It wasn’t Henry’s first trip to the National Archives, so he was prepared for the majesty of the vast reading room, which overlooked a forest through a curving wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. The holdings were a wonderland of undiscovered secrets and hidden treasures, there for the taking by anyone curious and dogged enough to dig them out. Anna was suitably impressed.
“Who wouldn’t want to work here? Any idea where we should start?”
“Over there,” Henry said, leading her toward a narrow, glass-walled room where a few researchers and archivists sat a tables, filling out requests for the next round of “pulls” from the many corridors of documents stored on the floors above and below. “There’s bound to be a resident expert on this stuff. Or let’s hope so. Otherwise we’re in for a real slog.”
Before leaving Poston they’d gone back into Anna’s mother’s office to take another, closer look at the ugly snow globe from Paris, if only because CDG’s final message had seemed to assign it some sort of significance. They blew off the dust, turned it over, tapped the base for any signs of a hollowed-out space, and peered through the glass for any possible clues that might be gleaned from the kitschy model of the Eiffel Tower and all those plastic snowflakes, suspended in water. Nothing.
They’d then checked online about the Pond materials during the two-hour drive to College Park, and had been daunted by the sheer volume of materials that awaited them—eighty-three boxes, filed under Record Group 263, the holdings of the CIA. A staffer directed them to a reference guide for the Pond materials, but said they probably wouldn’t make much headway without assistance.
“The guy you need is Larry Hilliard,” she said, pointing across the room toward a big fellow with a slight potbelly, in khakis and a polo shirt. “Good luck, though. He’s pretty busy.”
Hilliard was seated at a long table, flipping through a thick leather-bound volume, totally absorbed. Henry cleared his throat, but Hilliard kept on turning the pages.
“Excuse me. You’re Larry Hilliard?”
He sighed and looked up. Milk chocolate skin, hair graying at the temples, gold wire-rim glasses. His eyes were a little on the sleepy side, yet they shone with curiosity and a touch of impatience. The overall impression was that of a docile bear who had just emerged from hibernation deeply hungry, only to be interrupted in his foraging.
“And you are?”
“Henry Mattick. We’re interested in the Pond materials.”
“You mean the Grombach archive.”
“Grombach?”
“Colonel John ‘Frenchy’ Grombach. That’s who started the Pond and ran it till its dying breath.”
“In ’55?”
“Well, at least you know that much.”
“And not a whole lot more.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to navigate alone. For a few days, anyway. I’m working under a deadline, but I’ll be happy to authorize your records requests. Just bring them over when you’ve filled them out, you and your assistant here.”
“I’m not his assistant. He works for me.”
“Whatever you say, Ms….?”
“Shoat. Anna Shoat.”
He stared at her. For the first time since approaching him, they had his undivided attention, and when he next spoke his voice was almost reverential.
“Any relation to Helen Shoat?”
Anna reached into her jeans pocket for her mom’s research card and handed it to him.
“I’m her daughter.”
He shut the heavy volume and looked at her closely.
“Yes. I see the resemblance. Let’s take this to my office.”
Hilliard led them to a cubicle at the opposite end of the room. They sat facing him across a cluttered desk.
“I’d offer coffee, but you know the rules up here.” He shook his head in amazement. “Your mother was an impressive woman. It’s always a pleasure working with people who have that much enthusiasm. I gathered she also had some sort of personal connection to the material. Then when I heard about what happened…” His voice trailed off.
“It’s all right,” Anna said. “You can talk about it.”
“I was just going to say how sorry I was. Shocked, too.”
“We were all shocked.”
Hilliard briefly bowed his head.
“What can I do for you, then? Are you looking to pick up where she left off?”
“Actually, we didn’t even know she’d come here until a few days ago.”
“What we could use first,” Henry said, “is a little background on how this stuff even came to light. The story we saw said it was locked away in some barn?”
“Yes. It had moved around from one place to another for years, mostly because Grombach never wanted any outsiders getting their hands on it. After he died in ’82, everybody pretty much forgot about it. Sort of like the Pond itself.”
“I know I’d never heard of it,” Henry said.
“That’s the way Grombach wanted it. Frenchy was a strange bird. Born in New Orleans, his father was French. West Point, class of ’23, although he got kicked out. A good boxer. Fenced, played football, polo. Commissioned into the Army as a second lieutenant, where, oddly enough, he ended up doing some work with the NYPD and FBI. Dabbled in coaching for the Olympics. Kind of a man for all seasons, and a big-time anticommie.
“So, then. The war began. And in ’42 some general from Army Intelligence decided that he hated the brand-new OSS—the spy org that eventually morphed into the CIA—and wanted to set up his own intel network, even apart from Army G-2. He picked Grombach to run it. Not on his own, but hand in hand with a lot of big multinationals that kicked in money, office space, and commercial cover for agents and operatives. Companies like U.S. Rubber, American Express, Philips, Remington Rand, Chase Bank. The Pond was sort of a public-private hybrid, and Grombach liked that just fine.”
