State Department Murders

by Edward S. Aarons

  Edward S. Aarons

  (writing as Edward Ronns)

  State Department Murders

  CHAPTER ONE

  BARNEY CORNELL walked slowly from the Congressional investigating chambers to the parking lot off Fourteenth Street. He didn’t look back once. Paul had shown him a side door, and he had escaped the newspapermen and photographers. It was an effort to walk calmly through the five-o’clock crush of civil-service employees, just as if he were like everyone else, homeward bound at the end of a hot summer’s day. His impulse was to cut and run. There was no point in looking backward over his shoulder. They were behind him. They would be there, mingled with the crowd, one or two or more of them, always on his trail. He shivered with anger. It had been going on for days and weeks, for much too long. A man couldn’t take it without some resentment.

  The chill lingered inside him, an icy knot that had tied itself inside him early this morning. It was nothing that the oppressive murk of Washington could dispel. He walked alone, with an even stride, through the streams of homebound government workers, and then he turned the corner toward the parking lot where he had left his car. He could stand it no longer. He fished out a cigarette and paused to light it, and with the movement he looked quickly back toward Fourteenth.

  Nobody. Everybody and nobody.

  A man brushed past him, a neat young man with sandy hair, intent on his own business. Nobody. Maybe. When he turned abruptly through the gateway into the parking lot, the man kept going without a pause. Cornell shivered suddenly, and recognized the fear inside him.

  Fear was a thing he had managed to keep at arm’s length for the past two weeks. At first it was something not even to be considered, since he had nothing to fear. So he’d thought. But as day followed day before the committee, as lie was added to lie, fear crept into the corners of his mind and raised doubts that besieged him. Now it was out in the open, and his struggle for self-control was turning into a rout, and his anger was no longer one of pure outrage, but the anger of desperation and fright.

  The parking-lot attendant took his ticket and frowned over it.

  “Your car is in the back, Row D,” he said to Cornell. “Want me to get it for you?”

  The boy had a deep-South drawl. Cornell said, “I know where it is, thanks. I can get it myself.”

  “Yes, sir. Hot day, isn’t it?”

  “Plenty hot,” Cornell said.

  He turned away from the green-painted booth, taking his keys from his pocket and jingling them ostentatiously. Maybe the boy was one of them. You couldn’t tell any more. You were trained for this sort of thing yourself, but things had reached the state where you could trust no one—or almost no one. He was innocent, but he couldn’t fight lies forever. He could never catch up to the source and overtake the perjury, the slander, the brutal destruction of his reputation.

  The men who were following him didn’t really count. They were simply doing their job, and doing it well, following orders to achieve security, doing what they knew best to do. Behind them was Congressman Ira Keach, and Cornell winced as the name conjured up the man in his mind. The face of a hawk and the eyes of a crusader, rapping out the questions, repeating the same lies, daring him to deny them. It didn’t even stop with Keach, who, after all, in his own way, was possessed of good, if mistaken, intentions. There was the man behind Keach, the man behind them all, who had no official standing in any of this, but who stood like a tall shadow cast over the whole Washington picture.

  When he thought of Jason Stone, he thought at once of Kari, too, and something turned over inside him. He looked at his watch, a memento from others in the State Department who had worked with him on Project Cirrus. He wished he had never heard of Project Cirrus. He had half an hour. In that half hour he had to make sure he was alone; he had to lose himself in the city, somewhere, anywhere, with no one behind him.

  The car would do him no good. Even if he could get away in it from the parking lot, he wouldn’t go five blocks before the police cruisers noted his license plates and relayed his position. Cornell turned in between the rows of cars, still jingling his keys, and headed for the big black D painted on the concrete wall behind the lot. Outwardly, he seemed calm enough, a tall man, expensively but not obtrusively dressed in gray gabardine. His thick black hair was bared to the hot afternoon sun; his face was deeply tanned and lean; his white shirt collar was somewhat wilted, but his blue necktie was uncrushed, and he didn’t have to shave until the morning. The tension inside him was well concealed under his air of quiet competence. His convertible was parked four cars from the concrete side wall, which ended at this point and became a low iron picket fence about four feet high, edging the sidewalk of the back street behind the lot. A man sat in a small black coupé twice removed from his own car. The man was reading a newspaper and didn’t seem to be aware of him as he walked by. The coupé was standing in the full blast of the sun. It would be hot in there, Cornell thought. But he derived no pleasure from the other man’s discomfort. The fear was back with him again, the sense of being trapped and hopelessly surrounded. He felt himself to be an outcast, and the injustice of it fed his turbulent anger.

  He turned in casually beside his convertible and then, without pause, without giving the other man the slightest additional warning, he kept walking toward the low iron fence that bounded the parking lot. Behind him, he heard a car motor start up and then die. There was a gate in the fence that was kept unlocked for the use of patrons approaching the lot from this direction. Cornell went through it with a long stride. A car door slammed, and he walked faster.

