Mudcat pondered his options. He didn’t have many eyes inside Higgins Industries’ Michaud plant, other than his own. And he needed more eyes.
There was only one place in the plant that he himself couldn’t go, but it was the most important place of all. He’d been able to put just one person behind the doors hiding the Carbon Division from him. His operative had valuable skills, but there was only so much snooping around that one person could do without being obvious about it. One person couldn’t pass through every closed door or chat up every worker making classified gadgets, not without getting caught. One operative simply wasn’t enough support to accomplish Mudcat’s mission. He needed somebody else. So far, he had failed to secure that person.
This was an unprecedented failure. Mudcat had amassed considerable expertise in identifying people with potential. His superiors had noticed, and this had kept him in their good graces.
It all came down to finding each target’s soft spots. Then, when the time was right, he poked them. A love of money was the most obvious soft spot—and, in the end, doesn’t everybody love money and want more of what it can buy?—but his targets also needed the ability to deceive everybody around them. Precious few people had the wits to do that. Most of all, his targets needed a sense of adventure that drove them to take risks, just for thrills.
When faced with the right recruit, Mudcat could smell an adventurous soul. At the moment, he had his eye on an orange-haired woman whose eyes were full of thoughts she didn’t share. He sensed that she had the wits to be a great agent if he could find the right words to make her say yes.
Mudcat patrolled New Orleans like a bottom feeder patrolling a muddy river, ready to gulp down any information that served his cause. He had liked the image of the bottom feeder so much that he’d gone to the waterfront and chatted up fishermen, asking the names of the fish that lurked at the bottom of the broad, brown river that carried cargo from the Port of New Orleans to a world at war.
Their tales of the mudcat, a carnivorous fish that grew to the size of a full-grown human being, had intrigued him. He’d listened to the fishers talk until he could say “mudcat” with the varied vowel sounds of speakers from all around southern Louisiana, from Irish Channel neighborhoods to rural Cajun towns to the Ninth Ward. He’d even heard a soft Uptown accent that had made him wonder what twists of fate had led the man from a patrician home to a life of grinding work on docks smeared with fish guts. For a moment, he’d considered recruiting the misplaced man—as an informant, at least—because people who have had money and lost it will often do anything to get it back. And then the smell of last night’s rum had penetrated the odor of fish entrails and explained the man’s hard fall. Mudcat couldn’t risk taking on an operative who wasn’t fully in control of himself, so he’d shoved the idea aside and just listened to the man talk. His dialect was easy on the ear, but not nearly so interesting as the harsh tones of the hardworking people around him.
Mudcat had chatted with the fishers and dockworkers for hours, crouching on a wet dock watching wet men do wet work. The full size and power of the river came home to him there, as he stood at the waterline and looked up at oceangoing vessels. Trees uprooted by an upriver flood floated past the spot where he stood. They dwarfed him, and the ships dwarfed them.
He’d enjoyed his day on the docks. Even better, it had helped him firm up his grasp of the local dialect in both English and French. Losing the last traces of his German accent was going to be a lifelong challenge. Perhaps it was better to say that he would be spending his life learning to submerge his mother tongue, pushing it into the depths of his brain. The German language would always be there at the riverbed of his innermost self, where his subconscious mind would feed on it like a broad, silent mudcat, but hard work and close listening would hammer its sounds and idioms into something that sounded like America.
To be a truly great bottom feeder, a spy needed the improvisational ear of a jazz musician. Self-preservation demanded it.
***
While Mudcat was crouching by the Mississippi River, a man who sometimes called himself Fritz walked through Higgins Industries’ cave-like Michaud plant. He was pretending to work as he gazed up at half-built boats and planes. It was almost unbelievable what people could do when properly motivated. And, by proper motivation, he meant fear. Fear of attack, fear of destruction, fear of violent death—these were the driving forces behind the orgy of construction that had resulted in all of these war machines. Soon, they would roll out of the plant, fully built and ready for battle, and the next crop of war machines would be sown.
Day by day, Fritz watched them come together, memorizing every detail that his superiors would want to know, so that he could go home and commit them to paper, but a stout wall stood between him and the workers of the Carbon Division. He couldn’t breach it. He had placed a single half-witted agent behind those doors, but two eyes were not enough to see all of the things that Fritz needed to know. He needed more eyes, and he needed those eyes to be set into a skull that also housed a functioning brain.
So far, Fritz had failed to secure the agent he needed—eyes, brain, and all—but perhaps his luck was about to turn. There was a woman with a sharp-eyed face that called to him. She kept to herself, which was an excellent quality in an agent, but her silent presence was not sullen. She watched. She considered. Her lively eyes missed nothing. He was aware of her whenever she was near because the flame-colored cloud of her hair drew his eye. Her glorious hair meant nothing in terms of her value as an agent, but if Fritz had a soft spot, it was his deep-seated appreciation for beauty.
Soon the whistle would blow to signal quitting time. Fritz would see her exit the restricted area of the Carbon Division and enter the main part of the plant. He would watch her walk past him, crowned with a golden-red cloud, and he would meditate on how he might convince her to do the things he wanted her to do.