by Eric Helm
“And if the traitor ditches the transmitter in the meantime? It’s nearly dark, sir. It would be easy for whoever is carrying it to just let it drop into the brush along the trail somewhere.”
“Which is fine. The VC won’t be able to follow us anymore, which is, after all, the main thing we’re after.”
“And we’ll have lost our chance to identify the traitor.”
“Who would you like to nominate for traitor, Sergeant? One of the team? Or maybe one of the Tais that we’ve fought alongside for a year and a half? How about the obvious candidate, our scout, the one who got herself half killed helping us kill the three guys who had this thing? Does that make any sense, that she would kill her cover team?”
“I just meant that it was something we should think about, sir.”
“I know, Galvin. I understand you’re just trying to help. But let’s do our thinking about it on our feet okay? Let’s just get the hell out of here.”
Maxwell thought that what he should do was get the hell out of there and forget about the whole mess. As he slipped the pick into the lock on the door of Crinshaw’s outer office, he figured he could hide out in Cholon for a few days until whatever was going on blew over, then surface again once things were nice and quiet.
No, he admonished himself, dismissing the thought. He really couldn’t do that. Just think of all the fun he’d be missing. After all, when was the last time he had a chance to break into U.S. military offices in a foreign country and wire the guys who were supposed to be on his side? When was the last time he bugged one of the boss’s conversations with a general officer on the MACV staff? When was the last time he risked his job, his career, twenty years in Leavenworth, and maybe his life because some woman reporter thought things just didn’t feel right? Jesus!
There was a click from the lock, deafening in the silence of the deserted hallway, and the door popped inward a few millimeters. Maxwell cautiously eased the door open enough to allow himself to squeeze inside, silently cursing the cacophony of creaks and groans emanating from the hinges. He slipped inside, barking his shin on the corner table near the doorway, eased the door back shut behind him, the hinges protesting vigorously, then froze there for a moment in the darkness, listening for any telltale sounds in the passageway outside and trying to remember the exact layout of the room from his earlier visits.
Satisfied that no one had heard the caterwauling of the hinges and come running to investigate, Maxwell breathed a great sigh of relief and slipped a small tube of graphite from the pocket of his jacket. Carefully, working by feel, he dusted each of the door hinges with the powdered lubricant. It wasn’t a modification he would have tried had he been breaking into a certain building on Dzerzhinsky Square, where some sharp-eared KGB officer might have noticed a door that suddenly no longer squeaked, but he felt reasonably safe with the modification here. It just might prevent some late-night MP walking his rounds from taking notice at an inopportune time. Even if it didn’t, it might prevent Maxwell from having a heart attack the next time the door started squeaking.
Having finished with the door, Maxwell pocketed the graphite, turned around with his back to the door and took a moment reviewing once again the layout of the room. He could have used the small penlight in his pocket — there were no windows in the outer office that might permit someone outside to notice a bit of unusual illumination in what should be a deserted room — but he had an almost pathological fear of even a few photons of light escaping between the door and the jamb and being noticed by a passing guard. When he was ready, he crossed the floor in darkness without incident and found the door to Crinshaw’s inner office. It was locked.
For some reason that surprised Maxwell. Doors to offices were supposed to be locked up at night on military installations, particularly those in foreign countries, but somehow that seemed out of character for the brigadier. Crinshaw had a most cavalier attitude toward security. He would keep his notebook, in which he jotted endless trivia, in a folder in a locked drawer of his desk, but leave uncovered the map in his office that marked the location of every major U.S. base and facility in South Vietnam. The map also showed the progress of each significant operation underway, updated daily, so that anyone who happened to enter his office might see the precise disposition of all U.S. commands at any given time. Anyone, including the Vietnamese cleaning woman. Of course, the cleaning woman had been cleared by Military Intelligence. And equally, of course, that meant nothing. Most of the greatest spies in the history of espionage had been cleared by the other side’s intelligence service.
So for that reason, if no other, Maxwell had half expected the door to be unlocked. He hadn’t tried the door last night, entering instead through a convenient partially open window. It hadn’t been too hard to force the window open a little farther, just enough to allow entry, but it had been a bit noisy, and getting it closed exactly the same amount it had been when he’d found it had been a real bear. Those factors, plus the fact that the window was fairly exposed to observation from outside — indeed, when he was ready to leave he’d had to wait twice before it was safe to exit — had persuaded Maxwell to try the inside route this evening.
It took three tries to find the right set of picks, but once he did only a couple of minutes of skillful manipulation was necessary to get the lock to yield. Maxwell smiled. Only two-thirds the time the outer office lock had taken. His old skills, learned so many years ago at the Farm, were coming back to him. He couldn’t help marveling at the expertise of all those celluloid agents he’d seen in countless Hollywood spy movies through the years. Those guys could always manage even the most stubborn door locks in fifteen seconds flat, usually with only one pick, and sometimes with nothing more sophisticated than a paper clip or the leading lady’s hairpin. In the real shadow world of secret intelligence, things were seldom as easy.
When he finally eased the door open, Maxwell nearly had a heart attack as a breath of frigid air hit him in the face. Crinshaw had left the air conditioners running.
