'You've got the one missing piece and you're going to have to put it in place for us now. Aren't you?'
'It won't be so painful' allowed Whiteside.
'Not if you keep your subsequent part of the bargain. I'll tell you anything you want if you provide the man were looking for.' Whiteside wore the expression of a tournament bridge player about to reveal a championship hand, the cards he'd waited years to throw onto a table.
'IT provide him,' said Thomas.
Whiteside eyed Hunter with amusement and looked at least once into each of the other three pairs of eyes at the table. The noisy excavation continued below them.
'In that case,' said Whiteside, the elegant man with a patch of soot on his cheek, 'please listen carefully.' He smiled.
'You'll like this. The story wears well.'
Chapter 35
Whiteside cleared his throat. 'I've been in double-double games before, even a triple-triple ruse along the line.' He shook his head and exchanged a cognizant grin with Hunter.
'This one beats them all, however.'
He glanced around, seeing that he was center stage. He continued addressing Hammond, the emissary of U.S. Intelligence, as much as anyone. And, sir,' he said,
'I'll supply you with your bloody missing piece, all right. Your Sandler.'
'Our what?'
Thomas inclined forward again, instantly baffled. He was going to point the. finger to Sandler. Not Whiteside.
Patiently, Whiteside repeated, the silence at the table now given an extra dimension of stillness.
'Well' Whiteside buffed with studied casualness, 'the man's been dead for thirty-one years. What I could never understand is how your Central Intelligence Service, sorry, Agency, never managed to learn that for themselves' The bastards probably did, thought Hammond, and never told anyone.
Hunter sat back in his chair, his hands folded, one thick finger interlocking with another, glancing toward his own chest as if to indicate he'd known it all along also. Hunter did look like a bear, Thomas noticed. Whiteside's smugness enraged Thomas.
Whiteside raised his eyebrows slightly, saw the stunned expressions around him, scratched his left cheek elegantly, and mused onward.
'Yes,' he said reflectively,
'I suppose I do owe the present company an explanation. Correct?
'I assure you' he began, 'it wouldn't change the current situation the smallest bit.'
He turned the calendar back to 1947, a year in which the British Exchecquer was still bedeviled by German pound-sterling notes, printed in Austria during the war. An investigation was in progress, yet doomed to failure. Someone was still printing pound notes. No one knew who. Or where.
'It was April of that year, forty-seven, I recall,' said Whiteside, 'when we were still fairly active in Central Europe. We, meaning M.I. 6, of course. We were recruiting Russians. The Iron Curtain had fallen and we wanted people who were behind it. We wanted Russians. But we took what we could get' What they got, what they managed to recruit, was just about anyone who could exchange a useful tidbit of intelligence for a one way ticket to the West.
'Poles, Hungarians, Czechs' continued Whiteside nostalgically, 'we could have set up our own League of Nations in exile, we recruited so many 'Why didn't you?' asked Daniels sarcastically 'Afraid your Congress wouldn't want to join' Whiteside shot back.
'Touche. May I go on?'
Daniels motioned an open hand to indicate Whiteside could.
'In forty-seven we recruited a Hungarian, man named Walter Szezic. He was a young man then, mid- twenties, and had been in the non-Communist resistance in Austria and Hungary during the war. Fine fellow, really!
'They all are' Thomas intoned.
Whiteside ignored the remark and dwelt on Szezic.
'Szezic stayed in Hungary for three years, until being uncovered in 1950 and being smuggled out in one battered piece. But when recruited he had told several stories, all of which were later confirmed… except one.
'There was no way of confirming that lone story. But since it wasn't important to Szezic that he deceive us on that point, and since all the more important information we received from him was true, we took this as the Lord's truth, also.'
The story concerned a spy, a man the Russians had planned to slip into the West since before the war. A man not identified by name, but rather by the identity he took.
'The spy was run by Moscow,' said Whiteside.
'Years in the making; straight out of the KGB building on Dzerzhinsky Square.
But he would have a control in New York, too. He'd be run in the United States and had been trained to assume the identity of a wealthy German-American industrialist' No one said it, but one name bolted into the listeners' minds.
'Sandler,' said Whiteside, though it wasn't necessary.
'The spy had memorized every facet of Sandler's life; he'd been given the man's voice, the man's face, practically the man's mind, in that he'd memorized the faces and relationships of everyone Sandler had known before the war. An extraordinary undertaking by our friends the Reds,' said Whiteside, not without deep admiration.
Thomas fidgeted nervously, beginning to sense the inevitable implications and consequences of Whiteside's story. Leslie glanced back and forth between Whiteside and Thomas. Hammond spoke.
'Why should we believe any of this?' he asked.
'Perhaps you shouldn't. But proof is available.' Whiteside held up a hand.
'Not with me now, unfortunately. No. But I could provide it, if necessary.'
Thomas's mind was leaping ahead, to the identity of the spy, to the controlling agent in New York. The pieces were fitting together, gliding uncontrollably like the needle of a ouija board.
'Just tell us what the proof is,' Thomas interrupted.
Whiteside told. Szezic, after his hasty departure from Hungary in 1950, led M.I. 6 agents to the confirmation of his story.
The German-American industrialist, Sandler, had been instructed eastward after the war by his control, the 'patriotic American' There he was met by Russians and shot summarily. The double took his place.
'Sandler's body was buried in Austria,' said Whiteside wryly, 'in a manner fitting a man who'd led a double life. The local Reds built a special coffin for him, one with a false bottom. He was sealed within.
Then when a local peasant died, the local was given the upper deck.
They both went into the ground together. Clever, don't you think? Same principle as the London buses. Who'd think of looking for a missing body in a grave already occupied by another man?'
'Jesus' mumbled Thomas to himself, almost disbelieving the fiendish ingenuity involved.
'Anyway,' said Whiteside. when Austria joined the West in 1955 we went to the cemetery. In the dead of night we brought up the coffin, abducted the half of the population whom we desired, and returned the other occupant to his eternal slumber. We took the body back to London. We obtained Sandler's dental chart from his New York dentist-a man who still practices, if' you care to confirm it with him. Or have a tooth fixed. No doubt, it was Sandler. You can even examine the body now, if you wish to come to London.'
'Where?' someone asked.
'A churchyard in Earl's Court,' grinned Whiteside. He turned to Thomas.
'You've been there. The girl thought to be his daughter is buried right next to him. Wrong name on his tombstone, of course. Couldn't have a real name. But we did think it would be fitting to keep all the important bones
