The Assassination Option

[ONE]

Knowing that Major Thomas G. “Dick Tracy” Derwin was either already behind the door or would be there shortly triggered many thoughts in Cronley’s mind as he put his hand on the enormous door lever and pushed down.

He remembered being with Derwin at the officers’ club bar in Camp Holabird when the Squirt came in.

He remembered why his fellow spooks in training had called Derwin “Dick Tracy,” and that it had not been rooted in admiration.

What the hell does he want from me?

He had dressed to meet him. That is, in triangled pinks and greens, not in his captain’s tunic, as that would have established the captain/major relationship between them.

While he was putting on the triangled pinks and greens, he had thought about Ludwig Mannberg’s elegant wardrobe, now shared with Max Ostrowski. He thought it would be a good idea to get some civvies for himself. There were a lot of bona fide U.S. civilians around wearing civvies, so why not?

The problem there was, where could he get some? He had two Brooks Brothers suits in Midland — two because his mother said he could be counted upon to spill soup on the first one he put on — and he didn’t think they would fit anyway.

And, of course, he was concerned, deeply concerned, about what was going to happen when he faced Sergeant Claudette Colbert after their most-of-the-night romp in the sheets, which was probably the dumbest thing he’d done since he started screwing Rachel Schumann. Or more accurately, had allowed Rachel Schumann to play him for the three-star naïve fool he could not deny being.

There were only two good things he could think of concerning his new relationship with Sergeant Colbert. He was willing to bet she wasn’t an NKGB agent, and she sure knew how to romp.

And he wondered about not if, but how soon Fat Freddy would pick up on what was going on between him and good ol’ Sergeant Colbert.

He pushed open the door and entered the room.

Fat Freddy was behind his desk and Dette behind hers, hammering furiously at her typewriter. The door to Major Harold Wallace’s office was open. He was chatting with Major Thomas G. Derwin, who sat in front of his desk with a briefcase on his lap. Both looked out at him.

“Good morning, sir,” Freddy said. “Major Derwin is here to see you. He’s in with Major Wallace.”

“Sir,” Dette said, “General Gehlen said that he’d like to see you as soon as it’s convenient.”

When Cronley looked at Colbert, she met his eyes. She smiled warmly, but it was just that, nothing more or less.

“Did he say where he was?”

“At the compound, sir.”

“Please call him back and tell him I’ll come out there as soon as Major Derwin and I have finished talking about whatever he wants to talk about.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll make sure a car is available.”

Cronley walked to Wallace’s office door.

“Good morning, gentlemen.”

“Major Derwin has been waiting to see you, Jim,” Wallace said.

“Captain Cronley,” Derwin said.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Major,” Cronley said. “What’s on your mind?”

“It would be better, I think, if we discussed that privately.”

What the hell does he want?

“Sounds ominous. Did one of Tiny’s Troopers complain I’ve been mean to him?”

Derwin didn’t reply.

“Why don’t we go in my office?” Cronley asked.

Derwin got to his feet and walked to the door. As they walked across the outer office, Dette asked, “Can I get you and the major coffee, sir?”

“That would be very nice, Dette, thank you,” Cronley said. He turned to Major Derwin. “Should I ask Miss Colbert to bring her book?”

“No. That won’t be necessary,” Derwin said firmly.

The office, now that of the chief, DCI-Europe, had formerly been the office of Colonel Robert Mattingly and reflected both the colonel’s good taste and his opinion of his own importance in the scheme of things. It therefore was larger and more elegantly furnished than Wallace’s office, and he saw that Derwin had picked up on that.

“Have a seat, please, Major,” Cronley said. “And when Miss Colbert has gotten us some coffee, you can tell me what’s on your mind.”

Derwin took a seat, holding his briefcase on his lap, but said nothing.

Dette came into the office, laid a coffee set on the table, poured, and then left.

“Okay, Major. Let’s have it,” Cronley said.

“Something has come to my attention, Cronley, that I thought, in the interest of fairness, I would ask you about before I go any further with my investigation.”

There he goes again, playing Dick Tracy. “My investigation.”

What the hell’s going on?

“Which is?”

“What would you care to tell me about your relationship with my predecessor, the late Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Schumann?”

“Excuse me?”

“And with Colonel Schumann’s wife, Mrs. Rachel Schumann?”

“Why are you asking?”

“Please, Captain Cronley, just answer the question.”

“Okay. I knew both of them.”

“How well?”

“Slightly.”

“So you’re telling me there’s nothing to the story that you tried to kill Colonel Schumann?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

“Once again, Cronley, please answer my question.”

Cronley leaned forward and depressed the intercom lever.

“Dette, would you ask Major Wallace to come in here, please? Right now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“At the moment, Cronley, I have nothing to say to Major Wallace,” Derwin said.

Wallace put his head in the door sixty seconds later.

“What’s up?”

“Come on in and close the door,” Cronley said. “And then, when no one else can hear us, please tell Major Derwin what you know about my attempt to murder the late Colonel Schumann. He’s investigating that.”

“What?” Wallace asked incredulously, chuckling. “Seriously?”

“He sounds very serious to me.”

“This is a serious matter,” Derwin said.

“What should I tell him, Jim?” Wallace asked.

“Everything… well, maybe not everything. And make sure he understands that whatever you tell him is classified Top Secret — Presidential.”

“What I am about to tell you, Major Derwin,” Wallace said, with a smile, “is classified Top Secret — Presidential.”

Derwin didn’t reply.

“The penalty for divulging Top Secret — Presidential material to anyone not authorized access to same is castration with a dull bayonet, followed by the firing squad, as I’m sure you know.”

“I have to tell you, Major, I don’t find anything humorous in this,” Derwin said.

“Stick around, it gets much funnier,” Wallace said. “Well, one day Colonel Schumann — and a dozen associates — found himself on a back road not from here — I’ve always wondered what he was doing out in the boonies…”

“Me, too,” Cronley said.

Now I know, of course, what the sonofabitch was doing there. He was looking for it. He wanted to find out what was going on at Kloster Grünau so he could tell his handler in the NKGB.

