Rogan said incredulously, “You mean all the codes are that easy?”
The colonel said drily, “To you they are, obviously. To anybody else they are all that hard. Are you prepared to enter the service immediately?”
Rogan nodded. “This very minute.”
The colonel frowned. “It doesn’t work that way. You have to be screened for security. And until you are cleared, we’ll have to keep you under arrest. You already know too much to be running around loose. But that’s just a formality.”
The formality proved to be an Intelligence department prison that made Alcatraz seem like a summer camp. But it did not occur to Rogan that this treatment was typical of all Intelligence attitudes. A week later he was sworn into the service as a second lieutenant. Three months later he was in charge of the section responsible for breaking all European codes, except for Russia’s. The Russian code was part of the Asian section.
He was happy. For the first time in his life he was doing something dramatic and exciting. His memory, his fabulously brilliant mind, was helping his country to win a great war. He had his pick of young girls in Washington. And soon he was promoted. Life couldn’t be better. But in 1943 he had begun to feel guilty again. He felt that he was using his mental ability to avoid front-line action, and he volunteered for the field intelligence section. His offer was rejected; he was too valuable to be risked.
It was then that he came up with the idea of himself as a walking code switchboard to coordinate the invasion of France from inside that country. He prepared the plan in detail; it was brilliant, and the chiefs of staff approved. And so the brilliant Captain Rogan was parachuted into France.
He was proud of himself, and he knew that his father, too, would have been proud of what he was doing now. But his mother wept because he was endangering his brain, that fabulous brain they had sheltered and nurtured for so long. Rogan shrugged it off. He hadn’t yet done anything so marvelous with his brain. Perhaps after the war he would find his real interest and establish his true genius. But he had learned enough to know that raw brilliance needs long years of hard work to develop properly. He would have time after the war. On New Year’s Day, 1944, Captain Michael Rogan was parachuted into Occupied France as chief Allied communications officer with the French Underground. He had trained with Britain’s SOE Agents, had learned how to operate a secret radio transmitter- receiver, and was carrying a tiny suicide capsule surgically embedded in the palm of his left hand.
His billet hideout was in the house of a French family named Charney in the town of Vitry-sur-Seine, just south of Paris. There Rogan set up his network of couriers and informers and radioed coded information to England. On occasion he received radioed requests for certain details needed for the coming invasion of Europe.
It proved to be a quiet, peaceful life. On fine Sunday afternoons he went on picnics with the daughter of the house, Christine Charney, a long-limbed, sweet-looking girl with chestnut hair. Christine studied music at the local university. She and Michael Rogan became lovers, and then she became pregnant.
Wearing his beret and flashing his false ID papers, Rogan married Christine Charney at the town hall and they returned to her parents’ house to carry out the work of the Underground together.
When the Allies invaded Normandy on June 6, 1944, Rogan had so much communication traffic on his radio that he became careless. Two weeks later the Gestapo swooped down on the Charney house and arrested everyone inside it. They waited for exactly the right moment. Not only did they arrest the Charney family and Mike Rogan; they also arrested six Underground couriers waiting for messages. Within a month all were interrogated, tried, and executed. All except Michael Rogan and his wife, Christine. From the interrogation of the other prisoners the Germans had learned about Rogan’s ability to memorize intricate codes, and they wanted to give him special attention. His wife was kept alive, Rogan was smilingly told, “as a special courtesy.” She was then five months pregnant.
Six weeks after their capture, Michael Rogan and his wife were put in separate Gestapo staff cars and driven to Munich. In that city’s busy central square stood the Munich Palace of Justice, and in one of those court buildings, Michael Rogan’s final and most terrible interrogation began. It lasted for endless days, more days than he could count. But in the years afterward his fabulous memory spared him nothing. It repeated his agony second by second, over and over again. He suffered a thousand separate nightmares. And it always began with the seven-man interrogation team waiting for him in the high-domed room of the Munich Palace of Justice-waiting patiently and with good humor, for the sport that would give them pleasure.
