Citadel (15 page)

“There,” whispered Boch. “It's him, there, do you
see, crouching just off the runway.” They knelt in
the darkness of the hangar closest to the Storch.

Macht saw him. The Englishman seemed to be
gathering himself.
The poor bastard is probably exhausted.
He's been on the run in occupied territory
over four days, bluffed or brazened his way out of a dozen near misses.
Macht could see a dark doublebreasted
suit that even from this distance looked
disheveled.

“Let him get to the plane,” said Macht. “He will
be consumed by it, and under that frenzy we approach,
keeping the tail and fuselage between ourselves
and him.”

“Yes, I see.”

“You stand off and hold him with the Luger. I
will jump him and get this”—he reached into his
pocket and retrieved a pipe—“into his mouth, to
keep him from swallowing his suicide capsule.
Then I will handcuff him and we'll be done.”

They watched as the man broke from the edge
of the grass, running like an athlete, with surprising
power to his strides, bent double as if to evade
tacklers, and in a very little time got himself to the
door of the Storch's cockpit, pulled it open, and
hoisted himself into the seat.

“Now,” said Macht, and the two of them
emerged from their hiding place and walked
swiftly to the airplane.

His Luger out, Boch circled to the left to face
the cockpit squarely from the left side while Macht
slid along the right side of the tail boom, reached
the landing struts, and slipped under them.

“
Halt!
” yelled Boch, and at precisely that moment
Macht rose, grabbed the astonished Englishman
by the lapels of his suit, and yanked him free
of the plane. They crashed together, Macht pivoting
cleverly so that his quarry bounced off his hip
and went into space. He landed hard, far harder
than Macht, who simply rode him down, got a
knee on his chest, bent, and stuffed his pipe in the
man's throat. The agent coughed and heaved,
searching for leverage, but Macht had wrestled
many a criminal into captivity and knew exactly
how to apply leverage.

“Spit it out!” he cried in English. “Damn you,
spit it out!” He rolled the man as he shook him,
then slapped him with a hard palm between the
shoulder blades, and in a second the pill was
ejected like a piece of half-chewed, throat-obstructing
meat, riding a propulsive if involuntary
spurt of breath, and arched to earth, where Macht
quickly put a heavy shoe on it, crushing it.

“Hands up, Englishman, goddamn you,” he
yelled as Boch neared, pointing the Luger directly
into the face of the captive to make the argument
more persuasively.

There was no fight left in him, or so it seemed.
He put up his hands.

“Search him, Macht,” said Boch.

Macht swooped back onto the man, ran his
hands around his waist, under his armpits, down
his legs.

“Only this,” he said, holding aloft a small camera.
“This'll tell us some things.”

“I think you'll be disappointed, old man,” said
the Englishman. “I am thinking of spiritual enlightenment,
and my photographs merely propose
a path.”

“Shut up,” bellowed Boch.

“Now,” said Macht, “we'll—”

“Not so fast,” said Boch.

The pistol covered both of them.

It happened so fast. He knew it would happen fast,
but not this fast.
Halt!
came the cry, utterly stunning
him with its loudness and closeness, and then
this demon rose from nowhere, pulled him—the
strength was enormous—from the plane, and
slammed him to the ground. In seconds the L-pill
had been beaten from him. Whoever this chap
was, he knew a thing or two.

Now Basil stood next to him. Breathing hard,
quite fluttery from exhaustion, and trying not to
face the enormity of what had just happened, he
tried to make sense, even as one thing, his capture,
turned into another—some weird German command
drama.

The SS officer had the Luger on both of them.

“Boch, what do you think you are doing?” said
the German in the trench coat.

“Taking care of a certain problem,” said the SS
man. “Do you think I care to have an Abwehr bastard
file a report that will end my career and get
me shipped to Russia? Did you think I could permit
that
?”

“My friends,” said Basil in German, “can't we sit
down over a nice bottle of schnapps and talk it
out? I'm sure you two can settle your differences
amicably.”

The SS officer struck him across the jaw with
his Luger, driving him to the ground. He felt blood
run down his face as the cheek began to puff
grotesquely.

