World War 2 Thriller Collection

  ‘You knew your son would never join you. He’ll be taking his exams next year … you wouldn’t want us to try and bring him out against his will.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Andrei Bekuv. ‘What you say is true … but it doesn’t change the facts. My wife can’t get used to the idea of never seeing her son again.’ He looked away. ‘And to tell you the truth, I can’t either.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mann. ‘Sure.’ He patted Bekuv’s arm as one might try to calm an excited poodle.

  Emboldened by this gesture of friendship, Bekuv opened his loose-leaf notebook. ‘I have completely changed my work on interstellar communication.’

  ‘Have you?’ said Mann. ‘That’s good. No more humming hydrogen, you mean?’

  Bekuv made some vague noises while pointing at the pages of closely written numbers. ‘At first we were looking for some means of communicating through the galactic plasma without dispersion. Obviously this meant using electromagnetic waves. We knew X-rays were no good …’

  ‘Why?’ I said in an attempt to join in.

  ‘They can’t be focused,’ said Bekuv, ‘and gamma rays have too limited a range.’

  ‘How limited?’ I asked.

  ‘About one hundred thousand miles,’ said Bekuv. Mann pulled a face. Bekuv smiled and said, ‘But now I am beginning to believe that we should abandon the idea of any sort of electromagnetic waves. After all, we will never be able to converse with another civilization, because each message will take twenty years getting there and another twenty to get back.’

  ‘Sounds like the British telephone system,’ said Mann.

  ‘Now I believe we should simply seek to make a mark in the universe … a mark that some other civilization will detect and so know there is some kind of sophisticated life on planet Earth.’

  ‘What kind of mark?’ said Mann.

  ‘Not ploughing patterns in fields. There has been a lot of talk about that but it is absurd. The canals on Mars that Schiaparelli reported in 1887 and the Mariner spacecraft revealed as a complete misinterpretation have ruled out that idea.’ He turned the page to where there were diagrams and more calculations. ‘I am thinking of a cloud of material that will absorb a chosen wavelength of light. This would leave a pattern – no more than a line perhaps – in the spectrogram of a star’s light. This would be enough to tell any civilization that there was scientific achievement here on Earth.’

  I looked at Mann. He raised his eyebrows. ‘What is the next step?’ Mann asked, with trepidation evident.

  ‘To put this before your Government,’ said Bekuv. ‘It will cost quite a lot of money.’

  Mann was unable to completely suppress a sigh. ‘Well, you’d better put this all to me in the form of a report. Then I will see what I can do.’

  ‘I don’t want it filed away and forgotten,’ said Bekuv. ‘I want to talk to someone about it. You have a Senate Committee on International Co-operation. Could I talk to them?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Mann, ‘but you’ll have to write it all down first.’

  ‘One more thing,’ said Bekuv. ‘It’s Christmas Eve, could I take my wife to the midnight mass tonight?’

  ‘It doesn’t say you are Catholics on the dossier,’ said Mann. He was disconcerted, and slightly annoyed. Or perhaps he was feigning annoyance.

  ‘We have lapsed in our church-going, but not in our faith,’ said Bekuv. ‘Christmas Eve has always been a special time for us.’

  ‘Someone will have to go with you,’ said Mann.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said.

  Bekuv looked at Mann. Mann nodded.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Bekuv. ‘I will go and tell Katinka. Thank you both.’ He went away wagging his tail.

  ‘Sometimes I don’t know how I keep my hands off that jerk,’ said Mann.

  ‘And it shows,’ I told him.

  Mann sat down in the soft armchair and closed his eyes tight.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Mann but his face had gone grey, and he looked as if old age had overtaken him very suddenly. I waited for him to speak. I waited a long time.

  ‘Henry Dean,’ I reminded him of the name Mrs Bekuv had given us. ‘Dr Henry Dean.’

  ‘Hank Dean,’ said Mann. He tightened his tie.

  ‘You’ve heard of him?’ I asked.

  ‘Hank Dean: airline executive’s son, born in Cottonwood, South Dakota. High school athlete; track star, truly great pitcher, tipped for pro baseball until he got injured.’

