The Filberg Consortium Read online

  More than twice Hollinger’s age, Colonel William Donovan was an accomplished, resourceful individual. Some colleagues thought him an old fud, somebody who bore a close resemblance to Hollywood comedian W C Fields. Hollinger paid such unfair babble little mind. Few fathomed the dedication of the 58-year-old that some knew as Mr. Bill and others as Wild Bill.

  Born to Irish parents in Buffalo, New York, Donovan was brought up near the tough Lake Erie waterfront where he had to fight to survive. Determined to make something of himself, he enrolled at New York’s Columbia University. On campus, he received his law degree and his Wild Bill nickname playing football. He was also a World War I battle hero, receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor. He later jumped in and out of different professions. He was once a successful mob-busting Buffalo District Attorney, then a millionaire Wall Street lawyer with connections, and a Republican candidate for Governor of New York.

  During the turbulent years before Adolf Hitler attacked Poland, Donovan had been the eyes and ears for his old friend, Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Irishman had conferred with various heads of state and prominent people, obtaining intelligence information that would someday be useful to his country. He took two trips to England in 1940, which gave him the ammunition he needed to model an American intelligence agency after the British. He studied MI-5, the experts in counterespionage on English territory, and the MI-6 Secret Intelligence Service, who specialized in foreign espionage. He discovered that the two departments’ paths crossed on occasion. That was a good sign. That meant cooperation. With Roosevelt’s blessings, Wild Bill began structuring a top-secret federal organization. He recruited individuals. He farmed them out to observe and report. By mid-1941, he was hoping that the work was not in vain. Wesley Hollinger was a product of that system.

  Only two weeks earlier the President appointed Colonel Donovan to head a new federal intelligence agency designated “The Office of the Coordinator of Information.” The American spy agency — the COI for short — was officially up and running. Considering the shaky world position, it could not have come any sooner for a handful of Americans and Brits in-the-know.

  Closing the newspaper, Donovan threw Hollinger a sideways glance. “Somebody is going to get their war soon.”

  “Why do you say that, sir?”

  “Because some high-ups want it, that’s why. And they always get what they want.”

  “You mean the President and his staff?”

  Donovan shook his head. “Nope. Higher than that.”

  Hollinger felt uneasy. “Who’s higher than the President?”

  “Wesley, you’re still young yet. And idealistic. Certain people, that’s who,” the colonel replied, thinking of the telephone conversation he had that morning with Aris, his former secretary at his Wall Street lawyer’s office. “Roosevelt supporters. People who stand to make a lot of money if we go to war.”

  “Thank God for Hitler,” Hollinger mumbled.

  “What was that?”

  “Nothing, sir.” The light turned red, and Hollinger nearly slammed into the car in front of him. “Oh, shit!”

  “Damn it! Watch it, Wesley!”

  Hollinger shot a glance at his boss. “Sir, are you telling me that–”

  “I’ve said enough. Take a right at the next block.”

  “Yes, sir.

  Hollinger slowed the Packard down at the light ahead, and turned at the street sign marked Pennsylvania Avenue. He looked ahead. In the distance, he saw it. The White House. He couldn’t believe he was doing this. If only that cheeky redhead were here to see him.

  * * * *

  MI-6 Headquarters, London

  The secretary finger-tapped on the office door, and peered into the room. “Colonel, the Prime Minister is on the line.”

  “Thank you, Margaret.” MI-6 officer Colonel Raymond Lampert quickly lit his pipe and lifted the C-phone receiver. It was not in his best interests to keep Winston Churchill waiting on his Whitehall 4433 private line. “Yes, sir.”

  “Let’s go on scramble.”

  “Very good, sir.” Lampert punched a white button on the side of the C-phone attached to a two-by-two-foot square box by his feet. “Can you hear me, sir?”

  “Yes, I can. You left word for me?” The Prime Minister’s familiar lisp was clipped, anxious for a reply.

  “Yes, sir. I did. A cable was forwarded to me just a few minutes ago from the Kid. He made it safe and sound last evening, and will be briefing the President at ten-thirty, Washington time. Any additional cables will be forwarded to your office.”

