"What is Section Seven?"
"Espionage and Counterespionage," Wheeler said, plucking a Missouri meerschaum pipe from a breast pocket. "Call it 'Spying' if you want to use the current profanity."
"I didn't know we actually had such a division."
"Officially, we don't. Fact is, we've been turned down six times since 1935 for congressional funding for it. The money comes out of General Appropriations." Wheeler stuffed tobacco into his pipe with his thumb and struggled to get a fire started. They walked down a hall, closing doors behind them. "You'll feel at home here. I read your reports from Germany last night. Fine work! I'm surprised you're still alive."
"So am I," said Cochrane.
"My office first," said Wheeler, leading Cochrane into the largest quarters on the floor. A picture window looked toward the Capitol. "Have a seat," Wheeler said. "We need to chat first." Cochrane chose an armchair, and Wheeler did likewise, staying away from his desk.
"Just out of curiosity," Cochrane asked, "what are Sections One through Six?"
"They don't exist."
"Then what's this seven?"
"Seven is everyone's lucky number. The number seven symbolizes God's perfection, doesn’t it? His sovereignty and holiness. God created earth in seven days. One seven-day week is a reminder of our Creator. And God blessed the seventh day, making it holy. So. ‘Section Seven.’ Good luck. That's what you're going to need, you know. Luck. Just like J.E.H. to toss a good capable man into an impossible situation. But, come on. It beats banking fraud in Bored-All-The-More, doesn't it? I'll give you the grand tour anyway. You're going to need all the help you can get. Someone's here all the time, of course. That's another reason for the name. 'Section Seven' seven days a week." Wheeler mustered a groan. "One of those assignments. Like Racketeering in the Kansas City office. You remember?"
Cochrane nodded.
Wheeler foraged through a drawer of his desk and produced a bottle of twelve-year-old bourbon. "Want a drink before we start?"
"No, thanks."
Wheeler poured himself a taste of Tennessee's best in a small glass. "You're sure? You and me? We have worked together three times now and I'm in charge here, you know."
"It's all right," Cochrane reaffirmed.
"Okay then," said Wheeler, sipping and positioning himself massively in his chair. "Just remember this is top-secret stuff. You don't even discuss this with any other agent. Only the people you see here."
Cochrane nodded.
"Let me explain," said Wheeler.
SEVENTEEN
As background in Section Seven, there wasn't much. Some counterespionage and intelligence gathering had been done in Europe, Wheeler said, but Cochrane himself had done the best of it and had a working knowledge of the rest. Bill Cochrane nodded and a flood of images came back to him, from Theresia dead on her bed to Engle carefully taking the order for a set of Swiss passports.
As for German espionage within the forty-eight United States, Wheeler continued academically, as his pipe smoldered in the ashtray, it had all been haphazard at best-at least as far as they knew. Cochrane nodded again.
"We've dropped down hard on a ring of sympathizers here and there, gotten the local police to hassle a few others. But there's no war, so there's no law being broken. A saboteur with some bombs is something else. He gets priority. Roosevelt is as angry as a wet cat." Wheeler sipped. "If we were just out to run down pro-Hitler groups, we'd be arresting half the Republicans in the Senate, William Randolph Hearst, Charles Lindbergh, and probably eighty percent of the Daughters of the American Revolution."
Cochrane mustered an uneasy grin.
"So you see, we're in a swampy area. Very few real rules. The laws we have to enforce are the usual civil and criminal laws. And many of them are state laws, so we don't have jurisdiction. Added to that, we have a peacetime espionage situation. Confusing?"
"No."
"Good." Wheeler drew a breath. "Because that leads us to the radio emissions. And the 'Bluebirds."
"The who? "
Wheeler finished his bourbon and poured himself a refill. He tossed Cochrane a sly smile. "So glad you asked," he said.
The Bluebirds' official name was Monitoring Division and they had been formed in the queasy days of 1937 upon a suggestion by William Donovan. On an evening in Washington, Roosevelt had casually mentioned a marked increase in mysterious radio emissions from the northeastern United States. Triangulation detectors had traced many of them to Newark and Manhattan, particularly Yorkville, in the East Eighties, and Little Hungary, in the East Seventies.
"I can't see that there's too much question what these emissions are," Roosevelt said.
"Why not listen to them?" Donovan asked. "Monitor them. Record them. Then decipher them."
Donovan explained how a skeletal monitoring station could be set up by the F.B.I. on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. FDR signaled to an aide to take notes. Then the notes were typed and organized.
"Have Mr. Hoover do something about this," FDR said to the aide.
Hoover assembled a division called Monitoring under the shadowy umbrella of Section Seven. Those who worked in Monitoring quickly self-administered the nickname of the “Bluebirds.” They were a number of men and women, usually somewhere between twenty- five and thirty in number who spent their time in the hastily constructed plywood stalls of the largest room in the east wing of the sixth floor. These were the foot soldiers of Section Seven.
Day after day, but mostly night after night, they turned dials on an endless succession of shortwave radios. Each man or woman, fluent in the international Morse code, monitored no fewer than three frequencies each, or read a book if nothing was coming across. Anything mysterious was recorded, particularly in the evening when emissions to Europe could be at optimum strength.
Each Bluebird worked a four-hour shift, and most, particularly those who finished between four and eight in the morning, acquired the sunken, narcoleptic look of the truly deranged. But each also emerged with a sheaf of papers, a scramble of notes, and notations of precise time, along with too many spools of wire recordings.
"Everything gets passed along to Deciphering and Cryptology," Wheeler said. "That's one unit, next door to the Bluebirds, on this floor also. I'll give you a look."
Wheeler set aside his bourbon. They rose and went a few paces down the hall. Cochrane was admitted to a large chamber where seven Bluebirds were at work, Saturday morning being a slow time to bounce signals around the clouds. Everyone in the room looked sleepy. No one had much to say, even to Wheeler, and Cochrane and Wheeler were gone from the room in ten minutes.
The next door down was another large room, this one cramped with wall-to-wall files and several large tables at its center. There was no activity whatsoever, because this was the CAR Division, as Wheeler described it. He pronounced it as if it had something to do with automobiles, and explained that the letters stood for Central Alien Registry.
"Everyone here still has weekends off," Wheeler said. "But not for much longer."
Central Alien Registry was a nightmare. Stuffed into the files in varying degrees of order were alien registration forms dating back through the waves of immigration that flooded Boston, New York, and Philadelphia in the 1920s.
"If someone came into this country legally, he's in these files," said Wheeler, motioning. "If he came in illegally," he added with a grimace, "he might be here, also."
Two hundred and sixty thousand names were crammed into the files of the CAR Division, along with any criminal reports or F.B.I. dossiers which might be pertinent. The files were divided into Asian and European-European being vastly larger-and there were cross-references of points of origin, many designated FRIENDLY, such as Britain or Canada or Australia, and others designated as UNFRIENDLY, such as Germany or Hungary.