The Cipher

Chapter 9-3

I"ll have their balls for that,But not tonight,I need to get home and get some bloody sleep.He sighed and rose from his chair, felt the muscles in his aching back click, picked up his set of keys to lock the station office and headed for his car. His weekend break was ruined, and in those tired few minutes in the middle of the night he was sick to the back teeth, in fact had had a bellyful, of Vienna, being a spy and getting himself involved in murder mysteries where the victim had had his throat ripped out like a stag that had been gralloched.

* * *

The very next morning, looking refreshed and wearing his best suit and overcoat, Her Majesty"s diplomatic servant the Right Honorable Cecil Rowlands strolled casually along Krummbaumgasse, his destination was the old Karmelitermarkt.

He did his best to fight his way through the busy Christmastime shoppers and keep the rain from his spectacles, which was not an easy task for someone of Rowlands" size and grace. He was more your strongman than your athlete, his wife would say.

If anyone had taken the time to ask this distinguished member of the diplomatic community where he was off to on that fine morning, he would simply have said that he was on a small errand of a personal nature before he began his day"s toils in the British Embassy. If pressed further, he would have confided to his acquaintance that he was on a mission to get back in his wife"s good books. A small, but modestly expensive pre-Christmas gift, to apologize for ruining their weekend together when he had been called back to the "office" to deal with a temporary problem. Some truffles from the specialist truffle seller in the market, he would say. Joyce did so love to cook and it was a rare treat that he was able to afford luxury items.

Of course it was a good story – not true – but a good tale nonetheless.

“Cover, ladies and gentlemen, is important,” he would drum into his field agents. “Always have a good reason for doing anything nefarious. You want to meet an agent at the opera; then I recommend that you at least know your Wagner"s from your Verdi"s, because you can bet your yearly wage that you"ll bump into someone who will chatter about it for days and be a fully accredited aficionado. I"m not saying you have to be an expert, but you at least need to be able to hold a conversation without making anyone suspicious… at least until you get the opportunity to bugger off double quick!”

Why the Karmelitermarkt? Well the most obvious reason was that there was an excellent truffle stall on the far side of the market. The ruse also gave him the opportunity to visit the ABEL dead letter box which was located nearby on the fringes of the market. Its exact location was behind a billboard at ground level. He just hoped that Max Dobos had secured it properly behind the loose wooden panel that held the timber frame together.

He strolled casually, moving through the throng, nodding to his fellow shoppers in greeting or in thanks. He perused the various meat, cheese and coffee stalls. There was nothing hurried about his manner and aside from his duties at the Embassy he looked like a man content to while away the rest of the day exploring the commerce of Vienna.

Rowlands did two rotations of the ABEL site, passing by it to confirm that there was no overt surveillance, then around the block and back for one more pass. A third pass would have been suspicious, shopkeepers and market traders do have a tendency to remember a face that they have seen before. The third and final time would be the emptying of ABEL.

Was the vegetable seller looking at him a bit too closely? That road sweeper – he"d been there an awfully long time, since his second pass in fact? Or what about that couple at the cafe who were drinking their coffee, had they been observing him all along as he passed by the ABEL drop? Were they Russian informants or were they KGB agents running a hostile surveillance operation on a suspected SIS drop site?

In truth, there was no way of knowing and Rowlands knew that when it came down to the wire all the field agent on the ground could do was pray, hope for the best, and take a massive leap of faith that he wasn"t about to be caught or compromised.

The dead drop was within a few feet. He did an awkward duck-shuffle and looked down in mock annoyance at his shoes. He had purposefully loosened his shoe laces this morning when he had set off knowing that they would work themselves free in time. A few more steps and he was finally at the billboard. Not stopping he began to bend in one fluid motion and then the seasoned intelligence officer reached down casually to tie his lace, and when he was sure that there were no observers his fingers explored around the gap between the brick wall and the billboard. It was only a space of roughly four inches, but it was big enough to conceal a decent-sized package.

Nothing! Damn!

He pressed his fingers in further, groping into the crevasse, a bit more, and then… there it was. Roughly the size of a pack of playing cards wrapped in sturdy brown paper and sealed with heavy duty tape and glue. A quick glance around the street revealed no one, and then the package was swiftly placed in his inside coat pocket. A quick tying of the laces and he was up, off and on his way. He spent the next thirty minutes running counter-surveillance maneuvers, just to be sure. Rowlands was an old pro who had done his fair share of shaking off a tail in his long and murky past.

* * *

An hour later Rowlands arrived back at the SIS station. He threw his overcoat into his office and gave strict instructions to his secretary, a Welsh harridan by the name of Eleanor, that he wasn"t to be disturbed for the rest of the day.

He sat in the security room and unpacked the package from the dead drop. “Now then Herr Dobos, let"s see what all this fuss is about.” Rowlands carefully opened the package, removing the tape with small neat cuts with his penknife. Inside was a single sheet of paper, handwritten in English, and a small pool of audio tape.

The note read:

“Recording taken November 1964. Luxembourg. Freelance job. Can give more details once you have listened to the tape. Tape assures my bona fides.”

Recording taken November 1964. Luxembourg. Freelance job. Can give more details once you have listened to the tape. Tape assures my bona fides.He placed it to one side and went to fetch the audio tape player, a big brute of a machine that came complete with headset, from the station equipment cupboard. He locked his office door and set about rigging up the tape in the machine. When it was all connected and tested he took a single piece of paper and a pencil, pressed the PLAY button, closed his eyes and began to listen. His pencil would make a short scribble every now and then, picking out a word or a phrase that interested him.

Thirty minutes later the tape had finished. Rowlands removed the headphones and stared down at the notes on the paper. Dobos had either edited the tape not to include too much detail, perhaps hedging his bets for a better deal later, or the people speaking on the tape were security conscious, thus suggesting that they were indeed professionals. He scribbled out things that he judged unimportant, donned the headset once again and listened to it for a second time.

“Bloody hell,” he said to himself when he"d finished. If the information was accurate and judging by Dobos previous work for them it always had been, then he had inadvertently stepped into the fringes of an American-backed operation. Not just any old operation either, from the sounds of it –a bloody assassination plot.

He now doubted that the Max Dobos murder had been a robbery gone wrong or a gangland affair, as there was just too much coincidence in the timing. Day One: Dobos offers information relating to a series of contract killings. Day Two: Dobos is murdered, violently, and his body searched. There was more to this than he"d expected, and false modesty aside, it was becoming unwieldy and needed to be looked at by people higher up the chain of command.

So, with the winter sun glaring through his office window, he pulled out the station codebook and started very carefully to compose what was to be in the fullness of time, an explosive communiqué to Broadway.