  “Jolly good.”

  “There’s a good lot resting on our errand boy. What do you think he’ll say, sir?”

  “What we told him to say, I should expect. He’s there for one purpose. Ours.”

  “As long as the Big Fish in Washington buys it.”

  “If he doesn’t bite, colonel, we’re done for.”

  “Yes. But can the Kid do it how we want him to do it?”

  “Second thoughts, colonel?”

  “Perhaps.” Taking a ballpoint pen, Lampert doodled on his foolscap pad.

  “Remember our goal. Stop Hitler. The end justifies the means, colonel.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’ll let the bloke think he’s a hero. He seems gullible enough.”

  “In any event, isn’t that what he rather is, sir. A hero?”

  “Yes, I suppose he is, now that you mention it.”

  Lampert hesitated. “Wesley Hollinger. Whoever would have believed it a few months ago? May the angels in heaven help us. Do you know what he did, sir, before he left?”

  “Up to more mischief, was he?”

  “He put NO SMOKING signs in his new office.”

  “It is his office.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Never mind. Did you receive the copy of the report I sent to the President?”

  “Yes, sir. About an hour ago.”

  “I have an update. We’ve made the arrangements for the Atlantic meeting. It’s on.”

  “Already? Good show, sir,” Lampert said, mustering as much enthusiasm as he could.

  “Anything else, colonel, while I have you on the line? How’s Operation Decoy coming along?”

  “Not a word, as yet.”

  “Let me know the minute you hear from your Portugal agent.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “What about Camp Z?”

  “I’ll be out the door in minutes, sir.”

  “Fine. Get it over with now.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Lampert’s secretary knocked at the door.

  “Just a minute, sir,” Lampert said. “Yes, Margaret?”

  “Colonel, a sealed envelope has just arrived from the code room.” She showed the package to him.

  Lampert waved her over. “Sir,” he said into the C-phone, “I think we just got our answer from Portugal.”

  TWO

  Firth of Forth, Scotland

  Two husky men struggled with the long, heavy, wooden crate. Sweating, they hauled it from the motorcar, across the creaky dock, to the edge of the water line and aboard the small boat. Then they ordered the whiskered fisherman on a north by northeast course.

  The Firth of Forth was a windy waterway off the western slant of the North Sea, filled by hard-working fishermen during the less turbulent hours — in the morning, when the water was the calmest. Now, mid-afternoon, the waves were choppy. It was a rough ride. Three miles from shore, one of the men gripped the starboard rail and vomited over the side.

  “Are you going to make it?” the other man asked.

  “Yeah, I will. Why do we have to go so damn far out?”

  “Still too shallow here. We need to go another mile or more.”

  “Tell that to my stomach. Who’s going to look out here, anyway?”

  “Orders. Chin up.”

  “I’ll try.”

  The fisherman steered into the brisk northerly wind, and a few
minutes later killed the throttle. The two passengers bent over the crate and picked it up. With grunts, they heaved it into the cold, unforgiving water. The crate bubbled and sank instantly, lapping a series of waves against the hull.

  “So long, Kraut,” the sick man said.

  * * * *

  Bletchley Park, England

  Langford removed her reading glasses and sniffed. She had picked up a summer cold from somewhere, and was a little under the weather.

  She sat on her desk, sipping her tea. She was back. She had slipped into the old routine at the Secret Service cipher school, a young face under twenty-five stuck in with the “elite old farts,” as Hollinger had often referred to them. They were mostly innocent old men, a decade older than her. And married. Murphy. Green. Boley. Scott. Jansen. Ellis. She told herself that she didn’t mind these last three weeks too much. The twelve-hour shifts, six days a week. The secrecy between huts. The stale food. She was a desk soldier at her post. A dignified clerk. For King and Country. And Lampert and the Prime Minister too.

