‘Local people?’
‘Not all of them, but they all know the city well enough.’
‘I feel sure Stein and Breslow have those damned papers here in town. Stein was able to take that Dr Morell file to show Stuart at fairly short notice. I think that means they have everything close by.’
‘Could be anywhere,’ said the CO. ‘Stein went to Geneva last month. We don’t know where he went in Switzerland. Could be that’s where he has the papers. His son Billy has a plane and he spends a lot of time down in Mexico, fooling around with that twelve-metre sailing boat. The documents might be somewhere south of the border, might even be on the yacht.’
The CO shifted in his seat. They had been in the car a long time by now and he was becoming uncomfortable. He watched a radio car drive slowly down the street; the cops eyed the passing crowds with careful and suspicious concentration.
‘Not on the boat,’ said the section head after the police car had passed them. ‘Not unless they have split the documents into more than one lot. The boat wouldn’t hold them. The report I saw describes the load as two large packing cases full.’
‘But maybe not all documents,’ said the CO. ‘Stein got suddenly rich after the war; I’d guess that there was also gold and stuff in the trucks that Stein helped to steal. The documents were probably a disappointment to them at the time.’
‘Disappointment, yes, I suppose so.’
‘The kind of disappointment I need once in a while,’ said the CO enviously.
‘Who did you say he’ll be talking to in this club?’
‘The owner is Jerry Delaney, a smooth-talking crook who’s into everything from porno movies to stolen fruit machines. Suspected of mob connections.’
‘In the army with Stein, you say?’
‘We’re not certain of that. London won’t let us dip into the Washington computer, you know, not even unofficially. But they are both about the same age; so it’s probable.’
‘I don’t think we’re going to get anything out of this,’ said the section head. ‘Let’s tell the people in the other car to take over. I’m sure that Stein will stay in that club all evening and then drive home and go to bed. I promised to phone London tonight with a situation report.’
‘I’m inclined to agree,’ said the case officer. ‘Let’s call it a day.’ But before they did anything about it, a grey Pontiac double-parked alongside them and a young man jumped into the rear seat of their car.
‘Hello, Santos,’ said the CO. The man grinned. He was a dark-skinned youth with an Afro hair-do and a long moustache which drooped over the ends of his mouth. He was wearing a rock-and-roll T-shirt and a football jacket.
‘Santos is monitoring the tap on the Stein and Breslow phones,’ the controller explained to the section head.
‘A call to Stein,’ said the youth. ‘A call timed at 8.30. A man named Bock called him from London.’
‘Who answered? Billy Stein?’
‘Billy Stein took off for Ensenada. He phoned the Breslow girl but he got nowhere with that proposition, so he took his T-bird and headed south. We have a tail on him.’
‘So who answered?’
‘No one. The message went on to the answering machine. I’ve got a transcript here.’ He was holding a piece of paper. ‘But you probably would sooner hear the essence of it.’
‘Yes.’
‘This guy Bock works for a German bank in London. Says he has life-and-death information about the documents – papers, he said on the phone, but that’s got to be the documents, right?’
The case officer nodded.
‘Bock wants to talk to Stein but he’s acting very nervous about his contact number. We have a secretarial service number. Bock says to leave a message there.’
‘Could be a chance for us,’ said the CO. He looked at the section head quizzically. The section head nodded.
The CO said, ‘On an answering machine, is it? Could you wipe it clean, Santos?’
‘Not without getting inside the Stein place, and his home is pretty well equipped with bolts and locks. Stein’s got a lot of valuable carpets and stuff in there. You can bet the insurance company have approved the burglarproofing.’
‘I smell this as being something of a break for us,’ said the CO.
‘I think we must try to get inside the Stein home and wipe it clean,’ said the section head. ‘I’ve arranged a high-security phone call to Stuart on Sunday evening.’
‘You want us to try getting into the Stein place?’ said the youth.
