Part 104 (1/2)
Thomas inclined forward again, instantly baffled. He was going to point the. finger to Sandler. Not Whiteside.
Patiently, Whiteside repeated, the silence at the table now given an extra dimension of stillness.
”Well” Whiteside buffed with studied casualness, 'the man's been dead for thirty-one years. What I could never understand is how your Central Intelligence Service, sorry, Agency, never managed to learn that for themselves' The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds probably did, thought Hammond, and never told anyone.
Hunter sat back in his chair, his hands folded, one thick finger interlocking with another, glancing toward his own chest as if to indicate he'd known it all along also. Hunter did look like a bear, Thomas noticed. Whiteside's smugness enraged Thomas.
Whiteside raised his eyebrows slightly, saw the stunned expressions around him, scratched his left cheek elegantly, and mused onward.
”Yes,” he said reflectively,
”I suppose I do owe the present company an explanation. Correct?
”I a.s.sure you” he began, 'it wouldn't change the current situation the smallest bit.”
He turned the calendar back to 1947, a year in which the British Exchecquer was still bedeviled by German pound-sterling notes, printed in Austria during the war. An investigation was in progress, yet doomed to failure. Someone was still printing pound notes. No one knew who. Or where.
”It was April of that year, forty-seven, I recall,” said Whiteside, 'when we were still fairly active in Central Europe. We, meaning M.I. 6, of course. We were recruiting Russians. The Iron Curtain had fallen and we wanted people who were behind it. We wanted Russians. But we took what we could get' What they got, what they managed to recruit, was just about anyone who could exchange a useful tidbit of intelligence for a one way ticket to the West.
”Poles, Hungarians, Czechs” continued Whiteside nostalgically, 'we could have set up our own League of Nations in exile, we recruited so many ”Why didn't you?” asked Daniels sarcastically ”Afraid your Congress wouldn't want to join” Whiteside shot back.
”Touche. May I go on?”
Daniels motioned an open hand to indicate Whiteside could.
”In forty-seven we recruited a Hungarian, man named Walter Szezic. He was a young man then, mid-twenties, and had been in the non-Communist resistance in Austria and Hungary during the war. Fine fellow, really!
”They all are' Thomas intoned.
Whiteside ignored the remark and dwelt on Szezic.
”Szezic stayed in Hungary for three years, until being uncovered in 1950 and being smuggled out in one battered piece. But when recruited he had told several stories, all of which were later confirmed ...
except one.
”There was no way of confirming that lone story. But since it wasn't important to Szezic that he deceive us on that point, and since all the more important information we received from him was true, we took this as the Lord's truth, also.”
The story concerned a spy, a man the Russians had planned to slip into the West since before the war. A man not identified by name, but rather by the ident.i.ty he took.
”The spy was run by Moscow,” said Whiteside.
”Years in the making; straight out of the KGB building on Dzerzhinsky Square.
But he would have a control in New York, too. He'd be run in the United States and had been trained to a.s.sume the ident.i.ty of a wealthy German-American industrialist” No one said it, but one name bolted into the listeners' minds.
”Sandler,” said Whiteside, though it wasn't necessary.
”The spy had memorized every facet of Sandler's life; he'd been given the man's voice, the man's face, practically the man's mind, in that he'd memorized the faces and relations.h.i.+ps of everyone Sandler had known before the war. An extraordinary undertaking by our friends the Reds,” said Whiteside, not without deep admiration.
Thomas fidgeted nervously, beginning to sense the inevitable implications and consequences of Whiteside's story. Leslie glanced back and forth between Whiteside and Thomas. Hammond spoke.
”Why should we believe any of this?” he asked.