Assignment - Treason Read online

  “Come in, Sam,” he said.

  Durell closed the office door. “I want to see Dickinson McFee.”

  “You can’t see him."

  “Is he in?"

  “Not to you.”

  “All right,” Durell said. “Tell me what this is all about.”

  Swayney lifted wisps of eyebrows. His round face was without guile. “Is something troubling you, Sam?”

  Durell’s anger was not entirely simulated. “You know damned well. This morning I found some of Art Greenwald’s mikes in my apartment. Don’t blame him. They were well hidden. Wyatt and Tramm tailed me to work this morning. I couldn’t help spotting them, too. What’s bothering you, Burritt?"

  “Nothing at all,” Swayney said blandly. “I happen to be at peace with the world.”

  Durell leaned both hands on the chiefs desk and bent forward. “Am I suspected of something?”

  “Routine surveillance, Sam.”

  “Like hell. You know. You know all about me. Why the check and double check?"

  Swayney made steeples of his fat, pink fingers. He looked happy. “Samuel Durell, born 1926, Bayou Peche Rouge, Louisiana, son of Jonathan Durell, Junior, and Mary-Ellen Lamont Durell. Cajun stock. Graduate of Yale, cum laude. OSS from 1943 to ’45, two years with G-two in Pentagon, service with CIA since March four, 1951. Engaged to marry Deirdre Padgett, of Prince John, Maryland. But marriage plans canceled last night. No bad or vicious habits except a tendency to gamble. Grandfather Jonathan was notorious for it. Still is. Old Mississippi sidewheeler man. You've been playing a lot of bridge at the Triton Country Club. Losing a lot of money, too. Is any of that wrong?”

  “You son-of-a-bitch,” Durell said softly.

  “Don’t blame me. You came in here asking for it.”

  “Does that make me disloyal?”

  “We wonder,” Swayney said. His jowls were pink. “You’d better get out of here, Sam."

  “You lecherous little bastard," Durell said.

  “Don’t goad me, Sam.”

  “Then take your tails off me, and stay off my back!”

  Swayney said in a rapid singsong, “The primary requisites of an operative of K Section are a cool mind, quick intelligence, an objective viewpoint, and clinical detachment toward problems either personal or involving line of duty."

  “To hell with you,” Durell said.

  “Good day, Sam.”

  Durell went out. He was shaking with anger.

  He tried to see General McFee anyway. Sidonie Osbourn was at her desk in the outer office. Through an open doorway to the left was a room filled with teletype machines and several small Mark III electronic computers. Sidonie was small and delicate, with hair like honey, Gallic eyes slightly uptilted. There were violet smudges under her lashes. She spoke with an accent more pronounced than her cousin Corinne’s.

  “You can’t see McFee," she said, shaking her head.

  “Why not?”

  “He specifically said he could not see you today if you came asking for him. I’m so sorry, Sam. Will you come to the house for dinner tonight?”

  “Thanks. But I doubt if I can make it."

  “The children miss you. They will be disappointed.”

  “Another time," he said. “Sid, can you help me?”

  “In any way possible. But if it’s about McFee, I‘m afraid not. Deirdre spent an unhappy night at my house. She didn’t sleep much. Today she’s in New York, looking for a new job there. What went wrong, Sam?”

  “She‘ll be grateful for the whole thing,” he said roughly.

  “Just give her a day or two. She won’t want to speak to me. I think I’m about to be strung up by the thumbs.”

  “Don’t you think she’ll have faith in you?”

  “I don‘t know. It might be too much to ask."

  Her distress was genuine. “I heard something—Sam, do you need money to get out of trouble?”

  He smiled. “No, Sid. Thanks again. You’re a sweetheart. Lew was lucky.”

  “While he lived, we had something wonderful,” she whispered. “Now I have the girls. And what I remember. But don’t call me sweetheart, please. Say that to Deirdre, not to me.”

  “You women,” Durell said.

  He went down in the elevator to the street. He was acutely conscious of the envelope that weighted down his pocket, and it seemed to him that everyone he passed must surely know about the material he had stolen from the fourth floor.