‘Let’s think about that for a moment. Stein might not even take the messages off the machine when he gets home tonight.’ The youth leant forward between the front seats. ‘Yeah, and he might be taking the messages off his tape right now. He has one of those musical codes that enables him to read back his own messages from any phone. Why don’t we take Stein off the street while we try to clean the tape?’
‘How?’
‘It doesn’t have to get rough,’ said the youth. ‘I could fix it so that the highway patrol pick him up for drunk driving and put him in jail all night.’
‘Highway patrol? What makes you think he’s going out of town?’
‘The CHP has jurisdiction on the freeways that criss-cross the whole of Los Angeles,’ explained the CO patiently to his visitor. ‘It would be unlikely – if not impossible – for Stein to go home without using them.’ The section head nodded his agreement.
‘Get on to it,’ said the CO.
The youth got back into the Pontiac and disappeared in the direction of Inglewood.
‘If anyone can fix it, Santos can,’ said the CO. ‘You can reckon on Charlie Stein being out of operation for the rest of the night. Early tomorrow morning I’ll try and get a telephone repairman into the Stein home.’
Chapter 21
The phone connection that Boyd Stuart used in London to speak to Los Angeles was the highest priority ‘crypto-ciph B’. The crypto-ciph network (A for America, B for Britain) is a scrambler phone. The encryption machines take the varying frequencies of the human vocal cords and, converting them first into fluctuating electrical current, use computer technology to rearrange each fraction of sound, a microsecond at a time, into new patterns. At the other end, similar machinery reconstructs the impulses and recreates a facsimile of the original sounds. Although the American National Security Agency owned and operated the network, they were so far not able to decipher intercepted conversations without knowing the day’s code. Thus London advised Boyd Stuart to use the ‘crypto-ciph B’ to speak to his contact clerk.
‘Sorry I’m a little late. The machine was in use until a few minutes ago,’ said the voice from Los Angeles.
‘It doesn’t matter, I was only sleeping.’
‘Well, I said I was sorry. Anyway you’d better make sure you are fully awake. It looks like we have a breakthrough on the Stein documents.’
‘Speak on.’
‘A call to Stein from London. A man named Paul Bock wants to talk to Stein about the papers. He says he works for a German bank in London. He says it’s a matter of life and death.’
‘Oh, he does, does he?’
‘He won’t give his address but he’s left the phone number of a secretarial agency which will take a message for him.’
‘Where did this call come through to?’
‘He was phoning Stein.’
‘All the way from London?’
‘That’s right. It’s gone on to Stein’s answering machine. Our people here have been trying to wipe the message off the tape so that Stein doesn’t get it.’
‘What’s the number he left?’ Boyd Stuart wrote it down on the message pad. It was bad enough getting access to the encryption machines only at these absurd hours when the senior civil servants and the politicians were in bed and asleep, but he did not enjoy being kept waiting for nearly two hours in the Foreign Office communications room deep under the traffic of Whitehall. He thanked the machine operator who had made the connection for hi
m and then went to follow the smell of coffee.
He came up through the basement of 10 Downing Street. It is not a hive of industry so soon after dawn. The upstairs apartment which provides a residence for the Prime Minister was not occupied. He could hear the policemen chatting together in the entrance hall; their voices had that special hush that night workers acquire. An elderly woman was making coffee in a small kitchen at the rear of the building. She poured him a cup almost before he had asked for one, she had mistaken him for one of the plain-clothes detectives from the ground floor, or one of the coding clerks from the basement.
Boyd Stuart looked at his watch. It was 6.40 A.M., Monday, 16 July. The only sound he could hear was the press service teleprinter firing off its occasional bursts of news.
Boyd Stuart went to one of the telephones and dialled the phone number of the secretarial agency. They answered. At least they worked all round the clock. ‘I’m trying to contact Paul Bock,’ he said when the girl replied.
‘Your name?’
‘Stein. Charles Stein,’ said Boyd Stuart.
‘Yes, I have a message for you. Go to Jimmy’s Militaria. It’s in York Way near King’s Cross Station. You can’t miss it, it says here.’
‘OK, thanks.’
