Heroes

by David Hagberg

  On the square there had been the noise of traffic and lights spilling from open doorways and windows. Here in the church it was cool and quiet, the only light coming from the votive candles beneath the statue of the Virgin on the left of the altar and a few dim lights hanging from fixtures above.

  Canaris dipped his fingers in the holy water at the door, crossed himself, and then went forward to a pew halfway to the altar. He knelt, clasping his hands on the seat back in front of him, and looked up at the wooden crucifix.

  “Dear God,” he murmured. He knew in which direction his fate was taking him as surely as he knew Germany’s eventual fate. He did not want it to be so. But he didn’t know what it was he could do to prevent any of it.

  Germany was lost. But there was still the possibility for an honorable peace. At least there could be. But he was afraid of what Dieter Schey was sending them from Oak Ridge. In the agent’s coded messages he had told them about the new secret weapon involving nuclear energy. The Fiihrer had called it

  “Jew science,” but the scientists at Peenemunde were ready to build it, and the mathematicians at Gottingen paled when he mentioned the possibility.

  One of them, reasonably certain that Canaris would not turn him over to the Gestapo for making defamatory statements, breathed the pronouncement that: “Only God has the right to tamper with such things. Man certainly has no right.”

  A side door opened and a woman dressed in black, a veil covering her face, entered the nave, crossed herself, and came around to the center aisle between the pews.

  Canaris’ heart began to accelerate as the woman genuflected before crossing in front of the crucifix; then she turned and glided back to where he was kneeling.

  He moved over, and she knelt beside him. She lifted her veil, and Canaris’ pounding heart skipped a beat. She was beautiful, in the classic Spanish aristocratic fashion. Her skin was olive, her complexion flawless. She had wide, dark eyes, high cheekbones, and full sensuous lips.

  “Hello, Wilhelm,” she whispered, her voice like gold.

  “Welcome back.”

  “Dona Marielle Alicia,” Canaris said reverently. He lifted her hand and pressed his lips to her fingers. She stroked his hair with her other hand as the tears fell from his eyes to the sleeve of her dress.

  Dieter Schey rinsed his coffee cup in the sink and put it on the drain. He stared out the window at the snow blowing in long streaks past the streetlight at the end of the block. The plows hadn’t been back here in the neighborhood yet, but the buses would still be running from Administration out to the plants. The main roads were always the first to be opened after a storm.

  Maine was going to stay with him for a very long time. All the way back on the train he kept seeing a vision of the coastal watcher’s face … the dead man staring up at him. He kept hearing Lieutenant Voster telling him about conditions at home.

  Berlin was being bombed by the Americans as well as the British. Berlin!

  And he worried about the submarine making it back to Germany.

  It would take nothing more than a simple malfunction aboard the boat to send the film canisters to the bottom of the Atlantic. All his work would have been for nothing.

  He gripped the edge of the counter hard enough to turn his knuckles white. The film would get home it had to! His work here at Oak Ridge was finished. Or very nearly finished. Very soon he was going to have to move on. A new project. A new location. A new identity. Robert Mordley would cease to exist.

  Two years of his life would be gone … “Do you want me to fix you some breakfast?” Catherine asked.

  Schey spun around as she came into the kitchen and put a half-full baby bottle in the refrigerator. She was still in her nightgown, her feet bare.

  “How is he? Any better?”

  “No,” Catherine said. She brushed her hair back. She looked very tired. “He’s still running a slight fever and he just doesn’t want to eat.”

  “Call the doctor this morning; see if he can come over.”

  Catherine nodded. “I’ll wait until eight. How late will you be?”

  “Just until noon. Riley has some tooling he wants me to get right on. Shouldn’t take more than three or four hours.”

  “Now, do you want a couple eggs?”

  Schey looked at her in amazement. Eggs. She was wonderful.

  But he shook his head. “I’m going to walk over and catch the early bus.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re coming down with something, too,” Catherine said. She came across the kitchen to him and touched his forehead with the back of her hand.

  “I’m fine,” he said, and he drew Her close. “How about you?” He kissed her, then laid his cheek against her forehead. It was cool.

  She was much shorter than he; her hair was a light brown, her eyes hazel, and her figure pleasant but very plain. From the first she had been flattered that someone so ruggedly good-looking as Schey would give her anything more than a glance. She had always been grateful to him, and her gratitude had always made him feel embarrassed—like he was a heel.

  It was going to be very hard to leave her and the baby—very hard, because he had committed the sin of sins for a deep cover agent in enemy territory: He had fallen in love with one of the natives.

  He shuddered.

  “I don’t blame you,” Catherine said. “I wouldn’t want to go out there this morning.” The baby started to cry again, and she looked toward the bedroom door. “Have a cup of soup or something, at the canteen. Promise me?”

  “All right,” Schey said, looking deeply into her eyes. She read something in his look, because her hand went to her mouth.

  But then Schey turned and went to the back door where he took his coat down from its hook and pulled it on. The baby was crying louder now, and he was coughing.

  “I’ll be home a little after noon,” Schey said to Catherine, and he went out the back door, leaving her standing in the kitchen, a strange look on her face.

