The Unlikely Spy(20)
Vogel pushed the files aside and drafted two messages. He added the ciphers to be used, the frequencies at which the messages were to be sent, and the transmission schedule. Then he looked up and called for Ulbricht.
"Yes, Herr Captain," Ulbricht said. He entered the office, limping heavily on his wooden leg. Vogel looked at Ulbricht an instant before speaking, wondering if the man was up to the demands of an operation like the one he was about to launch. Ulbricht was twenty-seven years old but looked at least forty. His close-cropped black hair was flecked with gray. Pain lines ran like tributaries from the edge of his one good eye. The second eye had been lost in the explosion; the empty socket was hidden behind a neat black patch. A Knight's Cross dangled at his throat. The top button of Ulbricht's tunic was undone because the exertion of the most simple movements caused him to become overheated and perspire. In all the time they had worked together, Vogel had never once heard Ulbricht complain.
"I want you to go to Hamburg tomorrow night." He handed Ulbricht the transcripts of the messages. "Stand over the radio operator while he sends these. Make certain there are no mistakes. See that the acknowledgments from the agents are in order. If there is anything out of the ordinary I want to know about it. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
"Before you go, I want you to track down Horst Neumann."
"He's in Berlin, I believe."
"Where is he staying?"
"I'm not certain," Ulbricht said, "but I believe there is a woman involved."
"There usually is." Vogel walked to the window and looked out. "Contact the staff at the Dahlem farm. Tell them to expect us tonight. I want you to join us there when you return from Hamburg tomorrow. Tell them we'll be there for a week. We have a lot to go over. And tell them to rig the jump platform in the barn. It's been a long time since Neumann jumped from an airplane. He'll need practice."
"Yes, sir."
Ulbricht went out, leaving Vogel alone in the office. He stood at the window for a long time, thinking it through once more. The most closely guarded secret of the war and he planned to steal it with a woman, a cripple, a grounded paratrooper, and a British traitor. Quite a team you've assembled, Kurt, old man. If his own ass wasn't on the line he might have found the whole thing funny. Instead, he just stood there like a statue, watching snow drifting silently over Berlin, worrying himself to death.
6
LONDON
The Imperial Security Intelligence Service--better known by its military intelligence designation, MI5--was headquartered in a small cramped office building at 58 St. James's Street. MI5's task was counterintelligence. In the lexicon of espionage, counterintelligence means protecting one's secrets--and, when necessary, catching spies. For much of its forty-year existence, the Security Service toiled in the shadow of its more glamorous cousin, the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6. Such internecine rivalries did not matter much to Professor Alfred Vicary. It was MI5 that Vicary joined in May 1940 and where, on a dismal rainy evening five days after Hitler's secret conference at Rastenburg, he could still be found.
The top floor was the preserve of the senior staff: the director-general's office, his secretariat, the assistant directors and division heads. Brigadier Sir Basil Boothby's office was there, hidden behind a pair of intimidating oaken doors. A pair of lights glared down from over the doors, a red one signifying the room was too insecure to permit access, a green one meaning enter at your own risk. Vicary, as always, hesitated before pressing the buzzer.
Vicary had received his summons at nine o'clock, while he was locking away his things in his gunmetal gray cabinet and tidying up his hutch, as he referred to his small office. When MI5 exploded in size at the beginning of the war, space became a precious commodity. Vicary was relegated to a windowless cell the size of a broom closet, with worn bureaucratic green carpet and a sturdy little headmasterly desk. Vicary's partner, a former Metropolitan Police officer named Harry Dalton, sat with the other junior men in a common area at the center of the floor. The place had a newsroom rowdiness about it, and Vicary ventured there only when absolutely necessary.
Officially, Vicary held the rank of a major in the Intelligence Corps, though military rank meant next to nothing inside the department. Much of the staff routinely referred to him as Professor, and he had worn his uniform just twice. Vicary's manner of dress had changed, though. He had forsaken the tweedy clothes of the university, dressing instead in sharp gray suits he purchased before clothing, like almost everything else, was rationed. Occasionally, he bumped into an acquaintance or old colleague from University College. Despite incessant warnings by the government about the dangers of loose talk, they inevitably asked Vicary exactly what he was doing. He usually smiled wearily, shrugged his shoulders, and gave the prescribed response: he was working in a very dull department of the War Office.
Sometimes it was dull, but not often. Churchill had been right--it had been time for him to rejoin the living. His arrival at MI5 in May 1940 had been his rebirth. He thrived on the atmosphere of wartime intelligence: the long hours, the crises, the dismal tea in the canteen. He had even taken up cigarette smoking again, which he had sworn off his last year at Cambridge. He loved being an actor in the theater of the real. He seriously doubted whether he could be satisfied again in the sanctuary of academia.