Soon enough I was busy with new assignments. If Dulles had been testing me through Colonel Gill, then I must have passed, because he began making good right away on his promise to get me out and about.
The extra distractions were welcome, and within a few weeks I was no longer dreaming of Messerschmitts and butchered comrades, although Parker’s guileless face did swim before me from time to time. Then came the day when Hitler shot himself. Flagg popped his question, Butchart supplied the reassuring answer, and from then on I had no more dreams of Parker. I was content to let him reside in my memory as a quirky sidelight of the war years. At least, I was until coming across his folder at the Records Center.
It was a thin file, with only four typewritten pages inside. But what really caught my attention was the Gestapo markings across the sleeve. As I steeled myself to read it in the sunlight of 1958, it occurred to me that soon there would be little need for fellows like Parker. Only months earlier, Sputnik had fallen to earth after its successful voyage. Bigger and better replacements were already on the launchpad, and, if you believed the newspapers, the chatter in intelligence circles was that half the work of spies would soon be obsolete. Both sides would soon be able simply to look down at enemy positions from high in the sky But in 1944 we had people like Parker, good soldiers who did as they were told, even when they were told very little.
By the second paragraph I learned that Parker had been considered a probable spy almost from the moment he had boarded the train. By the fourth paragraph I learned they had grilled him for twelve hours, off and on. The details were scanty-they always were in these reports when the Gestapo was pulling out all the stops-but I was familiar with enough eyewitness accounts of their usual tactics to fill in the blanks: Force them to stand for hours on end. Let them pee in their pants while they waited. Beat them, perhaps, and, if that didn’t work, beat them harder, or threaten them with a firing squad.
Spy was the word the report kept using, over and over. Twelve hours of this, yet Parker, the veteran of only a single combat mission over Germany, held out. Flagg’s judgment proved correct. He had hidden reserves. In fact, he had done us all one better. Lieutenant Parker had tried to escape.
It happened early on the following morning, the report said, right after the sentry left the room for a smoke. The officer in charge okayed the break because the subject had been at his lowest ebb. And at this point in the report, perhaps to cover his ass, the officer allowed himself the luxury of a detailed description of the subject’s physical state: one eye swollen shut, bruises about the face and chest, shins bleeding, apparent exhaustion due to sleep deprivation. Yet no sooner had the sentry made himself scarce than Parker had somehow managed to overcome the interrogating officer and throw open the door.
He made it about twenty yards before the gunshots caught him. He then survived another two hours before dying of his wounds. The reporting officer seemed resigned to the idea of being reprimanded for his lapse in judgment, which had led to the loss of a potentially valuable prisoner before any useful information had been extracted.
By then my hands were cold, my feet as well. I sighed deeply, shut the folder, and looked up at the clock. It was an hour past our usual closing time, and my assistant was eyeing me curiously from his desk. He was anxious to leave. What I needed was a stiff drink, although this time a pitcher of gimlets wasn’t going to be enough. But first I had one more bit of business here to take care of.
I carried the folder to a table next to my assistant’s desk. For a moment I hovered over the burn box. As I prepared to drop in the report for destruction, I like to believe that I was not guided chiefly by an instinct of self-preservation. I was thinking as well of Parker’s parents, perhaps still on their farm near Emporia. Having a son of my own now, I wondered what it would be like to hear that your only child had died while protecting secrets that he wasn’t supposed to protect, that he had failed in his mission by being too brave and too strong.
But I couldn’t bring myself to let go of the folder.
“Sir?” my assistant asked. “Is something wrong?”
“This one belongs with the OSS stuff.”
“Classified?”
I paused, still hovering.
“No. In fact, I’d like it to get some circulation. You go on. I’ll prepare the translation and a distribution list and have it ready for you to send out copies in the morning.”
He was gone within seconds, and I settled back at my desk with the folder still in hand. The list came immediately to mind. Colonel Gill and Butchart, wherever they might be, would receive copies. Dulles, too, down at his big desk in the director’s office of the agency we now called the CIA. Or perhaps each of them already knew, and always had. In that case, they needed to know that others had also found out.
But what about Parker’s parents? I would spare them the gory details, of course, but they at least deserved the gist of the story, beginning with that first meeting aboard the train. The most important part, however, would be the summation, and I already had one in mind: Your son didn’t tell the Germans a word. Not one. In fact, he did exactly as we asked, even if not at all as we had planned. The ball never left his mitt.
HEDGED IN by Stella Rimington
Ron Haddock usually knew what he wanted to do. Just now, he wanted to put a bullet through the rear tires of the ancient Bentley convertible sitting on the drive in front of his living room window. But he couldn’t, any more than he could grind his teeth. He couldn’t grind his teeth because he’d got the chewing gum habit during his years as an armed policeman, standing out in the rain guarding embassies or waiting for criminals to make their next move, and he was chewing now to keep calm. And he couldn’t shoot up the Bentley’s tires because the car belonged to his next-door neighbor, and it had every right to be there. The drive that led from Haddock’s gate to his front door didn’t belong to him, due to some ridiculous property rights that went back to the time of William the Conqueror. The bastard next door actually had the right to park his car there, which made Haddock angry.
Everything about his next-door neighbor made Haddock angry. It made him angry that the bastard had planted a hedge of conifers fifteen feet high between his house and Haddock’s bungalow, a hedge that took all Haddock’s light at front and back and incidentally blocked the best track out into the fields when Haddock wanted to go rabbit-shooting.
Perhaps his neighbor shouldn’t have made him quite so angry, because after all, the man was away on business more than a third of the time. But that made him angry, too, because Haddock didn’t like people who came and went; it was shifty and unreliable. Criminals, the lot of them, deserved to be shot. The bastard had even woken him up one day in the early morning to get him to unjam his garden gate to let the Bentley in. And he wouldn’t sell the drive. When Haddock had approached him about that, he’d said he needed the space for his second car. His number-one car was an Audi that he kept outside his own house, invisible behind the conifers. Evidently he liked to have a second exit when he needed it. Something very fishy about that, in Haddock’s opinion.
Where was Phyllis? Haddock asked himself, looking at his watch. It was past noon, and she was supposed to be back from the gym by now to get his lunch. That was the arrangement between them. Three times a week she went to the gym, came back, and made lunch. Then it was his turn-down for the afternoon to the gun club.
With guns, any kind of gun, Haddock was an artist, because he really loved them. Guns were straight. They did as you told them and didn’t argue. They were facts, powerful facts, things you could hold, things you could fondle without any comeback, with no complications. He specialized in veteran guns, Lee-Enfields, Webleys, Mausers, Colts. None of that modern arty-farty Russian stuff, or modern anything for that matter. Except for just one gun, his pride and joy, his Barrett sniper rifle, the one gun he really possessed because no one knew he had it. His unlicensed gun, the gun he could only ever use outside, at night, with its wonderful night sight, and then not often. Not just unlicensed-it had never been registered in England at all, because Haddock had picked it out of the hold of a small boat that was running guns to the IRA when he had been on antiterror duty, all of fifteen years ago. Yes, he’d taken a risk, a big one. He’d have been out of the force the day they found out that he’d retained any criminal property, never mind an unlicensed, unregistered firearm.