Frederick Forsyth - The Odessa File

It was at eight that evening that the lawyer in Nuremberg thought he had better ring Bayer and make sure the refugee Kolb had arrived safely. It was Bayer’s wife who answered.

“Oh, yes, the young man. He and my husband have gone out to dinner somewhere.”

“I just rang to make sure he had arrived safe and sound,” said the lawyer smoothly.

“Such a nice young man,” burbled Frau Bayer cheerfully. “I passed him as he was parking his car. I was just on my way home from the Hospital Visitors Committee meeting. But miles away from the house. He must have lost his way. It’s very easy, you know, in Stuttgart, so many dead ends and one-way streets-.”

“Excuse me, Frau Bayer,” the lawyer cut in. “The man did not have his Volkswagen with him. He came by train.”

“No, no,” said Frau Bayer, happy to be able to show superior knowledge.

“He came by car. Such a nice young man, and such a lovely car. I’m sure he’s a success with all the girls with a-.”

“Frau Bayer, listen to me. Carefully, now. What kind of a car was it?”

“Well, I don’t know the make, of course. But a sports car. A long black one, with a yellow stripe down the side-” The lawyer slammed down the phone, then raised it and dialed a number in Nuremberg. He was sweating slightly.

When he got the hotel he wanted he asked for a room number. The phone extension was lifted, and a familiar voice said, “Hello.”

“Mackensen,” barked the Werwolf, “get over here fast. We’ve found Miller.”

FRANZ BAYER was as fat and round and jolly as his wife.

Alerted by the Werwolf to expect the fugitive from the police, he welcomed Miller on his doorstep when he presented himself just before eight o’clock.

Miller was introduced briefly to his wife in the hallway before she bustled off to the kitchen.

“Well, now,” said Bayer, “have you ever been in Wurttemberg before, my dear Kolb?”

“No, I confess I haven’t.”

“Ha, well, we pride ourselves here on being a very hospitable people. No doubt you’d like some food. Have you eaten yet today?” Miller told him he had had neither breakfast nor lunch, having been on the train all afternoon.

Bayer seemed most distressed. “Good heavens, how awful. You must eat. Tell you what, we’ll go into town and have a really good dinner…. Nonsense, my boy, the least I can do for you.” He waddled off into the back of the house to tell his wife he was taking their guest out for a meal in downtown Stuttgart, and ten minutes later they were heading in Bayer’s car toward the city center.

It is at least a two-hour drive from Nuremberg to Stuttgart along the old E 12 highroad, even if one pushes the car hard. And Mackensen pushed his car that night. Half an hour after he received the Werwolf’s call, fully briefed and armed with Bayer’s address, he was on the road. He arrived at half past ten and went straight to Bayer’s house.

Frau Bayer, alerted by another call from the Werwolf that the man calling himself Kolb was not what he seemed to be and might indeed be a police informer, was a trembling and frightened woman when Mackensen arrived. His terse manner was hardly calculated to put her at her ease.

“When did they leave?”

“About a quarter to eight,” she quavered.

“Did they say where they were going?”

“No. Franz just said the young man had not eaten all day and he was taking him into town for a meal at a restaurant. I said I could make something here at home, but Franz just loves dining out. Any excuse will do—”

“This man Kolb. You said you saw him parking his car.

Where was this?” She described the street where the Jaguar was parked, and how to get to it from her house.

Mackensen thought deeply for a moment. “Have you any idea which restaurant your husband might have taken him to?” he asked.

She thought for a while. “Well, his favorite eating place is the Three Moors restaurant on Friedrichstrasse,” she said. “He usually tries there first.” Mackensen left the house and drove the half-mile to the parked Jaguar. He examined it closely, certain that he would recognize it again whenever he saw it.

He was of two minds whether to stay with it and wait for Miller’s return. But the Werwolf’s orders were to trace Miller and Bayer, warn the Odessa man and send him home, then take care of Miller. For that reason he had not telephoned the Three Moors. To warn Bayer now would be to alert Miller to the fact that he had been uncovered, giving him the chance to disappear again.

Mackensen glanced at his watch. It was ten to eleven. He climbed back into his Mercedes and headed for the center of town.

In a small and obscure hotel in the back streets of Munich, Josef was lying awake on his bed when a call came from the reception desk to say a cable had arrived for him. He went downstairs and brought it back to his room.

Seated at the rickety table, he slit the buff envelope and scanned the lengthy contents. It began:

Celery: 481 marks, 53 pfennigs.

Melons: 362 marks, 17 pfennigs.

Oranges: 627 marks, 24 pfennigs.

Grapefruit: 313 marks, 88 pfennigs….

The list of fruit and vegetables was long, but all the articles were those habitually exported by Israel, and the cable read like the response to an inquiry by the German-based representative of an export company for price quotations. Using the public international cable network was not secure, but so many commercial cables pass through Western Europe in a day that checking them all would need an army of men.

Ignoring the words, Josef wrote down the figures in a long line. The five-figure groups into which the marks and pfennigs were divided disappeared. When he had them all in a line, he split them up into groups of six figures. From each six-figure group he subtracted the date, February 20, 1964, which he wrote as 20264. In each case the result was another six-figure group.

It was a simple book code, based on the paperback edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary as published by Popular Library of New York. The first three figures in the group represented the page in the dictionary; the fourth figure could be anything from one to nine. An odd number meant column one, an even number column two. The last two figures indicated the number of words down the column from the top. He worked steadily for half an hour, then read the message through and slowly held his head in his hands.

Thirty minutes later he was with Leon in the latter’s house. The revenge-group leader read the message and swore. “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I couldn’t have known.”

Unknown to either man, three tiny fragments of information had come into the possession of the Mossad in the previous six days. One was from the resident Israeli agent in Buenos Aires to the effect that someone had authorized the payment of a sum equivalent to one million German marks to a figure called Vulkan “to enable him to complete the next stage of his research project.” The second was from a Jewish employee of a Swiss bank known habitually to handle currency transfers from secret Nazi funds elsewhere to pay off Odessa men in Western Europe; it was to the effect that one million marks had been transferred to the bank from Beirut and collected in cash by a man operating an account at the bank for the previous ten years in the name of Fritz Wegener.

The third was from an Egyptian colonel in a senior position in the security apparat around Factory 333, who, for a substantial consideration in money to help him prepare a comfortable retirement, bad talked with a man from the Mossad for several hours in a Rome hotel. What the man had to say was that the rocket project was lacking only the provision of a reliable teleguidance system, which was being researched and constructed in a factory in West Germany, and that the project was costing the Odessa millions of marks.