  The back street was out of the main stream of five-o’clock traffic, but there were a number of people on it, men and women hurrying through the stifling heat. There were a few bars, a Chinese laundry, a small and shabby pawnshop. The street looked poor and disreputable, in habitual contrast to the massive splendor of the national monuments nearby.

  It would be impossible to find a cab at this hour, Cornell decided. He paused at the corner, then ducked through the crowd on Fourteenth Street and headed for the safety island where the trolleys stopped. It had been a long time since he’d last got caught in the home-bound rush on public transportation. He urged his way deeper into the crush of people who crowded aboard the trolley. Behind him, he thought he heard a shout, but he didn’t look back. Surprise was on his side. For all these weeks of the investigation, he hadn’t given the slightest acknowledgment of his shadows. He had been careful to maintain the appearance of a man who didn’t know he was being followed. Now, if he could just vanish…

  The trolley rocked under the weight of the people pushing aboard. He was caught in the pressure of their bodies and found himself unable to turn to see if the man from the parking lot had got aboard with him. It wasn’t likely. He put down a quick sense of exultation. This was just the beginning. There was a long road ahead, and a dangerous one, and even if he were successful, it was dubious whether open vindication waited for him in the end.

  The heat and pressure inside the swaying trolley were almost insufferable. A girl wearing a feathered hat all but pushed him off his feet. There was no dignity or decency in the way the occupants were crowded one against the other in this sticky heat. It was like the close, suffocating air of the Congressional investigating chamber, where he had spent most of the hours of the day. The babble of voices and the heat made those hours return to him in vivid memory, the feel of the hard oak of the witness chair as he sat in it, heels hooked on the rungs. He remembered leaning forward a little, hands folded against his stomach, like a fighter in a defensive crouch. The room was smoky. From the spectators’ gallery came a babble of voices. The battery of microphones on the table waited, their dark grids turned for
his words. His mouth felt dry. He could see the male stenotypist, fingers poised over the tiny keyboard, waiting. Everybody seemed to be waiting, oblivious of the sweltering heat of Washington, the stuffiness of the room, their eyes on Congressman Keach, who looked and acted like a zealot, their ears listening for the bite of question and snap of retort.

  It was a familiar scene. He had never thought, though, that he would be playing one of the stellar roles in it today. He started to talk, and the stenotypist’s fingers made small, quick movements on the keys. He could imagine how the day’s session would appear in the records of the investigating committee, ungarnished and brutal, as opposed to the careful allegations and hedges of the public press.

  Keach began quietly enough.

  “Mr. Cornell, you were a member of the OSS during the war, were you not?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “From what years, and where was your field of operation?”

  “I was assigned to the Balkans, from 1943 to 1946.”

  “And after that?”

  “Special agent attached to the State Department.”

  “Your immediate superior?”

  “Paul Evarts.”

  Keach rattled papers in his hand. “I have here your record of service in the Balkan theater of operations during the war. Very commendable, for the most part. A brave and patriotic record, indeed. For the months of October and November 1944, however, there is a note indicating that you were absent from duty, believed to have been taken prisoner, injured, or killed. Is that correct?”

  “That I was absent from duty? Injured? Killed?”

  “Please. Where were you during that time?”

  “On my way to Sofia. I was dropped by parachute, and broke my leg. I tried to land in a haystack, but the parachute decided on a stone quarry.”

  “And this was behind the German lines?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell us what happened to you then?”

  “Some peasants came along. They had seen me fall. They took me in and set my leg—none too well, I’m afraid. I was hidden by them for almost two months until I was able to report back to my headquarters in Italy.”

  “Let us not skip over those two months lightly. You were aided and given succor by local peasants?”

  “Yes.”

  “They did not reveal your presence to the enemy?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember the names of these peasants?”

  “A man named Igor Strassky and his wife, Maria.”

  “Did you know they were Russian agents at that time?”

  “No.”

  “And they did not advise you that they were your allies at that time?”

  “No. They said they were Bulgarian peasants. They said they belonged to the underground. I saw no sign of any espionage activity during my stay with them.”

  “That’s rather hard to believe.”

  “Lots of things are hard to believe about those days, sitting here now.”

  Standing there in the swaying trolley, feeling the girl press hard against him as she clung to the hand bar, he saw Keach’s face, lean and angry, swimming toward him out of the haze of heat. Flashbulbs flared near the door of the chamber, and from the spectators’ gallery came an audible murmur. The chairman pounded with his gavel, and the hands of the clock on the paneled wall behind him went around and around, bringing the moment closer. He knew what Keach was driving at. It was carefully planned and prepared to build up a damaging monument of evidence with a single word inscribed on its base.

  Traitor.

  Through the swimming heat, he saw Keach’s mouth opening, asking the questions, driving home each point.

  “You kept in touch with the Strassky family after you returned home to the United States, did you not, Mr. Cornell?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “After the war ended, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I was grateful. They had treated me decently. They had saved my life.”

  “And you kept in touch with them even after you knew Strassky had moved to Moscow and was a government official there?”