  Then she set her tea down and thought for a moment, laughing at her situation. She forgot how much she disliked the place the first time around. Now she was here only temporarily, waiting on her boss — Hollinger — to return to Great Britain in a few more days. Not a bad job, this, she tried to tell herself. It was different this time. Like a sabbatical. Different messages. Different hut. Different people. And fascinating. Like a game. It was another part of the radio war that saw her organization processing over eight million enemy words every month. Although tedious, she took pleasure in heading off the Nazi military and High Command dispatches. Not many women in Britain had a wartime job as interesting — at least on the surface — as hers. She didn’t have to teach bratty kids, or toil on an assembly line. She didn’t have to drive an ambulance and pull mutilated bodies out of rubble, as her girlfriend had done during the dreadful London Blitz the past winter. Since choosing her profession, Langford hardly looked back.

  Roberta Langford flipped her shoes off and lit a Player’s cigarette. With her reading glasses in place, she leafed through the deciphered Enigma intercepts that had come through fairly steady from the Russian Front. Eighty-four for her eyes today. So far. Enigma II had six of low priority. Stacked on her desk were the messages from the girls in the nearby Decoding Room hut. Next, the Ultra experts — the distributors of the traffic, of which she was one — would take over and separate the correspondence for the Army, the Navy, and the other branches of the service. Alerting the Soviets and passing the German military codes on to them was forbidden. The Russians couldn’t be trusted to keep the source secret. They couldn’t do anything anyway. They were getting severely whipped by superior German forces and their new-fangled machinery. Roberta Langford would follow the directives. Her job was to chaperone only. Screen and catalogue for the departments. Let Lampert know of anything in the high-priority class. He’d be getting some dispatches today, without question.

  In the five weeks since their synchronized Operation Barbarossa ground and air attack, the German Wehrmacht forces had slashed deep into the Soviet Union. The Enigma orders in the deciphered messages spoke of lightning movements, major and minor sieges, and glorious victories. Today, in the north country, the German Sixteenth Army had already reached the south side of Lake Ilmen. Langford shot a glance over her shoulder to a map of Russia she kept on the wall. She nodded. Lake Ilmen was only 100 miles from Leningrad, a prime objective for the Germans. To be sure, the Sixteenth Army would push on tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. At the rate they were advancing, they would be knocking at Leningrad’s doors in a week.

  What made Langford’s work more interesting this time around was that the German Enigma machines being utilized on the Russian Front differed from the model preferred in the occupied countries of Denmark and France, and on the Atlantic U-boats. The cryptographers at Bletchley always had to keep in mind that the Germans had many variations of their high-grade cipher traffic. Every area encountered a new set of rules. Some meteorological reports — six — had come through today, using single letters for various conditions. Lucky for Bletchley, they had the codebooks for reference. Stolen, of course. Simple enough codes, once broken. The Germans changed letters weekly. This week ... K for cloud ... L for clear...

  She heard two people in the hall.

  “I’m looking for Roberta Langford,” a male voice asked.

  A female voice answered, “And you are?”

  “Spencer Winslow.”

  “Yes, go on in.”

  “Thank you.”

  Langford looked over her glasses through brown, deer-like eyes to see the freckled face and the thick round glasses of Spencer Winslow from the Enigma II Hut Nine. He had telephoned a few minutes before, keeping in mind that inter-office contact was forbidden, except by phone or memo first.

  “Ah, there you are. Caught you before the shift change, my dear.”

  She puffed on her cigarette. Blue tobacco smoke enclosed her like a fog. “Hello, Spencer. What brings you here this hour of the day?” She sniffed.

  “How’s the cold?”

  “Better, thank you.”

  “Got a cable for you. From Washington. Your Yank boss man, I should think,” he said, looking about.

  “You don’t say.”

  “They delivered it to the wrong hut.” He slapped the sealed envelope in his hand, shaking his head. “Hut Nine, his old stomping grounds.”

  “That’s simply terrible. What a way to run a war. With this kind of incompetence, we’ll lose for sure.”

  “I don’t know what you see in that fellow.”

  “I don’t see anything,” she told him.

  “Don’t pull my leg. He came, he saw, he conquered.”

