'Otto, I wouldn't be here if I'd been that close.'
Mauer laughed mirthlessly. 'You were a banker once. Probably not even a bad one. But, if you'll excuse me, you have no aptitude for intelligence work whatsoever.'
Cochrane felt the rebuke like a schoolboy, but kept quiet. 'You are like most other Americans. This is what I tried to tell you a year ago in Berlin. You fail to understand Germany. And when you fail to understand Germany, you fail to understand Hitler or German methods of doing things.'
But Cochrane did not fail to understand the German language. So he allowed Mauer to continue.
'There is no such thing as one man working alone,” Mauer said. “Nowhere, I repeat, nowhere in German society today. Particularly in the military. Or in the Abwehr. Or anywhere in the intelligence systems. The entire concept is totally antithetical to the Reich. Look,' he said. The German's eyes came alive with intrigue for the first time. 'A private in the Wehrmacht, the lowliest private, has a sergeant. The sergeant has a lieutenant. The lieutenant has a major, the major has a colonel, and so on up until you reach the field marshal. But the field marshal has commanders in Berlin, the strategists who plan the war. And they have their commander- Adolf Hitler himself.'
Mauer replenished his shot glass. 'Similarly with a spy,' said Mauer. 'A spy in America will have a command in his region. A spy based here in Pennsylvania, for example, may have a master in Washington. The master may be Portuguese or Spanish. But he is the master, nonetheless. The master would report by courier or by radio to Hamburg. Hamburg reports to the Intelligence Chancellery in Berlin and that agency reports to Admiral Canaris. Canaris reports to Goering. Goering reports to Hitler. Orders go down the chain of command. Reports go up. See? Very simple, very orderly. Very German. No man works alone.'
'But someone is!' Cochrane insisted.
'Then he is not German,' said Mauer sharply.
Cochrane rejected the notion. He was struck instead by the absurdity of being unarmed and interrogating a man who had a shotgun across his lap.
'So,' Mauer said. 'Now. I've told you what you wanted to know?'
'Only partially.'
'What else?'
'I'd like to know how you arrived here from Germany. Particularly,' said Cochrane, trying to maintain an easy, discursive tone, 'if you didn't use the Swiss passports intended for you.'
Mauer fingered the weapon again. 'Look in your own files,' he said.
'I want to hear it in your own words,' Cochrane said.
'You, too? Everyone wants to hear my own words. They sat here with a wire recorder and transcribed me.' 'Who did?'
'Your superior. This Herr Lerrick.'
Cochrane was thunderstruck and did his best to conceal it. Lerrick?
'He sat where you're sitting now,' Mauer said. Then he motioned across the room to a worn straw chair with a ladder back. 'And the other man. He sat over there.' Mauer indicated with his gaze.
'Yes. Of course,' Cochrane said, recovering. 'And when was this again? Shortly after your arrival, right?' he guessed.
'About two weeks. I go to New York first of course,' the German said, switching back to English for no apparent reason other than that the events recalled themselves that way. 'Then to Washington. Then they put me here. Lerrick and the other man, both of F.B.I., badges like yours, come to talk to me here.'
'The second man…?'
'I do not recall a name.'
'What did he look like? Large? Small?'
'Big and tall. Broad like a bear. Looked German but wasn't. Smokes a pipe. Looked clumsy but wasn't.'
Richard Wheeler, Cochrane realized. 'What was discussed?'
'Everything I previously tell you.'
'Nothing else?'
A long, hesitant pause, then: 'How I escape.' Mauer's indignation toward Cochrane returned. 'How I lose my family.' A vacant, uneasy glare came over the German, thinking back to his escape and its ultimate circumstances.
'Please, Otto,' Cochrane begged. 'Run through it once more. It's vital. And I may be able to help. Please believe me.'
'I want my son and my wife back,' he said. 'Nothing else. Not this house, this gun, not your passports or money.'
'I understand that,' said Cochrane with legitimate sympathy. 'And as God is my witness, I will do everything to get your family back to you. But you must tell me everything that happened. We're on the same side, you and I. I swear we are.'
For the first time since he had entered the farmhouse, Cochrane felt the relationship rekindling between the two men. Or was it wishful thinking?
'Please, Otto,' Cochrane said.
'All right,' Mauer said at length, looking away resolutely. 'All right. We talk. After that, I decide whether to shoot you or not.”
TWENTY-FIVE
The Swiss passports from Zurich never arrived, Mauer recalled. Either Swiss authorities intercepted them at customs or German authorities picked them off. Either was possible. In 1938, like people, things had a way of disappearing.
'Or, of course,' Mauer couldn't help but add, scrutinizing Cochrane closely, 'the passports never left Zurich at all. They never existed.'
Failing to receive the help as promised, Mauer continued, he took matters into his own hands. He was under twenty-four-hour watch and the number of thugs had increased to four. Mauer could read the message. It was time to tour Europe.
He practiced a bit of private capitalism on his own, Mauer admitted, working a deal with a pair of Dresden- born clerks in the Nazi documentation office in Berlin. He had come out of it with a pair of impeccable passports, one for a woman and one for a child and both on thirty-six hours' notice. The passports were Swedish and bore diplomatic numbers. Better than forgeries, they were the real thing, having disappeared from the Stockholm registry and reappeared blank in Berlin. No one admitted exactly how.
Mauer's wife and son were to leave Germany immediately for Spain. They would arrive in Madrid by air, then travel southward by train. They would cross the tenuous border to Gibraltar where they would contact an M.I. 5 agent, a self-styled nobleman called Major Asena, who ran a cafe in the afternoon and a network of anti-Franco infiltrators for the English at night. In exactly what force Asena was a major was open to dispute, and the conventional wisdom in Gibraltar had it that his rank was as self-proclaimed as his nobility. But no one pressed such questions; Major Asena solved problems.
From Gibraltar, Frau Mauer and her son were to take an Irish liner-named with the uncanny half-poet, half- warrior sense of Gaelic irony, The Empress of Belfast -to New York. There Otto Mauer and his family would rendezvous, at least according to prearrangements.
Mauer saw his wife and son to the airport in Munich. He watched them safely onto the aircraft, then stood on the observation deck as the airplane disappeared into the sky. He went to work for three more days. Then on a Friday morning, he threw his own ace.
I.G. Derringer, the sprawling German electrical supply company, had a plant in Helsinki. It was constantly under surveillance by both Russian and English operatives. Using his own passport and Abwehr identification, Mauer flew to Helsinki on a Luftwaffe civilian transport, ostensibly to run a spot security check on the plant.
He arrived, conducted his check, disappeared into a cafe, and convinced himself he was alone. He ordered a single Polish vodka, drank it, and waltzed out the side door and down two short, busy blocks. He reported to the