  She knew, Schey told himself as he hunched up his coat collar and headed up the street toward the bus stop in front of Administration. Damn. She had read it in his eyes. She knew that he was going to leave soon. She probably thought it was another woman.

  During his training and during the first months here, he had never given this moment a thought. He had been caught up in the excitement of his job and of meeting Catherine, in New Jersey, where they both worked in the shipyards. It had been an altogether heady experience, courting her, marrying her, and then getting this job at Oak Ridge. Everything had fallen into place for him, exactly as his instructors said it would if he would remember his training.

  But this part now—the hurt deep inside him—he had not foreseen.

  In the past few days he had come up with any number of wild schemes to convince Catherine and the authorities that the man they knew as Robert Mordley was dead. An automobile accident and fire; a boating accident; an accident at the big TVA dam.

  But for that he’d need a body. One that wouldn’t be missed. So far he’d drawn a blank on that score. But he did have the car parked in a rental garage in Knoxville. When the time came, he’d get down there and drive to Washington, D. C., where his contact would be waiting for him.

  He stopped. Was there a balance between all that and Catherine and the baby? Or was he being pressed into a corner where he’d have to make a choice.

  They had congratulated him when he got married. And they had been ecstatic when Robert, Junior, was born. He blended perfectly into his environment. The perfect cog to fit the perfect gear.

  All along he had told himself that someday Catherine would understand him when he explained to her about the Thousand Year Reich. He could tell her about the beauties of his home: about the Lorelei along the Rhine; about the Tiergarten or the Ziigspitze; about Unter den Linden or the castle at Heidelberg.

  Christ! When it was over, they could have an apartment in Berlin, perhaps even a small cottage in Garmischpartenkirchen for the summers. They could even sp
end an occasional Christmas there.

  But whenever Edward R. Murrow reported the latest offenses in the war, reported the latest Wehrmacht defeat, Catherine would shudder and look at her husband, her eyes round, liquid.

  “We’re not like that, Bob, are we?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked carefully, not trusting his own emotions.

  “I mean about the concentration camps they’re talking about,” she said. She sat forward, the Knoxville newspaper she had been reading falling to the floor. “They’ve rounded up the Jews and they’re putting them in concentration camps. It’s possible they’re even being murdered. Innocent babies … just like ours.”

  “Katy,” Schey started, but he could not go on for a moment.

  There was so much he wanted to tell her, to explain to her, but he hadn’t gotten it all straight in his own mind yet. In the first place, it was almost certain that the radio and newspaper reports were grossly exaggerated. There were concentration camps all right. For enemies of the state. Just like Roosevelt’s Japanese camps out in the desert. That wasn’t widespread knowledge, but it was happening. And he also wanted to explain to her how the Jews had strangled the German economy for years—the economy as well as the white man’s strain. Couldn’t the world see what had been going on for the last two thousand years: It was so ^clear.

  “Bob?” Catherine asked in a tiny voice. Something in his look had frightened her.

  He smiled sadly. Once again he was in control. “It’s not what you think, Katy,” he said.

  “But it says in the paper.”

  “I know. But governments have a way of exaggerating things to make their own side seem much better and free of sin.” He heard his own words and thought about Goebbels.

  “None of us are … are we?”

  “What?”

  “Free of sin?”

  Schey had to smile at the innocence of the remark. He shook his head. “Only you and the baby.”

  Administration was housed in a large building called the castle.

  It was lit up, and several dozen people stood between the streetlights out front, waiting for the early buses that would take them over to Y-12, the electromagnetic separation plant; to S-50, the thermal diffusion operation; to X-10, the graphite reactor; or to gigantic K-25, the gaseous diffusion plant where Schey worked.

  Each operation had been designed to separate an isotope of uranium from its ore, which in turn could be used to build a bomb. Germany could never have mounted such an operation; the entire Reich did not have the resources. It was the reason Schey’s work here was absolutely essential.

  The Americans themselves had not known which method would produce results—or, indeed, if any method of separating the bomb material would be effective. Yet the plants had all been built. Tens of thousands of workmen were employed here and at a place called Hanford in Washington state. In addition, there was a laboratory somewhere near Los Alamos, New Mexico.

  Schey held toward the back of the group, anonymous in the dark, snow-blown morning, until the big buses appeared and pulled up with a hiss of their air brakes.

  K-25. The Americans were now pinning their hopes on the gaseous diffusion method. It would work. Everyone was confident.

  A fast-moving gray sedan flashed past the Administration building and turned down Schey’s street.

  For several pregnant seconds he stared at the car, trying to catalogue exactly what he had seen.

  “Come on,” someone behind him complained. He was holding up the line. He stepped aside.

  Government plates. There were two men. Hats, overcoats.

  Gray car. Some kind of a shield painted on the door … Security!

  “Damnit,” Schey said, looking up as the last of the workmen hurried across the street and boarded the bus for K-25. He smiled sheepishly. “I forgot my lunch.”

  “You comin’ or not, fella?” the driver said down to him. His right hand was on the door lever.