“… but anyway, there he was, and he comes up on a monastery, or what had been a monastery, Kloster Grünau, surrounded by fences and concertina barbed wire. On the fence were signs, ‘Twenty-third CIC’ and, in English and German, ‘Absolutely No Admittance.’

“Colonel Schumann had never heard of the Twenty-third CIC, and he thought as IG for CIC Europe he should have heard of it.”

“What was this place?” Derwin asked.

“You don’t have the need to know that, Major,” Cronley said.

“You’re not in a position to tell me what I need to know, Cronley,” Derwin snapped.

“Yeah, he is,” Major Wallace said. “But anyway, Schumann, being the zealous inspector general he was… I shouldn’t be making fun of him, the poor bastard got himself blown up. Sorry. Anyway, Schumann drives up the road and is immediately stopped by two jeeps, each of which has a pedestal-mounted .50 caliber Browning machine gun and four enormous soldiers, all black, in it.

“He tells them he wants in, and they tell him to wait.

“A second lieutenant wearing cowboy boots shows up. He’s the security officer for Kloster Grünau. His name is James D. Cronley Junior.”

“A second lieutenant named Cronley?” Major Derwin asked.

“This was before he got promoted.”

“I’d like to hear about that, too,” Derwin said.

“That’s also classified Top Secret — Presidential,” Wallace said. “Anyway, Second Lieutenant Cronley politely tells Lieutenant Colonel Schumann that nobody gets into Kloster Grünau unless they have written permission from either General Greene or Colonel Robert Mattingly.

“Lieutenant Colonel Schumann, somewhat less politely, tells Second Lieutenant Cronley that second lieutenants don’t get to tell lieutenant colonels, especially when he is the CIC IG, what he can’t do. And tells his driver to ‘drive on.’

“Second Lieutenant Cronley issues an order to stop the staff car.

“One of the .50s fires one round.

“Bang.

“Right into the engine block of Colonel Schumann’s staff car. It stops.

“At that point, Colonel Schumann decides that since he’s outgunned, the smart thing to do is make a retrograde movement and report the incident to General Greene. He does so just as soon as he can get back to Frankfurt, dragging the disabled staff car behind one of his remaining vehicles.

“General Greene tells him Second Lieutenant Cronley was just carrying out his orders, and for Colonel Schumann not only not to try again to get into Kloster Grünau, but also not to ask questions about it, and finally to forget he was ever there.

“End of story,” Wallace concluded. “Did I leave anything out, Jim?”

“No. That was fine. Thank you.”

“Any questions, Major?”

“That story poses more questions than it answers,” Derwin said. “What exactly is going on at this monastery?”

“I told you before, Major, you don’t have the need to know that,” Cronley said.

“And I’m more than a little curious, Cronley, how you became a captain so… suddenly.”

“I’m sure you are,” Cronley said, and then: “Oh, hell, let’s shut this off once and for all.”

He went to a door and opened it. Behind it was a safe. He worked the combination, opened the door, took out a manila envelope, and then took two 8×10-inch photographs from it.

“These are classified Top Secret — Presidential, Major,” he said, as he handed them to Major Derwin.

“Do I get to look, Jim?” Major Wallace asked.

“Who’s the fellow pinning on the bars?” Wallace asked a moment later. “I recognize the guy wearing the bow tie, of course.”

“My father.”

“Why is President Truman giving you a decoration?” Derwin asked. “What is that?”

Wallace answered for him: “It’s the Distinguished Service Medal.”

“What did Cronley do to earn the DSM?”

“The citation is also classified,” Cronley said.

He took the photographs back, put them back in the envelope, put the envelope back in the safe, closed the door, spun the combination dial, and then closed the door that concealed the safe.

“Are we now through playing Twenty Questions, Major Derwin?” Cronley asked.

“For the moment.”

“I want to play,” Major Wallace said.

“Excuse me?” Major Derwin said.

“I want to play Twenty Questions, too. What the hell is this all about, Derwin? You’re not a CIC special agent, you’re the CIC IG — without any authority whatever over the DCI — so why are you asking Cronley all these questions?”

“That, as Cronley has said so often today, is something you don’t have the need to know.”

“I’m making it my business,” Wallace said. “My first question is, who told you Cronley shot up Schumann’s staff car? No, who told you he tried to murder the poor bastard?”

“I learned that from a confidential source.”

“What confidential source?”

“You don’t have the need to know, Major Wallace.”

“Do you want me to get on the horn to General Greene, tell him what you’ve been doing, and have him order you to tell me all about your confidential source?”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“For a number of reasons, including Colonel Tony Schumann was a friend of mine, but primarily because the Army has handed me a CIC supervisory special agent’s credentials and told me to look into things I think smell fishy.”

“You’re interfering with my investigation, Major,” Derwin said.

Wallace reached for the telephone on Cronley’s desk, dialed “O,” and said, “Get me General Greene.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Derwin said.

“Cancel that,” Wallace said, and put the handset into its cradle.

Derwin went into his briefcase and pulled out a business envelope that he handed to Wallace.

“This was hand-delivered to me at my quarters in the Park Hotel,” he said.

“Hand-delivered by whom?” Wallace asked, as he took a sheet of paper from the envelope.

“I mean, it was left at the desk of the Park, and put in my box there, not mailed.”

“I never would have guessed,” Wallace said sarcastically, “since there’s no address on the envelope, only your name.”

A moment later, he said, his voice dripping with disgust, “Jesus H. Christ!”

He handed the sheet of paper to Cronley.

It took Cronley about fifteen seconds to decide the author of the letter had NKGB somewhere in his title, or — considering the other Rahil—her title.

“I have determined both that this letter was typed on an Underwood typewriter, and the paper on which this is typed is government issue,” Major Derwin said.

“You’re a regular Dick Tracy, aren’t you, Derwin?” Wallace said.

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, that really narrows it down, doesn’t it? There are probably twenty Underwood typewriters here in the Vier Jahreszeiten and twenty reams of GI paper. I wonder how many Underwoods there are in the Farben Building, but I’d guess four, five hundred and three or four supply rooms full of GI typewriter paper.”

