Checkpoint Charlie

Charlie’s Chase

“I’ve got a paper chase for you.” Myerson was unusually mellow. He neither bared his teeth nor puffed cigar smoke in my face. “I want you to look through the Hong Kong reports for the past ten weeks.”

“What for?”

“You tell me.”

When I returned to his fourth-floor office he cocked his head to one side. “Well?”

“Some weeks ago someone began systematically to double our China agents.”

“So it would seem. I wanted to make certain of my readings of the reports — that’s why I didn’t give you any hint what to look for. But you saw it too.”

“It’s a visible pattern.”

“Yes. Well, you’d better get out there and put a stop to hadn’t you.” Then for the first time he smiled. Myerson’s smile would frighten a piranha. It meant only that he hoped I would end up in trouble to my hairline.

As I went to the door he said to my back, “You’ve got to go on a diet, Charlie. You hardly fit through doors any more — you haven’t got any sideways.” He was still smiling — a wicked glitter of polished teeth.

I caught the noon flight from Dulles. The next day, fuzzy with jet lag, I descended upon the China Station.

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 penny.

“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.”

I assembled the cables in order and dropped them on Pete’s desk. “He’s been living in retirement on Tahiti.” “Karl Jurgens? He found his paradise then.”

“But he’s not there now.” I indicated the cables.

Pete sat up and looked.

I said, “He left eleven weeks ago on a plane for Djakarta. Coincidence? Within a week of his arrival in Djakarta you started losing agents. Djakarta, Taipei — he was sighted there two weeks later — they’re both major substations on your network and that’s where you lost the first two agents. If we keep digging I’m sure we’ll find traces of him in Macao and here in Hong Kong. It’s Karl all right. No doubt of it.”

“But what’s he up to? Surely the West German government can’t be running this caper. They’re on our side — aren’t they?”

“It’s not a German caper. It’s got to be a free-lance job. He’s hired himself out as a mercenary. Probably started to run short of money to sustain him in paradise.”

“Hired himself out where? Who’s the villain and why’s he doing these things to us?”

“I guess I’d better ask Karl,” I said.

Karl Jurgens and I had formed a warm friendship during the hottest of the Cold War years and I didn’t enjoy the prospect of dismantling him but I’d had unpleasant jobs before and I didn’t intend to do halfhearted work on this one. If Karl had set himself against us he could expect no quarter from us; I had little sumpathy to spare for him.

The first task was to find him. I couldn’t employ Pete’s people for the legwork because I didn’t know which of them might have been compromised; there were too many rotten apples in that barrel. So I had to use Myerson’s authority to call in security people from Kyoto and various floating departments. The hunt fanned out across East Asia and the Malay Archipelago; I directed the operation from our communications center at Guam.

Gradually reports began to drift in from Mindanao, Tokyo, Rangoon, Macao, Singapore — Karl was careful but he had left a bit of a spoor here and there, partly because he’d gone a bit rusty from disuse but mainly because he probably felt no one would have reason to be looking for him. It was only an accident that I’d been able to connect the defections with him.

It appeared he was all over the map; we kept finding his trail twelve or twenty-four hours too late.

During that week Pete Morgan found the rot had spread to four more agents. He had no choice but to spread the dictum throughout his network that all agents in the system were under suspicion and surveillance until further notice.

Whether the threat succeeded was not immediately clear but defections appeared to be on the decrease: either the agents were impressed or Karl was laying off, or perhaps his job was concluded. I suspected the latter because none of Pete’s agents came forward after the middle of that week to report attempts to bribe them.

By then we had lost seventeen agents — about twenty percent of the station’s complement — and this made the issue so grave that Myerson personally flew out to Guam to light a fire under me.

I gave him a cool welcome. Myerson has no head for tactics. He was not going to be any material help and I didn’t want him underfoot.

He favored me with his most menacing smile. “I’m not interested in your preferences, Charlie. I want this thing wrapped and I intend to sit on you until you wrap it. I’m getting flak from stations as far away as Beirut and Marseilles and even Mexico City — a flood of trouble coming in from the Far East without any prior warning from China Station. We’ve got to get this network back in operation before the trouble spreads all the way into Langley.”

I gave him a cold eye. “If you can do a better job than I’m doing then I’ll stand aside but otherwise don’t call me — I’ll call you.”

A stringer in Djakarta had his eyes open and spotted Karl Jurgens from the photo he’d memorized. The stringer phoned in from the airport and I was on the runway at Singapore with an armed crew when Karl’s plane landed. We took him into custody and bundled him aboard a cabin cruiser. Out at sea I conducted the interrogation personally. No witnesses; but I had a tape deck rolling.

Karl was urbane and stoic. He managed a bleak smile. “I thought you must have retired years ago — you’re even older than I am. If I’d known they would pit you against me I think I might have refused the job. I never was quite a match for you, Charlie. How did you tumble to me?”

“Legwork.” I wasn’t about to tell him how he’d revealed himself through his attachment to paradise. In a poker game you don’t tell another player that he wiggles his ears when he’s bluffing.

