Spy and the Thief (6 page)

“I know. That’s just what the Ambassador told me.”

“It’s the truth. You staying on much longer?”

“Probably not. But he wants some action. I’m going to bring in the girl.”

Fraze’s eyebrows went up. “That will really finish it.”

Rand shrugged. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

Her name was Ruth Young, and she had worked for the Americans nearly two years. Both her parents were British, and her background was good. She was slim and blonde and much better looking up close than she had seemed the previous day when Rand saw Ivor Kudat meet her. Across the desk from him she seemed full of innocence.

“Miss Young,” he began, “I’m sorry to trouble you like this, but we’re working with the Americans to clear up a little matter. You know a man named Ivor Kudat?”

“I … Yes.”

“Exactly what is your relationship with him?”

“We’re friends. He helped me find a place to live when I came here.”

Rand leaned back in his chair. “Miss Young, it happens that Ivor Kudat is an agent in the pay of the Russian government. You have been delivering to him certain weekly reports on the position of American ships in this area.”

The blood drained from her face.

“You’re in very serious trouble. Do you have anything to say?”

Her chin lifted in a sudden defiant gesture. “You have me, but at least Ivor’s out of your clutches. He flew to Hong Kong this afternoon.”

“We have men in Hong Kong too. He won’t get far.” He offered her a cigarette. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“No.”

“Tell me just one thing. Did Kudat’s plan work?”

“Of course it worked!” Her eyes sparkled as she said it. “I’ve waited so many years to make fools of you stupid British!”

“Thank you,” he said, almost sadly. “That was all I really wanted to know.”

He left her under guard and went back to the embassy to see Fraze. The afternoon streets were crowded but vaguely quiet, and over the city hung an air of vague suspense. Perhaps it was the weather—cloudy with a threat of rain. He wondered if the wet season would come early to Hoihong this year. He passed the familiar Oriental faces, the occasional Europeans looking so out of place, the peasants struggling to keep alive.

The Ambassador was not there, but Arthur Fraze was still in his little office. “How’d you make out, Rand?” he asked quietly.

“Pretty fair. We have the girl. Kudat’s in Hong Kong, but I have an alarm out for him.”

Fraze pulled open a drawer to take out his pipe tobacco. “It seems a shame to break up such a bungling operation.”

Rand perched again on the edge of the desk, playing with one of the gilded metal bookends. “But that’s the point. It wasn’t bungling. Kudat’s microdot messages were getting through to the Russians.”

“Three weeks late.”

Rand shook his head. “Two days, more likely. Or less. You see, our big mistake was that we didn’t know where the messages were really going. Kudat’s contact wasn’t really a man in Berne at all.”

“No? Then who was it?”

“You, Fraze,” Rand said. “The messages were meant for you.”

Fraze’s hand came out of the drawer fast, holding a small flat automatic. Rand swung the metal bookend with all his strength, and heard the crunch of Fraze’s wrist as it connected. The gun skidded onto the carpet.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Fraze sobbed, clutching his damaged wrist. “I was going to use it on myself.”

The Ambassador turned from a brightly colored wall map of the Hoihong territory and faced Rand across his desk. “I assume you have an explanation for me,” he said.

Rand nodded. “Believe me, sir, I was no more happy about it than you. Perhaps he’d just been our hero too long, like one of Conrad’s heroes.”

“How did you know he was working with the Reds?”

“Well, he was obviously unhappy to see me in the first place. It was quite clear that it had been your idea—not his—to notify London about the case. A couple of things struck me, such as the way Kudat immediately spotted me when I watched him meeting the girl, and the way he hopped over to Hong Kong when we started to close in. But none of that really proved anything. It was the whole gimmick—the postcards that took too long. When the girl admitted that their plan had been successful, she really told me a lot. Her admission told me the Russians weren’t being completely foolish with their money. The weekly payments to Kudat kept on because he was delivering the goods.”

“But Fraze is a member of British Intelligence. Why did he have to buy secrets from someone like Kudat?”