  The heat pressed down on him like a hand slapped against the nape of his neck. The trees looked lifeless, without motion, gray in the midmorning glare. At the far corner of the street, Joe Tramm drowsed in his open convertible. His bald scalp looked pinker than before. Frank Wyatt was not in sight, but Durell felt his presence without looking too hard for him. He walked to the parking lot where he had left his car, not looking backward or to either side.

  The bank on Fourteenth Street was cool and hushed, a marble mausoleum dedicated to finance. The clerk was distantly courteous. Durell opened an account in his own name, depositing the twenty thousand dollars in crisp currency. The clerk was more interested then. He asked Durell’s indulgence and went into consultation with a vice-president, who thereafter took personal charge of Durell’s new account. There was no question that he would be readily remembered when the time for remembering arrived.

  Tramm and Wyatt still dogged him when he paused for lunch. It was time now, Durell decided, to shake them off. And while both men were experts, Durell knew from his own experience that there were limitations to tailing a man. He went into a parking lot as if to reclaim his car, walked through to the exit on the opposite street, and entered a department store by a side doorway. He did not hurry. Mingling with the crowd, he used the escalator to the basement, where government girls shopped on their lunch hour. He bought a pepper mill and a screw-driver, then went up to the stationery counter and bought a Manila folder. Wyatt was still behind him. There was a surge in the crowd toward a side exit where the busses stopped, and Durell let himself be carried by the pressure of human bodies to the second bus in line. He saw Tramm following in the convertible when they pulled out. At the third stop he got off, crossed the street to another shop, then quickened his steps abruptly to leave by the back entrance. A cab stand was nearby. He flagged one, rode to Union Station, changed taxis again, and gave the address of a small hotel out near Rock Creek Park, not five blocks from Annapolis Street.

  Nobody was behind him now.

  The Park-Crown Hotel was small and residential, the lobby paneled in dark walnut, cooled by slowly revolving fans in the high ceiling. The clerk nodded when he asked for George Carlton Smith.

  “Room Eight-o-two, sir.”

  Durell rode up in the elevator, walked down the hall with its rows of anonymous shutter doors, and knocked twice on 802.

  General Dickinson McFee opened the door for him.

  “Come in, Sam. You’re right on time.”

  McFee was a small, gray man with cool, intelligent eyes. His size was forgotten after a man had been a few moments with him; he had the ability to fill any room with the force of his presence. Durell looked around quickly. The room was just a room. Nobody else was in it. Yet it was crowded by ghosts, all pointing fingers of accusation at him. He looked at Dickinson McFee. The General’s gray eyes were opaque, telling him nothing.

  “Sit down, Sam. You look unhappy. And hot. Not much different from the bayous, I suppose. Drink?”

  “Not now.”

  “I assume you were not shadowed?”

  “Tramm and Wyatt are good men,” Durell said. “They couldn’t help it.”

  “Yes, they’re good. But you’re the best I’ve got.”

  “I wish you thought otherwise,” Durell said. “I wish you had picked anybody else for this rotten job. I don’t like it. It’s making a mess of everything.”

  McFee had a small face, an intellectual brow. Eyes like ice, hard and brilliant, devoted. The pressure of his personality grew in the room re
lentlessly. He stood up and said flatly, “Sam, you knew what to expect when we first talked this over.”

  “I'm going to lose my girl.”

  “If she’s worth anything at all, you‘ll get her back.”

  “My friends look at me as if I have two heads.”

  “So you do. One for us, one for the other side. Did you get the file?"

  Durell took the envelope from his pocket and offered it to the small gray man, but McFee waved it curtly away. “Keep it. We want it found on your person when you’re arrested tomorrow for treason and espionage.”

  “Tomorrow?"

  "We’ve pushed up the target date for your trial. It’s a squeeze. State is in a real flap; so is the White House. I’ve been called to the Hill twice today, before the Foreign Affairs Committee.”

  “It’s that big?”

