hall of the Public Record Office resembles the foyer of a cheap modern hotel. A uniformed porter checked Hawn in, gave him an identification card, and showed him across to the reception desk. Here a girl handed him a form in duplicate and he filled out the details and dates which he required to check. She directed him up some shallow steps to a long corridor lined with steel drawers, like the receiving end of a crematorium.
A second girl took his names and dates, stamped them out on a card and slotted them into a computer. He was told to wait at a desk at the far end. A few minutes later a number of plastic-covered files were placed in front of him. The top one was fairly thick. Across the front was typed: AMERICA-BRITANNIA CONSORTIUM, Vol 6 1943-44. The first thirty pages were mostly a mass of statistics; but on page 32 he came to a subsection marked: CARIBBEAN: VENEZUELA, GULF OF MEXICO. COMMERCIAL OPERATIONS.
There followed a scribbled memo in the margin which Hawn had some trouble deciphering. He thought it said: ‘“T” (or “I”) S. and R. are damned lucky. The Mexics take an extraordinarily lenient view of drunken driving. Somebody might take a note of this.’ It was unsigned.
Six pages further on, he found a smaller, rather smudged photostat: AMERICA-BRITANNIC CONSORTIUM. (UK Division, Caribbean.) Confidential Report to Sir Richard Maynard, Foreign Office, 30 June 1944. Following a fatal accident outside Vera Cruz last month, I have arranged for one of our personnel, Mr Alan Oscar Rice, to be interviewed by SOC/Division Officers, Major D. Dyson and Captain G. Simpson. Their report contained in File 237/42 ABF.
Hawn disregarded the second, slimmer file whose code was not what he wanted. He returned to the computer desk and asked for File 237/42 ABF. The woman fed the information into the machine; it hummed, then stopped. No card appeared. ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right code?’ she asked.
Hawn showed her the bulky AJBCO file. She looked faintly puzzled. ‘According to the computer, it should be stored.’
‘What does it mean if the computer rejects it?’
‘It means that the information has either been reclassified or is missing.’
Hawn then asked her if they had anything on Alan Oscar Rice, German refugee, granted asylum in the US in 1943, and worked for ABCO in the Caribbean, 1943-44.
She fed the card into the computer, and a moment later the information came back: all references to Dr Alan Oscar Rice were contained in the file he had been studying. He next asked for Shanklin, Special Operations Executive, later employee of ABCO in the Caribbean, 1943-44.
Shanklin’s SOE period was little more than a detailed elaboration of his Who’s Who entry, with the potentially useful information that he had spent five months in Istanbul between November 1942 and April 1943, where his duties were to recruit agents. His career in the Caribbean referred once again to the ABCO file that Hawn had been studying.
There wasn’t much to learn about Toby Shanklin, except that he might or he might not have once been guilty of causing death through dangerous, even drunken driving on an empty road outside Vera Cruz. Hawn had made a note that there had been no mention of witnesses — except for Shanklin and Rice.
Yet HM’s Vice-Consul’s masters had been worried enough to send two officers all the way across the Atlantic to investigate de Vere Frisby’s demise, and had drawn a blank. Either the paperwork had been scanty, or it had been suppressed.
Hawn had just time for a pub lunch, before going on to the London Library, where he looked up the complete Foreign Office Lists for 1939-44.
Rupert de Vere Frisby was born in 1916 in Berkhamsted: graduated with First-Class Honours in PPE from Trinity College, Oxford, 1936; entered Foreign Service 1937, posted to Baghdad. 1940-42 worked at Bletchley Park. Served as Information Officer to British Embassy, Lisbon 1942; transferred, Vice-Consul, Istanbul 1942-43; transferred, Vice-Consul, Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1943-44. Died in road accident 12 May 1944.
Not a startling wartime career; but there were several aspects of this cryptic entry which interested Hawn. De Vere Frisby had come down from university with excellent qualifications for the FO; but a top degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics seemed incompatible with the esoteric rigours, four years later, of Bletchley Park — the top secret decoding centre, which had handled the ‘Enigma’ machine.
Hawn guessed that Frisby had been employed as some kind of political evaluator — a job which would have carried enormous responsibility, as well as giving him knowledge of a wide scope of secrets. Yet two years later he was popping up as Information Officer in Lisbon — certainly a cushy capital at that time, as well as one of the most volatile nests of spies and intrigue. It was also well known, on the inside, that FO Information Officers were mere errand boys for the Ministry of Defence, or MIG.
After Lisbon, Rupert de Vere Frisby had been given Istanbul — another neutral capital, and again hardly a dull spot for a young man still of military age: followed by the port of Vera Cruz on the other side of the world, where he had met his untimely death. Except for Bletchley, all his jobs had been Consular. Rupert de Vere Frisby had been a British secret agent.
