Page 271 of Winter of the World (The Century 2)

"He might do it for me," she said. "If I asked him the right way."

Erik said: "He's that naive?"

She looked defiant. "He's in love with me."

"Oh." Erik was embarrassed at the idea of his mother being involved in a romance.

Carla said: "All the same, we can't do it."

Erik said: "Why not?"

"Because if the Russians win the battle you might die!"

"I'll probably die anyway."

Carla heard her own voice rise in pitch agitatedly. "But we'd be helping the Russians kill you!"

"I still want you to do it," Erik said fiercely. He looked down at the checkered oilcloth on the kitchen table, but what he was seeing was a thousand miles away.

Carla felt torn. If he wanted her to . . . She said: "But why?"

"I think of those people walking down the slope into the quarry, holding hands." His own hands on the table grasped each other hard enough to bruise. "I'll risk my life, if we can put a stop to that. I want to risk my life--I'll feel better about myself, and my country, if I do. Please, Carla, if you can, send the Russians that battle plan."

Still she hesitated. "Are you sure?"

"I'm begging you."

"Then I will," said Carla.

v

Thomas Macke told his men--Wagner, Richter, and Schneider--to be on their best behavior. "Werner Franck is only a lieutenant, but he works for General Dorn. I want him to have the best possible impression of our team and our work. No swearing, no jokes, no eating, and no rough stuff unless it's really necessary. If we catch a Communist spy, you can give him a good kicking. But if we fail, I don't want you to pick on someone else just for fun." Normally he would turn a blind eye to that sort of thing. It all helped to keep people in fear of the displeasure of the Nazis. But Franck might be squeamish.

Werner turned up punctually at Gestapo headquarters in Prinz Albrecht Strasse on his motorcycle. They all got into the surveillance van with the revolving aerial on the roof. With so much radio equipment inside it was cramped. Richter took the wheel and they drove around the city in the early evening, the favored time for spies to send messages to the enemy.

"Why is that, I wonder?" said Werner.

"Most spies have a regular job," Macke explained. "It's part of their cover story. So they go to an office or a factory in the daytime."

"Of course," said Werner. "I never thought of that."

Macke was worried they might not pick up anything at all tonight. He was terrified that he would get the blame for the reverses the German army was suffering in Russia. He had done his best, but there were no prizes for effort in the Third Reich.

It sometimes happened that the unit picked up no signals. On other occasions there would be two or three, and Macke would have to choose which to follow up on and which to ignore. He felt sure there was more than one spy network in the city, and they probably did not know of each other's existence. He was trying to do an impossible job with inadequate tools.

They were near the Potsdamer Platz when they heard a signal. Macke recognized the characteristic sound. "That's a pianist," he said with relief. At least he could prove to Werner that the equipment worked. Someone was broadcasting five-digit numbers, one after the other. "Soviet intelligence uses a code in which pairs of numbers stand for letters," Macke explained to Werner. "So, for example, 11 might stand for A. Transmitting them in groups of five is just a convention."

The radio operator, an electrical engineer named Mann, read off a set of coordinates, and Wagner drew a line on a map with a pencil and rule. Richter put the van in gear and set off again.

The pianist continued to broadcast, his beeps sounding loud in the van. Macke hated the man, whoever he was. "Bastard Communist swine," he said. "One day he'll be in our basement, begging me to let him die so the pain will come to an end."

Werner looked pale. He was not used to police work, Macke thought.

After a moment the young man pulled himself together. "The way you describe the Soviet code, it sounds as if it might not be too difficult to break," he said thoughtfully.

"Correct!" Macke was pleased that Werner caught on so fast. "But I was simplifying. They have refinements. After encoding the message as a series of numbers, the pianist then writes a key word underneath it repeatedly--it might be Kurfurstendamm, say--and encodes that. Then he subtracts the second numbers from the first and broadcasts the result."

"Almost impossible to decipher if you don't know the key word!"

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