  “A problem of time has come up. I wish it didn’t have to be this way. Don’t get careless, Sam. They want me to push you and I told them to go to hell. I don’t want to lose you.”

  Durell waited.

  “Be in your apartment tomorrow morning. Make it ten o’clock. You will be arrested there. Swayney will do it. He’ll enjoy it. He doesn't like you, Sam.”

  “All right.”

  “Which means that Swayney will do a realistic job of it.”

  Durell waited.

  “You will be tried tomorrow, in the afternoon, before a special loyalty board. It’s a squeeze, as I said,” McFee paused. “Did you deposit the money?”

  “Yes.”

  “No other problems?”

  Durell thought of Corinne Ybarra.

  “Something, Sam?”

  “No,” Durell said.

  It was hot in the little hotel room. The windows were all open, but a furnace blasted outside in the green of Rock Creek Park. When the air stirred occasionally through the wooden shutter door, it had a brassy smell that only emphasized the suffocating heat. Durell sweated. His shirt stuck to his back.

  “You can still get out,” McFee said suddenly. “If you dislike it this much.”

  “I don’t like it. Who would? But I’ll do it. Do you tell me now what it’s all about?”

  McFee nodded. His gray hair was smooth and thick, cropped short. His small face was hard. Like stone. Like his voice. “This is the last time We may discuss it until you find the traitor in K Section, Sam. You don’t communicate with me in any way after you walk out of this room. We will be strangers. I shall despise you. I’ll throw every charge in the book at you. It will look good. It has to look good, in order to be convincing. Otherwise, you’re dead. When you get what I want, and not before then, you can talk to me again. Is that clear?”

  “Yes. But I wish you’d take this file off my hands.”

  “You have to be arrested with it in your possession."

  “It’s risky.”

  “It’s a calculated risk. Hell, I’ve told you, those people have to be convinced that you’ve gone sour. They won’t he fooled by anything else.”

  “And after the trial tomorrow?”

  “Your escape is arranged. Get as rough about it as you please. Just don’t kill anybody. Then you’re on your own.”

  “Like a fox in the bayou with Lem Hardway’s hounds after it,” Durell said. His smile was thin. He still sweated. “The twenty thousand you had me deposit in my name is just window-dressing?”

  “To show you’ve been accepting money. From somewhere. Don’t say where. Don't otter any guesses. You’re a clam.”

  “And my losses to Gibney at the Triton Club?”

  “You needed the money, you were desperate, so you broke your own private rules about gambling. Sorry, Sam. It was for your Grandpa Jonathan down in Bayou Peche Rouge. He’s desperately ill."

  Durell was startled. “Does he know?”

  “Nothing. He’d kill you, wouldn't he?"

  “He’s a proud old man.”

  “He’ll he prouder, later on. If it Works. If you live.”

  “And Colonel Gibney? It wasn't easy to keep losing to him. He’s not a very good card player,” Durell said.

  “He hasn’t been good in any direction since his son disappeared in East Berlin,” McFee snapped.

  “Is he our man?”

  “We don’t know. We think so. We think he worked with someone in K Section to lift the dossiers on the Triangle Group.” McFee got up and walked to the window and looked through the thin curtain at the dusty green of the park. From the street came the sudden sound of a taxi horn, the shrill yelp of a child, a woman’s scolding voice. A radio began to play in one of the rooms down the corridor. The music was loud and rhythmic. McFee drew a deep breath. “We have three men working for us on the other side of the Curtain. One of them is a Russian, Igor Kobyschev, a minor MGB clerk at Number Two Dzersinski Square. His son was killed by the Nazis in the Pripet Marshes in 1942. His brother lives in a small town in upstate New York. A farmer. Igor sends material to Herman Warsciusko, a Pole who lives in Gdynia. Warsciusko is—or was —the director of a small shipping and maritime department in the Scandinavian trade. The third leg of the triangle is a man simply named Antonio. Mixture of Rumanian and Italian. Handsome devil. Likes the ladies. Oddly enough, he’s in Hungary. Budapest. We’ve got a great amount of valuable information from them. They can never be replaced. But they‘re going to die. All three of them.”