“I was suggesting that it suggests this was written by an American.”

“You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes, aren’t you, Derwin?”

“There’s no call for sarcasm, Major Wallace,” Derwin said.

“That’s coming to me very naturally, Major Derwin,” Wallace said. “Permit me to go through this letter one item at a time.

“Item one: The explosion which killed my friend Tony Schumann and his wife was thoroughly — not superficially — investigated, not only by the DCI, but also by the Frankfurt military post engineer and by me. And I was there before the DCI was even called in. The gas line leading to his water heater developed a leak. The fucking thing blew up. Tony and his wife were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Period. End of that story.

“So far as Cronley’s ‘intimate’ relationship is concerned, I was here when Cronley was ordered, ordered, to take Mrs. Schumann to dinner. He was as enthusiastic about doing so as he would have been… I don’t know what… about going to the dentist for a tooth-yanking.

“I’ve already dealt with that nonsensical allegation that Cronley attempted to murder Colonel Schumann at Kloster Grünau. That brings us to the unmarked graves at the monastery. What about that, Cronley? Have you been burying people out there in unmarked graves?”

Truth to tell, which I obviously can’t, there are three I know about, those of the three men, almost certainly NKGB agents, that Max Ostrowski killed when they damn near killed Sergeant Abraham Lincoln Tedworth.

And then I suspect, but don’t know — and I don’t want to know — that former Oberstleutnant Gunther von Plat and former Major Kurt Boss are looking up at the grass in the cloister cemetery. They disappeared shortly after Clete turned Colonel Sergei Likharev in Argentina, and he told Clete, and Clete told me to tell General Gehlen, that they had been the bad apples in Gehlen’s basket who had given him the rosters of Gehlen’s people Tedworth found on Likharev.

“Every Friday afternoon,” Cronley said. “We call it ‘the Kloster Grünau Memorial Gardens Friday Afternoon Burial Services and Chicken Fry.’”

Wallace laughed, then turned to Major Derwin.

“What have you done with this thing, Derwin? Have you shown it to anybody else? The DCI, maybe? Anybody else?”

“I was not at that point in my investigation—”

“Your investigation?” Wallace asked, heavily sarcastic. “Derwin, were you ever a CIC agent in the field?”

“Of course I was.”

“Where?”

“What has that got to do with anything?”

“I can check your records.”

“I was the special agent in charge of the Des Moines office.”

“That’s all?”

“And then I was transferred to CIC Headquarters.”

“You mean the CIC School?”

“The school is part of CIC Headquarters.”

“And since I don’t think there were many members of the Japanese Kempei Tai, or of Abwehr Intelligence, running around Des Moines, Iowa, what you were doing was ringing doorbells, doing background investigations? ‘Mrs. Jones, your neighbor Joe Glutz, now in the Army, is being considered for a position in which he will have access to classified information. We are checking to see if he can be trusted with it. Which of his sexual deviations would you like to tell me about?’”

“I don’t have to put up with this… this being mocked and insulted.”

“The first thing that comes to my mind is for me to go to General Greene and give him my take on you, which is that you saw when you were being sent to replace my good friend Tony Schumann, you decided it was going to give you a chance to be a real CIC agent. And then when whatever miserable sonofabitch in our ranks decided to stick it to Cronley sent you that letter, you saw it as your chance to be a hotshot.

“But if I did that, and he shipped your ass to the Aleutian Islands to count snowballs, which he would do, and which you would deserve for your Dick Tracy bullshit, the prick in our midst who tried to stab Cronley in the back would hear about it and crawl back into his hole.

“And I am determined to find that bastard and nail him to the wall.

“So what you are going to do, Major Derwin, is put that goddamn letter back in your briefcase and then drop your quote investigation unquote. And forget investigations, period. You will keep that letter so that you take it out from time to time to remind you how close you came to getting shipped to the Aleutians. If you get another letter, or if there is any other contact with Cronley’s buddy the letter writer, I want to hear about it.

“Now, if this is satisfactory to you, get out of here and get in your car, and go to Frankfurt or anywhere else and do what an IG is supposed to do. If this is not satisfactory to you, I am going to get on the horn and call General Greene and tell him what a bad boy you have been. Which is it to be?”

“I really don’t understand your attitude—”

“Which is it to be?” Wallace snapped.

“I don’t seem to have much choice in the matter, do I?” Derwin said, mustering what little dignity he could. Then he turned to Cronley: “Captain Cronley, I assure you it wasn’t my intention to accuse you of any wrongdoing. I was just…”

“If that’s intended as an apology, Major Derwin. Accepted.”

Christ, I actually feel sorry for him.

Derwin nodded at Wallace and walked out of the office.

“Jesus Christ, Jim,” Wallace said. “Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know what to think,” Cronley said.

“Think about candidates for the letter writer,” Wallace said. “I think we can safely remove Colonel Mattingly and myself from the list of suspects…”

I’ll be goddamned. Maybe it wasn’t the Russians. Maybe it was Mattingly. Wallace, no. Mattingly, maybe.

“… but who else can you think of who is green with jealousy that you’re now the chief, DCI-Europe?”

Cronley shook his head, and then his mouth went on automatic.

“Be glad they didn’t give you the job,” he said.

Wallace looked at him curiously.

What the hell, why not tell him?

Screw Ludwig, I’m going with my gut feeling about Wallace.

Wallace’s one of the good guys.

“I had lunch with General Smith yesterday,” Cronley said. “And General Greene. And Lieutenant Colonel Ashton. And Lieutenant Schultz, who is really not Lieutenant Schultz, by the way, or even Commander Schultz, which is what he really was when he was working for Cletus Frade, but executive assistant to the director, Directorate of Central Intelligence.”

“Interesting.”

“And I raised the subject of why was I named chief, DCI-Europe, when there were so many fully qualified people of appropriate rank and experience around. And Schultz told me.”

“Like Bob Mattingly, you mean?”

“And you.”

“And what did Schultz tell you?”

“Mattingly, first. Schultz didn’t come right out and say this…”

“But?”