He hung up. He walked from 10 Downing Street through the connecting doors that gave access to the whole street of houses to emerge from the front door of No 12. Even at this time in the morning there were sightseers standing on the opposite side of the road hoping for a glimpse of someone important. Boyd had left his car near the foot of the steps that led down to St James’s Park. He wondered what time Jimmy’s Militaria opened. He decided that it was too late to go home and catch up on his sleep. He drove through Trafalgar Square and headed north up Charing Cross Road.
You can’t miss Jimmy’s Militaria. Its shop-front is part of a row of Victorian houses sited between a pet shop and a launderette. It’s not as busy as the launderette nor as smelly as the pet shop, but it’s painted in black, red and white stripes, and the name board is surmounted with fretwork Iron Crosses. In one window there are dummies dressed in military uniforms and equipment; on the other side of the door, the smaller window is packed tightly with steel helmets, swords and daggers, buttons and badges, swastika armbands and trays filled with broken model soldiers.
The bell push was marked ‘Upstairs flat’ in red feltpen lettering on a torn scrap of paper. Stuart pressed the button. Nothing happened, so he pushed it again, and kept on doing so until a miserable figure in a torn dressing gown made his way slowly through the life-size inanimate soldiers and draped flags to pull back the bolts of the front door.
‘We’re not open,’ he said. He was in his twenties, bespectacled, with long hair and a half-grown beard adorning his white, pimply face.
‘I’m looking for Mr Paul Bock,’ said Stuart.
The man took a cigarette from his mouth. ‘You ain’t the law, are you?’ He coughed and spat into the street. He had a strong south London accent.
‘I’m here because he wants to see me.’
‘At this time of day?’ said the man with disgust, but he stood back and opened the door. ‘You’re not Stein, are you?’
‘Charles Stein,’ said Boyd. ‘Yes, that’s me.’
‘You don’t have an American accent.’
‘I was at school in England,’ said Stuart.
The man looked Stuart up and down before saying, ‘Well, come in. Paul will be surprised to see you. He’s frying himself an egg upstairs.’
‘The message went on my answering machine,’ said Stuart. ‘I phoned to see if there were any messages, and I have a device which makes the recording play back over the phone.’
‘Ain’t science wonderful?’ said the man. ‘By the way, I’m Jimmy.’ He led the way up a creaking staircase to a landing with cracked lino. Small plastic dishes of ancient food scraps were placed in the corner, and a black cat stretched itself and came to look at the visitor. They went up another flight of stairs before entering the kitchen. A century of ground subsidence had given the doors and windows a curious rhomboidal shape and the stained wallpaper bulged with accumulations of loose plaster. A small plastic-topped table was set with crockery of mixed patterns, and a large economy-size packet of Kellogg’s cornflakes was its centrepiece. On the wall behind the square china sink there was an old Rolling Stones poster. At the ancient, cast-iron gas stove a second man was frying six eggs in a bent frying pan. He seemed fully occupied with his task, tipping the pan in each and every direction and using a spoon to baste hot fat over the yolks.
‘Here’s your Mr Stein,’ said the bearded man.
The man at the stove put down the teaspoon and, still holding the tilted frying pan, offered his hand. Stuart shook it.
‘Charles Stein,’ said Stuart. ‘I was in London.’
‘Phoned his home and got your message using one of those whistle gadgets,’ explained Jimmy.
‘That’s right,’ said Stuart.
‘Jimmy is a communications engineer,’ explained Paul Bock, the man at the stove. ‘I’m just an amateur, but I’ve been using my little microcomputer to get into main frames by telephone for years.’ He had a soft German accent.
‘Are you political activists?’ Stuart asked.
‘COMPIR,’ said Jimmy. ‘Computer pirates. We’ve no political ideals. Our idea of having fun is accessing password files. We’re sort of a club …’
‘The bank where I work has got a really big computer,’ said Bock. ‘It took us months to crack the “bug fixes” and find our way inside.’
‘What are “bug fixes”?’
