Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy (18 page)

A cold wind from the bay whipped up, rocking the bare upper branches of the trees in the park, making a low sound like leaves being blown by the wind; but the leaves were all long gone. Arnold considered their options. Barnsby and he had discussed the possibilities on the way back from Whitby by train. The card old William gave them somehow seemed too easy a lead to have found so quickly. Barnsby had suggested perhaps the author, Montgomery, had been hired by the Abwehr agent to look into the history of Jermyn House. This seemed likely, but something about it didn’t feel right. Perhaps, Arnold thought, the agent believed there could be no harm in asking about an abandoned manor house, because it seemingly had nothing to do with the war. This sounded much more probable. Spies were caught through apparently innocuous mistakes all the time. The first German agent captured in the United States was apprehended when he offered his passport to a toll booth operator on the Williamsburg Bridge.

“Are you strapped, Al?”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you bring a gun?” Arnold smiled despite himself.

“Oh. No. It’s at the Esplinade.” The Esplinade was their hotel in south Scarborough.

“Great.”

“Ought I have?” Barnsby asked quietly, his eyebrows raised.

“Never mind, Al.”

“I could go back.”

“Forget it.”

“Well, anyway, you finally will get to see why I was sent on this assignment,” Barnsby said with a smirk. “Let’s go, Tom.” The little man began to walk off and Arnold stopped him.

“Whoa there, pardner. If any funny business should happen to occur, just hit the floor, all right?”

“Certainly. You can count on me, Tom.”

“Good.”

As the door to the small, cluttered bookshop opened a pleasant tinkle of bells sounded, bringing a thin, dark-haired man with glasses out from the back room. The clerk appeared young, but the lines around his eyes indicated he was older than he looked, and the glasses made him distinguished, like a professor. His face was thin and sharp, with a beak-like nose and high arching eyebrows which made him appear to wear a haughty expression all the time. His clothing was ordinary, a bit cheap, but obviously recently purchased. In short, he looked like an English bookstore clerk.

“Michael Montgomery?” Barnsby asked with a winning smile. To Arnold’s amazement he removed one of his gloves and offered his hand to the clerk from across the room, walking forward with it outstretched.

“Yes? May I help you?” Montgomery replied in a northern English accent. He locked hands with Barnsby perfunctorily, half heartedly returning the little man’s greeting. Everything appeared to go normally—for about a second. At the point he realized everything was going wrong, Arnold could see Montgomery’s arm stiffen and his head come up. Montgomery looked like Barnsby had just given his hand a strong and inappropriate squeeze, although Barnsby looked frozen in place. The clerk’s eyes opened wide and he looked back at Arnold, not at his face, but at his jacket. The haughty expression suddenly disappeared from Montgomery’s face and was immediately replaced with one of the blackest, most absolute hate Arnold had ever seen.

Shit, shit, shit,
Arnold thought and fumbled for his gun, working the button straps to free it from his shoulder rig. The rig beneath his jacket, which showed through it as a gun bulge—something about that thought stuck with him, then he had it; the bastard had been looking for his gun! Arnold wanted to scream to Barnsby but that would have taken too much time. His gun pulled free and came up in slow motion. It felt like an anxiety dream to Arnold, where no matter how fast you go, it never is fast enough. For the first time the .45 felt heavy in his hands.

Lightning-quick Montgomery brought a chunk of polished marble from on top of a pile of papers down on Barnsby’s head. Barnsby just took the hit, he didn’t even try to block it with his free arm. An amazing sound like a coconut being stuck by a hammer resounded as the marble connected with Barnsby’s head, and only then did he let go of Montgomery’s hand. The little man fell, crashing headlong into a small display table of books, sending dozens of volumes flying, and then struck the ground.

Arnold realized he had been watching Barnsby when he should have been watching Montgomery, or whoever the hell the clerk was. To rectify the situation Arnold let go with his .45, tracing a scattered line of holes across the clerk’s counter. The sound of the gun was overwhelming in the tiny shop—a ringing remained in the air for seconds after each shot. As Arnold dove for cover behind a display table, knocking it over to block Montgomery’s line of fire, out of the corner of his eye he saw the clerk come up with a huge blue-steel shotgun. The weapon looked very at home in the clerk’s hands.

Arnold didn’t think. He dove to the left, behind a stone outcropping which acted as a ceiling support. A second later a huge hole ripped through the table where his chest had been. The front window shattered into a million pieces, spraying the street with razor-sharp shards of glass. Arnold took the risk and let go again, emptying his pistol, cutting jagged wood-splintered holes into the swinging door to the back room. A door somewhere in the back room slammed shut with a bang. The clerk had gone. Arnold considered running after him, but dropped the idea almost as soon as it had formed. MI-5 ran the tightest counter-intelligence system this side of the Kremlin. Sooner rather than later, Arnold knew, they’d pick Montgomery up. Besides, no one needed a running gun battle through the streets of Scarborough, especially one starring an American intelligence officer.

Arnold replaced the magazine in his .45 and ran over to Barnsby, who had pulled himself up to a sitting position in a corner, holding his head in both hands, trying to staunch the flow of blood. His entire face was a mask of red, although his eyes seemed alert. He glanced up at Arnold and smiled through all the blood.

Arnold said, “Shit! Barnsby, are you all right? What the hell were you doing?”

“Smooth, eh? He’s Abwehr, Tom,” Barnsby said thickly, spitting out a wad of blood which had flowed into his mouth.