I said, “Who’s footing the bill?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Don’t force me to make tedious threats, Karl.”

“The offer was made by telephone, just as my offers have gone to your agents by phone. I was given a list of names of agents to be subverted.”

“And the visas, passports and millions of dollars?”

“The visas and passports were sent to me at a general delivery post office box in Djakarta. They came in a plain carton. If it matters it was postmarked Hong Kong. As for the millions of dollars in bribe money, it was mostly fictitious. The numbered Swiss accounts exist but they contain only a few hundred francs each.”

“Then you intended to double-cross all these people who thought you were making them rich.”

“I intended nothing, Charlie. I was paid in cash, through the mails, and I’ve done the job I was paid to do. I didn’t ask my employer his intentions. If I had, do you suppose he’d have told me? It was only on my own initiative and from my own curiosity that I inquired into those Swiss accounts. After all, he had to give me the account numbers so that I could pass them on to the defectors.”

“The Mandarin Chinese who made the phone calls for you?”

“An unemployed Formosan actor of no account. I paid him to make the calls. He read from prepared scripts. He knows nothing more than that. Forget him.”

“You’re telling me it’s a dead end?”

He spread his hands and smiled faintly. “You have me in custody. That should solve your problem for the moment.”

“Hardly. Why’d you do it?”

“Money. What else? It’s hardly been stimulating to my ingenuity.”

“Why did they choose you?”

“I suppose I’d let the word go out that I was available for free-lance work. And I flatter myself I still have a reputation for efficiency and secrecy. I cover my tracks fairly well — I doubt any man but you could have tumbled me. In any case I swear to you I have no knowledge of the identity of my employers.”

“You weren’t curious?”

“I was, but I curbed it. Does the postman care who the postmaster is? My job was simply to deliver mail and messages. Menial — beneath me, really, but the money was attractive.” His smile dwindled and departed. “I’m an old man, Charlie. I take what I can get.”

“Describe the voice on the phone.”

“Disguised. Muffled with a handkerchief and artificial falsetto. High pitched, nasal. A man, not a woman.”

“Language?”

“German. Not a native German accent. Possibly English, American, Australian, Canadian, South African — English-speaking at any rate, but the falsetto confused things. I couldn’t be specific.”

“All right. What was the operation designed to cover?”

“I’ve no earthly idea. That’s the truth. I wasn’t told and I didn’t ask.”

“You’ve certainly come down in the world.”

“I’m an old beggar,” he agreed. “You know, oddly enough, I don’t think I’ve broken any laws. Isn’t that curious? At least not to the extent that it could be proved in a court against me. What do you intend doing about me? Is Miles Kendig still in charge of your Security Executive?”

“No. Kendig’s gone. Myerson runs the office.”

Karl made a face. “Him. The ultimate Philistine bureaucrat. Well — what will you do with me?”

“Nothing. Go back to Tahiti and lie on the beach. You’re too old.”

“You’re unkind but truthful.”

“How much were you paid?”

“One hundred thousand marks. About forty thousand dollars. Plus expenses — I spent those. Air fares, so forth.”

“Send an international money order for forty thousand dollars to the UNESCO children’s fund. When you get the receipt send it to me in Langley. If I don’t get it I’ll come to Tahiti after you.”

“What am I to live on?”

“Sorrow,” I told him. “We’ll send you a Care package now and then.”

“You probably ought to kill me.”

“I know,” I said, “but I don’t kill people. I never have and never will. It’s one of the silly crosses I bear. Auf wiedersehn, Karl.”

I met Myerson in Pete Morgan’s office in Hong Kong. The rains were intense. The narrow passages of Kowloon ran with rancid floods. I scraped my wet shoes on Pete’s carpet and tossed my voluminous dripping raincoat on a chair and sank into the couch. “Have them send me up three or four roast beef sandwiches.”

Myerson had commandeered the desk. He lit a Havana. “Do you ever stop eating?”

“It takes a lot of food to sustain all this. You wouldn’t want me to faint from hunger.”

“It might be good for a laugh.” He squinted at Pete. “Any more defections since last week?”

“No, thank God. Things are easing back to normal. We’ve done some recruiting. It looks as if they — whoever they are — decided to abandon the attack rather than find a replacement for Jurgens.”

Myerson growled, “I don’t like leaving a file wide open. I want this one closed.” He glared at me.

Pete said, “How can we close it? We haven’t got any leads.”

I said, “That’s a matter of knowing where to look.”

Myerson blew smoke at me and waited.

Pete flushed. “Look, this whole mess was my responsibility. I can’t solve it but at least I can tender my resignation. It’s the only thing I can do in good conscience.” He dipped an envelope from his inside pocket and tossed it on the desk. “There’s the resignation. Maybe I’ll join old Jurgens in retirement on Tahiti.”

His voice sounded bitter. He got up and went slowly toward the door — too slowly: he was waiting for Myerson to tear up the letter of resignation. It was a bluff, meant to appear as a conscience-salve.

Myerson opened his mouth to stop him but I got in first. “If we refuse to accept that resignation, Pete, what will you do?”

