A Spy in the Shadows (Spy Noir Series Book 1) (6 page)

“The colonel is waiting,” he told Catherine and turned on his heels.  “This way, please.”

She followed him across a stone street.  Richter?  Why would he need her in such a quick manner?  She noticed several other men stationed at the perimeters.

Richter sat at the table reading a newspaper.  “Ah, my sweet, Catherine,” he said, taking her hand.  “I hope you found your son’s health improving.”

“At least it appears the physicians know what we’re fighting,” she said.  “He’s a very sick boy.”

“Then at least some good news.”

“That’s why I’m late.  Meeting with the new physicians, of which I’m grateful,” she said.  “How could I ever thank you enough?”

“It was the least I could do,” Richter said.  He stood and stepped out of the shade and into the brilliant morning sun.  His skin was sallow, plowed with wrinkles.  “Shall we take a walk, Catherine?”  Richter nodded and one of his men brought two Schipperkes on leashes and the intelligence chief took the leather strap.  She fell in place behind as they strolled down the hill.

They had gone perhaps twenty meters when Richter stopped.

“I have read your request to resign,” he said, “and I can’t say I blame you.  I have no family and so it wasn’t hard for me to choose a life of dedication to the Fatherland.  On the other hand, you have Georgi.  I can understand your motivations, especially during his illness.”

“It means everything to me.”

“As it should.”

“But…” she said, waiting.

“Yes, there is a matter that concerns me greatly,” he said.  “Iran.”  Over the next twenty minutes he discussed the importance of that region.  The rich oilfields, access to the ocean, all reasons why the allies would desire to control that land. 

As he told her this, Catherine froze on the inside.  Richter wasn’t going to let her go, and she should have been prepared for that.  “What is it you need for me to do?”

“We’re prepared to send you to Czechoslovakia, Catherine, arranged through a series of circumstances I believe hold a high level of success.  It will eventually allow your way into the heart of British Intelligence in Tehran.”

Catherine held an unbreakable loyalty toward this man standing with her, but to leave her son when he needed her most?

“I know it’s much I’m asking, Catherine,” Richter said as if reading her mind.  “But I give you my word this is your last operation.  And—while you are away only the best physicians will care
for your son.  Upon your return you and Georgi will live out the rest of your lives in a cottage prepared for you in the forest north of the city.”

“My last operation?”

“The last and the most important,” he said.

If he needed her for one more operation, then he would have it.  Catherine owed him as much.  “Then this shall be my last,” she said.

Richter smiled.  “When we return to the café, I’ll give you a file on the events we’ve set in motion.  I think you’ll be impressed.”

“Then you knew I would accept?” she said.

The Schipperkes ran up and playfully nipped at Richter’s pant cuffs.  The spymaster reached down and gave each dog a gentle pat on the head apologizing for ignoring them.  He turned up to her.  “I know you, Catherine.”

----

Within five weeks she was in Prague posing as a German-born journalist—Leni Capek was who she would be known as for a long time—complete with forged documentation and false background.  Through some careful planning, and the assistance of another agent, she was given a government position within city hall.

Eduard Benes and this Czech government had fled to England eighteen months before.  The final carefully planned incident was orchestrated—false charges against Leni involving a late night incident outside of a famous bar when she slapped a German official.  Assault charges were brought up and among the crowded sidewalk witnesses were produced.  This story assisted her in fleeing with other Czechs.

Two months later at
Cholmondeley Park, near Chester, England.  While traveling with a group of officials reviewing the Czech army training, Leni met an older, unsuspecting, and very handsome Colonel Robert Boland.

A British officer who happened to be stationed in Tehran, Iran.

-Five-

When Salinger was reassigned to Cairo in late May 1943, he had rented a room in a large house on
Harras Street close to the Italian legation.  It was white stone, Mediterranean style, divided into four apartments.  The ground floor flat had a back door opening into a patchwork of grape arbors and a vegetable garden.  But Salinger had insisted on renting the second-floor apartment with a balcony overlooking a small garden among mango trees and a wrought-iron fence lining a narrow street. 

The cities of Tunis and Bizerte had fallen to the British Western Desert Force on May 7 when Salinger was still in Bern.  By May 12, the day Salinger departed the Swiss city by train, organized Axis resistance in Africa had ended.  Returning to Cairo, he found a city no longer living under the depressing threat of Rommel’s Afrika Corp marching into the city.

It was after dark when the taxi dropped Salinger off at his apartment.  He had spent the afternoon sending in reports and cleaning out his desk.  He mixed a drink and sat in the half-shadowed balcony overlooking the street just beyond the fence.  It was a sparsely furnished apartment with two wicker arm chairs and a thick rug.  Beside one chair was a floor lamp where he spent long nights with a novel.  Beside the other chair were a small, square table and a jar of flowers.  The woman who cleaned his apartment switched them out once a week.  

The chatter of quick conversation below calmed him for a while.  When the street fell silent, he turned on the radio and listened to the announcer’s voice broadcast the war news.  The Russians had officially captured Kiev.  Hitler’s folly in Mother Russia was draining his armies.  Then the announcer read a communiqué from the Central Pacific Command.  Three days before in the Pacific Theater. U.S. Marines had captured Makin.  On an island named Tarawa, the Marines had consolidated their positions and were making good progress against enemy positions on the eastern end of Betio Island.

Salinger heard the knock.  He went inside, walked through the dark apartment and opened the door.  Frank Bentley, head of OSS operations in Cairo, stood there.  “I really had no idea you would be here.  There wasn’t a light on at all, Booth.  It’s never a good sign when a man is sitting in a dark room.”

