Cambridge, Massachusetts: Friday 30 October
Early that morning, General Gerald Boyd took the train up to Boston to visit his daughter, Taylor, now in her second year at Harvard Law School. They had lunch, and a fudge sundae at Billings and Stover, then went for a walk along the Charles. They were sitting on a bench in Harvard Yard when he got a call from Colonel Lee.
“There’s a new development,” whispered Lee.
“Excuse me, honey,” Boyd told his daughter, smiling apologetically. “This’ll just take a minute.” Standing, he strolled away some fifteen feet and said to Lee, “Now what?”
“I thought you should know the Russians have sent the fingerprints of Rodriguez’s team to Division Thirteen. If they start looking into Rodriguez’s files and see—” The man’s voice cracked.
“Calm down, Colonel.” Boyd squinted up at the banks of heavy white clouds ripe with the promise of snow. Lee was rapidly becoming more of a liability than an asset. If Rodriguez would get his ass back to the States—
“We need to talk,” said Lee.
Boyd glanced over at Taylor. She was slim, like her mother, with fine light brown shoulder-length hair and a dimple that appeared in one cheek as she watched a squirrel grab an acorn and run. Whenever he thought of her, he still pictured the little kid in pigtails he used to take fishing. He had to keep reminding himself she was all grown up now. He said, “All right. I’m tied up the rest of the day, but I can meet you at the Boulder Bridge in Rock Creek Park at 0730 tomorrow morning.” If Rodriguez wasn’t back by then, Boyd would just have to take care of the Colonel himself.
“I’ll be there.”
Boyd slipped his phone away, then walked back toward Taylor, a smile on his face. “How’d you like to drive your old man to the train station?”
Kaliningrad, Russia: Friday 30 October
Jax barely managed to send Matt an urgent request to look into possible links between Kline and Paperclip, before the flight attendant’s warning voice crackled over the intercom and their plane pushed away from the gate.
“Operation Paperclip,” said October, watching him put away his phone. “Tell me about it.”
He glanced at the staid German businessman sitting in the aisle across from them, and kept his voice low. “Paperclip was the code name for a project dreamed up at the end of World War II by Allen Dulles.”
“Who was…?”
“Dulles? He was the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence. Basically, the idea was to sneak Nazi scientists into the United States.”
“Why would the United States want to import Nazis?”
“Because we were already gearing up for a fight with our new rivals, the Russians.”
“Ah. I see.”
“Even before the war was over, both the Americans and the Russians had competing intel teams ready to fan out over the German countryside and grab any kind of scientific booty they could get their hands on. And the biggest prizes of all were the German scientists themselves. At first the U.S. government just took the guys they nabbed back to places like Fort Hunt in Virginia, with the idea of interrogating them and then sending them home. But the more they learned about German advances in everything from rocketry to aeronautics, the more they wanted to keep them.”
“Isn’t that, like, slave labor or something?”
“Sort of. But a lot of these guys had wives and kids in the parts of Germany taken over by the Russians. They struck a deal: they’d work for the Americans if the U.S. government would get their families out of harm’s way.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“The problem was, some of the people they wanted to keep had been real Nazis—I mean Party members. And the U.S. had laws against the immigration of former Nazis. So Dulles and his boys basically drew up fake dossiers on those guys. The really, really bad Nazis had to be smuggled in through the ratlines and given false identities. The program went on for years, even after presidents like Truman and Eisenhower thought it had been shut down.”
“How many scientists are we talking about?”
“The official number is sixteen hundred. But who knows? A lot of the relevant documents are still classified.”
“After sixty years? But…why?”
Jax gave a soft laugh. “The government likes to pretend it classifies stuff for ‘national security’ reasons. But the truth is, most of that shit is kept under wraps because it’s embarrassing—either to some very important people or to the government itself.”
“But Kline wasn’t a nuclear physicist. He was just a doctor. Why would they want him?”
“Because we had a huge chemical and bioweapons program going ourselves. It wasn’t quite as crazy as what happened in Germany under Hitler, but there was some pretty ugly stuff going on.”
He expected her to say, I don’t believe it. Instead, she was silent for a moment, her gaze fixed on the thick white clouds on the other side of the window. When she spoke, her voice was a hushed whisper. “This is starting to sound really, really scary.”
“No shit.”
Washington, D.C.: 31 October, 6:25 A.M. local time
Rodriguez pushed through the doors from Customs and Immigration into a nearly deserted corridor, and put in a call to Boyd.
“It’s about time you got here. Colonel Lee is becoming a problem,” said Boyd, his voice gravelly with annoyance. “He’ll be at Boulder Bridge in Rock Creek Park at 0730. Can you make it?”
Rodriguez glanced at his watch. “I can make it.”