Ezra Prentice sat in a faceless, bare-furnished apartment on the Manhattan's West Side, in front of Sullivan, his security chief. The air was dank, with the smell of dust and idleness. This was only one of a dozen such of the so-called "safe houses" that had been installed by Ezra, frugal sites out of the inquiring eye and possible eavesdropping of Kykuit or his business offices. This is where business now occurred.
The subject of their conversation was the brilliant physicist Klaus Fuchs, the committed Soviet spy, a cancer that Ezra had willingly allowed to grow at the very heart of his most secret project.
"No, we cannot do away with him," declared Ezra, his voice toneless, face impassive. He was repeating the cold, hard judgment he had reached days prior. "The Oppenheimer teams are in that critical stage of the design for the implosion. The mathematical contributions of Fuchs, in Oppenheimer's own reports, are irreplaceable. Doing away with him now would mean a half-year delay. We cannot afford half a year."
Sullivan, a man accustomed to immediate and clear answers, shifted in his chair. "So we just let him walk the secrets right out the front gate?"
"No," stated Ezra, the glint of cold fire in his gaze. "We do not permit him. We are in charge of him. If we cannot kill the spy, then we will obtain possession of the information he is spying. We are going to surround him in a cage, Sullivan. A cage of lies."
Thus, within the quiet of a New York dust-filled apartment, a new, ultra-covert internal security project, Operation Chimera, was born. Only Sullivan, Ezra, and a limited group of specially chosen operatives would be aware of its very existence. Its job would not be to stop Fuchs, but to control him. The project consisted of two parts.
"First, the surveillance," Ezra outlined the plan in the voice of a CEO explaining a business proposal. "I'll need two of your best, men who will not be noticed in a crowd, planted among the community of Los Alamos. One will be in the theoretical division lab technician, the other will be a janitor with access to the housing projects. Their job is simple: they will tag along after Klaus Fuchs day and night. I need a record of every man he speaks to, every book he borrows from the library, every letter he sends. I need to know what he has for breakfast."
"That's the easy part," growled Sullivan.
"This is the hard part," explained Ezra. "We are going to poison the well. We cannot stop Fuchs from submitting reports to his Soviet masters. But we can ensure that lots of those reports will be filled with beautiful, plausible, and utterly disabling falsehoods."
That was the core of the plan, a plot of such cynically brilliant design that could only have occurred to a mind like Ezra's. He would use his own scientific community, the physicists in the other universities that composed his core but weren't actually part of the Manhattan Project, in constructing faulty but exceptionally plausible-sounding theoretical research.
"I need you to be a cutout," he told Sullivan. "You will visit a physicist of my choice at the University of Chicago. You will tell him you are from the internal security of the War Department. You will tell him that, for compartmentalization reasons, you need him to work out a set of calculations involving the hydrodynamics of a tamper for a new type of munition. The calculations you have him work out, however, will have an incorrect initial set of parameters, based upon those that I will provide you. His results will be mathematically correct, but they will be a dead end."
The plan was to fabricate a book of fake science. Flawed calculations of the density of the plutonium tamper. Incorrect designs of the neutron initiator, the "urchin" of the core of the weapon. These reports, stamped with all the proper-looking technical notations, would then be left in temporary, low-security safes at Los Alamos or "accidentally" left on blackboards in laboratories in which Fuchs would be. They would be the bait in the trap.
"So we'll provide him with a treasure trove of facts to steal," concluded Ezra. "And sixty percent of them will be cold, hard poison. It will send the Soviet bomb drive down a dozen expensive and time-consuming rabbit holes. Let them waste years in trying to develop a bomb on faulty physics."
This new venture required an absolute secrecy, even from among his most loyal friends. He could not tell General Groves that he was voluntarily keeping an open spy in business. He could not tell the nationally patriotic Oppenheimer that in his own laboratory, he was playing out a high-sophisticated counter-intelligence farce. He was now supporting a third, even more secret set of security in addition to the Army's official G-2 operations, a shadow war being fought within the perimeters of his own shadow war.
The subterfuge put a strain on his other connections. The ever vigilant Senator Truman, through his own connections in the committee, received whispers of unspecified "security concerns" and "possible foreign infiltration" in the secrecy-shrouded facilities of Tennessee and New Mexico. The fiery anti-communist, Truman, went ballistic in an indignant call to Ezra.
"What in the world is going on out there, Prentice?" the Senator demanded. "I'm hearing rumors that communists are running wild through your hush-hush labs. The Army sleeping on the job?"
Ezra had felt forced to lie to his most influential political sponsor. "Senator, you need not worry, General Groves and the Army G-2 have the issue totally under control," he lied smoothly, the words scorching like ash in his own mouth. "There were some early problems, but the individuals in question are being scrutinized most thoroughly. It's been taken care of."
The conversation was strained. The bloodhound's talent for evasiveness was unwittingly exercised in Truman's picking up the sense that Prentice was not disclosing the whole truth. For the first time since the alliance had been made, the seed of distrust was planted.
The cost of his subterfuge was a burgeoning, intense isolation. He was a man alone in a hall of mirrors, juggling reflections that only he could see. His wife knew he carried a huge secret, but not its true, terrible sophistication. His generals knew he was their irreplaceable logistical equivalent, but they could not see that he was, in actuality, juggling an enemy spy among their own. His political patron knew he was a fountain of irreplaceable intel, but he could not see that he was being duped about the most stringent security issue in the country.
A week later, the first message of Operation Chimera arrived, brought to the New York safe house by Sullivan. There was no flair, no color, no life in thedry, typed log of Klaus Fuchs' every move for the last seven days. It accounted for his work, his eating, his talking. There was a notation of a clandestine meeting behind a rusty general store in Santa Fe, with a man described as "Harry Gold," an identified Soviet courier.
Accompanying the report was a short, unsigned note in Sullivan's handwriting. It read:
"He took the bait. The paper that you produced on defective tamper configurations was removed from the temporary safe in the theoretical division's library. The paper was recovered the following day. The man inside confirms that only Fuchs could have accessed that time period."
Ezra folded the note. He had done it. He had actually gotten the first poisoned piece of data all the way to Moscow. It was a small, silent triumph in a war no one else knew he fought. But as he sat in the stale air of the empty apartment, he could not relish that moment of triumph. He could only feel the debilitating force of the web of lies that he now needed to maintain, a web that was growing every day in greater sophistication, greater peril.