Bentley was an always-somber man with Hollywood goods looks, slightly over six feet with black hair.  He was dressed in a light brown suit and blue tie.  His dark mysterious eyes shone from drinks earlier in the afternoon.

Salinger turned on the lamp.

“I’m taking several of the staff to dinner at the Shepheard later,” Bentley said.  “Would you like to go with us?” 

“Thanks for the offer anyway, but I’m going to try and get out of the city tomorrow night.”

“The baked fish is the best I’ve ever had.  You’ve been there, of course.”

“Thanks just the same,” Salinger said, stepping to the table and found his pack of cigarettes.  “But I can’t imagine, Frank you came here to talk about baked fish.”

Bentley followed him out onto the balcony.  Salinger turned down the radio.  “I’ve been listening to the war news.”

‘It’s all turned in our favor now, but we have to be careful.”

Out on the street there was the quick chatter of words, then they were down the street.

The OSS officer leaned on the rail.  “I just wanted to come by before you find out from someone else I personally don’t think you’re ready for this sort of thing,” Bentley said.  “And—I
let them all know that.  Nothing personal, but haven’t you wondered in the least why they want you involved?”

“They’ve given me what they consider a good reason.”

“Ah,” he said.  “The situation has changed in Tehran . . . a lot, no matter what they tell you.  We’ve overplayed our hand in Iran with our dealings with the pro-German government.  They simply don’t like us.”  He broke his glance from the dark street to Salinger.  “But when I said I didn’t think you were ready for this, I wasn’t referring to the political situation.”

“I know what you’re talking about,” Salinger said.

“Then you’ve thought about it?”

“I think about it every day.  There isn’t a day that those months don’t play out in my mind.”

“And you’re going back . . . knowing you’ll no doubt see Julia.  And you’ll have to deal with Goli, and what an awful mess that can turn out to be.”

“I’m going to patch up things with Julia one day if she’ll listen and forgive me.  As for Goli, she played on our team once, remember, Frank?”

“Not anymore.”

“Then I will have to deal with that, won’t I?”  Salinger’s mind tightened. “Look, the President wants me involved in this.”

Bentley rolled his eyes.  “And who could resist if they throw Roosevelt into the mix?  They know where your loyalty lies and you want to make up for losses.  What they don’t know for certain is the personal burden returning to Tehran will have on you, Booth.”

“Thanks for worrying about me, but it’s not necessary.”

“You’re welcome,” Bentley said glancing at his watch.  “Well, dinner waits.”  They walked inside and he continued to the door.

As the door began to close, Bentley stopped it with his hand.  “A final thought, Booth—and please don’t take this as a threat but only as friendly advice.  I’ve pulled you out of the fire once before.  To ask me do it again may be asking too much.” 

He wasn’t smiling as he allowed the door to close.

Salinger freshened his drink and turned the apartment light out.  Bentley was wrong.  Tonight he liked the dark.  He lit a cigarette and listened to the street noises.

When the street fell silent again, he didn’t turn on the radio, but instead thought back on the worse days of his life.

----

Bern. 

Goli had found him that late evening huddled on the apartment steps in the Old Town.  Salinger had lived for several weeks at the
Baur au Lac Hotel until someone decided that was too dangerous, then he was moved to an apartment off the Kreuzgasse. 

It was snowing and the air was crisp and sharp and the weather was much too cold for one to be out.  Besides, a man with a head full of secrets walking aimlessly through the winter streets of Bern had to be taken very seriously.  Maybe that was why when Salinger looked up at Goli her face held the most concerned expression.

“I just couldn’t go inside,” he said.

Goli’s gloved hand was on his shoulder.  “I understand, Booth.  I really do.”

They took him up to the apartment, questioned him briefly while several steps away Goli talked softly into the hall telephone.  Then he was placed in a sedan where he was grateful for the warmth in the rear seat.  Goli came down the steps, got in the back seat beside him, and the sedan drove away, her face in half shadow.  “They were worried when you didn’t show up because you know too much, Booth.  They can’t have you just disappearing like that.  Where were you?”

“Walking.”

“Just walking?”

“Did you talk to anyone?”

He smiled.  “No, I didn’t talk to anyone.”

The sedan had taken them out of the city and beyond the window there was only darkness and the gray outline of trees.  From that moment on Salinger’s world became a dull web of confusion.  Wires in the brain, short-circuited to the point where deep down inside he no longer cared.  They drove him along a rolling road to a wide, brown gothic place out among lush, full trees. 

He didn’t see Goli again for days.

He was given medicines in the mornings to make him alert, given medicines after dinner to help him sleep.  His world became strolls along shaded sidewalks accompanied by a nurse who he supposed was handsome in her own way.  During that time, Salinger was certain that he had finally gone mad.

At first he and the nurse didn’t talk on these walks, but simply chatted about things he had learned in his training—‘ciphers differ from codes—I was trained by the old agents who kept the Germans on their toes, you see—but ciphers are different from codes in that they are constructed upon a systematic method’—his voice was hollow, detached somehow, as if it wasn’t him speaking at all.  The nurse stood there and listened to everything he wanted to say.  Mrs. Walker, yes that was her name . . . “Now, Mrs. Walker, ciphers on the other hand are certainly different—”

Then one day—looking back he thought it must have been three weeks—he stopped talking about codes and ciphers.  That familiar voice inside his head returned as he tried to explain to Mrs. Walker he had tried his best, he really had, but still good men had died in those mountains because of him . . . and how it was all too late to make it right now.