  “Why?” Durell asked.

  “Somebody stole part of their dossiers from the Safe Section at Number Twenty Annapolis." McFee made a chopping gesture. “You have the rest of the dope on them in your pocket. The rest of what they need. The stolen part has their names in code. The file you took fits the file that was stolen. If they get yours, some throats will be cut.”

  “I see."

  “So be careful.”

  “When was the first theft?"

  “Last Thursday. It wasn’t the first, though.”

  “Have you heard from any of those three men since?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think the information on them is already out of the country?” '

  “Not yet. We’ve checked. But it can't be bottled up. A code letter to any of the Western NATO countries, an agent in Paris, Copenhagen, Athens—you name it—and it’s relayed to Moscow. All three will die. They may or may not talk. It’s arranged and understood that they try to die. But you can‘t tell. Lately, just when things start to look easier on the international scene, we've had leaks like this that threaten to blow the roof off. Peace is a delicate blossom, Sam, always threatened by blights. The trouble with these thefts is that each one is ultrasensitive. Usually, when they get one of our men or break up an apparatus We’ve built, they keep quiet about it. Just to keep us Worried and wondering. But not lately. Lately, each one has been publicized. It’s like a series of dynamite caps going off near an ammo dump. Hell to pay if it keeps up. You have to stop it. Find out who’s leaking information from K Section. Stop the transmission of their names to the MGB. Not an easy job.”

  Durell sensed something more. He waited. McFee walked up and down, then took a folded sheet of typescript from his pocket. Attached to it was a newspaper clipping. “Look at this.”

  The clipping was from a Communist daily in Budapest, Népszava. It was dated 22 June. The typewritten sheet was a translation from the Hungarian:

  “The following volunteers for resettlement in the Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan may sell for cash or on commission their surplus furniture and household goods, on appraisement at your home. Leave address at the Commission Warehouse, Bizoményi Aruhaz VIII, Kinizai utca 4, Telephone 621-223.”

  Under this notice was a list of perhaps one hundred names. Durell replaced the clipping in the envelope and returned it to Dickinson McFee. His face was impassive.

  McFee said, “All that is a small facet of the Communist program of deportation and population transfer to break up silent resistance. They move indigenous ethnic groups from Hungary, Rumania, the Carpathian Ukraine, and the Baltic states to Asia, Tatar co
untry, and transfer Tatar and Kirghiz peoples into Europe. The Soviets are transforming Europe’s ethnography daily. It’s nothing to do with us—except for one item.”

  Durell watched the small general quietly.

  “One of these so-called volunteer deportees,” McFee said in a heavy tone, “is Antonio’s girl.”

  Durell blew out air.

  “Antonio has been out of contact with the others in the Triangle since this happened. He’s insane over that girl. He’s made assassination threats, should anything happen to her. Now it’s happening.”

  “All this has been checked?”

  “And double-checked. He’s hunting with a gun. You know who for. If he kills anybody in their upper governmental echelons, and if this leak gets his name to Dzersinski Square as one of our agents, there will be hell to pay. They’ll scream we’re on a program of assassination. The man he’s after is not too balanced, emotionally. Any personal threat could bring down this house of cards we call peace.”

  “Can we stop Antonio?”

  “No. We can only pray. And keep them from knowing anything more about him than the code name that was stolen.”

  “It may already be too late,” Durell pointed out.

  “Yes. That’s why we’re squeezing this.”

  “And you think Colonel Gibney is mixed up in it?"

  “I accuse nobody. Not yet. But Gibney has been fishing for information on the Triangle from some of our people. It was reported to me. That’s why you’ve been playing cards with him.” McFee smiled tiredly. “I know it was a bad thing for you, Sam.”

  “I like to gamble. Not to lose.”

  “Gibney will offer a settlement with you. He lives high off the hog. He needs money. We think his son, Roger, is being held by our opponents in this rotten game, and we think Roger is being used as a lever to make Gibney do a little work for the other side. Not a nice thing. None of it is nice, eh?”