“There were really only two main things she was interested in,” Hilliard began.
He wiped his mouth with a napkin and shoved aside a plate with the last crumbs of his lunch. Then he dropped a file folder onto the table filled with maybe fifty pages of documents copied onto blue paper.
Anna was still picking at a salad, with seemingly little appetite. Henry had devoured a double cheeseburger and was working his way through a pile of fries.
A cardinal was singing cheery notes in the nearby woods, and their table was shaded by an umbrella. Nearly everyone else was eating indoors, so they had the patio to themselves.
Hilliard opened the folder.
“The first item was a group of individuals. A small one. This was her list.”
He slid forward a folded sheet of white lined notebook paper, the only item in the folder that wasn’t a copied document. Anna’s mother had printed out three names:
Clark Baucom (code name?)
Edward Stone (aka “Beetle”)
Cryptonym “Lewis”
“That first fellow on the list, Clark Baucom, well, there was quite a bit on him, but that was hardly surprising. He’s one of the few personalities in this outfit who went on to bigger, better things elsewhere.”
“We saw his obit in the Post,” Henry said.
“My mother had a copy of it. We think that’s where she first found out about these archives.”
“His Pond cryptonym, or code name, was ‘Joy.’ Based in Budapest. Joined up with the Pond just after the war ended and the Russians were taking over in Hungary. His big job in ’47 was to smuggle out members of the Hungarian aristocracy before the tanks rolled in. Baucom didn’t stay with Grombach very long, though. Joined the CIA in ’48, and that was the best way possible to burn your bridges with Frenchy, who hated the Bay, as he called it.”
“Who’s this Stone guy, code name Beetle?”
“His name is on the cheat sheet, some operative they hired fairly late in the game, in the early fifties, a fellow with commercial cover based in Vienna. But we couldn’t find more than a few mentions of him. Your mom seemed a little disappointed by that. The first was in one of Grombach’s personnel memos, when he was discussing some new hires in ’52.”
Hilliard flipped through the relevant pages for them as he spoke.
“Then, as you’ll see, there were a couple of Beetle’s field reports—one from Essen, in West Germany, the other from Salzburg, in Austria—but neither was anything special. They’re here, though, if you want to read them later.”
He flipped through another few pages.
“Okay, then. This was the stuff that seemed to intrigue her the most—any and all correspondence having to do with Grombach’s efforts to keep the Pond up and running past its shelf life. Officially it went out of business in ’55. But there are rumblings here and there of him looking for a more secretive way forward. Trying to line up support from his buddies in the business world, or on Capitol Hill. Shadowy references to certain Army generals and diplomatic types who might help. Here’s one example, a letter he sent to a bunch of folks in July of ’54, right after the CIA had made it clear they wouldn’t be renewing the Pond’s contract. Take a look. The money paragraph is down toward the end.”
We are informing our people that this is really a security blackout, and that is definitely the truth. We merely don’t know how long it will have to last, but we do know that our association with the Bay must end. We hope that we may be able to reactivate under new and different auspices the first part of 1955. We hope to do so even if we must do it privately, entirely supported by private funds, and even if we have to go underground even further than we have so far.
“Wow,” Henry said. “Is there a lot of that in here?”
“Dribs and drabs. But the bulk of it is in a strange little collection that Grombach called the ‘Jewelry’ file.”
“Jewelry?”
“Partly because of all the code names he used in that correspondence—Tiffany, for the Department of the Army. Van Cleef and Arpels, with Van Cleef supposedly being some Hungarian. Nobody seems to have a clue as to who Arpels was. Then there are all these other names that no one has yet identified: Mr. S., Mr. N., the Shark. There’s a fellow Grombach calls the Bishop, who may have been a retired admiral. Another name, Durrell, was apparently an Army general. ‘Staying in the jewelry business’ became Grombach’s euphemism for staying in the intelligence game. But with some of this stuff, even if you know the code names it’s all so cloaked and convoluted that half the time you can’t really tell what he’s saying. Your mom loved it, I suppose because it’s so rich with the whiff of conspiracy, and of unresolved actions. Let me show you another typical paragraph, from June of ’55.”
He flipped to another of the blue pages and tapped his finger on the third paragraph.
The only thing I have to suggest as a brand-new idea, but I imagine our ecclesiastical friend would have to check with Mr. van Cleef, is to let Bishop carry the ball in a new and different approach on Durrell. My suggestion is to let Mr. Bishop approach Durrell and tell him he knows of the desires of Arpels and of the reasons for those desires, and of the efforts of Arpels to find out about the organization.
“Now, skip down to this paragraph.” Hilliard poked a sentence farther down the page.
As I see it with the Jones boys still in command here, the only possible chance of a resurrection is away from here and with great quiet, which is exactly the answer provided Durrell can be convinced.
“Care to guess who Grombach meant by ‘the Jones boys’?” Hilliard asked.
“The Dulles brothers?” Henry said.
“Bingo. Allen Dulles was running CIA, John Foster Dulles was secretary of state. Frenchy despised them both, and the feelings were mutual.”
Hilliard heaved with gentle laughter.
“What became of all this?” Anna asked.
“Nothing, obviously. The Pond went out of business right on schedule. The CIA let one or two ongoing ops proceed to their natural conclusion, but even those were wrapped up within a year. Grombach himself went into the corporate security biz. That’s when he must have stashed away all these papers.”
“And what became of all this talk about staying in the jewelry business?”
“It just stopped. He was mentioning it on one day, saying nothing the next. Like it never even existed.”
They pondered that for a few seconds before Anna spoke up.
“But isn’t that exactly what you’d do—clam up and get real quiet—if you’d managed to succeed by taking everything even deeper underground?”
Hilliard smiled.
“Young lady, you think just like your mother.”
He closed the folder and slid it forward for them to take. Then he leaned back in his chair.
“Tell me, if you don’t mind me prying just a little. Any idea of why she found all this material so fascinating?”
Anna started to speak, and then stopped, so Henry picked up the thread.
“For one thing, Baucom was a former lover.”
Anna blushed, making Henry wish he’d used a more delicate word.
“Ah. So that was the personal connection.”
“One of them, anyway,” Anna said.
“You think there were more?”
“Well, maybe these other two names, Lewis and Beetle, this Edward Stone guy.”
“You may be right. Although I didn’t note any warmth or affection when they were mentioned. I was also a little surprised by her interest in the ‘jewelry’ material. I mean, that was in ’54, ’55? She would’ve barely been born, I’m guessing.”
“Born in ’54,” Anna said.
“Yet, it was almost like she believed the Pond was still a going concern. It was like she knew it. That was her whole approach.”
“Did you ever ask what made her so sure?” Henry said.
Hilliard shook his head.
“Why not?”
“Because she told me she was going to take a break for a while to run down some other leads, and then she’d be coming back for more. I always figured I’d be able to ask her later.”
Hilliard sighed deeply. A breeze ruffled the pages in the folder, and the cardinal again cried out cheerfully from the trees.