Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  George Havens had been twenty-six the first time he was summoned to an audience with the Great Man. Only the week before he had arrested the man who had stolen the Cantanflas bomb sight; it had been his first big pinch and was all over the papers, and he was being called in to receive the Director’s personal congratulations. He remembered that he had bought a new suit for the occasion and gotten his hair cut twice in four days. That was just the way it affected people.

  But since December 9, 1941, the Director had become nothing more than the bastard who was powerful enough to yoke him to a desk in Washington. Their conversation on that day had reduced Hoover for all time to the merely mortal. His capacity to reward or punish had been exhausted by the simple act of refusing to accept a letter of resignation, and George Havens had learned to hate him in much the same way he would have hated anyone else.

  So Havens didn’t pay much attention to the photographs. Instead, he sat down on the sofa directly across from the door that led through the secretarial offices into Mr. Hoover’s own, closed his eyes, and promptly fell asleep.

  “Mr. Havens.”

  It was beautiful. He was alone, shipwrecked on this island in the South Pacific—well, almost alone. There was this big, luscious blonde with a bunch of green grapes in her hand—did they have blondes in the South Pacific?—and she kept nudging his shoulder with her jugs while he lay under a palm tree, watching the surf come in. Did she want him to finish the grapes, or was she just being chummy?

  “Mr. Havens.”

  An eyelid fluttered open, and he saw that it wasn’t a blonde at all. It was Miss Crisp, who hardly had any jugs at all to speak of and was one of Mr. Hoover’s dog bodies. Her smiling, faded, fiftyish face was only a few inches from his own and she was speaking in what almost amounted to a whisper, out of kindness no doubt. God, what would happen if J. Edgar found out that a member of his Bureau had been caught asleep in the waiting room! The waiting room was for waiting.

  “Yes, Miss Crisp—just coming.” He sat up and ran his fingers through his hair as a kind of gesture in the direction of tidiness, and then he checked his watch. It was 4:25, so Hoover had kept him dangling for nearly half an hour. Havens grinned, thinking with some pleasure how angry the Great Man would be if he knew that his poor, quaking subordinate had been snoozing the whole time. The wise man took his revenge where he could.

  The Director looked much as he always did—as if about to explode in the next few seconds. His wavy, dark brown hair was carefully slicked back, which somehow only succeeded in emphasizing the heaviness of his petulant, babyish face. His lower lip was protruding slightly and his thick hands were placed palms down on his desk. That was not a good sign.

  There was another gentleman in the room, a heavyset soldier in his late forties, with the stars of a major general on his shoulders. He wore a mustache and sat on a small, uncomfortable looking chair against the far wall. Hoover seemed to ignore his presence—perhaps he was offended by the mustache—and the general was making no claims on anyone’s attention as he leaned slightly forward, his left hand resting on his knee.

  “I haven’t yet received your report,” Hoover snapped, making it sound like a court-martial sentence. Havens only smiled at him, in a way calculated to make him furious.

  “No, sir, that’s because I haven’t written it yet.”

  The Director remained unfazed at this impertinence, as if he had expected it, even counted on it, but the general seemed embarrassed. His face assumed that expression of tense, deliberate vagueness that you see in people who are unwilling to intrude on someone else’s domestic squabble, and out of respect for his feelings Havens allowed the smile to die away.

  “No, sir.”

  “I take it this von Niehauser individual is now definitely out of bounds?” Mr. Hoover’s eyes widened slightly—it wasn’t really a question. “One could have hoped the local police would do a little more professional job, but we’ve never had good cooperation from those people.”

  Those people—probably Mrs. Vanderbilt used the same emphasis when mentioning the IWW.

  “It was my case, sir, and my dropped ball. I was the one who called in the NYPD.”