  “Yes. For a short time.”

  “When did you stop your correspondence?”

  “When I learned he was in their Foreign Office.”

  “And the packages? When did you stop sending them?”

  They know, he thought. They know everything but the truth.

  “I sent the packages to Peter Strassky, their boy. He was just nine years old when I first saw him.”

  “Yes, we know the packages were addressed to the boy. And carefully relayed through a point in Germany, to get around the postal regulations. You sent one every month, for almost two years. Is that correct?”

  “More or less.”

  “And what did you enclose in those packages? Can you tell the committee that?”

  “Toys.”

  “Toys?”

  “All sorts of toys. Whatever they happened to have in the stores. I sent them to the boy.”

  Snickers of laughter in the gallery. Keach smiled.

  “You ask us to believe that statement?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Can you prove there were only toys in those packages?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “It would help.”

  “I can’t prove anything,” Cornell said.

  The hands of the clock went around faster, past noon, past one o’clock, then two, then three. He waited for Keach to make the final, damning point. The man took his time. He had to maintain his build-up. This was headline material, this was a career, this was the goal of every crusader. And it came. Two words: Project Cirrus.

  “Mr. Cornell.” (Extreme courtesy. Extreme patience.) “For the past six months, you have been associated with the development known as Project Cirrus?”

  “Yes.”

  “A top-secret atomic development?”

  “Yes.”

  “In what capacity were you connected with this project?”

  “I was a security officer assigned to it by my immediate superior, Mr. Evarts.”

  “A very secret project, was it not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now we can talk about it, however. It is no longer a secret. This country doesn’t seem to be able to keep its secrets very long, thanks to men like you, Cornell… Project Cirrus had something to do with radioactive dust, did it not—as a by-product of our atomic laboratories and experiments?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell us more about it?”

  “I am not a physicist. I am a security officer.”

  “But you knew quite a lot about the development of this project?”

  “I was briefed on it, yes.”

  “A deadly cloud of radioactive dust of short life cycle, a thousand times more deadly than any known poison gas during the period of its activity. Project Cirrus. Top secret.” A dramatic pause. Keach pointed his long finger. “And you sold that secret, one of national importance, to your friend Mr. Strassky, overseas!”

  “No,” Cornell said.

  “You wrote to him about it, and it appeared in all the official newspapers behind the Iron Curtain, a choice propaganda morsel that makes us appear to be vicious, brutal monsters planning the destruction of half the world! Lies and lies and more lies, but that is what propaganda feeds upon, as you well know, Mr. Cornell. And you fed that mill to the jeopardy and disadvantage of your own country.”

  “I did not!”

  “You are a traitor, Mr. Cornell!”

  “No!”

  No and no and no…

  You could say it over and over again, Cornell thought, but mere words wouldn’t bring down the towering edifice of circumstantial facts that build up to destruction. You sat there, leaning forward in your chair like a prize fighter who has been struck repeatedly below the belt, and the fear hurt your stomach, churned your insides, froze the heart in your throat. You looked for a friendly
face, and there was none. You saw words reflected in the eyes that watched you. Pariah. Outcast. Criminal. Traitor.

  Then the day was over and you were still free, for perhaps one last day, because the investigation was not ended. More capital had to be made of it, more names dragged in. And you slipped out, thanks to Paul, without running the gauntlet of newspapermen, and you walked alone, yet not alone, because you knew there were footsteps behind you, patient and implacable, always behind you.

  CHAPTER TWO

  EVEN with all the windows open, the jam in the trolley was intolerable. Cornell thought of Kari Stone, and managed to work his arm up so that he could look at his wrist watch. The girl in the feathered hat looked at him suspiciously. He said, “Excuse me,” and saw it was five-fifteen. He had gone far enough. Squirming, he began to make his way toward the exit doors.

  Three girls and another man alighted with him at the next corner. He recognized the neighborhood at once, one of the broad, tree-lined avenues of the northwest area, harboring diplomatic enclaves in stone mansions and, in the less important streets, the innumerable rooming houses of the government’s clerical force. Two of the girls who had got off the trolley with him walked away together, talking quickly. The third was the girl in the feathered hat.

  She was a small girl in a crumpled white linen suit, with a wistful, pleasant face. She hesitated, looking at him. Their eyes met in mutual relief at escaping the crush of people. She almost smiled.

  Cornell said, “It’s a pretty intimate business, isn’t it? Getting home by trolley, I mean.”

  “Yes,” she nodded. Then she hesitated. “I thought you were getting fresh in there, when you looked at your watch. Some of these fellows do.”

  Her voice trailed off uncertainly. There was a shyness in the way her eyes touched his and fled away. She looked as if she were about to say more, but then her small face was masked again. There was a clear freshness about her that made Cornell wonder fleetingly what she was like. He didn’t know her, yet there was something familiar about her, as if he had seen her somewhere before. Perhaps at one of those inevitable Washington cocktail parties, he thought.