Cochrane nodded.
'Major Asena is very capable and very able. Both sides play ball with him, we all know that. Not a major in anybody's army except his own. A mercenary, follow? Our sources in Gibraltar told us he was waiting for a woman and a boy. Germans, the sources said. At the same time, Norwegian intelligence shared with us the fact that one Otto Mauer, travelling alone, had passed through. So we watched the obvious route for the family of a German aristocrat and that meant Madrid.'
Whiteside's eyes clouded. Cochrane saw a cunning that had previously escaped his notice.
'Now,' Whiteside said, reckoning with the past, 'figure, one: Major Asena is a mercenary. Sells to the highest bidder. Figure, two: if Mauer of the Abwehr knows him, other
Abwehr officers know him, also. Conclusion?'
'Natalie and Rudy could have been up for grabs. The Abwehr could have bought them back and forced Mauer to 're-defect.' He would have been in a position to serve massive disinformation to the F.B.I. just in the hope of seeing his family alive again.'
Now Whiteside leaned back. 'You understand quite well,' he said.
'I'm learning,' Cochrane answered.
'Well, that's exactly what was going to happen. As soon as Mauer hit Helsinki and defected, he was safe. He was in British and American hands every step of the way. But the Abwehr had already contacted Major Asena. They had reached an agreement to pay the major ten thousand American dollars to hold Mauer's wife and children if they crossed to Gibraltar.'
Seeing Cochrane's intrigue, Whiteside purred soothingly. 'Our source on that is excellent,' Whiteside said. 'That's all I can tell you, of course.'
Your own infiltrator in the Abwehr, mused Cochrane. Good for the Brits.
'Congratulations,' Cochrane said.
Whiteside went ahead. 'So we picked up the missus and the boy in Madrid. I'd dare guess that we had every street man in town looking for them. It wasn't difficult,' Whiteside smirked. 'The bell captain at the Ritz was ours for several years. He's in London now so I can tell you that.'
From there it was simple. Whiteside's people in Spain assigned a photographer within hours, took some nice touristy photographs of the mother and child in the Plaza Mayor to prove they had arrived there and were all right, then went back up to the hotel room and took some photographs for passports. The Mauers were moved to a British safe house the next morning and British passports were drawn by noon.
'And if I'm guessing right you had them out of the country within two days,'
Cochrane said.
'Within one day,' said Whiteside. 'Not that it was easy. The airports were being covered, Otto Mauer by now being considered a significant defector. There was Gestapo manpower and hardware everywhere. So we used a soft route by car into France. Then we moved them to Ireland from Bordeaux. It was the only route open at the time.'
'But if they're close by, they're not in Ireland,' said Cochrane. 'You said you could have them here within three days. That's not Ireland.'
'No it's not.'
'That means Canada or one of the islands in this hemisphere.'
'You're getting warm.'
'Canada's not warm this time of year.'
Whiteside laughed. Laura sat nearby, quietly taking it in, working on the cup of tea, holding it in her hand to preserve its warmth. For several minutes, Cochrane had all but forgotten about her.
'Let's say they're on a very safe island about three hundred miles off the coast of South Carolina. Very coral, very sunny, and very secure.'
'Lucky them in Bermuda,' Cochrane said.
'They're miserable. They want to be reunited. This is where you come in, Mr. Cochrane, you see. Your F.B.I. is holding Mauer and we haven't notion where he is. Further…” he began shrewdly.
'Further, you've invested a lot in the operation. You're holding a woman and a child to use as a lever. You want something in return.'
'A vulgar but accurate way of putting it.'
'What do you want?' Cochrane asked, ignoring the distasteful expression that Laura had made.
Whiteside drew a fatigued breath and turned unexpectedly to Laura. 'Are you certain you wish to hear this?' he asked.
'Yes, I'm certain,' she said.
Whiteside turned back to Cochrane. 'We want Siegfried out of the operational picture,' he said. 'And we want whatever network goes with him.'
'He's said to work alone,' Cochrane tried.
'Poppycock. Somewhere there's a control. Or at least a guardian angel. He can do a lot of things on his own, but not everything. Look. You can arrest him here. I cannot. And so far SIS has no authority to take, shall we say, more physically forceful means of action on U.S. soil. We need the goodwill for the future, you understand.'
'I understand,' said Cochrane. And he did. Whiteside preferred that Siegfried be arrested or shot, perhaps preferably the latter, by his own countrymen. No use having an international flap among friends. The logic was sound, the situation a classic trade-off. Everyone in the room, even Laura, recognized that.
'Then there's the matter of your own Bureau,' said Whiteside. 'Seems they're handling the intelligence end of things on this side of the ocean. It would help us in the future if we knew how clean Mr. Hoover's Bureau is. Contacts we could trust, and all.'
'We'll take care of Siegfried,' Cochrane said. 'As for the Bureau's bill of health and Siegfried's control, I need Natalie Mauer and her son for that. What can you arrange?'
'Where do you want them?'
'Philadelphia would be fine.'
'When?'
Cochrane shrugged. 'As quickly as possible.'
'Two days,' Whiteside promised. 'Consider it done.'
Whiteside offered his hand and the two men shook. 'A gentlemen's agreement,' Whiteside said gleefully. The words sent spasms of anxiety through Cochrane, as he remembered so well where he had heard a similar phrase before.
THIRTY-SEVEN
As Thanksgiving 1939 approached, the mood at the White House was grim. Liberals pleaded that Roosevelt must run again to preserve eight years of the New Deal. Added now, however, was the powerful and irrefutable argument that no true leader could walk away from the nation's most serious crisis since the Civil War.
Yet Roosevelt was, in many ways, a conservative and a traditionalist. A third term flew in the face of established American political custom. So, the pressures mounted.
The German and Russian armies had met at the confluence of the Bug and Muchavec rivers; Poland had been successfully partitioned within four weeks. With peace on his western front, Stalin looked toward Finland. And with the Soviet Union neutralized, temporarily at least, Hitler turned his attention toward Western Europe.
A desperate French Premier, Albert Lebrun, begged Roosevelt daily to issue a declaration of war against Hitler. An equally impassioned but more restrained Prime Minister Chamberlain asked for more aircraft and more heavy artillery for Great Britain. Winston Churchill, who returned to Chamberlain's coalition cabinet at the outbreak of war as First Lord of the Admiralty, exchanged a private series of letters with the American President. The two men had met only once, in London in 1920, but each had long been impressed with the other. They had occupied parallel positions during the World War and had each opposed Hitler since the early 1930s. Now they exchanged confidential correspondences through the office of Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. Each letter from Churchill underscored the urgency of Chamberlain's requests.