That sudden realization made Maxwell wonder if he had committed a terrible tactical blunder. Last night the air conditioners had been shut off and a window left partially open. It made Maxwell ask himself a lot of questions. Like, did the fact that the air conditioners were running mean Crinshaw was hiding in the darkened room, waiting for the opportunity to pounce upon him like some demented bird of prey? Or, did the fact that he had found an open window last night mean that Jirasek had wanted him to break into Crinshaw’s office? And if so, what was the purpose? Was Jirasek now trying to arrange a meeting in his roundabout fashion, or was it some kind of trap he was baiting? Or perhaps Jirasek wanted him to break in and wire Crinshaw’s office so that he would, when he played back the tape, hear exactly the conversation Jirasek wanted him to hear?
When no one sprang upon him screaming from out of the darkness or shot him outright, Maxwell finally decided that the only thing it meant was that Crinshaw had left the air-conditioning on, and that for some reason, when he’d left, his administrative sergeant hadn’t been around to shut it off for him. Not wanting to risk the noise of stopping and restarting it, nor knowing exactly what the air conditioners were set at and being unwilling to risk his flashlight to check the knobs, Maxwell tightened his tie, buttoned his suit coat as best he could and got on with the job at hand.
Although the curtains were drawn, they weren’t quite closed, and the light passing through the teakwood Venetian blinds threw a striped rectangle on the carpeted floor. Maxwell eased the inner office door shut behind him, in case anyone should suddenly decide to enter the outer office, and waited shivering a few minutes for his eyes to adjust to the light level. When it got to the point where he could see the outlines of large objects fairly well, even if they weren’t silhouetted against the window, he pulled a pair of white cotton gloves from his pocket and slipped them on, then he got down on his hands and knees and crawled over to the general’s gigantic desk. There was no sense risking tripping over somethin
g at this stage of the game.
Maxwell felt along the underside of the bottom edge of the front of the desk until he found the ultrasensitive microrecorder he had taped there. Once he had it located, he lay on his back and slid his head and shoulders underneath the desk. Only then did he risk the penlight. Taking it from the inside pocket of his jacket, he switched it on and held it in his mouth while he worked, the piece of red cellophane he’d taped over the end allowing only the slightest of light to come from the penlight. It was enough, barely, to do the job.
Working quickly, he shut off the sound-activated microphone and rewound the magnetic tape. He had to untape the recorder from the tiny space between the front of the desk and the back of one of the lower drawers in order to change the tape spools.
Doing it in the minimal light proved to be a lot more difficult than it would have sounded, had he described the procedure to someone. Maxwell fervently hoped he would never have to explain to anyone how he had bugged a U.S. Army brigadier general’s office. That kind of explanation wasn’t likely to get him anything but a quick trip to Kansas.
Having switched the spools, Maxwell deposited the used one in his jacket pocket and retaped the recorder into position, using fresh adhesive tape. He then gathered up the mass of used adhesive, put that in his other pocket and slid back out from under the desk.
As he was preparing to leave, it occurred to Maxwell that someone could have been hiding in the closet the entire time, watching him, and that he should have immediately checked the closet upon entering the room for safety’s sake. It was the kind of mistake a man of his experience shouldn’t have made, but exactly the sort of thing that comes from spending too many recent years managing agents instead of doing the job yourself.
It seemed as if it might be a little late to remedy that kind of error now, but Maxwell crossed silently to the closet and checked it anyway. Inside, however, along with a raincoat and Crinshaw’s familiar field jacket, he found only a dress uniform, two sets of khakis and three fatigue outfits, all freshly cleaned and starched with razor-edged creases pressed into the pants. There were also a couple of sets of slightly limp-looking fatigues and one lackluster set of khakis, all of which lacked the plastic bag laundry covers of the fresh ones.
Maxwell had often suspected that Crinshaw changed uniforms several times a day in order to maintain his appearance. The presence of the fresh uniforms and used ones — you couldn’t call them dirty — in the general’s office tended to confirm the idea. Otherwise the majority of the items would have been in the general’s quarters, not in his office.
Maxwell closed the closet door, switched off the penlight and returned it to his inner jacket pocket. Then he crossed back to the office door and stood there a moment, listening to be sure no one had come into the outer office and was now waiting on the other side of the door.
As he listened, Maxwell slipped off the cloth gloves and returned them to his pocket. His fingerprints in Crinshaw’s office by themselves would mean nothing. He had been in the office many times on official business. But he had worn them while changing the magnetic recording tape. His prints on the spools or the recorder, or even the underside of Crinshaw’s desk, would have been damning.
Satisfied that there was no one lurking in the outer office, Maxwell opened the door and went out, pausing to make sure the door locked behind him.
He crossed the floor of the outer office without incident, then paused again to listen. He was just about to open the door when he heard the sound of footsteps in the hallway outside.
There was no time to retrace his steps across the room and pick the lock to Crinshaw’s inner office again. He slid to the hinge side of the doorway and flattened himself against the wall, bumping up against a coatrack in the process. It didn’t fall, and in fact made only a slight scraping sound on the floor, but to Maxwell the noise was deafening. He pressed himself up even tighter against the wall and practiced becoming invisible.