  “Can’t go without my lunch,” Schey said, and he turned and strode down the street toward his house, his pounding heart steadying as he fought for control. Catherine and the baby were innocents. He hadn’t wanted them involved in this.

  There were no reasons for him to suspect that security was on its way to his house. On its way to see him. No real reasons. Yet lately Schey had been getting that between-the shoulder-blades feeling that someone was watching him, that someone was dogging his every move. Riley had not been the same toward him ever since the Maine trip. Some of that Schey had put down to his own feelings of paranoia after what had happened up there.

  But Riley was different toward him.

  It didn’t matter, though, what he suspected or didn’t suspect; he was going to have to find out for sure. If they were after him, he’d have to deal with it. Better here than at the plant.

  Already his mind was racing forward to Knoxville and his car.

  He’d have to retrieve the radio transmitter, if there was time, and then he’d have to get to Washington, D. C., and his contact. All before the general alarm was sounded and an effective dragnet was begun.

  Schey seldom if ever carried a weapon. His instructors at Park Zorgvliet had warned against it: “If you find yourself in a situation where you need a weapon, it will no longer matter what you do, for your cover will have been blown. But if you don’t have a weapon on you, there will always be that element of doubt: Is he a spy or is he innocent? Where there is doubt, there certainly is hope.”

  Only at this moment Schey wished he had a gun.

  It took less than five minutes for him to make it to the end of his block. His tiny prefab house was on the upper side of the block in a long row of nearly identical structures. His house was lit up. The gray sedan was parked in front of it.

  So this was it, after all. Whatever plans he had been making for moving on were now forced upon him. He resented it, almost as much as he was frightened and sad for Catherine and the baby.

  There were lights on in a couple of other houses on the block, but everything else was dark and silent, the snow muffling all sounds. From each chimney came a plume of white smoke bent over with the wind. It was very cold.

  He had three choices. He could take the bus into Knoxville right now; chances were, no alarm had been sounded. Or he could steal a car if need be. Or if the circumstances warranted it, he could walk; he knew the route through the hills, past the security posts, out of here. That would be the most extreme. But it all depended upon what security knew, why they had come here. If it was merely on some suspicion for one thing or another, he’d be safe for at least a little while. But if they had found his transmitter or if they had somehow connected him with the thing in Maine, he’d have trouble getting out of here. Before he made that decision, he’d have to know.

  Keeping to the shadows, he made his way up the block, to a spot across from where the government car was parked. The curtains on all the windows in his house were drawn, so he could not see what was going on inside.

  Ducking low, he hurried across the street and looked in the car. The keys were in the ignition. The Americans always had such supreme confidence. He smiled.

  There was no one coming. No traffic on the street. No one on the way to work. No one out on a porch or in a window watching what was going on over here. The neighborhood could have been deserted.

  Schey hurried around the front of the car, across his snow covered lawn, and around to the backdoor that led into the back hall and kitchen.

  He mounted the two steps, scraped the frost off the one small window at eye level, and looked inside. The kitchen door was closed, as he hoped it would be. He opened the back door, stepped inside, and softly closed it.

  For several seconds he stood in the darkness, breathing shallowly, listening for sounds from inside. Someone called from upstairs.

  Schey couldn’t quite make out the words, but it was a man’s voice. The hairs at the nape of his neck bristled. A man was in his house. An intruder. He felt a sense of righteous i
ndignation.

  A door closed somewhere near (a closet?) and he could hear a man’s heavy footfalls on the stairs.

  There had been two of them in the car. One of them had called from upstairs. The other had just gone up.

  Schey pulled off his coat so that he would have more freedom of movement, hung it on a hook, and eased open the kitchen door.

  Catherine, still dressed only in her nightgown, was seated at the kitchen table. She looked up, her eyes going wide, her mouth open. He shook his head urgently and hurried across to her.

  “What do they want?” he whispered.

  He was bent over her, and she was looking up into his eyes.

  Her lips were working; she was trying to form words, but she could not.

  They were moving around upstairs. It sounded as if they were in the front bedroom. Probably going through his things. But there was nothing up there. Or elsewhere in the house.

  If they were merely Oak Ridge security people, it would be one thing; if they were FBI, it would be totally different.

  He turned back to his wife. “Listen, Katy, did they have a warrant? Did they show you a piece of paper?”

  Catherine was frightened. “What … what’s happening, Bob?”

  she stammered. “Why are they here?” She was too loud.

  There was a silence upstairs. “Mrs. Mordley?” one of the men called.

  The color left Catherine’s face.

  Schey straightened up and hurried into the living room as one of the men started down the stairs. He flattened himself against the wall next to the opening to the stair hall.

  “Mrs. Mordley?” the man called again, just around the corner.

  Then he stepped into view.

  Schey reached out, grabbed a handful of the man’s coat, and pulled him the rest of the way around, his arm encircling the agent’s head, his hand clamped powerfully over the man’s mouth and nose.

  The agent grunted, his eyes bulging nearly out of their sockets as he tried to reach inside his coat for his gun. But Schey was much stronger, and he had had the advantage of surprise.

  “Jerry?” his partner called from the head of the stairs.