But then, just as quickly as the thought had been upon him, Worthington dismissed it. He had after all met Laura's husband upon several occasions, knew the young man's family, and instinctively had liked him. Why else would he send his only daughter back to him?
"There's one other item to discuss," Nigel Worthington said at length. "I haven't brought it up until now. I didn't think the time was right."
Laura waited.
"Peter Whiteside insists upon seeing you," he said. "Says it's vitally important."
Laura drew a long sigh. "Tell him," she answered, "that he knows where he can find me."
*
Thirty-six hundred miles away, in the county and city of Baltimore, there was general consternation at the F.B.I.'s local outpost. Cochrane's recall papers to Washington had landed with a loud thump. Idle gossip concerning Bureau affairs was definitely against handbook regulations: an employee would have to be mad to murmur even the slightest syllable of hearsay. So naturally, rumors abounded madly concerning why Cochrane, formerly the Bureau's number one leper, had been summoned to grace by none other than the Chief himself. Such drastic turnabouts were never without reason.
The clerical employees held that Cochrane had once been involved in a dodgy operation in New York in which the give and take with local racketeers had included a little too much of both on Bill Cochrane's part. He was subsequently returning to Washington to face a federal indictment.
Among the field agents, however, an entirely different account was common currency. There was a major scandal brewing at Treasury, the stories maintained, and Cochrane was being called in to blow the Democrats out of the White House in November of 1940. What the Roosevelt administration lacked most with an election year coming, the Republican field agents suggested hopefully, was a good Teapot Dome-style scandal, complete with soiled money and soiled laundry. Cochrane eventually heard both rumors and broke out laughing at each. Meanwhile, he spent three days turning over his own investigative work-in-progress to two younger agents.
Late on his final evening in Maryland, Bill Cochrane had two suitcases jammed shut and a third one, nearing completion, on his bed. He had packed the clothing and personal articles he would need on his extended transfer back to the home office. Just before closing the third, his eye settled upon the picture of Heather that rested in its frame on his night table. It was August again, almost the twentieth. Bill Cochrane's nerves were always steadier after the anniversary of the accident. Each August, more times that he cared to admit, he saw the fuel truck jumping the divider on a dark Tennessee highway. And then there was always the sound and moment of impact…
It was all in the past now, more distant with each day. When she had died, he had been a simple banker.
Fragments of fantasy conversation came to mind as Heather listened:
I've begun a new career. They sent me to Berlin… There is another war coming. I think we will all be in it…
I've missed you horribly sometimes… but I'm trying to live my life again…
Perhaps all those things, not necessarily in that order. His eyes drifted from the photograph.
He was tired and tried to sleep. Rest, however, came with considerable difficulty.
THIRTEEN
Red Bank, and the United States Navy Yard that had been located there since 1933, was fifteen miles due southeast of Newark. For Siegfried, however, the distance was an exasperating drive of thirty miles, through the incessant trafficked clutter of the towns on the New Jersey side of Staten Island. The drive each way took two hours.
Siegfried purchased a detailed road map at a Flying A station along Route One south of Perth Amboy. He filled his car with gasoline for two dollars and studied the map before proceeding. The map told him that Red Bank was located across a one-mile inlet from the Atlantic Ocean. When the spy came to the town of New Monmouth, he left the coastal road and drove directly toward the inlet. He found it easily. He then drove the length of it until he found an area in which he could park his car without causing suspicion. Thereupon, he slung a camera case over his shoulder and set out on foot, across a field which, after a walk of about a mile, led to a promontory overlooking the inlet.
Siegfried stood overlooking a river to which he did not know the name. He scanned in every direction on his side of the water. There were no houses and no parks. He was blessedly unobserved.
Across the river he could easily see the navy yard. The view was invigorating. So much so, that for a few seconds Siegfried lost his concentration. He mused how it might feel to stand above the Rhine or the Danube in a similar vantage point. Thoughts of Germany returned him to earth, and his work.
The spy walked to the southeast along the bluff and made careful note of the path that he had taken. As he walked toward a slightly wooded enclave he realized that he was following an old footpath. He kept his eye to the ground.
The grass had grown on the path in the same manner as the rest of the field. He scanned for evidence of people: discarded soda bottles. Cigarette butts. Gum wrappers. He found none. He concluded that few people came to this particular place. Yes, the view was spectacular, but it was spectacular all along this inlet. And Siegfried had purposely come to the least accessible spot on his side of the water.
He arrived among a clump of trees. He settled onto the ground and waited for several minutes. Convinced that he was alone, he took out his Celestron 1000 telescope and trained it across the water at Red Bank.
On the scope's third adjustment, the navy yard came perfectly into focus. On the fifth adjustment, the spy could move in tightly enough to read the insignias on the uniforms of the sailors.
He scanned, moving the telescope in methodical patterns up and down, left to right. He found a ship flying a Union Jack. The angle at which the vessel was berthed allowed him to read the legend off the ship's stern:
HMS Adriana
Sunderland
Siegfried studied the ship. It was a frigate, probably about 120 meters from bow to stern. It was particularly hefty for a British frigate, he concluded. The Adriana was a seagoing bulldog, anxious to work but not upset over the prospects of a fight, either.
Siegfried closely scrutinized the top deck and found it was packed with especially large guns. Normally, frigates were scaled down for escort duties in convoys. So why not the HMS Adriana?
But what puzzled Siegfried most was that the Adriana was a frigate at all. He had expected a military cargo ship of some sort. It would have been armed, of course. Everything that ventured beyond sight of native land was armed these days. But why, the spy asked himself as he scanned the decks closely, readjusting his telescope in the process, was a big brawny frigate parked at a U.S. Navy yard in Red Bank, New Jersey? And why were there both British and American naval personnel busy aboard the Adriana?
Why, indeed? Siegfried reminded himself-that's what he was there to discover. The spy set his telescope onto the soft grass by his side. He smoked a Pall Mall and gazed across the river for several minutes, waiting for an explanation to emerge. None did. He smoked another cigarette and took in the view across the river with his naked eye. What in hell was he watching? What the Americans lacked in subtlety, he reminded himself, the British made up in tight-lipped trickiness. Together, what were they up to? Was he witnessing a small piece of a grander picture? If so, what was it?
He raised the spyglass again. The Adriana was briskly taking on cargo. Several teams of sailors were conveying crated goods onto the ship. As Siegfried studied the activity, it suddenly was clear to him that the cargo fell into two groups.
One group consisted of hundreds of large wooden coffin-sized crates that had apparently been trucked to the bow end of the ship. These crates, which seemed quite heavy from the way the sailors reacted to them, were in turn being loaded onto smaller trucks and driven into the lower hold of the ship. It took eight sailors to lift a crate onto a truck. Siegfried calculated that each crate must have weighed seven to eight hundred pounds, considering the difficulty the sailors were having.