THIRTY-NINE
Laura was the first to see the man across the street in the shadows. She was upstairs with her bedroom light off. There were few leaves left on the trees this late in November and she had an improved view of the church entrance. It was 2 A.M.
She was sure this was a different man than the one she had seen before. He walked differently and wore different clothing. She felt her heart race. This was the man they expected downstairs.
She stepped back from the window and kept him in view. He disappeared into the church. For the first time she truly felt like a spy; but she was too frightened to savor the moment. She only gave the signal that Bill Cochrane had asked of her.
One sharp rap to the floor: the man had appeared. He was in the church. Downstairs, four men had spoken from one station to the next in whispers. Now pulses raced. Nerves tightened like taut rubber bands and each man fell to a death of silence.
Hearn and Cianfrani took cover in the dining room and living room respectively, feeling like bloody fools or, worse, schoolboys at play. Hearn was under the tablecloth of the dining table, his Colt drawn, listening to his own pulse in the darkness. Cianfrani had found a suitable place between a couch and a wall in the Fowler living room. He too had his weapon drawn and ready in a darkened silent room.
He felt his own hands sweating against the weapon. The whole catechism came back from the National Police Academy.
Rounds, chambered, sir!…
Safety catch up, sir!…
Set to fire, sir!…
Between them they had covered the only access to Fowler's study. Back door chained. Windows locked. Cellar door bolted.
Front door open.
In the study burned the only light in the house. The light was from Reverend Fowler's desk lamp, the one with the green glass shade. At the sound of Laura's heel on the wooden floor, Peter Whiteside sprang to his feet and took his position within the stationery closet of the minister's study. Whiteside had fallen silent over the last hour, wondering what to expect, wondering just how to phrase his report to Whitehall, and inevitably-as does any spy when he has too much time to think in a foreign place-sorting out the loves, accomplishments, and failures of his own life. But then Laura's rap had come, and his weapon was ready and he was on his feet. He drew the closet door three quarters closed and if he could have held his breath for an hour he would have.
He held his pistol upraised. Easier to lower and aim than raise and aim. He saw his watch: 2:04 A.M. It seemed like 5 A.M. His eyes were aching and his stomach was in open revolt with his nerves.
Bill Cochrane had found a black shirt, black jacket, and white collar belonging to Siegfried. He had donned all three. Better to set the final stage, all four men agreed. Then he had settled in at Fowler's desk and waited, his pistol across his lap, never more than a few beads of sweat away from his hand.
Over the course of the evening he had stared for several hours-interrupted only by occasional conversation with the moody Whiteside-at the curios on Reverend Fowler's desk: a silver framed color photograph of Fowler and Laura, presumably from their honeymoon, a handsome couple arm in arm before the Chateau Frontenac and the St. Lawrence in Quebec; a worn leather Bible, probably family, which made Cochrane reflect for hours if the Bible's value was that of an heirloom or a prop; an oval crystal paperweight and a brass scissors and letter-opener set.
Cochrane had studied these artifacts intensively, as if they were clues to some great puzzle. They yielded nothing. He tried, as he sat at Fowler's desk and coveted Fowler's wife, to move into the psyche of the man. What mad flywheel made Siegfried run? What furies besieged him? What demons possessed him?
He thought of the minister, calm and conciliatory even at the moment of his arrest. He thought of the helpless anonymous woman murdered in the woods behind the church and he pondered a sailor from landlocked Kansas slaughtered two miles from Red Bank. Nothing had connected by the time Cochrane heard Laura's foot on the ceiling above him.
The traitor-Fowler's guardian angel within the F.B.I.-was in the church. Then, upstairs, Laura saw the man emerge, clinging to the shadows cast by the streetlamp and the trees. He crossed the lane and Laura practically felt her heart explode.
The man opened the gate before her home and briskly approached the house via the flagstone path. As bold and as blatant as that! She almost forgot the second signal. Then her fear took over for her.
She rapped a second time. The man was on his way.
All at once, and unfolding in all its complexities within the breadth of a second, an appalling notion was upon Bill Cochrane. It was so neat and clear that Cochrane could not understand why it had never come to him before:
Tiny Mr. Hay was the demon within the F.B.I.! Toupeed, scheming, malevolent Mr. Hay:
I know everything, Cochrane…
Pull my whiskers again and there'll be bloodshed, I swear it to you…
If there's a fire, I figure I can be assistant director…
The little imp was probably assembling matches and kerosene already!
In Bill Cochrane's tired mind, allegiances blew apart, swirled into a vortex of confusion, then reassembled in queer, bright ominous new formations. Before Bill Cochrane was a panoply of deceit.
Mr. Hay sat astride a network that involved both Dick Wheeler and Frank Lerrick, at least as subalterns. Hoover was kept in the dark, which wasn't difficult, and the entire floor of Bluebirds in Section Seven were legmen for the cabal on the second floor.
Hope See Ming, Lanny Slotkin, and, yes, even Mary Ryan had deciphered Siegfried's code long ago. But they weren't telling. The Germans-Roddy Schwarzkopf and Liz Pfeiffer-were doubles, quite obviously now, and Bobby Charles Martin was a crypto-Nazi from the Rhineland of Ohio. At 2 A.M. it all made perfect sense. Cochrane had been the fall guy for the entire operation, the one to whom Hoover had turned for an answer and who had not been able to supply one. Hoover was thus destroyed at the White House and Cochrane was ruined as a public servant. And, most important in this scenario, America's fledgling intelligence networks would be washed away. A reorganization would be forced going into an election year, 1940, and then everything would again be wiped clean by a new President.
Then the whole conspiracy flew apart, spiraled, and reformed. Peter Whiteside and Laura Fowler were Gestapo. So was Otto Mauer. So was Stephen Fowler, who had been hauled away not by M.I. 6 agents but by co- conspirators. The transmitter at the top of the church tower was dead and the man now lured to Liberty Circle was not an F.B.I. traitor but an executioner who would in a few moments treat Cochrane to a bullet between the eyes. The only betrayal within the F.B.I., Cochrane reasoned, was Cochrane himself, who, against all entreaties of rational, professional men like Dick Wheeler, had thrown in his lot with the opposition.
'I'm going crazy,' Bill Cochrane said softly. His hand was on his pistol, which was across his lap. Then there was a sound. It was the front door of the house opening and then softly shutting. Peter Whiteside stood in the doorway of the stationery closet with a. 38 drawn and upraised. Even in the dim light cast from Fowler's green desk lamp. Cochrane could find his eyes.
'No shooting unless absolutely necessary,' Cochrane said again, his voice no stronger than a whisper. But no one could hear and that had been decided a day ago, anyway.
The footsteps moved closer.
No shooting, Cochrane reasoned. Why then was his own hand soaking wet upon the pistol? Why was there a cramp in his wrist and vein pounding in his neck? Why was the sweat on his face unbearable?
Why was he taking a final glance at the sturdiness of the wooden desk to see what parts of it might stop a bullet?
The footsteps had found the sliver of light cast by the partly open door to the minister's study. They drew closer now, careful footfalls on a carpet, then upon a bare floor. Cochrane swiveled in his chair to place his back to the door and he prayed that the intruder would speak before shooting.
A large man or a small man? Cochrane wondered. Then, to his abiding horror as he heard the door push