  “It was their case, Mr. Havens. Officially, we don’t have enough to support a charge of espionage, and murder is not a federal offense.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Havens stood staring at the wall behind Mr. Hoover’s desk, his face as blank as he could make it. If the Director didn’t want to admit in front of a third party that anyone working in his Bureau could be anything less than infallible, that was his business. For the record, Special Agent Havens was the victim of other people’s incompetence. Still, Special Agent Havens noticed that he hadn’t been invited to sit down.

  Anyway, it could have been worse. You weren’t allowed to argue with the umpire, even if the only side he favored was his own, and at least he wasn’t sending anybody back to the dugouts. If it wasn’t going to be the Coral Sea, at least it wasn’t going to be Kansas City either.

  There was a manila folder directly under Mr. Hoover’s right hand. He opened the cover delicately, the way anyone else would have removed the housing from a land mine, and frowned at the first page.

  “We have here the available information on your spy,” he said, glancing up at the blameless Special Agent Havens with an expression that might have been mistaken for hatred. “The name seems to have rung a bell in certain circles of Military Intelligence—everything after 1939 is a blank, but there are one or two points that might interest you. . .”

  The Director ran his’ finger down the first page, just as if he had never happened to glance at this particular dossier before. It was a little routine of his, intended no doubt to suggest that he was merely seeking confirmation of something he had known already from ages past

  “Yes, well—born, March 12, 1909, in Garlitz, Prussia, third son of a military family. The mother was the granddaughter of Helmuth von Moltka, the head of the Prussian General Staff during the Franco-Prussian War. The father was decorated in the last war and served abroad as a military attaché.

  “Education: Le Rosey, 1919-23; Winchester, 1923-26; Göttingen, 1926-28; the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, 1928-33, taking a doctor of philosophy degree in physics. He stayed on the faculty there until the beginning of the war, when apparently he entered the Army. Does any of this suggest anything to you, Mr. Havens?”

  The Director’s eyebrows crept up about half an inch, implying that any sharp young man—any young man with the stuff of a Bureau agent in him—should have been able to deduce the rest.

  “No, sir.” Special Agent Havens shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He disliked guessing games.

  “Nothing, Mr. Havens?” The son of a bitch was genuinely pleased.

  “Nothing, sir. Except that he sounds like kind of a big fish to be wasted as a spy. Could be he got in wrong with the regime, though.”

  “‘He got in wrong with the regime. . .’” There was that in Mr. Hoover’s inflection to suggest that maybe von Niehauser wasn’t the only one. “You can’t do any better than that, Mr. Havens?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, be that as it may, Mr. Havens, Herr von Niehauser has managed to do for you what you never succeeded in doing for yourself. He’s managed to get you transferred to the Army.”

  The Director was looking at Havens, who was perhaps lucky that looks couldn’t kill, but Havens was looking at the overweight major general who all this time had been sitting against the wall, who hadn’t said a word or moved a muscle, who didn’t officially seem to be there at all. Havens was grinning at him.

  “This is General Leslie R. Groves,” Mr. Hoover announced, rising from his chair—it was only when he was standing that you remembered how short he was. “General Groves, you’ll be interested to know, was the one who brought von Niehauser’s background to our attention. You belong to him now, Mr. Havens, and I wish you joy of each other.”

  Havens waited, wondering what wa
s going to happen next, but what did happen was the last thing he would have expected.

  Because Mr. Hoover walked out of the room. He actually left, surrendering his office, the sanctum sanctorum, closing the door behind him with angry violence. It didn’t seem to make any difference for the first few seconds—his presence was like an image that doesn’t just suddenly disappear but fades slowly away.

  Nevertheless, he was gone. It was like finding oneself in the presence of a miracle.

  For a moment after they had the office to themselves, both Havens and General Leslie R. Groves—ask for it by name—seemed to be trying to pretend that each was alone in the room. Or perhaps they were just waiting for the vibrations to subside. Anyway, it was Groves’ show now, and he wasn’t inviting anybody to sit down either. Havens caught himself wondering what the “R” stood for.

  Finally the general ventured so far as to look in his direction; he might have been examining a piece of furniture.