All seven wore swastika armbands, but two men wore tunics of different shades. From this and the collar insignia, Rogan knew that one of them was with the Hungarian armed forces and the other was with the Italian army. These two took no part in the interrogation at first; they were official observers.
The chief of the interrogation team was a tall, aristocratic officer with deep-set eyes. He assured Rogan that all they wanted was the codes stored in his head, and then Rogan and his wife and the unborn child would live. They hammered at him all that first day, and Rogan stood mute. He refused to answer any questions. Then on the night of the second day he heard Christine’s voice screaming for help in the next room. She kept calling his name, screaming, “Michel! Michel!” over and over. She was in agony. Rogan looked at the burning eyes of the chief interrogator and whispered, “Stop that. Stop. I’ll tell you everything.”
For the next five days he gave them old, discarded code combinations. In some way, perhaps by comparing them with intercepted messages, they learned what he was doing. The next day they seated him in the chair and stood around in a circle. They did not question him; they did not touch him. The man in the Italian uniform disappeared into the other room. A few moments later Rogan heard his wife screaming in agony again. The pain in her voice was beyond belief. Rogan started to whisper that he would tell them everything, anything they wanted to know, but the chief interrogator shook his head. They all sat in silence as the screams pierced the walls and their brains, until Rogan slipped from his chair to the floor, weeping, almost unconscious with grief. Then they dragged him across the floor of the high-domed room and into the next chamber. The interrogator in the Italian uniform was sitting beside a phonograph. The twirling black record sent Christine’s screams shrieking through the Palace of Justice.
“You never tricked us,” the chief interrogator said contemptuously. “We outwitted you. Your wife died under torture the very first day.” Rogan studied their faces carefully. If they let him live, he would kill them all someday.
He realized only later that this was exactly the reaction they wanted. They promised to let him live if he would give them the correct codes. And in his desire for vengeance, he did so. For the next two weeks he gave them the codes and explained how they worked. He was sent back to his solitary cell for what seemed many more months. Once a week he would be escorted to the high-domed room and interrogated by the seven men in what he came to realize was a purely routine procedure. There was no way for Rogan to know that during these months the Allied armies had swept across France and into Germany and were now at the gates of Munich. When he was summoned for his final interrogation he could not know that the seven interrogators were about to flee and disguise their identities, disappear into the mass of Germans in a desperate effort to escape punishment for their crimes.
“We are going to set you free; we are going to keep our promise,” the aristocratic chief interrogator with the deep-set eyes said to Rogan. That voice rang with sincerity. It was an actor’s voice, or an orator’s. One of the other men pointed to some civilian clothes lying over the back of a chair. “Take off your rags and change into these.”
Unbelieving, Rogan changed his clothes before their eyes. There was even a wide-brimmed fedora, which one of the men jammed on his head. They all grinned at him in a friendly way. The aristocratic officer said in his sincere, bell-toned voice, “Isn’t it good to know that you will be free? That you will live?”
But suddenly Rogan knew he was lying. There was something wrong. Only six men were in the room with him, and they were smiling secret, evil smiles. At that moment Rogan felt the cold metal of the gun touch the back of his head. His hat tilted forward as the gun barrel pushed up against its brim, and Rogan felt the sickening terror of a man about to be killed. It was all a cruel charade and they were killing him as they would kill an animal, as a joke. And then a great roar filled his brain, as if he had fallen under water, and his body was torn out of the space it filled, exploded into a black, endless void…
That Rogan lived was a miracle. He had been shot in the back of the head, and his body was thrown on a pile of corpses, other prisoners executed in the courtyard of the Munich Palace of Justice. Six hours later, advance elements of the U.S. Third Army entered Munich, and its medical units found the great pile of bodies. When they came to Rogan they found him still alive. The bullet had deflected off the skull bone, tearing a hole in, but not penetrating, the brain-a type of wound not uncommon with shell fragments but rarely made by small arms.
Rogan was operated on in a forward field hospital and sent back to the United States. He spent another two years in various army hospitals for special treatment. The wound had impaired his sight; he could see only straight