The footsteps outside, however, passed by without stopping, and after many long, heart-pounding seconds, Maxwell exhaled slowly, drew a breath and tried the door again. He listened for perhaps forty-five seconds, in case the hall walker should come back, but when the silence remained unbroken, he unlocked the door and opened it a tiny crack.
Although he could see only up the hall in one direction, it looked clear. He listened again for the footfalls of anyone coming from his blind side, but there were none. Cautiously he opened the door wide, risked a peek in both directions and stepped boldly out into the hallway, closing and locking the door behind him. Then he strolled nonchalantly down the hall, remembering to unbutton his coat and loosen his tie as he went.
“Good evening, Mr. Maxwell. Working late?” The guard at the desk greeted him.
“If it’s not late, it’s early,” said Maxwell, trying hard not to seem overly friendly, but not unusually brusque either.
“Yes, sir. You boys in the U.S. Information Agency sure do keep odd hours.”
“We wouldn’t if I could help it. But when the embassy staff wants something, they usually get it, regardless of the hour.”
“Yes, sir. It does look like they could get you a nicer office than that little place you’ve got down in the basement though with all the work you do.”
“If you’ve got any influence with the ambassador or General Westmoreland, I’d appreciate something with a view.”
The army private laughed. “I don’t even have any influence with my sergeant. Sign here, please, sir.”
Maxwell dutifully signed the log and wrote the time in the out column, then trudged out the door as though it had been a very long day. It had.
Outside he walked some distance before hailing a taxi, had the driver drive around Saigon for half an hour with no particular destination in mind, paid off the cab, walked several blocks and hailed another. After three changes, he was satisfied that no one had picked up his tail, and he took another cab to the safe apartment he’d established in Cholon, having the driver let him out a couple of blocks away and walking the remaining distance. Upstairs he paused and listened before unlocking the door.
The room was littered with the refuse of Maxwell’s recent occupancy. A variety of empty take-out food containers from diverse Chinese restaurants covered the small tabletop, and there was a row of Coke cans running along one edge. They made a ninety-degree turn at the corner and ran partway along the wall, which the table was pushed up against. Two shirts were draped over the back of the armchair in the living area, one clean, which he had bought this morning along with the shirt he was now wearing, the other dirty. There was both a Chinese and a Vietnamese language newspaper on the rickety coffee table, and a French language weekly on the floor beside it, all of them this morning’s editions.
Maxwell checked the bedroom of the apartment, including the closet and beneath the bed, then went back to the little kitchen area. He took off his jacket and hung it over the back of the unused second chair. He checked the tiny, ancient refrigerator, but found it empty, then searched among the cans on the table until he found one that contained a swallow or two of Coke. He drank that, explored the others, and finding them all empty, opened the tiny cupboard and took down a tape recorder and a portable radio.
Maxwell put both items on the table. He eased the big hard-chromed Swenson .45 Auto Custom with the ambidextrous safeties and slide releases from his Milt Sparks shoulder holster and laid it on the table next to the radio. He switched on the radio and tuned in to AFVN, which was blaring out ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T. and the M.G.s, adjusted the volume to something just short of physically painful and fished the spool of magnetic tape from the recorder in Crinshaw’s office out of his jacket pocket. Then he sat down and fed the tape into the recorder.
The microrecorder, identical to the one beneath Crinshaw’s desk, was designed to utilize the tape at a very slow rate. Since the microphone was voice-activated, or triggered by any other sound of a significant volume and amount, he had to wade through a
lot of one-sided conversations consisting of Crinshaw speaking to people on the telephone or yelling at his administrative sergeant over the field telephone intercom Crinshaw insisted on using because he thought it gave the office a military look.
Eventually Maxwell hit pay dirt. The conversation was far from straightforward, but what was said, and what could be inferred, was far from reassuring.
“Do you think it’s a good idea for us to keep meeting here?” Crinshaw’s voice asked.
Maxwell recognized the reply as Jirasek’s. “What do you want us to do, General, meet in the officer’s club? Here is an appropriate place for two people of our rank to be conducting business. If anyone who knows me sees me coming in here, they may wonder what we’re talking about, but it won’t raise nearly as many questions as it would if we kept ‘accidentally’ bumping into each other in bars and restaurants and on park benches. That sort of cloak and dagger nonsense only happens in the movies.”
“Yes. I suppose you’re right. It’s just that so many people come in and out of here that I worry someone might spot you. Maxwell’s office is in the basement, you know. What if he should see you coming in the building?”
“I felt it important that we talk, and I don’t think Maxwell will be in today.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“He saw me last night.”
“Oh, my God!”
“Relax, General. He didn’t see my face. I’m sure of that. All he knows is that someone was shadowing him, so he’ll stay away from his office, his apartment, anyplace he usually goes for a couple of days, on the assumption those places are being watched. It’s standard procedure for an agent in the field. Just routine. Nothing to worry about. It might even work to our advantage if this thing blows up and we need to find a scapegoat. He’d have to explain the missing time when nobody saw him, and since he’s trying to avoid being seen anyway, that might not be the easiest thing for him to do.”
