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“I will have nothing further to say about anything,” Orlovsky said. “I would request that I be returned to my cell, but I suspect that would be a waste of my breath.”
“One, we haven’t had our dinner yet, and two, you haven’t seen this,” Cronley said. He took Frade’s message from his pocket and tossed it onto the table. “Read it, Konstantin.”
For a moment, it looked as if Orlovsky was going to ignore the message. Then he unfolded it and glanced at it.
“You do not actually expect me to believe that you would show me a bona fide classified message?” Orlovsky asked.
“I thought he said he wasn’t going to say anything about anything,” Tiny said.
“NKGB officers, Sergeant Dunwiddie, like women, always have the option of changing their minds,” Cronley said. “Isn’t that so, Konstantin?”
Orlovsky shook his head in disgusted disbelief.
“Let me explain the message to you,” Cronley said.
“Wouldn’t that be a waste of time for both of us?”
“Well, chalk it up to professional enrichment,” Cronley said. “Didn’t they teach you in NKGB school that the more you know about your enemy, the better?”
“As I have no choice, I will listen in fascination to your explanation.”
“Great! Thank you so much. At the top there, it says ‘Priority.’ That shows how fast the message is supposed to be transmitted. ‘Priority’ is ahead of everything but ‘Urgent.’ ‘Urgent’ doesn’t get used very often. For example, so far as I know, the last time ‘Urgent’ was used was on the messages that told President Truman the atom bombs we dropped on Japan went off as they were supposed to. Got the idea?”
Orlovsky didn’t reply.
“Next comes the security classification. I’m sure you know what ‘Top Secret’ me
ans. ‘Top Secret Lindbergh’ is a special classification dealing with anything connected with a special project we’re running. You may have heard that we’ve been sending members of Abwehr Ost to Argentina to keep them out of the hands of the NKGB . . .”
“I am a little surprised that you are admitting it,” Orlovsky said.
“Why not? For one reason or another, you’re not going to tell anybody I said that. That next line, ‘Duplication Forbidden,’ means you’re not supposed to make copies of the message. Copies of messages tend to wind up in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. I’m sure you can understand that.
“Next is what we call the signature blocks, who the message is from, when it was sent, how, and to whom. Tex is Colonel Frade, who sent this message via Vint Hill, which is a communications complex in Virginia. I’m sure that you know what Greenwich Mean Time is.”
Orlovsky nodded.
“Polo is Colonel Frade’s deputy, Major Maxwell Ashton the Third. They call him Polo because he spends his off-time in Argentina playing polo. Do they play polo in the Soviet Union?”
“Not so far as I know.”
“Hell of a game. The next line says Altarboy—that’s me—gets a copy at Vatican. That’s what we call Kloster Grünau. You know, because of the religious connection.
“Now, to the message itself. The first paragraph means that Colonel Frade arrived in Washington, D.C., at five in the morning Greenwich time. What it doesn’t say—we’re presumed to know this—is that he took off from Frankfurt, flew to Prestwick, Scotland, then across the Atlantic to Gander, Newfoundland, and from Gander to Washington. He was flying a Lockheed Constellation. You ever see a Constellation, Konstantin?”
“No.”
“Magnificent airplane! Four engines. It can carry forty passengers in a pressurized cabin for four thousand three hundred miles at thirty-five thousand feet at better than three hundred knots. You know what a knot is, right?”
Orlovsky, in a Pavlovian response, nodded.
“Impressive, if true,” he said.
“Well, you play your cards right, Konstantin, and maybe I can get you a ride in one.”
“I think that is highly unlikely.”
“The next paragraph, two, says he’s leaving Washington for Midland at eight o’clock Greenwich time. Midland is in Texas. Colonel Frade and I grew up there. My wife was just buried there, beside her father, who raised Colonel Frade from the time he was an infant . . . Oops, sorry. I forgot that talking about wives, especially dead ones, upsets you—”
