The Reunion (12 page)

21

Dr. David Johnson lived on Grove Avenue in Richmond's Fan District, well within walking distance of the city's trendy shopping areas. Everything he needed could be found there, convincing him sometime in the early years of the Nixon administration that he no longer needed a car. His red brick, three-story, Victorian row house had a slate roof, an ornate stained-glass transom, and an elaborate front porch. The front yard was minute but meticulously kept.

Dunlevy, carrying Kenny, climbed the porch steps. He wondered what had possessed him to impulsively invite Carolyn and her child along. There were long periods of uncomfortable silence during the drive to Richmond. She was a smart, beautiful woman, yet somehow the agent felt uneasy about allowing her to get too close too soon.

Dunlevy passed Kenny to his mother and then rapped on the solid oak door.

“Agent Dunlevy?” asked the voice behind the door.

He knew he was being examined through the peephole. He centered up so the old man could get a good look. “Yes, it's Martin Dunlevy and Carolyn Baker,” he replied. He heard the deadbolt slide and saw the glass handle turn.

“I recognize you from television. I saw you on the news last week. Come in, come in.” The old man had a full head of white hair, but his complexion seemed jaundiced. Carolyn also noticed the yellow in his eyes. He walked gingerly, as if each step pained him. It was evident Johnson was not a well man.

“I'm sorry, but I have to be awfully careful these days,” he stated flatly. “This neighborhood isn't what it used to be.”

“No neighborhood is, I'm afraid,” Dunlevy said as he reached out to shake the professor's hand. “Thank you for the invitation. Quite honestly, I never expected you to go to all this trouble. This is Carolyn Baker and her son Kenny. She's the young lady I told you about. She found the messages.”

He looked her up and down through very thick bifocals. “Welcome, my dear. Could you excuse me a moment?”

Dunlevy and Carolyn exchanged a curious glance. “Certainly,” the agent said with a polite nod.

The aging professor returned a few moments later with a bright red Fisher-Price fire engine in his hands. He stooped as far as his aging body would allow. “This is for you, young man. This was my great-grandson's. He's too big for it now. You play with that, okay?”

Kenny's face lit up as he snatched it from the old man's hands.

Johnson laughed out loud. “I love children this age.”

Carolyn took the arm of this kind gentlemen she now saw as a kindred spirit. “That was sweet of you. You just bought us a good ninety minutes.”

Their laughter washed away any concern or regret Dunlevy had felt about bringing Carolyn and Kenny here. Turning to the professor he said, “I can't tell you how grateful we are that you were able to do this for us. You're one of only a handful of people with this kind of skill.”

“Probably the only one.” The small, frail professor forced a smile. “There isn't much call to have Enigma messages decoded anymore.”

Johnson directed his guests into the formal parlor he had converted into an office. Two computer monitors, both displaying the flying toasters screen saver, sat side by side on a cluttered desk. Books were everywhere. The professor lifted stacks of legal pads and manila folders from two wooden chairs and placed them on the floor so his guests could sit.

Johnson slowly eased into his desk, his fingers instinctively reaching for the keyboard.

“This Internet business is marvelous. The key to solving your little mystery was getting the code keys from the Navy. If I had to find the actual hard copies, it would have taken months of digging through stacks of documents in a basement somewhere in Bethesda.”

The two young people marveled at Johnson's knowledge of the information super highway, unaware that the old man had been a hacker long before the word had been invented. Whereas most seniors have nothing to do with computers, Johnson embraced the technology.

His analytical thinking skills made him a chess champion by the age of seventeen. At nineteen, his ability in mathematics had the professors at Oxford using the term “genius,” and the War Department agreed. When war broke out in Europe, Johnson was called to service, along with an odd collection of young mathematicians and linguists at Britain's code-breaking headquarters, Bletchley Park.