He stopped and favored me with a sour smile. Then he shook his head. “Keep on going out the door, I guess. You’ve got to accept it. I blew this job. Everybody on the station knows it. Everybody in Langley will know it soon enough. How can I go on working in the Agency when everybody has good reason to ridicule me?”

“Would you accept a transfer?”

“I guess not. To tell you the truth I’m sick of the whole back-alley trade. I imagine I’ve been looking for an excuse to quit for a long time.”

“Not to mention the wherewithal,” I remarked.

“What?”

I said, “I’ll accept the idea that you’re sick and tired of the job. I’ll accept the idea that you’ve wanted to get out for quite a while. But you haven’t got enough time in, Pete. You’re ten years too young for a retirement pension. What do you intend to use for money?”

“I’ll get a job.” He mustered a smile. “You can live cheap in Papeete, I hear. Maybe I’ll become a beachcomber.”

Myerson stubbed his cigar out. The room reeked of its noxious fumes.

I said, “Pete, sit down.”

He didn’t move; he only shifted his feet and his bewildered gaze — it fled toward Myerson, who said to me, “What’s on your mind, Charlie?”

I said, “Not long ago we lost our station chief in Moscow, remember? We caught him selling secrets to the Comrades. The turnover in section chiefs is always pretty high, especially in the thankless unglamorous stations like this one. Gruelling work load, indifferent pay, not much patriotism left to bolster a man after the Bay of Pigs and all the assassination attempts and Vietnam and Watergate. It’s turned into a me-first world, hasn’t it. People see cynicism and corruption and greed all around them — they decide it just doesn’t matter any more, there aren’t any good sides or bad sides, the only thing to do is make sure you get your own piece of the action. We’ve seen it right here on this case with poor old Karl Jurgens. Twenty years ago it never would have entered his mind to betray his friends. But times have changed. Nothing’s sacred any more. You agree, Pete?”

Pete exhaled a gust of air. “Yeah, Charlie, I guess I do.”

I said to Myerson, “One of the chief functions of this station is to keep tabs on shipments of opium coming out of China and the Indochinese Montagnard country. Since we shut down the Saigon station that’s been one of the main preoccupations of Pete’s section.”

Myerson said drily, “Is this supposed to come as news to me?”

“It might have rung a bell with you — it did with me — when you mentioned you’d been getting complaints about the lack of East Asian forewarnings in Beirut and Marseilles and Mexico City. That’s one of the principal routes for the heroin traffic into the States.”

Myerson sat up.

I said, “Suddenly a senseless caper knocks off agents on this station — which just happens to have the effect of drying up drug-shipment information all along the route to America, thereby opening up that route to God knows how much heroin traffic — maybe enough to stockpile the dealer honchos with enough drugs to last a year on the street. Is that a coincidence, Pete?”

Pete had nothing to say.

I went back to Myerson. “I don’t know how much the opium people paid him to sabotage his own station. It must have been a hell of a lot of money — enough to finance his early retirement in style. In any case he was able to pay Jurgens out of it, forty thousand dollars, and set up several Swiss accounts, one of which probably is his own and contains the bulk of the money. Maybe he got half a million, maybe as much as a million. They can afford it. The heroin people deal in eight-figure sums.”

Myerson said, “Let me get this straight, Charlie. Are you accusing Pete of blowing his own network?”

“With regret, yes.”

Pete said, “I deny that.”

“Naturally,” I said. “The voice that hired Jurgens over the phone spoke German with an English-speaker’s accent. Jurgens said it could have been an American.”

“Proving nothing,” Pete said.

“I agree. But neither does it rule you out.”

“So?”

I said, “Jurgens was given a list of names of agents to be taken out. Those were the agents whose areas included the routes of the major drug shipments — Hong Kong, Taipei, Djakarta, Singapore and on toward the Middle East and France and Mexico. As chief of station you were the only executive with that information at your fingertips — the names and covers of all those agents. It couldn’t have been anybody else, Pete. You doubled your own agents.”

I turned to Myerson. “He wanted out. Maybe he can’t be blamed for that. But he had to get rich first.”

Pete said, “I deny it. It’s ridiculous.”

Myerson lit another Havana. “In that case you may as well go, Pete. I expect we’re finished with you for the moment.” He picked up Pete’s letter of resignation and put it into his pocket. “Now that we know what to look for we’ll be able to put men on it. I wouldn’t try to withdraw any money from Switzerland if I were you. Sooner or later we’ll find evidence against you and then we’ll come after you.”

“Even if you have to manufacture fake evidence.”

Myerson snarled. “What do you think this is? A game of croquet? You’re all finished, Pete — accept it.”

After Pete left the office I ate my sandwiches. Myerson glowered through his cigar smoke at the dreary rain outside the windows. “He won’t do anything dramatic, will he?”

“No,” I said. “Pete’s a survivor. He’ll keep running as long as he can.”

“Do you want to chase him?”

“Give that job to somebody else. I want to get out where the air’s cleaner.”

“All right.” Myerson certainly is mellowing. “I’ve got a job for you in Kenya...”