“Shut your mouth, you bastard,” the officer
said. Then he turned back to the police officer in
the trench coat.

“You see how perfectly you have set it up for
me, Macht? No witnesses, total privacy, your own
master plan to capture this spy. Now I kill the two
of you. But the story is, he shot you, I shot him.
I'm the hero. Moreover, whatever treasure of intelligence
that little camera holds, it comes to me. I
will weep pious tears at your funeral, which I'm
sure will be held under the highest honors, and I
will express my profound regrets to your unit as it
ships out to Russia.”

“You lunatic,” said Macht. “You disgrace.”

“Sieg Heil,” said the SS officer as he fired.
He missed.

This was because his left ventricle was interrupted
mid-beat by a .380 bullet fired a split second
earlier by Basil's .380 Browning in the Abwehr
agent's right hand. Thus Boch jerked and his shot
plunged off into the darkness.

The SS officer seemed to melt. His knees hit
first—not that it mattered, because he was already
quite dead, and he toppled to the left, smashing his
nose, teeth, and pince-nez.

“Excellent shot, old man,” said Basil. “I didn't
even feel you remove my pistol.”

“I knew he would be up to something. He was
too cooperative. Now, sir, tell me what I should do
with you. Should I arrest you and earn the Iron
Cross, or should I give you back your pistol and
camera and watch you fly away?”

“Even as a philosophic exercise, I doubt I could
argue the first proposition with much force,” said
Basil.

“Give me an argument, then. You saved my life,
or rather your pistol did, and you saved the lives
of the men in my unit. But I need a justification.
I'm German, you know, with that heavy, irony-free,
ploddingly logical mind.”

“All right, then. I did not come here to kill Germans.
I have killed no Germans. Actually the only
one who has killed Germans, may I point out, sir,
is
you
. Germans will die, more and more, and Englishmen
and Russians and even the odd Frog or
two. Possibly an American. That can't be stopped.
But I am told that the message on the film, which
is completely without military value, by the way,
has a possibility of ending the war by as much as
two years sooner than expected. I don't know
about you, sir, but I am sick to death of war.”

“Fair enough. I am, too. Here, take this, and your
camera, and get out of here. There's the plane.”

“Ah, one question, if I may?”

“Yes?”

“How do you turn it on?”

“You don't fly, do you?”

“Not really, no. At least, not
technically
. I mean
I've watched it, I've flown in them, I know from
the cinema that one pulls the stick up to climb,
down to descend, right and left, with pedals—”

“God, you are something, I must say.”

And so the German told him where the ignition
was, where the brakes were, what groundspeed he
had to achieve to go airborne, and where the compass
was for his due north heading.

“Don't go over 150 meters. Don't go over 150
kilometers per hour. Don't try anything fancy.
When you get to England, find a nice soft meadow,
put her down, and just before you touch down,
switch off the magnetos and let the plane land itself.”

“I will.”

“And remember one thing, Englishman. You
were good—you were the best I ever went after.
But in the end I caught you.”

The War Room

“Gentlemen,” said Sir Colin Gubbins, “I do hope
you'll forgive Captain St. Florian his appearance.
He is just back from abroad, and he parked his airplane
in a tree.”

“Sir, I am assured the tree will survive,” said
Basil. “I cannot have
that
on my conscience, along
with so many other items.”

Basil's right arm was encased in plaster of Paris;
it had been broken by his fall from the tree. His
torso, under his shirt, was encased in strong elastic
tape, several miles of it, in fact, to help his four broken
ribs mend. The swelling on his face, from the
blow delivered by the late SS Hauptsturmführer
Boch, had gone down somewhat, but it was still
yellowish, corpulent, and quite repulsive, as was
the blue-purple wreath that surrounded his bloodshot
eye. He needed a cane to walk, and of all his
nicks, it was the abraded knee that turned out to
hurt the most, other than the headache, constant
and throbbing, from the concussion. In the manly
British officer way, however, he still managed to
wear his uniform, even if his jacket was thrown
about his shoulders over his shirt and tie.

“It looks like you had a jolly trip,” said the admiral.

“It had its ups and downs, sir,” said Basil.