“I got the feeling the admiral thinks Mattingly is more interested in his Army career than the DCI.”

“Explain that.”

“That since he’s thinking of his Army career, he’d be more chummy with the assistant chief of staff for intelligence — with the Pentagon generally, and ONI, and the FBI — than the admiral wants his people to be. He was in ONI, and he knows how unhappy they were when Truman started up the DCI to replace the OSS, which they thought they’d buried once and for all.”

Wallace didn’t reply to that immediately, but Cronley thought he saw him nod just perceptibly, as if accepting what Cronley had told him.

Then Wallace asked, “And that applies to me, too?”

“I was given the job, the title, because no one is going to think that something important like Operation Ost is going to be handed to a very junior captain. Or the corollary of that, DCI-Europe — and Operation Ost — can’t be very important if they gave it to a very junior captain.”

“That makes a perverse kind of sense, I suppose.”

“Which brings us to you.”

“Oh?”

“Nobody told me this either, but if — more than likely when — this blows up and I get thrown to the wolves — and they did tell me to expect getting thrown to the wolves — somebody’s going to have to take over from me.”

“You mean me?” Wallace asked dubiously.

“Think about it. You’re only a major, not a full-bull colonel. You’ve got an unimportant job running a small — actually phony — CIC detachment close to DCI-Europe. It would seem natural to give you something unimportant like DCI-Europe when the young incompetent running it, as predicted, FUBAR…”

“‘Fucked Up Beyond Any Repair.’” Wallace chuckled as he made the translation.

“The executive assistant to the director of the Directorate of Central Intelligence shows up here,” Cronley said. “He says, ‘I guess you heard how Cronley blew it.’ You say, ‘Yes, sir.’ El Jefe says, ‘Wallace, you’re ex-OSS. I would be very surprised if while you were sitting here with your thumb in your ass running this phony CIC detachment, you didn’t snoop around and learn a hell of a lot about what Cronley was doing.’

“Then he says, ‘We were counting on this. So tell me what you know, or suspect, and I will fill in the blanks before I have you transferred to DCI, and you take over as chief, DCI-Europe.’”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Yeah. Anyway, that’s my take.”

“If you’re right, why wouldn’t Schultz have told you to keep me up to speed on what you’re doing?”

“Because he’s being careful. He knows you were Mattingly’s Number Two in the OSS. He didn’t tell me to tell you anything. This is my scenario.”

“Schultz doesn’t know we’re having this little chat?”

“I thought about asking him if I could, and decided not to because he probably would have said, ‘Hell, no!’”

“But you’re going to tell me anyhow?”

“I’ll tell you as much as I can, but there’s a lot going on you neither have the need to know, nor want to know.”

“Like what?”

“Next question?”

“So what are you going to tell me? And for that matter, why?”

“Despite Ludwig Mannberg’s theory that when you really want to trust a gut feeling, don’t — my gut tells me I can trust you.”

“I realize I’m expected to say, ‘Of course you can.’ But I’ll say it anyway.”

“There are two operations I think you should know about. One involves my cousin Luther…”

“Your cousin Luther?” Wallace asked incredulously.

“My cousin Luther and Odessa,” Cronley confirmed, and proceeded to relate that story.

When he had finished, Wallace asked, “You realize that Odessa is the CIC’s business, and none of yours?”

“I’m making it mine,” Cronley said. “And the second operation I think you should know about is our getting Colonel Likharev’s family out of Russia.”

“Whose family out of Russia?”

“The NKGB major Sergeant Tedworth caught sneaking out of Kloster Grünau turned out to be an NKGB colonel by the name of Sergei Likharev. We shipped him to Argentina, where Clete and Schultz turned him…”

He went on to tell Wallace the details of that, finishing, “That’s what we were doing in Vienna, giving a Russian female NKGB agent, who also works for Mossad, a hell of a lot of expense money.

“And just before our little chat with Dick Tracy Derwin, Claudette Colbert—”

“Hessinger’s new, and I must say, very-well-put-together assistant? Is her first name really Claudette, like the movie star?”

“Yes, but she prefers to be called ‘Dette.’”

“And is Freddy dallying with her?”

“No. Freddy sees her as his way out of being what he calls ‘the company clerk,’ and he’s not going to screw that up by fooling around with her.”

“She makes me really sorry there’s that sacred rule forbidding officers to fool around with enlisted women,” Wallace said, and then quickly added, “Just kidding, just kidding.”

“Anyway, Dette told me just before we had our chat with Derwin that General Gehlen wants to see me as soon as possible. I think that’s because he’s heard from Seven-K…”

“His Soviet asset?”

Cronley nodded. “A/K/A Rahil. And I’ve started to think of her as our asset. So far we’ve given her a hundred thousand dollars.”

“One hundred thousand?” Wallace parroted incredulously.

Cronley nodded again. “And she’ll be worth every dime if she can get Likharev’s family out and he stays turned.”

“You think he will stay turned?”

“Yeah,” Cronley said thoughtfully after a moment.

“Gratitude?”

“A little of that, but primarily because… he’s smart… he will realize that once we get his family to Argentina, that’s not the end of it. The NKGB will know that he’s alive and turned and has his family with him. And the NKGB can’t just quit. Likharev knows they’ll really be looking for him to make an example, pour encourager les autres, of what happens to senior NKGB officers who turn, and we’re the only protection he has.”

“Yeah,” Wallace said.

“So, instead of going out to Schleissheim and removing the Storch from curious eyes, I’m going to have to go to Pullach.”

“Can I ask about that?”

“Ask about what?”

“You and the Storchs. Now that EUCOM has been told to give DCI-Europe anything it wants, why don’t you get a couple, or three or four, L-4s and get rid of the Storchs? And all the problems having them brings with it?”

“The Storch is a better airplane than the Piper Cub. And only Army aviators are allowed to fly Army airplanes, and I’m not an Army aviator…”

“I’d forgotten that.”

“… and I don’t want two, three, or four Army aviators out here, or at the Pullach compound, seeing a lot of interesting things that are none of their business.”