Looking back, Johnson always privately held that it was his modest musical talent that pushed him to the top of the intelligence community. His attempt to master the piano somehow unlocked a window in his subconscious, bringing together the left and right sides of his immeasurable brain. The end result was an uncanny ability to identify rhythms in numbers and letters that no one else could see. That aptitude was still intact at the age of eighty-five, providing him with a personal road map to the information highway that few would ever see.

“Scoot those chairs closer to me,” he instructed. “I want you two to get a good look at this.”

Johnson opened Microsoft Office and pulled up a page of grids. Letters filled the five center boxes on the screen from top to bottom. He scrolled down to the bottom of the page.

“Each of the messages has been transcribed onto a separate grid page. Five messages, five pages.”

Dunlevy let out a mild sigh. “I'm with you so far,” he said, sensing the old man planned to walk him through the entire process. It was evident that Johnson didn't have company often and planned to take full advantage of this opportunity.

The old man pressed on enthusiastically. “I created a searchable folder of Enigma code keys. The key changed every three days. I used Dr. Hudson's book as a reference to log all the dates in question. I found the keys from the day your submarine left port in Brest until the day it sank.”

“That must have been pretty labor-intensive,” Dunlevy noted.

“Not really. U-352 was only at sea for two months. You've got ten keys a month, times two months, so that's twenty keys. That was the easy part.”

“For you maybe,” mumbled Carolyn.

A smile came to Johnson's face. He basked in the attention. “I hope you don't mind, but I told the archivist at the Naval Museum in Annapolis you'd be sending along a bottle of scotch.”

Dunlevy shot him a quizzical look. “And why will I be doing that?”

“Because Andy is probably one of about a dozen individuals in the world with a complete set of all eight Enigma wheels. The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry has an entire Enigma machine and two sets of wheels, but the curator wouldn't let me borrow them until September. And I didn't think you'd want to wait that long,” he added with a smile.

Dunlevy scribbled on his pad. “One bottle of scotch for somebody named Andy,” he said aloud. “I'll get the address from you later.”

“Once I received the wheels, I had to create a virtual Enigma machine—a second computer program, really.”

“And you did that by yourself?” Carolyn asked, astonished.

Johnson hesitated. “Well, not quite. I had to call in a marker from the dean of engineering at VCU. It was a win-win. I got the program I needed, and a bright but underachieving graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University got some much needed extra credit.”

The agent laughed. “One of the perks of academia, involuntary servitude.”

Dr. Johnson reduced the page identified as message one and pulled up the Enigma program. “Once the virtual Enigma program and the key folder had been created, my computer did the rest,” he said, affectionately patting his CPU. “The first message was deciphered within six hours. Within twenty-four hours I had all five.”

“So, what do we have?” Carolyn asked excitedly.

“It's pretty interesting, but nothing that would explain that nasty business down there in North Carolina. One message was incoming, four were outgoing,” he said, moving his mouse to click the print icon. The laser-jet started to hum and seconds later spat out copies of all five messages.

Johnson handed them each a printout of the messages while he pulled up the text on his computer. He double-clicked on message number one and began reading aloud.

“April 11, 1942, U-352 resupplied, no contact, full complement. Down one, proceeding south.”

Dunlevy looked up from his copy. “Sounds like a code within a code. Does that mean anything to you?”

He nodded. “A U-boat could spend only about forty-two days at sea. The Germans had supply submarines that did nothing but transport food and fuel. ‘Milch-cows' is what they called them. It would appear U-352 had been resupplied at sea. Full complement means all their torpedoes were intact. No contact is self-explanatory, and down one means they've lost a crewman. I don't know what happened to him. There's no explanation here.”

Johnson quickly scrolled up to the next message. “Message two is just a weather report. Mild seas, the location of a convoy contact. Message three is the incoming, and pretty intriguing.”

Carolyn perked up. She flipped through his stack to find the third page. Still, nothing in the text caught her eye.

“What's special about this one?” she asked.

Johnson didn't read from the jumble on his screen. He waded through all the abbreviations and military jargon to explain.