“Remember, they weren’t British secrets. The positions of American ships were as much a secret to Fraze as to the Russians. He couldn’t just call up the Americans and ask for them. But once he had those weekly microdot messages, he also had a foolproof way of verifying the information—by asking young Perkins to check it. The postcard went back in the mail, on its long journey by sea to Genoa, and then to Berne, but a copy of the information was passed to the Russians—at one of those embassy parties that everybody went to almost every week. If there was no party or reception scheduled, Fraze could still see a member of the Russian staff without causing undue suspicion.

“Once I knew the messages were getting through to the Russians in time to be useful, Fraze was the only possible link. He read the messages every week, and he could easily get them to the Russian Embassy—and from there to Moscow by diplomatic code or courier. Two days at the most, for the whole operation.”

“Why the microdots? Why didn’t Kudat just pass the information to Fraze? Or directly to the Russians, for that matter?”

“Two reasons. Regular weekly meetings between Kudat and Fraze were obviously out of the question, as were regular contacts with the Russian Embassy. Second, the microdots and the cards to Berne gave Fraze an opportunity of not only verifying the information with Perkins, but also of learning C.I.A. reaction and possible countermoves.”

The Ambassador stirred in his chair. “How did you first get on to him?”

Rand lit a cigarette and gazed out the window at the city. It was night now, and the lights were going on. Out toward the harbor some of the junks had lanterns glowing. “I suppose because he never told us how he first discovered the microdot messages. It’s not the sort of thing you stumble on by accident.”

“But why
didn’t
Kudat send the cards by air mail?”

“Two reasons again. First, they had to try to keep the C.I.A. convinced that the messages were reaching the Russians too late to do them any good. And second, from a practical standpoint, there’d be a danger of a postcard slipping through on the daily air-mail flights without being first turned over to Fraze. Going by ship, Fraze could always ask his man at the post office to double-check if he didn’t have the card in his hands by Tuesday morning.”

The Ambassador looked somber. “How can a man go so wrong?”

Rand didn’t answer immediately. He was still staring out the window, thinking that this was probably his last night in Hoihong. When he did reply he said, “Anyway, Arthur Fraze will be going back to England at last.”

T
HE AMAZON JUNGLE WAS
hot and steamy that day. Though it was autumn in London, the weather here, just below the equator, rarely varied from the moist, languid heat that kept wise travelers far away. It was a day like any other for the scientists who worked on the project, with the urgency of Pearl Harbor still a month in the future.

In the very center of the compound was a large cement-lined pool with a plank across it. Two white men, stripped to the waist because of the excessive heat, were working on the plank, throwing food to their charges in the water below. A third man, also white, stood at the edge of the pool, one foot on its concrete rim, speaking to the others in English. From time to time one of the men on the plank would chuckle.

After a while the third man glanced at his watch. He knew that time was running short. He made some casual comment to the two on the plank and pointed to the sky—a tiny patch of blue in the overhanging trees. When they looked upward, the man on the rim of the pool kicked out with his foot, catching the edge of the plank where it rested against the cement.

The two men on the plank screamed as they fell, and, when they hit the water there was a sort of flash, and then another. It was as if someone were taking photographs with a flash bulb beneath the water. The man at the edge watched for some time, but there was no human movement in the pool. Nothing but the vague, shadowed motions of the creatures who lived there …

Colonel Nelson leaned back in his chair and sighed. “You have to realize, Rand, that the whole thing happened nearly twenty-five years ago.”

Rand lit one of his-American cigarettes. “Suppose you tell it to me from the beginning, Colonel.”

“The beginning? That would be way back somewhere, when Hitler put half the scientists in Germany to work on secret weapons. Do you know they had nearly a hundred different projects going?—everything from rocket planes to infra-red guns. But the one that concerned us the most—still concerns us, for that matter—was the Nazi experimentation with nerve gas. They had a factory at Dyhernfurth, near the Polish border, where they perfected a nerve gas called G.B. Unfortunately, the plant and the supply of gas both fell into the hands of the Russians after the war.”

“Do you really think they’d use it?”

