“Do you? Then enlighten me. What is it exactly that you understand?”
“That I will prepare for sabotage actions to thwart any British invasion north into Iran, or Russian invasion south into Iran.”
Canaris said, “You know, Shultz, I was a bit worried about this as a first operation for an officer so young. Now I am worried no longer. You understand that since you are going behind the lines, so to speak, for reasons of security any further information over and above your operational assignment will be withheld from you.”
“I understand, Admiral.” That didn’t mean a thing. This wasn’t like the Lubyanka, where every door was locked and an officer in one section was shot if he as much as exchanged some friendly gossip with someone in another. Here once you were on the inside all you had to do was walk about and listen.
“You will remain here in Berlin for a few more months to receive briefings on the area and begin planning your mission. Then on to Abwehr Vienna, which is responsible for the Balkans and Middle East. From there to Switzerland, where you will assemble the final details of your cover identity and learn all you can about the textile business in what will be a regrettably short time.”
“Yes, Admiral.” Neutral Switzerland? Well, he remembered Yakushev’s album. The NKVD could shoot him in the face just as easily there.
Canaris stood up and offered his hand. “May I say that you have made my morning unusually pleasant, Shultz. One becomes tired of having to explain everything in detail. I wish you luck.”
Alexsi shook the hand, which seemed as mild as the man. He took a step back, slapped his cap back on his head, popped his heels, and saluted once again. “Good morning, Admiral.”
But Canaris was already head down back in his papers. “Good morning, Shultz,” he replied without looking up. But then, “Oh, Shultz?”
Alexsi turned on his heels. “Yes, Admiral?”
“Be so good as to remember me to your uncle, will you?”
“Of course, Admiral.”
The dachshunds tried to follow Alexsi out the door, and Canaris had to whistle them back.
31
1940 Berlin
In the privacy of his bedroom, with the door locked, Alexsi began his report to Moscow. After all these years he finally had a great secret for them.
On a single sheet of paper, and on the glass top of the desk to leave no impression, he wrote it out, beginning, as had been drilled into him, with the most important information: PERSONAL INTERVIEW WITH CANARIS. NO GERMAN INVASION OF ENGLAND. GERMAN INVASION OF SOVIET UNION PLANNED FOR SUMMER OF 1941.
He did several drafts, cutting it down until it was as short and succinct as possible. Now he had to encrypt it. Yakushev had insisted he do so in English, because with an intercepted message originating from Berlin any cryptanalyst trying to break the code would be expecting German or Russian. He made a straddling checkerboard using the mnemonic ASINTOER, which were the eight most common letters in English, and the remaining letters of the alphabet after:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
A S I NT O E R
4 B C D F G H J K L M
9 P Q U VW X Y Z . /
Both he and the cipher clerks in Moscow used the same agreed-upon 4–9 gap. The period was used to end sentences, and numbers were written as themselves twice and straddled on either side with the slash. In converting a letter to a number he read across from the number on the left of the checkerboard and then up.
So INVASION 1941 would be encrypted as:
I=2 N=3 V=93 A=0 S=1 I=2 O=6 N=3 /=99 1=11 9=99 4=44 1=11 /=99
239301263991199441199
Next Alexsi went to the book he had been instructed to purchase upon arrival in Germany, an almanac of European industrial statistics. He flipped it open to a random page and picked out a number that happened to be for British coal production in 1930: 243,876,427 tons. He simply repeated it to the length he needed, and added it to his first group of numbers without carrying the tens digit:
239301263991199441199
+243876427024387642702
=472177680915476083891
The continuous line of numbers that made up the message were broken down into five-number groups with zeros to fill out any empty spaces at the end. So the final encrypted message INVASION 1941 would be written as:
47217 76809 15476 08389 1000
The coal statistic had come from page 147, line 3, column 7 of the almanac. That five-number group was the key to the entire message: 14737. He would add that number to the fourth group from the beginning of his message, and the fourth group from the end. And that resulting indicator group would be placed at the very beginning of the message.
With the indicator key and the identical almanac the cipher clerk in Moscow would be able to reverse his steps and decode his report. No one else could. Yakushev had assured him that the code was unbreakable. It had been adapted by Soviet intelligence from one used by the Nihilists, one of the many leftist groups, like the Anarchists, that the Bolsheviks had destroyed as they consolidated power after the 1917 Revolution.
As soon as he was finished, Alexsi brought the original report and all the paper used in coding to the toilet and burned it in the basin, carefully washing the ashes down the drain. Why not wait to throw them in the fireplace or the coal furnace? No, destroy them at once! Yakushev’s voice still haunted him even in Germany.
Now that the message was in code, it had to be sent. Alexsi couldn’t take the risk of it being fouled up by whoever cleared his taynik. Yakushev’s orders were explicit in such a case. A war warning would have to be radioed direct to Moscow.
Which was in itself amusing because Yakushev categorically hated the use of radio. It was the best way to catch a spy. Amateur radio enthusiasts were all licensed, so whenever an unknown station began transmitting both the Nazis and Soviets immediately began using direction finding to try to locate it.
