Checkpoint Charlie

Pete Morgan, the chief-of-station, was dour and dismal, his normal hey-buddy ebullience crushed under a weight of worry. I had known him for years and never seen him so morose. “I’ve been wondering when somebody would show up with a hatchet. In a way I’m glad it’s you, Charlie. You’re tough but you’re fair. I never heard of you railroading anybody just for the sake of marking up a score on your record sheet.”

“I’m obliged for the vote of confidence, Pete, but if you know about the trouble why haven’t you done something about it?”

“You think I haven’t? I’ve given seven men the chop so far. Two of them damned useful informants.”

“You’ve interrogated them?”

“Certainly.”

“And?”

“Four of them denied it. Three of them admit it.” He showed his despair. “They admit they’ve been bought. Bribed with huge sums in Swiss banks and new passports and visas that will set them up in South America like baronets.”

I stood at the window of his office and tried to make sense of it. Below me the Kowloon traffic of pedestrians and cars and tricycle-rickshas thronged the narrow street. I said, “The whole point of doubling an agent is not to let his employers know he’s been doubled.”

“Exactly. They’re busting all the rules.”

“So they’re not really being doubled, are they.”

He said, “I can only see one answer. They’re trying to destroy my network.”

“Why?”

“You tell me and we’ll both know.”

Pete’s network wasn’t concerned with mainland China; that was another — and far more vast — outfit with headquarters in Langley itself and branch monitoring stations in Kyoto, Seoul, Hong Kong, Taipei, Rangoon and Delhi. Pete’s more modest operation covered Singapore, Djakarta, Formosa, Macao and Hong Kong itself — the seething corrupt smuggling ports of the western Pacific. We had substations in each of them but their operations were under Pete’s direct control. And it appeared he was right: someone was systematically tearing the network apart.

Pete said, “It’s so damned methodical. Like a bulldozer. I don’t know who and I don’t know why. We used everything but rubber hoses on the seven people we’ve busted so far. I’ll show the interrogation reports. Three of them cooperated, more or less, but all they know is they were offered six-figure bribes. The offers came by phone from public call boxes and everything else came in the mail, plain envelopes, untraceable. Now I’ve got taps on most of my remaining agents’ phones — if the opposition calls again maybe we can get voiceprints.”

It was a crude destructive attack without any of the clandestine finesse that usually characterized warfare in our field — it was as if someone had decided to conclude a game of chess by blasting all the pieces off the board with a fire hose.

“I don’t know how to fight this kind of thing,” Pete complained. “It doesn’t make any kind of sense. They must know they’re doing it — and they just don’t care. What kind of espionage is that?”

I said, “It’s a cover for something. They want us to be deaf and blind so that they can pull off something they don’t want us to know about.”

“They. Who’s they?”

“Anything could be happening out there — right now we wouldn’t know about it, would we.”

“If you want the ball, Charlie, I’ll be happy to toss it over in your court.”

Yes, I thought. That was why Myerson had picked me for the job. He hates me so much that he drops all the dirtiest ones in my lap.

“Pete said, Does Langley want my scalp?”

“Not yet. They’re as baffled as you are. Nobody’s putting the finger on you.”

“Ultimately it’s my responsibility. The buck stops here.”

“Why didn’t you make a full report on this?”

He was surprised. “I did. To the Security Executive.”

Myerson.

“Didn’t you read it?” he asked. “I thought that was why you came.”

Myerson, I thought. Myerson and his “need-to-know” compartmentalization. He’d had Pete’s report in his drawer all the time but he’d withheld it from me. I could picture his mock-sweet smile: I didn’t want to clutter your head with Pete Morgan’s prejudged opinions, Charlie. Better you go into it with an open mind.

I said, “Let me have those interrogation debriefings. And you can have sandwiches sent up?”

“Didn’t you have breakfast at the hotel?”

“I did. But I’m hungry.”

*   *   *

THE AGENCY keeps threatening to put me out to pasture and Myerson keeps intervening in my behalf — not because he likes me but because he needs me: without me to sweep up his messes for him he’d be out on his own ear.

One of the reasons the Agency hasn’t made good its threat to retire me is that my head is a computer-bank of facts, experiences and associations stretching all the way back to the days of the OSS when I cut my teeth in the trade. Often a remembered iota will put me on the track of something vital when the same trivial item might pass straight over the heads of the pushbutton whiz kids in Covert Operations. It pays to keep one fossil around for the sake of continuity.

It was such an item from the deep past that provided me with a pointer toward the solution of this case. Going through the transcripts of the interviews with the three doubled agents who’d confessed, I found a clue that kept appearing like a bad pe

“And then this voice on the phone said I could live out my days in paradise with the visas and all that money.”

“He said I’d be able to quit grubbing around in these stinking Macao sewers and move my whole family to paradise.”

“He asked me how I’d like to be rich and carefree and spend the rest of my days in paradise.”

It echoes in my mind various conversations I’d had down through the years with Karl Jurgens. A slim and possibly misleading hint to be sure; but Karl had been smitten with the idea of a paradise for his retirement. It was one of his favorite words.

*   *   *

“KARL JURGENS?” A look of alarm passed across Pete Morgan’s face. “He’s a scary one. But didn’t he retire from the Abwehr?”

“Some years ago.”

That made him dubious. “If that’s all you’ve come up with, it seems to me we’re back to Square One.”

“Just the same I want to send out a few coded cables.”

The replies to my cables trickled in during the next twenty-four hours. In the meantime Pete’s office was a shambles, trying to deal with three more defections that had come to light. Pete’s security people dragged one of them in for questioning and I sat in. The compromised agent was a Chinese cleaning lady with a sheepish expression; she kept shaking her head apologetically and wringing her hands. “I knew I should not have accepted this temptation but it was so very much money — enough to support my children in comfort for the rest of their lives. Not like the bits of money you pay me.” She gave Pete a pathetically defiant look.

He made a face and said in an aside to me, “I ought to get a transcript of this to those cheap idiots who keep trimming our budgets.”

I drew the woman’s attention. “What did he say to you when he made the offer? Do you remember his words?”

“Not really, sir. It was just a voice on a telephone.”

Pete said, “We got a voiceprint — the call was taped. The man spoke Mandarin Chinese with a Peking accent.”

“More people in the world speak Mandarin Chinese than any other language,” I said drily. “In any case it’s probably a red herring. This isn’t a Chinese operation.”

“What makes you think that?”

“The Chinese have been dealing in subtle intrigue for three thousand years. This isn’t their style — it’s far too crude.” I went back to the frightened woman. “Did he offer you anything specific besides the money and visas?”

I was fishing for a word but I didn’t want to put it in her mouth.

She sighed wistfully. Her head tipped back and she murmured, “He offered me paradise.”