“I think we know why we are here,” said General
Cavendish, ever irony-free, “and I would like
to see us get on with it.”

It was the same as it always was: the darkish War
Room under the Treasury, the prime minister's
lair. That great man's cigar odor filled the air, and
too bad if you couldn't abide it. A few posters, a
few maps, a few cheery exhortations to duty, and
that was it. There were still four men across from
Basil, a general, an admiral, Gubbins, and the man
of tweed, Professor Turing.

“Professor,” said Sir Colin, “as you're just in
from the country and new to the information, I
think it best for you to acquire the particulars of
Captain St. Florian's adventures from his report.
But you know his results. He succeeded, though he
got quite a thrashing in the process. I understand
it was a close-run thing. Now you have had the results of his mission on hand at Bletchley for over a
week, and it is time to see whether or not St. Florian's
blood, sweat, and tears were worth it.”

“Of course,” said Turing. He opened his briefcase,
took out the seven Minox photos of the pages
from
The Path to Jesus
, reached in again, and pulled
out around three hundred pages of paper, whose
leaves he flipped to show the barons of war. Every
page was filled with either numerical computation,
handwriting on charts, or lengthy analysis in typescript.

“We have not been lazy,” he said. “Gentleman,
we have tested everything. Using our decryptions
from the Soviet diplomatic code as our index, we
have reduced the words and letters to numerical
values and run them through every electronic
bombe we have. We have given them to our best
intuitive code breakers—it seems to be a gift, a certain
kind of mind that can solve these problems
quickly, without much apparent effort. We have
analyzed them up, down, sideways, and backwards.
We have tested the message against every classical
code known to man. We have compared it over
and over, word by word, with the printed words of
the Reverend MacBurney. We have measured it to
the thousandth of an inch, even tried to project it
as a geometric problem. Two PhDs from Oxford
even tried to find a pattern in the seemingly random
arrangement of the odd crosslike formations
doodled across all the pages. Their conclusion was
that the
seemingly
random pattern was
actually
random.”

He went silent.

“Yes?” said Sir Colin.

“There is no secret code within it,” the professor
finally said. “As any possible key to a book code, it
solves nothing. It unlocks nothing. There is no secret
code at all within it.”

The moment was ghastly.

Finally Basil spoke.

“Sir, it's not what I went through to obtain
those pages that matters. I've had worse drubbings
in football matches. But a brave and decent
man has put himself at great risk to get them to
you. His identity would surprise you, but it seems
there are some of them left on the other side.
Thus I find it devastating to write the whole thing
off and resign him to his fate for nothing. It
weighs heavily.”

“I understand,” said Professor Turing. “But you
must understand as well. Book codes work with
books, don't they? Because the book is a closed,
locked universe—that is the
point
, after all. What
makes the book code work, as simple a device as it
is, is, after all, that it's a book. It's mass-produced
on Linotype machines, carefully knitted up in a
bindery, festooned with some amusing imagery for
a cover, and whether you read it in Manchester or
Paris or Berlin or Kathmandu, the same words will
be found on the same places on the same page, and
thus everything makes sense. This, however, is not
a book but a manuscript, in a human hand. Who
knows how age, drinking, debauchery, tricks of
memory, lack of stamina, advanced syphilis or gonorrhea may have corrupted the author's effort?
It will almost certainly get messier and messier as
it goes along, and it may in the end not resemble
the original at all. Our whole assumption was that
it would be a close enough replica to what
MacBurney had produced twenty years earlier for
us to locate the right letters and unlock the code.
Everything about it is facsimile, after all, even to
those frequent religious doodles on the pages. If it
were a good facsimile, the growth or shrinkage
would be consistent and we could alter our calculations
by measurable quantities and unlock it. But
it was not to be. Look at the pages, please, Captain.
You will see that even among themselves, they vary
greatly. Sometimes the letters are large, sometimes
small. Sometimes a page contains twelve hundred
letters, sometimes six hundred, sometimes twentythree
hundred. In certain of them, it seems clear
that he was drunk, pen in hand, and the lines are
all atumble, and he is just barely in control. His
damnable lack of consistency dooms any effort to
use this as a key to a code contained in the original.
I told you it was a long shot.”