“Really? You think so? Is this your special skill—finding spies by getting clocked by them?”

“His name is Albrecht Rahn. He’s a sleeper. Been here since ’36. His code name is Summer. He has a safehouse in Wear Head in the mountains. That’s where he’s going...ahh.” Barnsby was prodding around the wound with one gloved hand. Blood continued to pour out of it in amazing quantities, drenching his coat, shirt, and even his pants.

“You knew all this and didn’t tell me?” Arnold could not believe what he was hearing.

“No, no, I shook his hand.” Barnsby pushed himself up, unsteadily, to his feet, presenting his naked blood-stained hand to Arnold as if to illustrate the point. Arnold waited for the punchline. He began to think that Barnsby had lost a few marbles in that last round.

“And?” Arnold let the question hang. As his hearing returned to normal, in the distance he could make out the whistles of the local constables as they rushed to the scene of the gunplay.

“I saw all of it. He was thinking in German. I saw his mind,” Barnsby replied, in a harsh whisper.

“I think you better sit down, pardner. You took a bad hit.”

Barnsby laughed and spit a bit of blood into a now completely red handkerchief.

“What’s so funny?”

“I saw your mind too, in the parlor at the manor,” Barnsby offered.

“What did you see?” Arnold asked, taking his identification card from his breast pocket.

“A man who misses his brother very much,” Barnsby said, solemn faced, pressing the red cloth to his head. They could both hear people approaching, running frantically up the pavement towards their position. Arnold replaced his gun in his shoulder holster.

“So what? Anyone could know that.” Arnold turned away, looking through the broken window across the street at the trees in the park.

“I also saw a man who likes my fiancee a little too much for my comfort.” Barnsby laughed as he said this, and Arnold turned around.

“Who?”

“Natalie Greer. Major Cornwall’s secretary. You were thinking about it when we touched. I saw it in your mind.” Barnsby touched his finger to the clot of tacky blood on his forehead and considered it carefully. “I could likely use someone else’s mind, right now. Mine seems to be leaking out.” He laughed and Arnold stared at him with wonder.

“You’re one of Cornwall’s Talents,” Arnold muttered numbly.

“I am one of Cornwall’s Talents,” Barnsby replied.

The bobbies arrived and the two men presented their identification.

Albrecht Rahn, a.k.a. Michael Mark Montgomery, a.k.a Abwehr Agent Summer was captured in a raid on his safe house in Wear Head the following morning. The unit involved in the capture had all of Summer’s codes and passwords through some miracle in intelligence gathering (no one knew these and other vital clues were gathered through Barnsby’s special “Talent”). The MI-5 team was able to draw the enemy agent out into the open where he could be subdued easily. A general media silence was thrown over the whole incident, including the unfortunate shoot-out in Scarborough.

Agent Summer turned almost immediately when confronted with the rather one-sided option British intelligence offered him. It was either continue his broadcasts to Berlin under the auspices of British counterintelligence, feeding the Reich messages Churchill wanted to put in the Fuhrer’s ear, or face a firing squad. To the haughty, self-centered German there was no choice, really. He would be absorbed by England’s growing Double-Cross system, which by 1942 had transformed over thirty-five Axis spies into double agents and engulfed much of the English Abwehr network, along with most of the British MI-5 staff in the bargain. British intelligence officers had to act in all capacities to control a turned agent. MI-5 officers acted as case officers, translators, drivers, and even cooks for the turned agents. Often one turned agent required more than seven fully briefed officers to handle him properly. This number seemed to be steadily growing, with no visible end to the incredibly advantageous and delicate program in sight. The prime minister believed its benefits were worth the drain on labor. Recruitment for the British intelligence sections had been increased to fill the gap in manpower.

Summer surrendered a case full of coded transmissions that contained a great deal about the history of Jermyn House, which he had located in his instructed search in November 1942 and had transmitted back to Berlin later that month. He knew very little, it seemed, about why the Nazis required the information. Several facts relevant to the PISCES/DELTA GREEN investigation were discovered among these papers. Summer had found documentation about another man who had been interested in Jermyn House, or at least in its last lord, Arthur Jermyn. The man was an American who stayed at the manor house as Sir Jermyn’s guest for more than a week in October of 1912, drawn, it seemed, by Jermyn’s interest in occult lore.

This American was Professor Nathaniel Peaslee. Although no records existed to indicate what the two spoke of during his stay at Jermyn House, it seemed Peaslee had been on a tour of the principle cities of Europe in that year, perusing private libraries on the continent for occult literature. Arthur Jermyn’s interest in the occult aspects of African religions and his extensive library of rare volumes were well known to the staffs of many universities. While visiting Durham University, Peaslee was directed to the Jermyn estate to further his research. Summer believed Peaslee went to Jermyn House to search the lord’s library for occult information.

Little else about Peaslee was mentioned in the spy’s text, except that he later purchased a rather costly 1768 monograph called
Observation on the Several Parts of Africa
from Durham University. This book had been penned by Arthur Jermyn’s great-great grandfather Sir Wade Jermyn, who died in the madhouse at Huntington, screaming about a lost city in the middle of the Congo in which certain unmentionable creatures lived. Research and Analysis at PISCES headquarters had failed to locate a copy of the book in Britain, which suddenly seemed terribly important to the Nazi Parsifal investigation. Two copies of it were known to be on the continent and were by now probably in Nazi hands.