Allerton seemed to come out of a deep reverie. “Yes… that was when we came up with the fanciful code name for this double agent: Talbot. Lawrence Talbot — you know, the fellow who turned into a werewolf by the light of the moon… Popular movie at that time.” Allerton smiled. “For the intellectuals among us, talbot is also the old Anglo-Saxon word for a ravaging wolf. So, then, we began an operation to expose him and… eliminate him. We called it Silver Bullet—”
O’Brien cleared his throat. “Actually, it was called Wolfbane.”
“Yes, that was it, Patrick.” Allerton stroked his long nose. “Time dims things that seemed so important once.”
“Silver Bullet,” said O’Brien, “was the joint British/American name for the termination of the operation.” O’Brien took something from his pocket. “One of our more flamboyant officers had this fashioned by a London silversmith.” He held up a gleaming .45-caliber silver bullet. “This was to be fired into Talbot’s brain.”
No one spoke for some time, then O’Brien added, “Talbot was the worst sort of traitor. He didn’t confine his treachery to stealing and passing on secrets like the majority of traitors. He actively sent men and women to their deaths. I picture him sometimes on an airstrip in England, striding around the tarmac at dusk, patting agents on the back, embracing the women, adjusting parachute harnesses, wishing them luck… and all the while knowing…” O’Brien looked at Allerton.
James Allerton said softly, “You would think a man like that… a man who had lost his soul… could be easily spotted… his eyes should reveal the corruption in his heart.”
Abrams listened. He had become to them as unobtrusive as a trusted servant; they knew he was listening, but they didn’t expect him to talk back until they addressed him. It was, he thought, not unlike a detective’s brainstorming session. He glanced at Katherine, wondering if the mention of her father was painful.
West picked up the story again. “Henry Kimberly reported in by radio twice a day for a week, then radioed what was to be his next to last encoded message, which is still in the file. It said”—West recited with no hesitation—“‘Most important: Re Alsos: Have made contact with grocer’—that was Karl Roth—‘Grocer has reported the location of two pixies’—that was the atomic scientists. ‘Will recover same.’” West paused, then said, “Henry Kimberly’s last message, a day later, reported that he’d established contact with the Russian authorities for the purpose of searching Gestapo files and interrogating captured Gestapo officers who might have information about missing OSS agents. The last lines of his message read, ‘Red Army helpful. Gestapo has revealed the arrest and execution of most of our mission. Names to follow. Trace and locate bodies of them. Will continue recovery operation.’” West looked at Allerton. “Do you remember that, sir?”
Allerton nodded. “Yes. That was the last we heard of Henry. There was some suspicion, of course, that it was the Russians who got to our agents, not the Gestapo. We feared that Henry was going to suffer the same fate.”
O’Brien said, “Henry signed that radio message with his code name, Diamond. If we suppose he was sending under Russian control, then he should have used the signature Blackboard, which was a distress signal meaning ‘I am captured.’”
Thorpe said, “Why would you suppose he was sending under Russian control?”
O’Brien answered, “We’ll get to that. But if Henry was captured and yet signed his encoded message Diamond, that told us that the Russians knew that Diamond was his code name, and therefore he could not use the distress code name Blackboard. The OSS operator who received his message recognized Henry’s wrist — his style of telegraphing — so we can assume it was he who was sending, but with a gun to his head.”
Allerton interjected, “It was frightening to think that the Russians knew Henry’s code name, which was picked just ten minutes before he crossed the Russian lines. And that they knew code names like Grocer and Pixie.”
O’Brien nodded, then added, “We thought the Russians might be persuaded to let him go. A strong note was personally delivered to Red Army headquarters in Berlin. The reply said, ‘Major Kimberly unknown here.’” O’Brien spoke directly to Katherine. “I hitched a ride on one of the first American flights into Berlin. By the time I arrived, there was another message from Red Army headquarters saying that Major Kimberly and the three officers with him had been killed when their jeep hit an undiscovered German land mine — a very common accident that we and the British also used, to dispose of unwanted people. Anyway, I claimed the bodies… the ashes, I should say. The Russians cremated for reasons of expediency and sanitation… ” He looked into Katherine’s eyes. “I never gave you all the details… ”
For the first time Katherine knew that the grave in Arlington contained an urn filled with ashes. She said, “How do you know it was my father?”
O’Brien shook his head. “We hope it was, that he didn’t die in the Gulag.”
She nodded. She knew that the Russians at that time usually sent healthy males to the Soviet Union to repair the devastation resulting from the war. She tried to imagine this man who was her father, young, proud, daring, reduced to a slave in a strange land, for no reason other than he’d gone on a mission of mercy. With each passing week and month he’d feel the life leaving his body. And he’d know, of course, that he’d never go home. She looked up and spoke in a barely controlled voice. “Please go on.”
It was West who spoke. “Major Kimberly had undoubtedly dropped the quartermaster cover in order to inquire about his agents. But under no circumstances would he have revealed to the Russians the Alsos mission or Karl Roth’s connection with it. Therefore, those last two radio messages, which were sent under duress and which mentioned these facts, were his way of saying the Russians already knew about Alsos and Roth, just as they knew our codes.”
Thorpe spoke. “I think you’re making too much of this highlevel-mole theory. I don’t have the facts you have, but it seems to me that the mission was blown by the field agents. It’s fairly obvious that Karl Roth, for one, blew the whistle. That’s where the leaks were. Not in London or Washington.”
West looked at Thorpe closely. “Good analysis. In fact, that was the official conclusion at the time… However, if you assume that Major Kimberly’s message was sent under the direction of the helpful Red Army, then you should look at the message more closely. He was, after all, a trained intelligence officer, and from all accounts a brave and resourceful man. So you try to read a code within the encoded ciphers — you look for non sequiturs, clumsy sentence structure, that sort of thing.” West paused, then said, “‘Trace and locate bodies of them.’ That’s not even good radio English—”
Thorpe sat up straight. “Talbot.”
West nodded. “Nowhere does the code word Talbot exist in my research, but it existed in the private conversations of Henry Kimberly, Mr. O’Brien, Mr. Allerton, and a few others. Major Kimberly, in the course of his interrogation at the hands of the Russians, was told or deduced from the extensiveness of the questions that there was a highly placed traitor in the OSS. Any good agent could conclude that. The radio message gave him one last chance to reach and to warn his friends.”