To reduce the risk you followed Yakushev’s rules. You could never transmit from where you lived. You could never hide your radio, or anything else incriminating, where you lived. If you transmitted from the same place every time they would eventually catch you. And if you always transmitted on the same day and at the same time they would catch you quicker.
The temptation was to drag your radio to some quiet lonely place, but instead it was much safer to transmit from a busy location where many people lived, to confront a direction-finding team with a daunting number of choices if they managed to narrow down your general location.
Yakushev always emphasized that any method used before was useless, simply because it was known. You had to come up with your own solution. Alexsi had one rule of his own, one that Aida had taught him well. Have no accomplices to betray you. Which precluded renting a room.
He folded up his message and placed it in his green packet of Memphis cigarettes. The sort of thing that attracted no notice if it had to be thrown away quickly.
After supper he left his uncle’s house in the diplomatic quarter just west of Potsdamer Platz with nothing in his hands. In uniform, of course. In wartime Berlin uniforms were a guarantee of anonymity.
On the crowded evening streets any surveillance would have to be close. Whenever Alexsi turned a corner he would step into a shop and examine the window display from the inside, really watching for anyone coming down the street quickly and trying to catch sight of him. He was clear.
Three kilometers northeast of the Brandenburg Gate was the Protestant cemetery of the Sophienkirche, the Sophie Church. Alexsi went over the brick wall where a tree cast its shadow from the streetlights. There was a light breeze and overcast. Rain was threatening.
The cemetery gate was locked at night, and the grounds deserted. Alexsi still did two more drills, carefully circling his destination. No watchers. Other than the wind blowing the leaves, it was quiet. He wasn’t afraid of the dead, only the living.
There was a line of large stone tombs on a path. Like little houses for the dead. Rich families who buried their dead aboveground and
indoors. Some had the entrances bricked up. Others had old iron doors. Alexsi had picked one where he was sure the family had died out. A slender white birch had grown up in front of the entrance. The outside was carved like a Gothic church with a big cross in the center of the spires.
He had planned carefully for this day, making his own door key and carefully oiling the hinges to keep from waking the dead and anyone else nearby. It only creaked slightly as he opened it, and he closed it again as soon as he was inside.
Alexsi ignited the cigarette lighter for illumination and set it burning down on a stone slab that covered some fellow’s coffin. Tucked away in a corner was a suitcase and a metal toolbox. He stripped off his uniform and donned a workman’s boiler suit and a leather eye patch.
Yakushev would have dismissed it as impossibly melodramatic, but it was the perfect disguise. A missing eye was the only way to account for an otherwise able-bodied young man in civilian clothes these days. And no one would ever remember anything but that patch. What did the fellow look like? He had an eye patch, Herr Wachtmeister. Height? Hair color? He had an eye patch, Herr Wachtmeister.…
32
1940 Berlin
The young man with the eye patch shouldered his way through some bellboys having their smoke break at the service entrance at the back of the Hotel Adlon, the most luxurious in Berlin. All the film stars stayed there. They paid him no mind because he was wearing the dark blue service cap with red piping, and over his workman’s clothes the blue armband with the gold swastika-bearing eagle of the Deutsche Reichspost, the German post office. He was carrying a metal toolbox.
He was inside and heading for the service elevator when an authoritative voice said, “Hold on, there.”
Alexsi turned. “Yes?”
It was a watchman. Aggressive enough looking, if he hadn’t been fat and middle-aged, with a blunt rounded head like a pistol bullet. “What are you doing here?”
“Telephone problem,” Alexsi replied gruffly, as if to say, What do you think I’m doing here?
“The repairman just left,” the watchman said. “What are you doing here?”
That was a shock. But as Yakushev said, you couldn’t run, and you couldn’t just stand there with your mouth open. “I know that,” Alexsi said impatiently. “There’s still a problem. I have to check the lines coming in from the street.”
The watchman was looking him up and down. “I’ll have to see about this.”
“Your name?” Alexsi demanded crisply.
As a question he was most likely used to asking, that startled the watchman. “What?”
“If I don’t get this fixed tonight, and the hotel complains,” Alexsi said, “I’m not being blamed.”
“All right, all right,” the watchman grumbled. “Do you know where you’re going?”
“I’ve worked here before,” Alexsi said over his shoulder, already moving.
As he went past the kitchen his eyes flashed to the chalkboard list of rooms, for the room-service orders. He pressed the call button for the service elevator.
The elevator operator opened the door. A very old man, creaking like the door, whom they probably didn’t want on the guest elevators anymore. “Floor?”
Alexsi had never been stopped before in a hotel, let alone questioned. He knew he should just go to the lobby and get the hell out of there. “Five.”
“Now that’s the job right there,” the elevator operator said, closing the swinging grate. “Fixing telephones.”
“As soon as I finish up here I have to go down into the sewers,” Alexsi said. “I’ll take your job tonight.”
“The sewers?” the elevator operator said. “No, thanks.”
When they reached the floor, Alexsi peeked out the door before getting off. No more Hollywood stars in wartime. The top floors were reserved for foreign dignitaries and Nazi Party big shots who took rooms on the weekends to do some whoring away from their wives. But it was a weekday. And if any of either were about there would be security men, a sign for him to get back in the elevator and go home. The hallway was deserted, and the room-service board had given Alexsi a good idea which rooms were empty. He knocked on the door and put his ear to it. No answer, no sound from inside. Hotel room locks were easy. He opened it up and peeked inside.
