be managed, and a month or two meant another three hundred and fifty certificates, at least seven hundred lives. Seven hundred lives were worth a lie-in Szara’s calculus they certainly were. But it was worse than that.
When he’d first gone to the British, he’d believed his figures to be false, part of a German counterintelligence attack. It had not mattered, then. But the world had shifted beneath his feet; Germany would take Poland, and Russia would agree to a treaty that left Britain and France isolated. False figures delivered now might deform the British armament effort in unforeseen ways, false figures could well help the Nazis, false figures could cost thousands of lives, tens of thousands, once the Luftwaffe bombers flew. So those seven hundred lives were lost.
“Have you told them? ” de Montfried asked.
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“On the possibility that you and I, sitting here, might invent something, discover something, find another way. On the possibility that you have not been forthcoming with me and that you have resources I don’t know about, perhaps information of some kind that can be substituted.”
De Montfried shook his head.
They sat in silence.
“What will you tell them?” de Montfried said at last.
“That there has been an interruption at the source, that we wish to continue until a new method can be worked out.”
“And will they accept that?”
“They will not.”
“Not even for one month?”
“Not even that.” He paused for a moment. “I know it’s difficult to understand, but it’s like not having money. Lenin said that grain was ‘the currency of currencies.’ That was in 1917. For us, it might now be said that information is the currency of currencies.”
“But surely you know other things, things of interest.”
“For the people I deal with directly, that might very well work. But we are asking for something I’m certain they-MI6-had to fight for, and only the magnitude of what we were offering made it possible for them to win that battle. I don’t think they’ll go back to war for other material I might offer. I’m sure they won’t. Otherwise, believe me, I would try it.”
Slowly, de Montfried gathered himself to face the inevitable. “It is very hard for me to admit to failure, but that is what’s happened, we’ve failed.”
“We’ve stopped, yes.”
De Montfried withdrew a leather case and a fountain pen from the inside pocket of his jacket, unscrewed the top of the pen, and began to write a series of telephone numbers on the back of a business card. “One of these will find me,” he said. “I am almost never out of touch with my office-that’s the number you’ve been using- but I’ve included several other numbers, places where I’m to be found. Otherwise we’ll leave it as it’s been, simply say
Szara put the card in his pocket. “One can never be sure what might happen. One has to hope for the best.”
De Montfried nodded sadly.
Szara stood and offered his hand. “Good-bye,” he said.
“Yes,” de Montfried said, rising to shake hands. “Good luck.”
“Thank you,” Szara said.
The card joined the money and the Jean Bonotte passport that afternoon.
The OTTER operation had ended suddenly and badly.
Odile must have activated an emergency signal available in Berlin, because Goldman called a special meeting, to take place just after she got off the train. Szara and Schau-Wehrli were summoned to a place called Arion, in Belgium, an iron mining town just over the Luxembourg border a few kilometers north of the French city of Longwy. It was hot and dirty in Arion. Coal smoke from the mills drifted through the soot-blackened streets, the sunset was a dark, sullen orange, and the night air was dead still. The meeting was held in a worker’s tenement near the center of town, the home of a party operative, a miner asked to spend the night with relatives. They sat in the cramped parlor with the shutters closed amid the smells of sweaty clothes and boiled food.
Odile was shaken-her face an unnatural white-but determined. She had gotten off a local train from the German border only a few minutes before they arrived. Goldman was there with another man Szara did not know, a short, heavy Russian in middle age, with wavy fair hair and extremely thick glasses that distorted his eyes. At first Szara thought he might be asthmatic: his breath rasped audibly in the little room. After they’d settled down, Szara noticed that the man was staring at him. Szara met his glance but the man did not look away. He put an oval cigarette between his lips, creased the head of a wooden match with his thumbnail, and lit the cigarette from the flare. Only then did he turn to face Odile. As he shook the match out, Szara saw that he wore a large gold watch on his wrist.
By the time Szara and Schau-Wehrli arrived, Odile had told her story to Goldman and the other man and produced Baumann’s message. Goldman handed it to Szara. “Have a look,” he said.
Szara took the slip of paper, read quickly over the production numbers, then discovered a terse sentence scrawled along the bottom of the sheet:
“What is your opinion?” Goldman asked.
“My opinion,” Szara said. “It seems he’s trying to supply additional information. We’ve been after him for months to do that. Do such rumors exist? “
“Perhaps. In the class of people he refers to, they could easily be more than rumors,” Goldman said. “But how would Baumann know such things? Who is he talking to? “
Szara said he didn’t know.
Goldman turned to Odile. “Please tell us again what happened.”
“I always clear the drop early in the morning,” Odile said, “when the maids go to work in the neighborhood. I went to the wall by the little wood, made certain I was not observed, reached over the wall and felt around until I found the loose rock, then withdrew the paper and put it in the pocket of my raincoat. There was no message from the network, so I was next going to the telephone pole to acknowledge reception by turning the bent nail. I went about ten steps when a woman came out of the woods. She was approximately fifty years old, wearing a housedress, and extremely agitated and nervous. ‘He has been taken,’ she said to me in German. I pretended not to understand what it was all about. ‘He is in a camp, in Sachsenhausen,’ she said, ‘and his friends can’t help him.’ I stared at her and started to hurry away. ‘Tell them they must help him,’ she called after me. I walked very fast. She came a few steps after me, then stopped and went back into the woods. I did not see her do this, but I looked over my shoulder a few seconds later and she was gone. I heard a dog barking, a little dog, from the woods somewhere. I made my way to the Ringbahn station at Hohenzollern-Damm, went into the public toilet, and hid the message in my shoulder pad. I was out of Berlin on a local train about one hour later. I saw nobody unusual on the train, had no other experience out of the ordinary.”
“Friends?” Schau-Wehrli said. “His
“Or work associates,” Szara mused. “People at the German companies he deals with.”
“The point is,” Goldman said, “has he been arrested as a Jew? Or a spy?”
“If they caught him spying, they would have taken her as well,” Schau-Wehrli said. “And the Gestapo would have him-that means Columbia House, not Sachsenhausen.”
“Perhaps,” Goldman said. “It’s hard to know.”
“Can he be helped?” Szara asked.
“That’s a question for the Directorate, but yes, it has been done before. For the time being, the Berlin operatives are going to try and contact him in the camp and let him know we’re aware of what’s happened and that we’re going to get him out. We’re trying to help him to resist interrogation. Do you think he can? “
Szara sensed that Baumann’s life hung on his answer: “If anyone can, he will. He’s a strong man,