And he had been killed either by another British agent, or by a Nazi agent who was also a war criminal — depending upon which one of them had been driving that car.
Hawn then checked on the two SOC/Division officers, Dyson and Simpson. Here he drew a blank. Dyson had been drowned in a swimming accident three months after the memo had been written to the Foreign Office; and Simpson had later been murdered by the Gestapo in Slovakia.
When Anna got back that evening, her satchel was bulging with files and photostats, and she was lugging a string bag full of books taken out of the LSE library. She went to work almost at once, sorting the papers into piles on her desk, and stacking the books on a nearby shelf.
She had managed to talk to two professors at the School who both knew something about wartime economy, and after sparring around for a bit, she had asked them direct how they thought the Nazis had got their oil. Both men were evasive: it was obviously a subject to which they had never applied their full academic skills, and they were forced to improvise. They trotted out the same answers as Logan, Robak and Shanklin: reserves built up before the war; captured supplies in Occupied Europe; natural sources in Russia and Rumania; synthetic fuel.
‘Tom, I’m going to take each one of those factors and destroy it, systematically, rationally, by means of hard facts and statistics — and not just random ones, but ones that check and doublecheck.’
Hawn then described to her his own day’s findings.
He felt reasonably satisfied. He already had a number of plausible leads. Toby Shanklin — wartime secret agent and ABCO executive in the Caribbean; de Vere Frisby, ditto secret agent, killed in mysterious circumstances (relevant file missing) by Shanklin and German double-agent, Rice. Furthermore, both Shanklin and Frisby had spent periods of the war in Istanbul and Vera Cruz — both highly sensitive and strategic seaports, one commanding the Eastern Mediterranean, the other the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic.
Anna put the dinner on, then afterwards began working through a complex table of oil consumption statistics for Western Europe in 1939.
CHAPTER 8
When Hawn had first arrived in Fleet Street, the Economics Correspondent had been an elderly colonel who had spent the Second World War in an obscure Whitehall ministry called MI14, which dealt with Economic Warfare. He was a quiet Scotsman named MacIntyre: and on one occasion early in Hawn’s career the old man had gently corrected a serious error in his copy — a slip which would probably have led to the sack.
After that MacIntyre assumed an almost paternal role, and gave him innumerable pieces of advice, as well as much practical information. Hawn had never been adept at economics, and whenever one of his stories touched on this bleak subject, it was to Colonel Angus MacIntyre that he turned.
The man had retired from the paper three years ago; and after a brief correspondence, Hawn lost touch with him. The last he heard was that MacIntyre had gone to earth in a small riverside house in Teddington; he was widowed, childless, and probably bored. Hawn knew that the old man was also loyal and decent; and he felt sure that if he approached him tactfully, and put his thesis to him as cogently as possible, MacIntyre would at least listen with sympathy. Above all, Hawn knew that he could trust him.
He found the man’s number in th
e book. The familiar Scots voice answered: ‘Tommy, my lad! So what are you doing wi’ yourself?’
‘I’d like to come and see you, Mac. To discuss a few things with you. Draw on your wisdom.’
‘Any time, laddie. When can I expect you?’
‘Would this afternoon be too soon?’
‘Never too soon. You know Teddington? Fielding’s Lane, and I’m second on the right after the post office — last house.’
‘I’ll be seeing you, Mac.’
Hawn left his flat shortly after lunch, driving through a thin rain. After Shepherd’s Bush, he cut south towards Hammersmith and the river. He was a swift driver, but an observant one. His ancient Citroën was fitted with both side and wing mirrors, so that it was difficult for any speed-hog to creep up on his inside without being seen.
It was just beyond the scramble after the Hammersmith roundabout, as he was turning under the legs of the flyover, that he first suspected that he was being followed. It was a grey Ford Escort which had been behind him now since before Shepherd’s Bush. Just the driver, and the usual radio aerial.
Hawn put on speed over Hammersmith Bridge, then opened up fast once he reached Barnes Common. The Ford had kept its distance at first, and now began to drop back. Hawn shot the lights on amber at Roehampton Lane, and on the long stretch to Richmond he knew that the Ford had lost him. But he had taken the precaution of scribbling the car’s number down on the back of his A to Z.
Five minutes later, in the snarled one-way system at Richmond, he spotted a second Ford — a white one this time, again only the driver, and an ordinary aerial. It stayed three cars behind, manoeuvring skilfully.
Hawn’s training as a journalist had taught him most of the tricks of following cars, and of being followed. Usually it had been tailing film stars and top celebrities to and from London Airport, and if necessary, shaking off the opposition. The techniques he had learnt had never been very subtle. You just kept the car behind in sight, then pulled up as close as you could when it looked as though some lights were going to change.