There was a very brief and indistinct flash of white in the darlaiess as though she had just grinned. “Let’s get one thing straight,” she said. “I know about Conroy, but he’s not why I’m here.”
“But you just said—”
“Sure, but wait a moment, Commander. You don’t have the picture… let me give it to you in full, right?”
“Right,” he agreed, “but make it fast. We haven’t all night.”
There was another longish pause before she went on again, and when she did so she seemed to have brought herself under control. “I have a hook-up with CIA, but mainly I work for the FBI on crimes you might call international in scope. Nothing to do with Interpol exactly, but — you know — special duties. Well… one of those international crimes is gold smuggling.”
“Gold smuggling!” he echoed. Wicks and Fawcett? Was that what Major Loga had been after, too? “So that’s what’s in the air, is it?”
“Sure — and that’s what I was sent over on. There’s one hell of a lot of gold leaving the States illegally. That’s not too bright for our economy wherever it goes, but even worse, most of it is finding its way into Russia.” She stopped again, catching her breath as if more pain had come to her, then she went on courageously, “Officially, at any rate, the Soviet Government’s just as anxious to stop it as we are. They don’t want a black market in gold — or so they say. Frankly, we don’t believe them, and I guess you can’t blame us. In any case, neither we nor they seem to get any real place in stopping it. Trouble is, we haven’t been able to collect any conclusive evidence so far, and again there’s this point that we can’t be absolutely certain the Soviet’s on the level in saying they want to stop it. The theory back home is this — if the Soviet Union can corner a supply of gold over the years there’ll be a time when they’ll be so goddam flush with it, as compared with the West, they’ll be able to use it to smash what’s left of our Western economy — upset the whole balance, if you follow.”
“Go on.”
She stirred in his arms. “Well… I was sent in to see what I could pick up about agents and fences inside Russia and the satellite countries. We believe the Soviet Government themselves may be doing the buying through undercover agents.”
“So you aren’t here by permission of Moscow?”
She said scornfully, “Grow up. Moscow doesn’t know a thing about this.”
Shaw looked down at the vague blur of her mud-covered outline. Sardonically, he asked, “Then what were you doing with Major Loga, back in Poznan? If the USSR doesn’t know about you, how come you’re so matey with the secret police of a Communist satellite state?”
She was smiling again. “In the first place, that wasn’t Loga you saw me with… and you’ll admit I wasn’t taking any special precautions to avoid being seen, right? That was just a cop — with orders to take me to Loga. I was being hauled in for further questioning for all that cop or anyone else knew, and only Loga and I know what took place at headquarters.” She paused. “You see, Loga’s a part-time US agent working for the Central Intelligence Agency—”
“Loga is?”
“Sure,” she told him, “and he’s not the only one in his line, and don’t tell me you British don’t have a few the same! I guess there’s no time now for details, but he hates the Russians’ guts and we pay him well. Dam well — in dollars, in the States. He wants to get over to the West… right now, he’s kind of doing his apprenticeship. CIA’s guaranteed him and his family safe escort out of Poland the moment things look like catching up on him, and entry to the United States is fully guaranteed by the State Department under a gold-plated directive from a certain high-up place. Him and others. Well, that night in Poznan he passed on a few things our security services wanted to know, and told me he’d been forced to search us all under orders from above.”
“Why? What did Loga’s bosses suspect?”
“Well, not the presence of Conroy if that sets your mind at rest. Gold smugglers. Britishers — who we believe are running the stuff out of UK after it comes in from the States, and into Russia from there.”
“Wicks and Fawcett?”
“Dead on target, Commander! Which is why those two were hauled in for questioning. Loga warned me they might be, and he also said that if the authorities in Warsaw couldn’t make anything stick they’d let them go and use them as bait for the bigger boys, which suited us fine, so long as—”
“Maybe. But how does that tie in with your theories that the Communists aren’t on the level in saying they’re trying to stop the racket?”
She said, “Every now and again they put on a show of co-operation. This seems to have been one of those times — but they’d have made dam sure they never got to the big boys.” She added, “The FBI would have expected me to, of course. Well, anyway… later, after we’d left Warsaw, someone must have changed his mind and decided to bring those two guys in as a kind of sacrifice to us — maybe just in case they did lead to the big fish if they were left on the loose!”
“And the Russian authorities hoist with their own petard,” Shaw murmured. “I suppose Wicks and Fawcett suspected just that and decided not to wait when Pope announced the road block.” He hesitated. “All the same, it’s my own belief those two may have been after something a bit more precious than gold. Or shall I say — someone.”
“Come again?”
He said, “Comrade General Kosyenko. You see, I’ve just a suspicion one or other of them could turn out to be Conroy, or at any rate they could be working with him. What you tell me doesn’t entirely persuade me to jettison that theory. Gold could be just a cover.”
“Oh sure!” She was recovering fast, and he was relieved to note it. “Cover that got them arrested, and darn near held indefinitely?”
Shaw laughed. “Believe me, I’ve known far odder propositions pay off! They were just unlucky. Gold smuggling could even be their main business and they were killing two birds… in fact it could all fit in very nicely. As gold smugglers they’d have just the right work of ready-made set-up — agents, escape routes, and so on — to use as a base of operations for planning and directing the killing. They’d be able to call upon all the help they needed inside Russia — don’t you see?”
“I guess I do…”
“And now,” he said, “There’s just one more thing — how do you come into the Conroy affair?”
She didn’t answer straight away, then she said hesitantly, “I don’t, not really. I hate to admit this, but someone at headquarters slipped up. Left a file lying around. I read it.”
“The report on Conroy?”
“Yes.”
“But London’s report wouldn’t have reached Washington till after you’d left to join the coach, my dear Virginia!”
She said, “I wouldn’t know about that.”
“You mean your people had heard about the Conroy business — independently of us?”
“It looks that way, doesn’t it? As I said, I really wouldn’t know. But I did get a look at that file.”
“What was in it?”
“Just the bare facts as known,” she told him. “What Conroy meant to do. Nothing else. Nothing seems to be known about the man, other than that he could have become a US citizen.”
“But look — my name couldn’t have been mentioned in this report!”
“No,” she said, “it wasn’t, but I did get a message back in Berlin that you were joining the party. No explanation given, but it checked with that file I’d seen.”
“Why did they tell you about me?”
He felt her shrug. “Could be just so’s I knew who was who, I guess. Or maybe so I could help out if necessary, if the time came. Which,” she added, “I reckon somehow it has, don’t you?”