“Understood,” Wallace said, then added, “You’re good, Jim. You really try to think of everything, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. And one time in say, fifty times, I do think of everything. The other forty-nine times something I didn’t think of bites me in the ass.”

Wallace chuckled.

“Or something comes out of the woodwork, like Dick Tracy?”

“Like Dick Tracy,” Cronley agreed. “Do you think you turned him off for good?”

“Yeah. I think the more he thinks about it, the more he will decide the best way to cover his ass is to stop playing Dick Tracy.”

“Jesus, I hope so,” Cronley said, and then stood up and walked out of his office.

[TWO]

“Where’s the car?” Cronley asked Hessinger.

“Wait one, please,” Hessinger said, and then, raising his voice, called, “Colbert, are you about finished in there?”

“Be right there,” she called, and came out of the supply room.

“Claudette has finished four of the after-action reports,” Hessinger said. “I need you to look at them as soon as possible.”

“Not now, Freddy. I have to see General Gehlen. Maybe after that.”

“I propose to have Claudette drive you out to Pullach. She drives, you read the after actions, and tell her what, if anything, needs to be fixed. Okay?”

Cronley didn’t immediately reply.

“And then,” Hessinger said, “she drives you wherever you have to go, Schleissheim, or back here, or even out to Kloster Grünau, when you’re through with the general.”

“Don’t look so worried, Mr. Cronley,” Claudette said. “I’m a pretty good driver, for a woman, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“Let’s go. Where’s the car?”

“By now it should be out front,” she said. “Let me get my purse and a briefcase for the after actions.”

“‘Individuals in possession of documents classified Top Secret or above must be suitably armed when such documents are being transported outside a secure area,’” Hessinger said.

Obviously quoting verbatim whatever Army regulation that is from memory.

“I’ve got my snub-nosed .38 in my purse,” Claudette announced.

“Where did you get a snub-nosed .38?” Cronley asked.

“I brought mine from the ASA,” Claudette said. “I thought I’d need it here. ‘The officer or non-commissioned officer in charge of an ASA communications facility where Top Secret or above material is being handled, or may be handled, shall be suitably armed.’”

And that, too, was quoted verbatim from memory.

Then she added, “Don’t worry, Mr. Cronley, I know how to use it. Actually, I shot Expert with it the last time I was on the range.”

“And where is your .45, Mr. Cronley?” Hessinger asked.

“In my room.”

“You should go get it, and not only because of the classified documents, if you take my meaning, as I am sure you do.”

“I stand chastised,” Cronley said. “I’ll go get my pistol and meet you out front, Dette.”

“Yes, sir.”

Five minutes later, when he walked through the revolving door onto Maximilianstrasse, the Opel Kapitän was at the curb, with the rear door open and Claudette at the wheel.

He looked at the door, then closed it and got in the front seat beside Claudette.

She didn’t say anything at first, but when they were away from the curb, she said, “I was trying to make it easy for you. Opening the rear door, I mean.”

“How so?”

“Officers ride in the backseat, when enlisted women are driving.”

“But we are not an officer and an enlisted woman, Miss Colbert. We are dressed as two civilian employees of the Army are dressed, and hoping the people think we work for the PX.”

She chuckled.

“And I wanted to be sure that you didn’t think I was trying to get cozy when I shouldn’t.”

“Never entered my mind. What you should be worried about — what we should be worried about — is Freddy, who is twice as smart as he looks, and he looks like Albert Einstein. Do you think…?”

“I don’t think he thinks anything. Read the after actions. That’s what’s on his mind.”

He opened her briefcase and took out the after-action reports. There were four:

Cronley read all of them carefully, decided they were better than he expected they would be, and then made a few minor changes to each so that Freddy would know he had read them.

“Very nice, Dette,” Cronley said, putting them back in her briefcase.

“I got the details of Tedworth grabbing the Russian from Tedworth,” she said. “And the details of Ostrowski saving him from getting garroted from him and Ostrowski. The interrogation and transport stuff I got from Freddy.”

“These are first class,” Cronley said. “I moved a couple of commas around so Freddy would see I’d really read them, but they were fine as done. You’re really good at this sort of thing.”

“I’m also very good at Gregg shorthand,” she said. “Which is really causing me an awful problem right now.”

What the hell is she talking about?

“The reason Freddy wanted you to come to us from the ASA is because you can take shorthand. How is that a problem?”

“You remember when you came out of your office, Freddy had to call me out of the supply closet?”

Cronley nodded.

“What I was doing in there was taking shorthand.”

“Of what?”

“What was being said in your office. What went on between you and Major Derwin and Major Wallace.”

“What?”

“As soon as I reported to Freddy, he told me about Colonel Mattingly, who he said absolutely could not be trusted, and that while he thought Major Wallace could be trusted, he wasn’t sure.”

Freddy really brought her on board, didn’t he?

“He’s right about Mattingly, but I can tell you Major Wallace is one of the good guys.”

“So I learned when I was in the supply closet.”

“I still don’t understand what you being in the closet has to do with you…” He stopped. “Jesus, Freddy bugged Mattingly’s office? My office?”

“Actually, that’s how I met him,” she said.

“Find someplace to pull off the road,” Cronley said. “We’re almost to Pullach, and I want to finish this conversation before we get there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sir”?

She turned onto a dirt road and drove far enough down it so the Kapitän could not be seen from the paved road.

“You’re not supposed to sit with the engine idling in a Kapitän,” she said, almost as if to herself. “But it’s as cold as that witch’s teat we hear so much about, so to hell with it. I’ll leave it running.”

“You were telling me how you met Freddy,” Cronley said.

“Before you moved the ASA Munich station into the Pullach compound, Freddy started hanging out around it. Around me. I thought he wanted to get into my pants. I knew who he was — that he was in the mysterious, not-on-the-books CIC detachment — and I thought just maybe he could help me to get out of the ASA at least into his branch of the CIC, so I didn’t run him off.

“Finally, when he thought it was safe, he took me to the movies. After the movie — it was They Were Expendable. You know, Robert Montgomery and John Wayne? About PT boats in the Philippines?”

“I remember the movie,” Cronley said.