  ‘How do you know so much about him?’ I asked.

  ‘We grew up together in a village just outside Cleveland. My dad was a pilot and his was sales manager for a tinpot airline; flying contract mail between Chicago and New York City. The airline families lived alongside the airfield, and the village kids beat shit out of us. The war came, we both went into the army. Hank was a bright kid, came out a captain in the airborne, but he’d done a few drops in civilian clothes. At the end of the war, the army kept him on, but sent him to MIT to get his masters. He wound up with a PhD before he got back into uniform. Next thing I heard he was working in Berlin for a little company that made high-voltage electrophoresis machines for medical labs … you’re beginning to get the picture?’

  ‘I get the picture,’ I said. ‘This little engineering company had a very lenient policy about employees who disappeared for long weekends, and came back with their hair slightly ruffled and a hole in the hat.’

  ‘Yeah, a CIA front, and a very active one. Henry Dean was making quite a name for himself. They switched him back into the army and gave him the police desk in Berlin. Then they began saying that Dean would be running Operations in Langley before he was thirty-five – that kind of crap, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But Dean got into the juice. His old man was a lush, I remember. That’s why his dad quit flying and went to sales. Hank was very close to his dad; he used to hide the bottles, argue with him, plead with him, but it was no use. Poor Hank – and Berlin is a bad place for a guy who is easily tempted.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Mann passed a hand across his eyes as if trying to see into the past. When he spoke again it was the voice of a man half asleep. ‘Got into the juice. There was some kind of foul-up … a row about some documents being given to the East Germans … there was an inquiry. I don’t know the details but Dean was never the same again after that. They gave him a second chance. The next thing was a back-up assignment for a routine crossing. It was unlikely that he’d be needed, but suddenly he was, and they dug him out of a bar on the Ku-damm, stoned out of his mind. There was a lot of static from Langley, and a lot of promises from Dean. But it was the third time that ended his career.

  ‘Berlin in the late ’fifties – it was heavy stuff, and two really good guys went that night. Those two had a lot of friends, and the friends blamed Hank Dean. He was finished for that kind of field-work. He went back to Washington but he couldn’t handle a scene like that – it needs a light touch – Washington “A list” hostesses, all that muscle from the satellite embassies, too many whizzkids chasing your job. No, that wasn’t Hank Dean.’

  I tried to pour some tea. There was only a trickle left, and that was cold. There were no lights on in the sitting-room, and Mann was no more than a silhouette against the darkening sky. The silence lasted so long that when he spoke again it made me start.

  ‘He stayed on the wagon for years,’ said Mann. ‘And then finally Special Services found something for him in Vietnam. They wanted me to sign a chit sponsoring him …’ Mann sighed. ‘I thought about it all day and all night. I was sure he’d foul up and spatter me with shit … so I said no.’

  I tried to ease some of the guilt off his back. ‘Hindsight reveals a wise decision,’ I said.

  It did nothing to cheer Mann. Against the wintry light from the window, I saw him pinch the bridge of his nose. He was slumped lower now, his chin almost on his chest. ‘Can’t be sure of that, can we?’ he said.
‘Maybe if I had signed it we wouldn’t be running our pinkies down the Christmas airline schedules.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I agreed.

  ‘There comes a time in your life when you have to do the human thing – make the decision the computer never makes – give your last few bucks to an old pal, find a job for a guy who deserves a break, or bend the rules because you don’t like the rules.’

  ‘Even in this job?’

  ‘Especially in this job, or you end up as the kind of dispassionate robotic bastard that communism breeds.’

  ‘Are you going to bring Dean back, or try to turn him?’

  ‘I’ve embarrassed you, have I?’ said Mann bitterly.

  ‘Because if you are going to bring him back, there will be a lot of paperwork. I’ll want to get started on it as soon as possible.’

  ‘You like baseball?’ Mann asked. ‘He was second baseman. I saw the whole thing … a double play and this little fink put a set of sharpened cleats into his knee. He would have turned pro, I’m sure. He’d never have come into this lousy racket.’