“U-352 has been ordered to make a pick-up of some kind. They're backtracking for a rendezvous at two-thirty in the morning at this specific latitude and longitude,” he said, pointing to the numbers on the screen. “Their instructions are to look for signals on shore. They've been given a three-hour contact window. That length of time poses significant risk. And immediately following the pick-up, they were to make contact with another submarine, U-239.”

Dunlevy looked stunned. “They actually came within American waters and picked someone up from shore?” he asked incredulously.

Johnson smirked, never taking his eyes from the screen. “Not a who, but
what
they picked up. The next two outgoing messages from the sub are very detailed specs of an American submarine. They also mention a heavy wooden box.”

Dunlevy slammed his fist on the desk, causing the old man to flinch. “I'm sorry, but this doesn't make any sense. There was no mention of any spy business in Dr. Hudson's book. And he did extensive interviews with the surviving crewmen. Before he was killed, Hudson made a point to tell me that U-352's tour of duty was quite uneventful. Maybe these messages originated from another U-boat,” he scoffed.

The muscles in Johnson's face wrenched. He snatched the younger man's hard copies from his hands and quickly flipped through the pages. “No, clearly not. There are two specific references to U-352. The code keys match up, there were some typos in the messages, and translational differences from German to English, but the key points of these messages are accurate.”

Dunlevy looked up from the pages. “What type of translation differences?”

The professor scanned the computer screen. “Here, page four. The exact German translation would have been acquired U-239, which I took to mean contacted U-239.” He readjusted his bifocals and moved closer. “Actually, there was a typo, he put a ‘P' in front of the ‘U' in U-239, but there were at least five places where the Enigma operator struck an odd key. That's to be expected.”

“Why?” asked Dunlevy.

“They're at sea on a moving ship, typing, and there's no backspace key. If you hit a wrong key, you hit a wrong key. Enigma messages were always full of typos.”

“And you're sure they transmitted submarine specs?”

Carolyn shot Dunlevy a dirty look. The old man was trying to be accommodating, but now was clearly flustered. He wasn't used to being questioned. He turned his attention back to the monitor, his nose now almost touching the glass as he read aloud. “Maximum breadth, three hundred eleven, eight inches times twenty-seven feet, three inches. Displacement, two thousand tons surfaced, two thousand four hundred fourteen tons submerged. The specs include cruising speed, torpedo tubes, and patrol endurance.” He winced. “Son, you don't have to graduate Annapolis to know that those are submarine specs.”

Carolyn gave the agent a grin of satisfaction. “Well, I'm certainly no expert, but that sounds like a submarine all right.”

Johnson paused a moment in thought. “You know, it's very possible U-352 had a rendezvous with someone on shore and the men your author friend interviewed had no knowledge of it.”

Dunlevy shook his head. “Doesn't sound plausible.”

Johnson glared at him. “Why, did he interview the captain?”

“No, he'd been dead for thirty years.”

“Then it's possible, even likely.”

Dunlevy didn't buy it. “Why would you say that?” he asked.

“Young man, I've read Hudson's book,” he said in an agitated voice. “Have you ever actually been inside a vintage class VII U-boat?”

“Actually, no.”

“Well, I have. The control room is just below the conning tower. If someone comes or goes in the middle of the night, only those on duty in the control room would have to know about it. The captain and his first officer are dead, according to Hudson's book. The only surviving crewmen, the people he interviewed, were teenagers at the time, the grunts of the mission. Correct?”

Dunlevy gave it some thought. “True.”

Johnson gave him a wry little grin. “Then trust me; it's possible. Too bad there aren't more surviving crewmen you could ask.”

Carolyn and Dunlevy shared a knowing glance before he redirected his eyes to the screen. “I guess the next step will be to research the specs and determine which type of submarine plans they were stealing.”

“I've already done that. I took the liberty of faxing the specs to Andy. I've known Andy for more than forty years. He has access to all kinds of historic, yet otherwise useless, information at the Naval Museum, information that you need. He's not going to break any confidences.”