“So after the movie, when Freddy was driving me back to my kaserne—in this car, by the way — he pulls off onto a dark street, and I thought, here it comes, and started asking myself how much I really wanted out of the ASA and into the intelligence business.

“But what he whipped out was his CIC credentials. He said what he was going to say to me was classified. Then he said he had reason to want to bug two offices, and he didn’t want anyone to know he was doing it.”

“Why did he go to you for that?” Cronley asked.

“The ASA — Army Security Agency — started out making sure nobody was tapping Army telephones. It went from that to making sure nobody was bugging Army offices, and finally to intercepting radio signals. Freddy knew that. You didn’t?”

“I must have slept through that lecture at the CIC School. Or chalk it up to my all-around naïveté, innocence, about things I ought to know.”

“Oddly enough, some women find naïveté and innocence to be charming, even erotic, characteristics in younger men. But to fill in the blanks in your education, the ASA teaches ASAers courses in how to find bugs. It therefore follows if you know how to take them out, you know how to put them in. Verstehen Sie?”

Actually, she should have said du. Du is the intimate form of Sie. And God knows we have been intimate.

This is not the time for language lessons.

“Okay, so where did you get the bugs you put in for Freddy?”

“There’s a rumor going around that the ASA sometimes installs bugs, too. Anyway, I got half a dozen bugs from the supply room. And installed them in what was then Mattingly’s office, now yours, and in Wallace’s. And Freddy promised to see what he could do about getting me transferred out of ASA.”

“When did you put these bugs in?”

“A long time ago. Or what seems like a long time ago. You were then a second lieutenant in charge of the guards at the mysterious Kloster Grünau.”

“That does seem like a long time ago, doesn’t it?” Cronley said. “Which means Freddy regularly bugged both Mattingly and Wallace.”

“He did. You didn’t know this?”

Cronley shook his head.

“And today he ordered you to… what’s the word, transcribe?…”

Colbert nodded.

“… my conversation with Major Derwin?”

“Right. Which is the original source of my loyalty dilemma. And it gets worse.”

“Explain that to me, now that we’ve already established that I’m naïve and innocent.”

“When Freddy said, ‘Derwin worries me. Get in there and get a record of what’s said, and don’t let Cronley know,’ that put me in a hell of a spot. Freddy lived up to his end of his deal with me — there I was in triangles — and I obviously owed my loyalty to him.

“On the other hand — and this has nothing, well, almost nothing, to do with you sweeping me off my feet with that innocence and naïveté I find so erotic — you got me out of the ASA, you’re my boss and Freddy’s boss… Getting the picture? So what do I do? Who gets my loyalty?”

“You did the right thing to tell me about this,” he said.

“Even if that was betraying Freddy’s trust in me? Even if that means you will no longer trust him?”

“Pay attention. Freddy didn’t tell me about the bugs because if he got caught, he could pass a lie-detector test saying I knew nothing about the bugs. And he told you not to let me know you were listening to the bugs because he had a good idea, was worried about, Derwin’s interest in me. And he really didn’t want me to know you heard either what Derwin asked me, or what my answers were.”

“You mean you were fooling around with Colonel Schumann’s wife?”

And here we are at decision time. Do I tell her everything, or not?

I don’t have any choice.

She’s either part of this team, or she’s not.

And I can’t send her back to the ASA because (a) she’s already learned too much about Freddy, and now about me, and (b) I believe what they say about hell having no fury like a pissed-off female, and (c) she would have every right to be thoroughly pissed off because she’s done nothing wrong.

So once again, it’s fuck Ludwig Mannberg’s firm belief that if you really want to trust your intuition, don’t.

“Turn that around, Dette. Rachel Schumann was fooling around with me. More accurately, she was making a three-star fool of me.”

“She was into the erotic attraction of your innocence and naïveté, is that what you’re saying?”

“In hindsight, I don’t think she liked me at all. I think she held me in great contempt… and, from her viewpoint, rightly so. She was playing me like a violin, to coin a phrase.”

“Her viewpoint?”

“That of an NKGB operative. And for all I know, an NKGB officer. Probably an NKGB officer.”

“You’re telling me this colonel’s wife was a Russian spy?”

“Him, too.”

“My God!”

“Welcome to the wonderful world of intelligence.”

“What information did she want from you?”

“Whatever she could get about Kloster Grünau and Operation Ost generally, and whatever she could get about Likharev specifically.”

“You’re implying she got it. From you.”

“She got what she wanted to know about Likharev. From me.”

“Like what?”

“Like the fact that he wasn’t buried in an unmarked grave at Kloster Grünau, despite an elaborate burial we conducted for him in the middle of the night. That he was in fact on his way to Argentina. And because I gave her that information, people died and were seriously wounded — Americans and Argentines — in Argentina, and the NKGB damned near managed to take out Likharev.”

“You’re sure about all this?”

“I’m sure about all this.”

“Then there was something fishy about the explosion that killed this woman? Her and her husband?”

“Listen carefully. The only thing I know is that there was an explosion. That said explosion was investigated by everybody and his brother, including Major Wallace, who thought, still thinks, which we had better not forget, that Schumann was a fine officer and a good friend — and nothing fishy was uncovered.”

“But you have your suspicions, right?”

“Next question?”

“So what do I do with my Gregg notes?”

“Transcribe them accurately and in full, give them to Freddy, who already knows everything, and don’t tell Freddy we had this little chat. Questions?”

“No, sir,” she said, then, “Yes, one. A big one. Where the hell did I get the idea you’re naïve and innocent?”

“Does that mean I’ve lost the erotic appeal that went along with that?”

“Perish the thought! I meant nothing of the kind!”

“Put the car in gear, please, Miss Colbert. Before we get in trouble, we better go see the general.”

She did so, and then parroted, “‘We better go see the general’?”

“Yeah. I think it’s important that you get to know one another. And when we finish, you can bring Freddy up to speed on what he had to say. Thereby sparing me from having to do so.”

[THREE]

As they were passing through the final roadblock and into the inner compound, the massive sergeant manning it, when he was sure Colbert was concentrating on the striped barrier pole as it rose, winked at Cronley and gave him a thumbs-up in appreciation of her physical attributes. Cronley winked back.