  ‘Turn Dean,’ I said, ‘and perhaps we could do without the Bekuvs.’

  ‘Hank Dean … big noisy lummox … full of farts and funny stories … untrimmed beard, dirty dishes in the sink, rot-gut in flagons, and a sleeping-bag in the bathroom if you’re too drunk to drive home. You’d never recognize him for this bright kid who got the sharpened cleats in his leg. Funny how a thing like that can change a man’s whole life.’

  ‘This is just a way of getting at you,’ I said.

  ‘It looks like it,’ said Mann. ‘I wonder how long ago they started working on it.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Poor old Hank. A KGB operation – I can smell it from here, can’t you? Payments into his bank balance, witnesses who can identify him, microdots pasted into his copy of Thunderball, you know what they get up to. Jesus! – and I’ve got the choice of handing over to another investigating officer, the way the book tells it, or of bending the rules and try and make it easy on him.’

  ‘If the KGB have set it up, they will have dotted every i and crossed every t. They dare not risk something like this blowing up in their faces.’

  ‘They’ve not necessarily framed him,’ said Mann calmly. ‘They might have just offered him enough dough to get him working for them.’

  ‘You don’t believe that.’

  ‘I don’t want to believe it,’ said Mann. ‘Do you know something … for a moment there I wasn’t even going to tell you that I knew Dean. I was just going to press on with the investigation and keep stumm.’

  If the Russians wanted to compromise or discredit Mann, they’d chosen a racking dilemma for him. But they’d misjudged their target. Many would have folded under such pressure, most would have handed the file over to someone else, but not Mann. He was shaken, but not for long.

  ‘Already it’s working,’ Mann said. ‘Already there is a gap between us.’

  The neon signs and the lights of the nearby town were turning the night sky fiery. ‘No gap,’ I said.

  ‘No gap,’ said Mann scornfully. ‘Already you are getting nervous – worrying about your pension and trying to decide how much you can afford to play along with me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why no?’ he asked. ‘Why no, Frederick Antony, old buddy?’

  He deserved some warmer reassurance that reflected the times we’d had together. Something that told him I’d stake my life upon his judgment – be it good or bad. But I was too English for such extravagances. Coldly I said, ‘Because I trust you more than I trust Mrs Bekuv. For all we know she could be planted by the KGB … acting on their instructions, and giving us the spielmaterial they want to feed to us.’

  The phone rang but Mann made no attempt to answer it.

  I said, ‘That will be the girls reminding us about the dance they’ve dressed up for.’

  Mann didn’t move, and soon the phone ceased to ring. ‘The side of his knee,’ said Mann. ‘His left leg, he still limps.’

  9

  That strange winter afternoon, Mann’s soft voice in that darkened room, my lack of sleep, the infatuation for Red that was fast becoming love, the contrived nostalgia of the Christmas festivities, or perhaps those last three whisky-sours, accounted for the way I remember it as a hazy dream. A dream that became a nightmare.

  The hotel management loaned us two old-fashioned tuxedos. My outfit included a shirt with a piqué front, as stiff as a board, and Mann’s even had a wing-collar. The band played Glenn Miller arrangements with suitable verve and sweetness, and the brass stood up and swayed through the choruses.

  The Manns were dancing to the tune of ‘Sun Valley Serenade’ when Red and I took the Bekuvs into town for the midnight mass. The Catholic church in Waterbridge was crowded, and an elaborate nativity scene occupied the entrance. The nave was lit by a thousand flickering candles. They made the interior warm and yellow, but the upper parts of the church were dark.

  The Bekuvs sat close together, and we chose a seat behind them so that I could watch them without intruding upon their privacy. Long after the singing of the choir ended, my mind remained full of the candlelight and the resonant chords of the great organ. And, mixing with it, came the brassy riffs of the Glenn Miller arrangements and the soft whispered words of love from Red.

  Outside, the first hours of Christmas Day were celebrated in an icy wind and scattered showers of sleet. At the exit people paused to wrap their scarfs tighter and button their thick overcoats. It was this that created a solid crush of worshippers at the door. We shuffled forward a step at a time.

  It was exactly the right place for it.