“Were they any good?”
“Depends on who you ask. Grombach would tell you they were the greatest, and once the war ended he wanted to keep the whole thing going. Of course, the OSS wanted to keep going, too, and a few years later it won the power struggle, and pivoted straight from fighting Hitler to fighting Stalin. But, if anything, Grombach’s people had started fighting the Cold War earlier. He was raising hell about commie infiltrators even before Hitler was dead. And not long after the war he set up a private channel of communication with Senator Joe McCarthy and some of the other big red-baiters on Capitol Hill.”
“What finally put him out of business?”
“The CIA. They signed up the Pond as a contractual contributor after the war. But Frenchy and the CIA never got along worth a damn, so in ’55 Allen Dulles pulled the plug on them. Grombach didn’t go down without a fight, and there was a lot of back-and-forth about trying to keep it going, maybe by taking it deeper underground, with more corporate support. That’s just a fraction of the material here, but I mention it because it was one of the angles your mother was most interested in. That, plus Grombach’s obsession for code words.”
“Code words?” Henry said.
“He had a mania for it. Not just for agents and ops, but for cities, countries, public figures, departments of the government. You name it, Grombach had a code word for it, and he used them all in his correspondence, which can make for pretty crazy reading unless you know what the heck he’s talking about. Which reminds me…”
He raised a finger in the air and swiveled his chair toward a filing cabinet. He opened the drawer, rummaged around, and pulled out a stapled sheaf of papers that he tossed on the desk. The title was in caps: GROMBACH CRIB SHEET. It was a glossary for the code names and buzzwords Grombach regularly employed.
“A historian who’s researching a book came up with this, and kindly let me make a copy. Nineteen damn pages, double-spaced. Boy, did your mother’s eyes ever light up when she saw it. In fact…”
Hilliard paused to look down at the floor. Then he cleared his throat.
“Yes?” Anna prompted.
“I was just going to say you could keep this particular copy, because it belonged to her. To your mother. I kept it here so she wouldn’t have to check it in through security every damn visit. And, frankly, because for whatever reason she never seemed all that comfortable about taking any copies home with her. She never said why, and I never asked. So I ended up keeping quite a few items for her. Anyway…”
He handed it to Anna.
“As you’ll see, she circled the words that interested her the most. She also made a little list of her favorites, right up there at the top of the first page.”
“Yes.” Anna began reading from it. “ ‘The Bay, the Lake, the Zoo, Effies, Jack, the Hump, the Vee People.”
“That’s right. She almost laughed when she saw those. The Bay was the CIA, the Lake was the War Department, or Pentagon now. The Zoo was the State Department, the Effies were the FBI, and Jack was good old J. Edgar Hoover himself, another big-time buddy of Frenchy Grombach’s, partly because they both hated the OSS and CIA. The Hump was Capitol Hill. The Vee people was a reference to Philips, the company I mentioned earlier, one of Grombach’s corporate sponsors. It was Dutch, and I think its full name was Philips N.V.”
“Why’d she zero in on those?” Henry asked.
“She never said, but I got the idea they were something that had been bugging her for years.”
“One thing I can tell you,” Anna said, “is that she used to work for the CIA. Way back in 1979.”
Hilliard’s mouth dropped open. Then he laughed aloud, while shaking his head in amazement.
“I’ll be damned.”
“You truly had no idea?”
“None whatsoever. My guess was that someone in her family might have been involved with Grombach. But the idea that she was in the same business? Granted, with a whole different outfit, but still…” He shook his head again. “She hid it well.”
“If it’s any consolation, I was more surprised than you were. Not a clue until the week after she died, when they called about a severance check for her two years of service.”
“Still, you said 1979? That was decades after the Pond closed shop. Wonder what got her interested?”
“You said a second ago that you kept some other items of hers?”
His smile turned sheepish.
“We don’t offer that service for all researchers. But, like I said, she was always reluctant to take anything with her. So whenever she made copies, she left them behind.”
“Can you show us?”
“Be happy to. In fact, it’s funny you’d be here today at all. I was just thinking about that stuff, wondering if I should throw it out. So it’s all yours, if you want it. There isn’t all that much, so if you’d like I can guide you through it. Probably wouldn’t take more than an hour or two.”
“That would be great,” Anna said. “Thank you.”
Hilliard checked his watch.
“It’s getting on toward one o’clock. Are you two hungry?”
“Now that you mention it,” Henry said. The only thing in his stomach was the cup of coffee from early that morning, and he was already running low on energy.
“We’ve got a pretty decent cafeteria. Why don’t we grab some grub and take her pages out on the patio. That’s where she liked to take her breaks, and it’s as pleasant a spot as any.”