The room was clearly unoccupied. Alexsi wedged a triangle of wood under the door to keep it shut no matter what. He opened the glass door a crack and checked the balcony.
Once he was sure he was alone, he unpacked his toolbox onto the room’s writing desk. The radio took less than ten minutes to set up. The receiver was a regular shortwave that, once removed from its bulky cabinet and speakers, was just a thirty-centimeter sheet of Bakelite with the tubes and mechanism mounted on it. The transmitter was more complex and completely homemade. The frequency coils were automobile copper tubing wrapped around cardboard toilet paper cylinders, the vacuum tubes of the best German quality. It looked like a pile of junk wired together in a shallow wooden tray, but it worked.
Alexsi connected the two units and strung the copper strand antenna wire across the room. He hooked it from picture frame to picture frame, small glass medicine bottles serving as insulators.
He was very proud of his idea. Germans submitted unquestioningly to anything official, so a telephone repairman could go anywhere. Transmit from an unoccupied hotel room for an hour or less, and then leave. A different hotel every time, the slow weekdays when they weren’t full, people always coming and going. Even Yakushev would approve.
Alexsi plugged his power cord into the outlet and donned the hard Bakelite headphones. With the transmitter powered up and working, he tapped out D7Y continuously on his Morse key. This was his Soviet call sign.
Moscow was reading him weak and broken, and he had to reposition his antenna wires. Finally they gave him the go-ahead. He began sending his coded message. At the Red Army school they considered him a very fast operator, but it still took time to send out the numbered groups.
He thought he heard something over the static in his earphones and the clicking of the Morse key. Alexsi paused and pushed the headphones back. It sounded like a door nearby. And then a key being slid into the lock of his room, very quietly.
Alexsi quickly tapped out DAVID, to end the message and signal it was genuine. In one smooth motion he crammed the message paper into his shirt, scooped the receiver, transmitter and toolbox up into his arms, tearing out the power and antenna wires in the process, dashed across the room, kicked open the balcony door, and hurled everything out into the night.
The door unlocked but hung up on the wood wedge he’d driven underneath it. Someone gave it a hard kick but it didn’t open.
The balcony ran all the way around the fifth floor, with only a low iron fence protecting the outside and the border of each room. Alexsi leaped up, grabbed the edge of the roof, and pulled himself up just as the door crashed open.
The edge was only about fifteen centimeters wide, and the roof sloped too sharply for climbing, especially with a light rain falling. Alexsi hesitated for an instant, but falling off would be preferable to being caught. He fixed his eyes on the far end of the roof, never once looking down at his feet, and ran flat out.
Everything was fine until he reached the end of the roof and tried to stop. The leather soles of his shoes gave him no traction. He slid forward, stomach-wrenchingly out of control. Fortunately a tall metal grate separated the last of the balcony from the building next door. The top of it came up to his knees. Still sliding, Alexsi stuck out a foot to try to stop himself. It hit the top of the grate, but the other foot slipped out from under him. He fell onto his ass and nearly off the roof. Only one hand grasping the grate for dear life and a single buttock on the edge of the roof were keeping him on. With the strength of sheer terror, Alexsi gave a great heave and pulled himself up. Now on his knees and both hands on the grate, he yanked himself upright, stepped on top of the grate, and leaped out onto the roof of the next building. Landing hard and rolling ba
ck to his feet, he dashed across that roof to the other side, pulled himself up to the edge, and stepped off onto the roof of the next adjoining building.
The joined buildings, all at roughly the same height, made it faster than running down the street. A diagonal walk across and he was on the other side of the block. Now he paused to check his back. No one was chasing behind him. Either they’d thought he’d run along the balcony and ducked into another room, or the Gestapo didn’t have anyone dedicated enough to follow him across wet rooftops. He quickly peeked over the edge. There was a long gray radio-direction-finding van, with its distinctive circular roof antennas, parked at either end of the street. They must have been cruising the area, lucked upon his transmission, and that damned watchman and elevator operator tipped them off.
The roof door was locked. Alexsi gave it a sharp kick, but it only bounced back. He could tell from the resistance that the door wasn’t just locked but barred. It was always something. He took a quick look around but there was no other roof exit, not even a maintenance hatch. Time was running short. The Gestapo and police had probably surrounded the hotel but soon would spread out all over the neighborhood. Alexsi circled around the edge until he found it. The fire escape was an iron ladder attached to the side of the building, following the rain gutter down to the street. Before going over the side Alexsi discarded his eye patch and Reichspost armband.
Leaning down over the edge of the building, he grabbed the top rung and swung himself over onto the ladder. Just his weight made it sway like a stalk of wheat in the wind. No sense wasting time, then. He clamped the sides of his shoes on the outside of the vertical rails of the ladder, got a good grip with his gloved hands, and slid down instead of climbing. Just as he used to slide down the silo ladder at the farm.
A Single Spy Page 19