  I heard the strangled cry from Mrs Bekuv, and the scream of some other unidentified woman. Hands flailed and hats were knocked askew. A man began to shout. The Bekuvs were no more than five yards away from me but they might have been five miles for all the help I could give them.

  I swore, and ripped at the crowd, tearing a way between the worshippers like a man demented.

  By the time I got to the Bekuvs, the crowd had parted enough to let Mrs Bekuv sit on the stone steps. She was conscious but said nothing. She looked heavy and lifeless, the way soldiers do when their battle is done. Andrei Bekuv was bending over her. Both of them had blood on the front of their clothes. Andrei was pulling at his wife’s sleeve so that blood ran down her arm to form a puddle on the step.

  ‘They’ve killed Katinka,’ said Andrei Bekuv.

  I reached for her pulse and bloodied my hands.

  ‘Get an ambulance, Red. Ask the church to phone.’

  ‘They’ve killed my Katinka,’ said Bekuv, ‘and it’s all my doing.’

  I bound my handkerchief tightly round her arm but the blood still came. It marked the cuff of my borrowed tuxedo, and dribbled on to my new leather overcoat.

  There were no shadows. Everything in the room was white, and the fluorescent tubes lit it with a cold, pitiless glare. My blood-encrusted handkerchief lay coiled and discarded on the trolley, like the scaly skin of some terrible red serpent, and alongside it – carefully aligned – was the gold wrist-watch and bracelet that Bekuv had bought for his wife in New York.

  My coffee was cold. I tore open a sachet of powdered cream, stirred the mixture and gulped it down. It was a hell of a lousy way to spend Christmas morning.

  There was a rap at the door and Mann entered without waiting for a response. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair imperfectly parted.

  ‘You talked with the surgeon?’ He unbuttoned his trenchcoat to reveal a partly buttoned shirt, and a cardigan pulled down over his evening trousers.

  ‘No arterial cuts. Her hands will be scarred for life – she grabbed at the switchblade – maybe scars on the abdomen too, but the thick coat saved her anything worse than superficial wounds. If the blade had entered her the way it was intended, she would have been dead before she hit the ground.’

  Mann sniffed, walked over to the trolley and moved the wrist-watc
h and bangle with the tip of his finger, as if making a chess move. ‘Description of the assailant?’

  ‘At least a dozen,’ I said. ‘All of them different.’

  ‘And our pal Andrei?’

  ‘She stepped between them. It was meant for Andrei, but he wasn’t scratched. He’s taking it badly.’

  ‘“My darling Katinka, what have I done to you?”’

  ‘That’s the kind of thing,’ I agreed.

  ‘No one could have known that the Bekuvs started talking,’ said Mann, as much to convince himself as to convince me.

  ‘There must be a few people in Washington suffering sleepless nights.’

  ‘There will be a few people in the Kremlin suffering worse than sleepless nights if we break this one wide open,’ said Mann. ‘They don’t set up Henry Dean situations unless it’s really big.’

  ‘We should have expected some attempt to kill them.’

  ‘I did expect it. But not this soon. Who the hell could have known we’d brought them to this godforsaken hole.’

  ‘Gerry Hart?’

  Mann scratched his face. His was unshaved, and he touched his beard self-consciously. ‘Yes, that little bastard is certainly kept well informed. Who might be leaking to him? Any ideas?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Well, this is the way it’s going to be from now onwards,’ said Mann. ‘We’d better get prepared for more of the same. We’d better move the Bekuvs out of here.’

  I looked at my watch. ‘Merry Christmas,’ I said.

  ‘The better the day, the better the deed. Isn’t that what they say?’

  ‘It might look damned funny to the local press boys.’

  ‘A mugging?’ said Mann. ‘Nothing to leave the tree for.’

  ‘Knifing at midnight mass,’ I said. ‘In Waterbridge that’s a headline. They will go for it. You won’t shake that one, Major.’

  ‘And if I put a security guy at her bedside, it will look even more like a story.’ Mann grabbed at his face and rubbed hard as if trying to wake up. ‘And yet without a security guard they might try again.’