  “We’ve never even so much as gone out.” She held out her pearl-smooth hand. “Now I’ll take that, if you don’t mind.”

  “So, there’s other fish in the sea?”

  She laughed low and husky. “Right you are.”

  They smiled at each other.

  He left and she opened the cable.

  HEY REDHEAD. MEETING POTUS FOR COFFEE. WISH YOU WERE HERE. SAY HELLO TO THE JUDGE. TOODELOO. THE KID.

  Langford smiled at Hollinger’s silly humour. What a tease.

  The fast-talking American had a nickname for everybody. He felt comfortable now in his surroundings, this exclusive club. She was Redhead. Churchill was the Big Guy. Lampert was the Judge or Your Honora. Then again, Langford knew, Churchill was no better, for he thrived on his codenames. Enigma II transmissions were recently christened the Falcon File. It made sense. Falcon was the Deputy Fuehrer’s codename.

  And it didn’t end there. The Prime Minister favoured Former Naval Person for himself when communicating with Roosevelt. He was also the one who came up with Operation Urge, Hollinger’s “Mission of Persuasion” to Washington. Not to be left out, Roosevelt used POTUS — President of the United States — whenever he cabled Churchill over the London-Washington Hotline. Nicknames and codenames were getting to be a habit in this line of work.

  She wondered how well Hollinger was performing on his trip to the White House. What would they do when he returned? She still couldn’t quite see herself with Hollinger, the bloke with the ego, although she was leaving the back door open all the same. She tried to tell herself she was not in love with him. Not really. Not the way she had been with Arthur. She was fond of Hollinger.

  Love? Good Lord, no! At least she didn’t think so. Not with the man who hardly ever took things seriously. Neither was she steadfastly in love with her new friend, Alex Nevin, the RAF fighter pilot from Liverpool. Suitors everywhere. So many to pick from. But she was in no hurry. Spencer Winslow had always enjoyed her company. He was single. One of the few at Bletchley. He knew her status since Arthur had dropped her, and he had tried to move in on her a couple of times. Although she always backed off, he was still trying. But he wasn’t her type. Too dreary. At least with Hollinger there was never a dull mo
ment. He was a cocky young man, but rather nice at times, when he wanted to be. Sometimes he was even honestly sincere. He definitely had a good side to him. She took a long pull of her cigarette and wondered what Lampert thought of the gutsy analyst now. The Kid was briefing the President on the status of England. Put a mark on the wall.

  She sniffed and wiped her nose with a tissue. Damn this cold!

  * * * *

  Farnborough, England

  Lampert steered his mud-covered Austin to the gate at Mytchett Place. It was another warm day in what was turning out to be one of the hottest summers on record. This was Camp Z. For two months, the sinister, eighteenth century Victorian mansion an hour’s drive out of London had housed Great Britain’s most notorious Nazi prisoner-of-war.

  The German was now referred to as Prisoner Z. Most of the world knew him to be Nazi Germany’s Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess. Only a handful would even guess he was an impostor. Lampert checked in with the armed guard and drove ahead to the gravel parking space alongside the driveway. Inside the double-perimeter barbwire barricades were machine-gun posts, slit-trenches dug into the lawns, floodlights for night use, as well as colourful, unkempt gardens full of rhododendrons. Lampert could see the German prisoner walking the gardens this late afternoon, very slowly, under close surveillance. Three hundred feet up, two Spitfires from the nearby fighter base roared, full-throttle, in close formation.

  Lampert raised his six-foot frame from the vehicle, lit his pipe and waited. Colonel Raymond Lampert went about his work today with a high degree of dignity, as Executive Officer of Enigma Operations, his new, month-old MI-6 title. The ex-British Army officer who had distinguished himself in the Great War had all the time in the world. So did the prisoner, it seemed. When the armed entourage helped the prisoner into the building through the ground floor music room, the colonel waited several more minutes, then entered the gloomy front entrance of the badly-maintained estate. When he saw the cracked, wooden floors, dark walls, and chipped furniture, he wondered who had done the decorating. A drunk? Mytchett Place could have passed for Dracula’s castle.