When they went into the “Military Government” building, they found General Reinhard Gehlen, Colonel Ludwig Mannberg, Major Konrad Bischoff, and Captain Chauncey Dunwiddie sitting around a coffee table.

“Oh, I’m so glad you could finally find time for us in your busy schedule,” Dunwiddie greeted Cronley sarcastically. “Where the hell were you?”

Cronley’s mouth went on automatic: “‘Where the hell were you, sir?’ is the way you ask that question, Captain Dunwiddie,” he snapped.

His anger dissipated as quickly as it had arisen. “What the hell’s the matter with you, Tiny? You got out of the wrong side of the bed?” He turned to Gehlen and the others. “Sorry to be late. Couldn’t be helped. I was being interrogated by Major Derwin.”

“The CIC IG?” Tiny asked incredulously. “What was that about?”

“This is getting out of hand,” Cronley said. “Time out.” He made the Time out signal with his hands.

“This meeting is called to order by the chief, DCI-Europe, who yields to himself the floor. First order of business: Gentlemen, this is Miss Claudette Colbert. She is now Mr. Hessinger’s deputy for administration. She comes to us from the ASA, where she held all the proper security clearances. You already know Colonel Mannberg, Dette, and you may know Captain Dunwiddie. That’s former Major Konrad Bischoff, of General Gehlen’s staff, and this, of course, is General Gehlen.”

“Mannberg has been telling me about you, Fraulein,” Gehlen said, and bobbed his head. “Welcome!”

“Your call, General,” Cronley said. “Do you want to start with why you wanted to see me, or why I was delayed getting out here?”

“Actually, I’m curious about the major,” Gehlen said. “Derwin, you said?”

“Yes, sir. Major Thomas G. Derwin. When Colonel Schumann died, Major Derwin was sent from the CIC School to replace him as the CIC/ASA inspector general. When I was a student at the CIC School, I was in Major Derwin’s classes on the Techniques of Surveillance. Major Derwin was known to me and my fellow students as ‘Dick Tracy.’”

“I gather he is not one of your favorite people,” Gehlen said drily. “What did he want?”

“He said he wanted to ask me about credible rumors he’d heard about (a) my having an ‘inappropriate relationship’ with the late Mrs. Schumann, and (b) that I had attempted to murder Colonel Schumann at Kloster Grünau.”

“And what did you tell him, Jim?” Mannberg asked.

“I asked Major Wallace to join us. He explained to Major Derwin what had happened at Kloster Grünau when Colonel Schumann had insisted on going in, and told Major Derwin that the idea I had had an inappropriate relationship with Mrs. Schumann was absurd.”

“Jim,” Tiny said, “are you sure you want Sergeant Colbert to hear this?”

“She already has. And since she’s wearing triangles, why don’t you stop calling her ‘Sergeant’?”

“And then?” General Gehlen asked.

“Major Wallace asked Major Derwin from whom he’d heard the rumors, and after some resistance, Derwin produced a typewritten letter he said had been put in his box at the Park Hotel, where he lives.”

“Who was the letter from?” Gehlen asked.

Cronley held up his hand in a Wait gesture.

“It began by saying the water heater explosion was suspicious, and the investigation ‘superficial.’ That set Wallace off. He said that he personally investigated the explosion, that he got there before the CID did, and there was nothing suspicious about it.

“He really lost his temper. He said the only reason he wasn’t getting on the telephone to General Greene, to tell him what an asshole Derwin was—”

“He used that word?”

“Did he, Dette?”

“Words to that effect, sir,” Claudette said.

“How would she know?” Tiny challenged. “She was in there with you?”

“Let me finish, please, Tiny, then I’ll get to that,” Cronley said. “Wallace said the only reason he wasn’t going to General Greene, who would almost certainly relieve Derwin, was because he was determined to find out who wrote the letter to Derwin, and if Derwin was relieved, whoever wrote it would crawl back in his hole, or words to that effect, and he’d never catch him. He also told Derwin to call off his ‘investigation’ of the allegations in the letter as of that moment.”

“Did Major Wallace have any idea who wrote the letter?” Mannberg asked.

“He thinks it’s someone, one of us, who doesn’t think I should have been named chief, DCI-Europe.”

“That’s what it sounds like to me,” Gehlen said. “And you think Major Derwin will cease his investigation?”

“Yes, sir. I don’t think he wants to cross Major Wallace. You knew Wallace was a Jedburgh?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did I leave anything out, Dette?”

“Sir, you didn’t get into the tail end of your conversation with Major Wallace.”

“I asked before, was Serg— Miss Colbert in there with you?” Tiny said.

“Fat Freddy put bugs in what was Mattingly’s office, and Wallace’s. Or, actually, Miss Colbert did, when Freddy asked her to.”

“You knew about that?” Tiny asked.

Cronley shook his head.

“I think, when Freddy thinks the moment is right, he’ll tell me.”

“Then how did you find out?” Tiny asked.

“With your permission, sir?” Claudette said, before Cronley could open his mouth. “When Mr. Hessinger ordered me to transcribe what would be said between Mr. Cronley and Major Derwin, I realized I could not do that without Mr. Cronley’s knowledge, so I told him.”

“Afterward?” Mannberg asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“There is no question in my mind that I owe Mr. Cronley my primary loyalty, sir.”

“What was ‘the tail end’ of your conversation with Wallace?” Tiny asked.

“I told him what I learned from El Jefe in the Farben Building. Why I’m chief, DCI-Europe. And I told him that Lieutenant Schultz hasn’t been a lieutenant for some time, and that he retired a little while ago as a commander, and is now executive assistant to the director of the Directorate of Central Intelligence. A few little things like that.”

“Why? He doesn’t have the need to know about little things like that,” Tiny said.

“Because I’ve come to understand that unless I want to be tossed to the wolves — did I mention El Jefe told me that was a distinct possibility? — I’m going to need all the friends I can get that I can trust. And after carefully considering Ludwig’s theory that when you really want to trust your intuition, that’s when you shouldn’t, I decided, Fuck it… Sorry, Dette.”

