“Spell Venona.”
“What?”
“Just do it?”
“V-e-n-o-n-a.”
O’Brien stared hard at Miller. “How’d you know about the U-boat?”
“Navy knew another one was out there. They’d radioed us. We told them they could surrender at Mayport near Jacksonville, but when I heard they had two Japs aboard, two who would have committed suicide had the Germans formally surrendered, I instructed them to drop off the Japanese on a remote strip of beach. They had information I needed.”
“What happened to them?”
“They were eventually executed.”
“How convenient. What about the U-235?”
“We figured they were carrying some, just like the sub that we took in Portsmouth. German Admiral Otto Heinz spoke English. I told him to off-load his cargo with the Japanese south of Fort Matanzas. Bury the stuff, and we’d take it from there.”
“Why was a German shot and buried in the hole?”
“One of Heinz’s men protested. Said he couldn’t surrender. He was silenced.”
“Why was their sub hit with depth charges?”
“Because of Billy Lawson. He saw too much. We didn’t know who he had spoken to before he was killed, but he became, as they say today, collateral damage.”
O’Brien held back his anger as he watched the old, arrogant man sip the expensive liquor, eyelids half closed.
O’Brien said, “What I do know without a doubt is, it wasn’t about the war, the one in ‘45 or the approaching Cold War. Power was your drug of choice so that you and others like you could run amuck in the world. Did J. Edgar Hoover know, or was he in on it?”
“Hoover told President Truman what he wanted Truman to hear.”
“So you drift along three decades, about ready to retire until a young agent named Mike Gates trains under you. The poetic justice comes when Borshnik’s son manages to get in the game with Gates and tips him his cards. All Gates has to do, at that point, is blackmail you. Figures a guy like you-never married, no children, probably has stashed away enough of the motherland money to live well without raising suspicion. FBI fakes your death and obit. Knowing you’re off everyone’s radar, Gates taps you for hush money. He continues his pen pal relationship with Borshnik junior, and along comes the buried treasure, the HEU when my crew stumbles across it.”
Miller swirled the scotch in the bottom of the glass. “You never told me your name. I thought you were delivering groceries, but you just delivered a death sentence.”
“Six decades too late.”
“Your name?”
“O’Brien, Sean O’Brien.”
“Mr. O’Brien, I suppose you just caught the oldest spy in our nation’s history. And I was beginning to think I’d take it to my grave. All this time, no one really knew.”
“Gates knew.”
“But he didn’t learn it on his own. As you just said, he was tipped off. You managed to discover him, too. Gates would have gotten caught, sooner or later.” Miller sipped his drink. “When you’re not delivering groceries, what do you do?”
“I fish, but I’m not very good at it.”
“Let’s see how good you are at proving all this. I won’t live long enough to be brought to trial, not that you have anything tangible. I know you’re not wearing a wire. The T-shirt, shorts. No place for it. So what you heard was the hallucinogenic ramblings of an old man taking morphine washed down with very fine scotch. Maybe you’ll have better luck with Gates. Too bad I won’t be here to see that. He’s an incompetent idiot.”
O’Brien unclipped the cell phone from the back of his belt, adjusted the speaker phone button and asked, “Dave, did you get that?”
“Loud and clear. All recorded in digital sound.”
Robert Miller stared at the cell phone. The light flickered and faded from his eyes. They became hard, the cataracts like two diffused crescent moons floating just beneath the veiled surface of a turquoise sea.
“Dave,” O’Brien shouted. “If you spell Venona backwards you get a-n-o-n-e-v. Anonev.com is the website where we saw the hostiles holding a knife to Jason’s throat.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
It was almost ten when O’Brien returned to the marina. Nick Cronus, bottle of beer in one hand and a long fork in the other, was turning a steak over on his small grill perched in the cockpit. O’Brien could see him chatting with Max like she could understand every word.
Nick looked up though the thick smoke and poured some beer on the coals to douse flames. “Sean, where the hell you been? Man, you look like shit. When’s the last time you slept?”
Max barked and ran to where Sean was stepping from the dock into the cockpit. She danced around O’Brien’s legs, tail blurring. He bent down and lifted Max. She ran her tongue over his unshaven face. “Is Dave on his boat?”
“Saw him about an hour ago. He looks like somebody told him his ex-wife is in town. What’s gonna happen? We got no idea if Jason’s still on God’s earth.”
O’Brien scratched Max behind the ears as she watched the steak cooking.
“Why are you cooking so late?”
“Couldn’t eat earlier with all this stuff goin’ on … worried ‘bout Jason.”
“Me, too. Thanks for keeping an eye on Max.”
“No problem. Women love her, especially the outdoors types, you know?”
“I have to talk with Dave.”
“How ‘bout a steak?”
“Don’t have time.”
O’Brien stepped on Gibraltar’s cockpit and heard jazz coming from the open sliding-glass door.
“Come on in, Sean,” Dave said. “Hello, Max.”
O’Brien stepped into the salon, eyes taking a second to adjust to the reduced light. Dave was hunkered over his laptop, staring at text on the screen. He leaned back and looked above the top of his reading glasses. “I’ve been digging in a few Agency drawers and discovered some Yuri Volkow socks mated with Boris Borshnik socks amongst the soiled underwear.”
“What’d you find?”
“After listening to Miller’s confession, I started scratching at old files. By the way, here’s a flash drive copy of your conversation with him. Your cell had amazing clarity inside that condo.” Dave lifted a flash drive off his desk and handed it to O’Brien. “Ivan Borshnik, father of the man holding Jason, spent seven years undercover in the states. He, like the German would-be saboteurs caught in ‘42 after they disembarked from the two U-boats, got justice in front of a military tribunal. The only witness in Borshnik’s case was none other than Robert Miller, whose testimony nailed the coffin for Borshnik. Verdict was delivered in less than fifteen minutes. He was executed three days later.”
“Does it say anywhere in your CIA sock drawer how much money Borshnik paid Miller, ostensibly the FBI, for the HEU?”
“No. Here’s how a guy like Robert Miller could manipulate the system. The system was all about finding communists, the witch-hunt fire that Joseph McCarthy brought to a boil. Miller was acting as a double agent in the early saber rattling rounds of the Cold War. Now we know he indeed was a real double agent. Stalin, one never to trust Americans, had spies coming out of the woodwork over here. The Venona Project, that Miller alluded to, was a secret program, a precursor of the NSA, where our best cryptographers deciphered Soviet cables trying to attach real identities to fake names. They used the cover name of Kapian for President Roosevelt. The Manhattan Project was labeled Eormoz. We managed to catch a few covert operatives. They included people like Alger Hiss and Klaus Fusch.”
“Class acts.”
“Indeed. Young Congressman Richard Nixon, acting on information from the FBI, pushed for indictments, especially in the Hiss case. But it was the husband and wife spy team of Jules and Ethel Rosenberg who got the death sentence. They were the only Americans executed as Soviet spies during the Cold War. Both were strapped to the electric chair, as was Ivan Borshnik. He’d been in the states, undercover, as a record producer, working with some of the Big Band and jazz artists.”