‘Modifications that the manufacturers keep adding to stop people like us,’ said Bock. ‘Do you want an egg? Soft or turned over?’
‘Soft.’
‘Jimmy eats them turned over. They taste like plastic.’
There was an open packet of cigarettes on the table. Jimmy leant across and nipped the end of one and tried to tease it out of the packet. When it did not budge he shook it more fiercely like a terrier with a rat. Finally it came free. ‘Help yourself,’ he said and pushed the packet towards Stuart.
‘No thanks,’ said Stuart. ‘It’s too early for me.’ He watched Jimmy light the new cigarette from the stained, misshapen old one.
‘Tell me everything you know about Operation Siegfried,’ said Bock. He turned round with the frying pan and tipped the eggs on to the plates, two at a time. He was a muscular boy with a short haircut and a carefully shaved face. Under a shabby silk dressing gown he was wearing a clean blue shirt and the trousers of a grey suit. He saw the puzzled expression on Stuart’s face. ‘I have to go to work,’ he explained. ‘Jimmy is lucky he doesn’t have to disguise himself in these absurd uniforms.’
Stuart became painfully aware of the ‘uniform’ that he himself was wearing. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Now tell us about Operation Siegfried.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘We can get rough, Mr Stein,’ said Paul Bock. ‘You might find that hard to believe, but we can get very rough.’
‘I believe you can get rough,’ said Stuart. ‘So why don’t you believe me when I say that I’ve never heard of Operation Siegfried?’
Jimmy took the bread knife and roughly sliced some bread. He tossed a slice to each of the other men. Stuart dipped a piece of it into the soft yolk of his egg and ate in silence.
‘If you’ve got something to tell me, then tell me,’ said Stuart.
Paul Bock cut his egg into rectangles and ate it section by section between his fingers. ‘I work in the bank – a big German bank – no matter its name at the moment. We got this information from the bank’s computer.’
‘Is that difficult?’ asked Stuart.
‘This computer was a beauty,’ said Jimmy, rubbing his hand over his half-grown beard. ‘Could be this is one of the most complex of its sort anywhere in Europe.’
‘But we cracked it,’ said Paul Bock. ‘Or Jimmy
did.’
‘Paul got the hardware keys,’ said Jimmy. ‘Until we could physically unlock the machinery, I couldn’t even begin. And he completed the first codes for the terminal keyboard. Then it got trickier. The bank have performance-measuring consultants who tune the computer; they notice the access per programme, and we didn’t want them to get suspicious. We had to trickle the stuff out bit by bit; spread it over a few weeks.’ He coughed and thumped his chest with his fist still holding the cigarette.
‘This material is ultra secret,’ said Bock. ‘There were many software keys, each one opening up more and more secret stuff.’
‘It’s like a series of doors,’ explained Jimmy. ‘You’ve got to unlock each and every one to get into the inner sanctum. And every door has a sort of burglar alarm that will close down the terminal and store a message saying that someone has attempted an unauthorized access.’
‘And you managed all that?’ said Stuart, not without a trace of genuine admiration.
‘Jimmy’s a wizard,’ said Paul Bock.
‘So what is Operation Siegfried?’ Stuart asked.
‘We are not quite sure,’ admitted Jimmy. He put his cigarette into the ashtray and began to eat.
‘There is a secret fund – a Trust, they call it – formed by some of the most powerful organizations of the Bundesrepublik,’ said Paul. ‘Steel companies, armaments, car-parts manufacturers, insurance companies, publishers and very big banks. We know that the senior trustee is a man named Böttger, who is president of a bank based in Hamburg. Like all the other men involved, he has never been associated with any post-war political party. That’s significant.’
‘In what way significant?’ asked Stuart.
‘If you were going to resurrect the Third Reich,’ said Paul Bock, ‘would it not be a good idea to tell your agents to avoid all political activity?’
‘The war was thirty or more years ago,’ protested Stuart. ‘You mean they’ve been asked to wait that long for Operation Siegfried?’ It all seemed highly unlikely.