Thomas inclined forward again, instantly baffled. He was going to point the. finger to Sandler. Not Whiteside.

Patiently, Whiteside repeated, the silence at the table now given an extra dimension of stillness.

"Well" Whiteside buffed with studied casualness, 'the man's been dead for thirty-one years. What I could never understand is how your Central Intelligence Service, sorry, Agency, never managed to learn that for themselves' The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds probably did, thought Hammond, and never told anyone.

Hunter sat back in his chair, his hands folded, one thick finger interlocking with another, glancing toward his own chest as if to indicate he'd known it all along also. Hunter did look like a bear, Thomas noticed. Whiteside's smugness enraged Thomas.

Whiteside raised his eyebrows slightly, saw the stunned expressions around him, scratched his left cheek elegantly, and mused onward.

"Yes," he said reflectively,

"I suppose I do owe the present company an explanation. Correct?

"I a.s.sure you" he began, 'it wouldn't change the current situation the smallest bit."

He turned the calendar back to 1947, a year in which the British Exchecquer was still bedeviled by German pound-sterling notes, printed in Austria during the war. An investigation was in progress, yet doomed to failure. Someone was still printing pound notes. No one knew who. Or where.

"It was April of that year, forty-seven, I recall," said Whiteside, 'when we were still fairly active in Central Europe. We, meaning M.I. 6, of course. We were recruiting Russians. The Iron Curtain had fallen and we wanted people who were behind it. We wanted Russians. But we took what we could get' What they got, what they managed to recruit, was just about anyone who could exchange a useful tidbit of intelligence for a one way ticket to the West.

"Poles, Hungarians, Czechs" continued Whiteside nostalgically, 'we could have set up our own League of Nations in exile, we recruited so many "Why didn't you?" asked Daniels sarcastically "Afraid your Congress wouldn't want to join" Whiteside shot back.

"Touche. May I go on?"

Daniels motioned an open hand to indicate Whiteside could.

"In forty-seven we recruited a Hungarian, man named Walter Szezic. He was a young man then, mid-twenties, and had been in the non-Communist resistance in Austria and Hungary during the war. Fine fellow, really!

"They all are' Thomas intoned.

Whiteside ignored the remark and dwelt on Szezic.

"Szezic stayed in Hungary for three years, until being uncovered in 1950 and being smuggled out in one battered piece. But when recruited he had told several stories, all of which were later confirmed ...

except one.

"There was no way of confirming that lone story. But since it wasn't important to Szezic that he deceive us on that point, and since all the more important information we received from him was true, we took this as the Lord's truth, also."

The story concerned a spy, a man the Russians had planned to slip into the West since before the war. A man not identified by name, but rather by the ident.i.ty he took.

"The spy was run by Moscow," said Whiteside.

"Years in the making; straight out of the KGB building on Dzerzhinsky Square.

But he would have a control in New York, too. He'd be run in the United States and had been trained to a.s.sume the ident.i.ty of a wealthy German-American industrialist" No one said it, but one name bolted into the listeners' minds.

"Sandler," said Whiteside, though it wasn't necessary.

"The spy had memorized every facet of Sandler's life; he'd been given the man's voice, the man's face, practically the man's mind, in that he'd memorized the faces and relationships of everyone Sandler had known before the war. An extraordinary undertaking by our friends the Reds," said Whiteside, not without deep admiration.

Thomas fidgeted nervously, beginning to sense the inevitable implications and consequences of Whiteside's story. Leslie glanced back and forth between Whiteside and Thomas. Hammond spoke.

"Why should we believe any of this?" he asked.

"Perhaps you shouldn't. But proof is available." Whiteside held up a hand.

"Not with me now, unfortunately. No. But I could provide it, if necessary."

Thomas's mind was leaping ahead, to the ident.i.ty of the spy, to the controlling agent in New York. The pieces were fitting together, gliding uncontrollably like the needle of a ouija board.

"Just tell us what the proof is," Thomas interrupted.

Whiteside told. Szezic, after his hasty departure from Hungary in 1950, led M.I. 6 agents to the confirmation of his story.

The German-American industrialist, Sandler, had been instructed eastward after the war by his control, the 'patriotic American" There he was met by Russians and shot summarily. The double took his place.

"Sandler's body was buried in Austria," said Whiteside wryly, 'in a manner fitting a man who'd led a double life. The local Reds built a special coffin for him, one with a false bottom. He was sealed within.

Then when a local peasant died, the local was given the upper deck.

They both went into the ground together. Clever, don't you think? Same principle as the London buses. Who'd think of looking for a missing body in a grave already occupied by another man?"

"Jesus" mumbled Thomas to himself, almost disbelieving the fiendish ingenuity involved.

"Anyway," said Whiteside. when Austria joined the West in 1955 we went to the cemetery. In the dead of night we brought up the coffin, abducted the half of the population whom we desired, and returned the other occupant to his eternal slumber. We took the body back to London. We obtained Sandler's dental chart from his New York dentist-a man who still practices, if' you care to confirm it with him. Or have a tooth fixed. No doubt, it was Sandler. You can even examine the body now, if you wish to come to London."

"Where?" someone asked.

"A churchyard in Earl's Court," grinned Whiteside. He turned to Thomas.

"You've been there. The girl thought to be his daughter is buried right next to him. Wrong name on his tombstone, of course. Couldn't have a real name. But we did think it would be fitting to keep all the important bones in the same general area.

Don't you agree?"

"The parish minister puts up with a lot" grumbled Thomas, remembering the man in the presbytery who'd watched them so intently.

"The parish minister," gloated Whiteside, 'is Szezic' He noted Thomas's surprise and drove home the point.

"We wouldn't put celebrities in just any churchyard, you know."

Whiteside grew deathly serious agaip.

"But I'm off from the most important point" he said.

"Szezictold us why the agent was inserted into Sandler's ident.i.ty. The Russians, he said, had liked the German counterfeiting plans so much that they decided to launch their own scheme with their own master engraver. Undermine the currency of the West. Call into question the West's financial foundations, and you've gone a long way toward shaking the earth out from under our side. Don't you all agree?"

No one disagreed.

"And at worst," he added, 'theyd have a way to finance their postwar intelligence operations in the West' The first attack came on the pound, said Whiteside.

"We had a pretty fair idea who was doing it. We asked for U.S.

cooperation against Sandler, but. couldn get it," he intoned angrily.

He looked at Hammond.