  But two could look as cheaply as one. The insignia on General Leslie R. Groves’ jacket lapels indicated that he was with the Corps of Engineers. Havens sighed as his last best hope deflated in front of his eyes. So much for combat.

  “What is it you want with me, General?” he asked at last, more out of irritation than from any feeling of curiosity. “What does the Army care about von Niehauser, and what’s it got to do with me?”

  The general smiled.

  “Son, I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the Manhattan Project?”

  10

  The general turned out to be actually rather a decent sort, something the hierarchy of the FBI didn’t prepare you to expect from a boss.

  The two men had dinner together that night, around a conference table in an office on the fifth floor of the War Department. A secretary brought in a couple of paper bags full of little cartons of Chinese food and then left, ostentatiously closing the door behind herself. Havens was really too tired to be hungry, but Groves made up for him.

  “Naturally we don’t get much intelligence on it,” he was saying as he felt around in one of the cartons for another fried shrimp, “but there’s reason to believe that the Germans are every bit as interested as we are in building such a bomb—and they’ve got a head start. They’re beaten in the field and they know it, but you can imagine the consequences if Hitler manages to get his hands on a weapon like this.”

  Yes, he could. The general had been quite eloquent on that score: a device maybe not much bigger than a steamer trunk that would be capable of destroying most of downtown Washington, that might poison the earth for a generation and go right on killing. A fireball that might even be able to ignite the atmosphere and burn up the whole planet.

  Or maybe he couldn’t. Maybe nobody could. Maybe that was what made the thing so horrible—a weapon that couldn’t be controlled or even imagined. Just endless devastation.

  “We really don’t have much of an idea what it might be able to do—it’s all theory at this point. But I don’t think the Nazis would hesitate to use such a device against, say, London, if the alternative were losing the war. If they can’t have the world, they might be willing to watch it go up in flames.”

  Havens leaned against the table, propping his head up between his hands. It was a novel sensation to be half asleep and scared to death, both at the same time. The two together created a strange feeling of panicky helplessness—this was probably what it felt like to be drowning.

  “That still doesn’t tell me what makes von Niehauser such a big threat. How do you know that he’s even interested in your device or would know where to look?”

  “Figure it out for yourself. Last November we bombed the heavy water installation at Vemork, Norway. The place had been under tight Wehrmacht security ever since ‘42, with production increased a couple of hundredfold, and it’s all been going to about four research facilities, all of them associated in the past with atomic physics. Do you follow me so far?”

  “No. Sorry, but I was an English major.”

  General Groves smiled suddenly. It was the smile of someone who understood the limits of the humanly possible. “You want to go to sleep for a few hours? We can continue this in the morning.”

  “No. Just tell me—do you use this ‘heavy water’ to make bombs?”

  “Sort of.” Groves leaned back in his chair, and the smile faded away of its own accord. He picked up a pencil which had rolled against his hand, holding it delicately between thick first finger and thumb. “All of that is complicated and classified. The point is that Vemork was their only source, so let’s just say that they need it and all at once they haven’t got it anymore.”

  “Okay. Let’s say that.”

  Suddenly Havens felt like apologizing. He hadn’t meant to sound like a smart ass; he must be getting punchy. But Groves didn’t appear to have noticed.

  “Then two months later we get a visit from Herr von Niehauser.” He looked at the younger man as if he expected that everything had been made clear, but Havens merely stared at him.

  “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, General. ‘After this, therefore because of this’—it’s a classical error in logic. Von Niehauser’s appearance may have nothing to do with your bomb. There must be all kinds of other things the Jerries would like to know about over here. And the fact that he used to be a physics teacher doesn’t mean very much either; he can’t know anything significant about their project or they’d have to be out of their minds to have sent him. Would you risk dropping one of your bright boys into the Third Reich?”