Colonel Nelson thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know. Perhaps not, but the Americans have been quite concerned about G.B. ever since our agents discovered the Nazi research back in 1939. Two years later, just a few months before Pearl Harbor, the curator of the New York Aquarium and a doctor on assignment for the U.S. Army Chemical Corps started a unique project in the heart of the Amazon jungle. There they set up a research center and hired natives to capture electric eels from the shallow jungle tributaries of the Amazon.”

“Electric eels?” Rand stared in disbelief. “What in hell do they have to do with nerve gas?”

“The exact nature of the research is still highly classified, but it had to do with finding an antidote for G.B. Actually, a sort of antidote was developed—an automatic device for injecting atropine into the victim’s bloodstream—but it seems to be only partially effective. The research is still going on.”

“With electric eels?”

“With electric eels. They were secretly transported after the war from the jungle to the U.S. Army chemical laboratories at Edgewood, Maryland. Only recently we’ve set up a research center in Scotland as well, and that’s where you come in.”

“I do?” Rand’s business was communications, not ichthyology, but he was willing to listen. “How?”

“Two men—the curator and the doctor—died in the jungle back in ’41. Somehow they fell into the eel pool and were electrocuted. It was only one of a series of sabotage attempts aimed at the entire project, and it was the main reason for moving the eels to a research center in the United States. Someone doesn’t just happen to sneak into a research compound in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Obviously, one of the workers was a Nazi spy, and we believe he killed those two men. Later, in the American center, another worker, an anti-Nazi German, was also killed by the eels. It was probably another murder.”

“I always thought it was a myth about electric eels having enough of a charge to kill someone.”

“It’s no myth. I’ve studied up on it for this assignment. The
electrophorus electricus
grows to a length of eight or ten feet, and weighs perhaps as much as ninety pounds. It can discharge anywhere from 400 to 650 volts at one ampere—enough to kill a man instantly on contact.”

“A tidy murder weapon, if that’s what it was in those three cases. What about the spy? What happened to him?”

“His name at the time was Schultz. He was posing as a German Jew who’d fled Hitler and been living with the Jewish community in the Dominican Republic. He claimed some knowledge of fish in general and eels in particular, which was why he was hired as an assistant on the project.”

“No security clearance?”

“The Nazi government would not have been too cooperative regarding his background. In those days a good many men had to be employed pretty much on faith. In any event, he was at the Amazon camp at the time of the first two killings, and later in Maryland when the third man was killed. It’s possible the third man was someone he’d known in Germany—someone who recognized him.”

“I gather this Schultz has dropped from sight.”

“He left the American project some ten or twelve years ago, and hasn’t been seen or heard of since. I gather the Americans had finally gotten some evidence on him and were about to close the trap. Anyway, the whole eel business was eventually abandoned until just recently when the British government opened a research station in the Scottish highlands, with American cooperation. Apparently there’s evidence that the Russians are active with nerve gas research again.”

“Where does Schultz come in now?”

“We hope he doesn’t. He’d be about 60 years old today, and after fifteen years with those eels, pretty much of an expert on the subject. But he might be working for the Russians now.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Simply because he stayed on with the American project for so many years after the war ended. Either somebody new had started paying him, or he just decided he liked eels. We have to assume the Russians might have acquired his dossier along with that nerve gas factory and taken over control of him.”

“You still haven’t told me why this is an assignment for Double-C.” Rand was growing more restless, anxious to be back in the far simpler world of codes and blackboards and frequency tables that was the Department of Concealed Communications.

“I’ll get to the point,” Colonel Nelson said with a smile. “They’ve just taken on a man who might be Schultz. He’s German, gives his age as 62, looks a little like Schultz’s old photographs. Most important, he seems to know everything there is to know about electric eels.”

“Can’t they check his fingerprints?”

“Oddly enough, no. You see, Schultz was clever. When he was helping on the Amazon project, he somehow managed to get someone else’s prints on his record card. When the F.B.I. became suspicious and wanted to check further on the project workers some ten years back, they discovered they had two sets of prints belonging to a Columbia professor and no set belonging to Schultz. That’s when he vanished.”