“How?”

“He writes to a man named Ottmar Pedersen, a Dane living in the Bronx. Over the past few years he has passed on a great deal of important information to Pedersen.”

“And Pedersen is your agent?”

“No. Pedersen is a loyal Nazi, a member of Madole’s National Renaissance Party. The man who opens Pedersen’s mail is our agent.”

“I see.”

He got to his feet. “Kotacek knows a great deal more than he has ever told or will ever tell to Pedersen. At one time we considered killing our Golden Goose – making a raid on Kotacek’s home in Lisbon and grabbing off what records we could. This was always rejected. The information is only valuable when our knowledge of it is not known. Sooner or later we would have found a way to gain full access to Kotacek’s files without his knowing it. But it was not urgent, it could wait.”

“And now?”

“His capture changes things considerably. We’d planned on going through his files when he died. He’s an old man and a sick man. He has diabetes and a heart condition and is a cataleptic. He would probably have died within a year or two and that would have given us our opportunity. Now we can’t wait – his death won’t do us any good if he dies on the end of a rope in Prague. More important, we don’t want the Russians to get to his files. I don’t think he’s given them anything yet. I don’t think they know enough to ask for it. But during or after his trial, he may try to barter his information for his life. It would be a bad bargain for him. His files are worth a great deal more than his life.

“There’s more to it than that. This doesn’t entirely concern you, but I’ve never felt that it hurts an agent to know what the hell is going on and why. The Czechs are likely to make a big show out of his trial. They’ll stir up a lot of anti-German feeling at a time when we don’t want too much attention focused upon the policies of our friends in Bonn. Armament policies and such. There’s more, but that’s the essence of it. We want Kotacek out of Czechoslovakia. We want his files.”