  “I might not have any choice—and neither might they.” Groves smiled again, his blue eyes almost disappearing in the folds of his heavy, tanned face. He had been over all this terrain before, apparently, so he knew where he was. “You can’t just smash open a safe somewhere and then grab the papers and run. We guard our secrets better than that, and so do the Germans. It’s not what’s written down that matters but what’s in people’s heads—there are hundreds of men involved in this project, and we can’t keep them all under lock and key. And to get anything from any of them, von Niehauser is going to have to know what they’re talking about.”

  He sighed heavily and shifted his weight in the chair. The subject seemed to make him uncomfortable.

  “Before the war,” he went on, “the atomic physicists used to be like a private club. There weren’t very many of them and they all knew each other. They’d meet for conferences and write each other letters about their work, right up to the invasion of Poland. They’ve got their own language and their own values, and they trust each other a lot more than they trust any government. They don’t know the meaning of the word ‘security’—if I told you the trouble I’ve had with some of them. . . Anyway, the point is that von Niehauser is a member in good standing. He wasn’t just a physics teacher.”

  Havens glanced sleepily around the office, thinking that it was a drab little place to be discussing the survival of the world. There was a green carpet on the floor, and the walls were painted the usual institutional buff. Through the Venetian blinds were visible a road and, beyond that, the Arlington cemetery. Memento mori.

  “Well, then, I hope you catch him, General.” He reached out a tentative finger and tipped one of the cardboard cartons far enough toward him that he could see inside. It was about half full of fried rice. He let it go with a shudder of disgust, and it rocked back on its heels like a first day recruit snapping to attention.

  “I’m not going to catch him—you’re going to catch him.”

  There was a moment of almost tangible silence, and then Havens’ face split into a grin.

  “Don’t make me laugh, General. You know what happened in New York. At this minute von Niehauser could be anywhere, and recent experience would suggest that right now I probably couldn’t catch a cold.”

  But nobody was laughing. General Groves just sat there in a kind of frigid immobility, as if nothing had been said that called for any response whatsoever. To this man, it seemed, there were
no arguable points.

  And then, finally, he shook his head.

  “I talked to a Lieutenant Phelan in New York this morning,” he said, as if he were deliberately changing the subject. “He seems to think von Niehauser got out of the city by some act of levitation. He was very embarrassed; he nearly burned up the phone wires. Anyway, he says you’re the best bird dog in the business. Hoover says the same thing. He’s not very fond of you otherwise, but he tells me you’re good at hunting down spies.”

  “Hoover’s just covering his ass.”

  “Maybe so.” Groves frowned slightly, as if he found the expression distasteful. “But you were the one who figured out that the Germans had landed an agent, and you tracked him all the way down to New York. And everything we’ve been able to find out about von Niehauser suggests that he’s a clever man—not just book clever, but smart and resourceful. So far, I’d call it a draw.”

  It was an obvious enough ploy—first the appeal to vanity and the competitive instinct. It was the Military Intelligence version of the pregame pep talk. And it was working.

  Havens wasn’t kidding anybody. What he wanted more than anything in the world was another crack at von Niehauser. He would never be able to live quietly with himself if somehow he didn’t manage to turn the key on this guy. This was his Battle of the Coral Sea, his invasion of Europe. His war had come down to him and Joachim von Niehauser, physicist and spy. And he wouldn’t have been surprised if General Leslie R. Groves knew that every bit as well as he did, the bastard.

  “This bomb of mine is a priority one item,” Groves went on. “I get anything I need—money, men, anything. I got you away from Hoover, so you understand what I’m talking about. And it’s priority one with me that you catch this German agent. You can have anything or anybody you want, and no one is going to question you about your methods. Just get him, and there won’t be any complaints. But get him.”

  “And when I get him?” Havens ran a hand through his hair, which he found, much to his surprise, was damp with sweat, and tried to smile again. “It doesn’t sound like what we have here is the sort of deal where anyone would much care for having von Niehauser put on trial for espionage. What are you planning to do with him once I’ve caught the poor son of a bitch?”