off the roads. Someone in Moscow has decided that the Germans need a
lesson in humility.'
'Maybe they do,' Harry said softly. 'Did you pick up anything on the
names I gave you? Zinoviev or Phoenix?'
'Yes and no.' Rose shared a glance with the unidentified passenger in
the backseat- 'In the office, Harry.'
Harry nodded slowly. 'Okay.'
In the silence that followed, it became impossible for Harry to ignore
the man on the seat beside him. Finally, Rose acknowledged the
stranger. 'Harry, meet Detective Julius Schneider of the Berlin
Kriminalpolizei. He's gonna be working with us for a while. He's the
guy who saved your ass. Says he knows you.'
'A pleasure, Detective.' Harry shook Schneider's bearlike paw.
'I thought you looked familiar. I owe you a very tall 'It is not
necessary,' said the German.
'Okay, okay,' Rose grumbled. 'Let's adjourn this mutual admiration
society and get up to my office.'
The car had arrived in Clay Allee, the thoroughly American boulevard
named for the first U.S. commandant of West Berlin. While Sergeant
Clary returned the Ford to the motor pool, Rose, Schneider, and
Richardson made their way to the fourth floor. Rose took a seat behind
his huge desk. poured whiskeys all around, and waited for Clary to take
up his post outride the door H&' opened the discussion. 'So what's the
big secret, guys? Who's Comrade Zinoviev? He isn't Lenin's Zinoviev,
is he?'
Rose gave Schneider a sidelong glance. 'H@y, Harry.
We don't know exactly who Zinoviev is, or was. We don't know if he's
dead or alive. But I can guarantee you that 'comrade' wasn't his
preferred manner of address.'
Harry drummed his fingers impatiently. 'Christ, tell me something.'
Rose took a pull from his Wild Turkey. 'Our computers didn't have squat
on Zinoviev, Harry, zero. I was tempted to put in a coded request to
Langley-you know, can we run a name through your sacred database, blah,
blah? But I never liked using those guys. To me it's kind of like
going to the Mafia. They're a little too greasy for my taste. So what
I ended up doing was calling an old buddy of mine stateside.
Programs computers for the FBI. He ran it through their setup for me,
and you wouldn't believe what their machine spit out.'
'Surprise me.'
Rose smiled, knowing that for once he would. 'V.V.
Zinoviev was a captain in the Okhrana. Ring any bells?'
Harry looked bewildered. 'The tsar's secret police?'
'Give the boy an apple,' Rose quipped. 'The Okhrana were the world's
original anti-communists. They make Joe McCarthy and his pals look like
a pack of church ladies. The question is, What could a hitman for Tsar
Nicholas possibly have in common with Rudolf Hess?'
'Well,' Harry reflected, 'for one thing, the Okhrana carried out massive
pogroms against the Jews in Russia.'
Both Rose and Schneider looked stunned.
'Look, Colonel,' said Harry, 'you're way ahead of me on this. Why don't
you just back up and give me the Reader's Digest version?'
'Okay. My FBI buddy punches Zinoviev into the Bureau computers, right?
Well, up comes a file. It gives the Okhrana reference, Zinoviev's date
of birth, but no death date. It says he disappeared from sight in 1941,
which was@' 'The year Hess flew to Scotland,' Harry finished.
'Right. Well, in Zinoviev's file was a code-HCOwhich I'm told stands
for 'Hardcopy Only.' There was also a cross-index to another file.'
'Hess?'
'You got it. So my buddy goes for the Hess file, right?
And what does he find? A bunch of crap you can get from Encyclopaedia
Britannica. But he also finds a notation showing a special addendum to
Hess's file, with what the Bureau calls a J classification. Want to
guess what the J is for?'
Harry's face showed disbelief. 'No way.'
Rose smiled thinly. 'Old J. Fdgar himself. And J files cannot be
accessed by anyone except the director.'
'Christ. What does the FBI have to do with Rudolf HessT' 'You're not
gonna believe this, Harry. Remember the big Soviet defections of the
sixties and seventies? Nosenko, Penkovsky and the rest? The CIA
handled their debriefings, right? Naturally. But if you'll recall, the
FBI wasn't always limited to operations within the Continental U.S.
During World War Two, Hoover couldn't stand seeing Bill Donovan's OSS
get all the glory, and the result-aside from a lot of political
head-butting-was that the Bureau got involved in some pretty big
espionage cases. So-after the CIA finished debriefing those big
defectors, the FBI got themselves a little taste. They were given a
very limited brief, of course, questions to be confined to KGB
recruitment methods on U.S. soil, et cetera.'
Harry nodded slowly.
'However, when the FBI got their shot at these defectors, they took the
chance to clean up some unfinished business.
They had quite a few unsolved cases from the war years, and Hoover had
left instructions that they be pursued whenever possible. One of those
cases happened to involve British collaboration with the Nazis-e.g the
flight of Rudolf Hess.'
Harry whistled long and low.
'The FBI questioning turned up a shitload of information, but as you
might imagine, the Bureau wasn't anxious to reveal to the CIA how far
outside their brief they had strayed. Anything that couldn't t)e
confirmed by collateral evidence was buried in the basement of a file
warehouse.
'Hardcopy Only,' get it? Apparently Zinovidv fell into that category.'
Rose's eyes shone with excitement. '@, those files have been sitting in
that warehouse for twenty-five years. My contact thinks our query is
the first dung to turn up Zinoviev's name since it went to disk.'
'Jesus. What kind of access do we haver' 'Hess's file is out of the
question. A team of MIT hackers couldn't break into a J file in a
month.' Rose suppressed a satisfied smile. 'Zinoviev, on the other
hand, we may get.