She gave a deprecating gesture with her left hand.

“… I decided (a) Wallace can be trusted, and (b) I need him. And the more time I’ve had to think it over, the more I think I made the right decision.”

“Even though Wallace was Mattingly’s Number Two in the OSS?” Tiny challenged.

“Mattingly was a politician in the OSS. The only time he ever served behind the enemy lines, if you want to put it like that, is when he flew over Berlin in a Piper Cub to see what he could see for General White. Wallace jumped into France three times. And into Norway once with a lieutenant named Colby. My gut feeling is that he’s one of us.”

“One of us? I was never behind enemy lines, or jumped anywhere. Where do I fit into ‘us’?”

“I’m tempted to say you get a pass because you’re a retard,” Cronley said. “But you’re one of us because you got a Silver Star, two Purple Hearts, and promotion to first sergeant in the Battle of the Bulge. You’ve heard more shots fired in anger than I ever heard. Mattingly never heard one. Not one. Do you take my point, Captain Dunwiddie?”

“I take your point, Captain Cronley,” General Gehlen said, and then added, “Tiny, he’s right, and you know it.”

Dunwiddie threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“Is this where someone tells me that we’ve heard from the lady with the dachshund?” Cronley asked innocently.

“It is,” Mannberg said, chuckling. “Go ahead, Konrad.”

“It is Seven-K’s opinion,” former Major Konrad Bischoff began, “that the exfiltration of Mrs. Likharev and her children from their present location — which I believe is in Poland, although I was not told that, and Seven-K’s man in Berlin said he doesn’t know—”

“Seven-K’s man in Berlin?” Cronley interrupted.

A look of colossal annoyance flashed across Bischoff’s face at the interruption.

Fuck you, I don’t like you, either, you sadistic, arrogant sonofabitch!

“Answer the question, Konrad,” Mannberg said softly, in German. The softness of his tone did not at all soften the tone of command.

“NKGB Major Anatole Loskutnikov,” Bischoff said.

“We’ve worked with him before,” Gehlen said. “We suspect he also has a Mossad connection.”

“And you sent Bischoff to Berlin to meet with him?”

“Correct.”

“And what did Loskutnikov tell you?” Cronley asked.

“That Seven-K believes it would be too dangerous to try to exfiltrate the Likharev woman and her children…”

Not “Mrs. Likharev”? She’s a colonel’s wife. You wouldn’t refer to Mannberg’s wife as “the Mannberg woman,” would you? You really do think all Russians are the untermensch, don’t you?

“… through either Berlin or Vienna.”

“So what does she suggest?”

Bischoff ignored the question.

“According to Loskutnikov, Seven-K says the exfiltration problem is exacerbated by the mental condition of the woman and the children—”

“Meaning what?” Cronley interrupted. “They’re afraid? Or crazy?”

Bischoff ignored him again.

“—which is such that travel by train or bus is dangerous.”

“I asked you two questions, Bischoff, and you answered neither.”

“Sorry,” he said, visibly insincere. “What were they?”

“Since Bischoff is having such difficulty telling you, Jim, what he told me,” General Gehlen said, “let me tell you what he told me.”

“Please,” Cronley said.

“A lot of this, you will understand, is what I am inferring from what Bischoff told me and what I know of this, and other, situations.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Understandably, Mrs. Likharev is upset — perhaps terrified — by the situation in which she now finds herself. She has been taken from the security of her Nevsky Prospekt apartment in Leningrad and now is on the run. I agree with Bischoff that she and the children are probably in Poland. She knows what will happen if the NKGB finds them. Children sense when their mother is terrified, and it terrifies them.

“Seven-K knows that if they travel by train or bus, the odds are that a terrified woman will attract the attention of railroad or bus station police, who will start asking questions. Even with good spurious documents, which I’m sure Seven-K has provided, travel by bus or train is dangerous.

“So that means travel by car, or perhaps truck. By car, providing that they have credible identification documents, would be safer than travel by truck. What is an obviously upper-class Russian woman doing riding around in a truck in Poland with two children?”

“I get it.”

“To use your charming phrase, Jim, ‘cutting to the chase,’ what Seven-K proposes is that the Likharevs be transported to Thuringia…”

“My massive ignorance has just raised its head.”

“The German state, the East German state, which borders on Hesse in the Kassel-Hersfeld area. Do you know that area?”

“I’ve been to both Hersfeld and Kassel. When I first came to Germany, I was assigned to the Twenty-second CIC Detachment in Marburg. But do I know the area? No.”

Gehlen nodded.

“And then be turned over to us and then taken across the border.”

“Turned over to us?”

“Preferably to Americans, but if that is not possible, to us. Seven-K says Mrs. Likharev cannot be trusted to have control of her emotions to the point that she could cross the border with her children alone.”

“Turned over to whomever in East Germany?”

Gehlen nodded.

“I can see it now,” Cronley said, “Fat Freddy, Tiny, and me sneaking across the border.”

“Not to mention what the lady and her kids would do when they saw the Big Black Guy,” Tiny said. “If Tedworth and I terrified Likharev, what would she do when she saw me?”

“We could use the Storchs to get them,” Cronley said thoughtfully. “If we had someplace to land…”

“Could you do that?” Gehlen asked.

“I don’t know, but I know where to get an expert opinion.”

“From whom?” Tiny asked, and then he understood. “If you ask Colonel Wilson about this, he’ll get right on the horn to Mattingly.”

“We don’t know that,” Cronley said. “We’ll have to see how much I can dazzle him with my DCI credentials.”

“It’s a lousy idea, Jim,” Tiny said.

“It’s a better idea than you and me trying to sneak back and forth across the border with a woman on the edge of hysteria and two frightened kids. Saddle up, Dette, I need a ride to the airport. I’m off to see Hotshot Billy Wilson.”

[FOUR]

“Is there anything I should know about this Colonel Wilson you’re going to see?” Claudette asked.

“Aside from the fact that he’s twenty-five years old, you mean?”

“Twenty-five and a lieutenant colonel? You’re pulling my leg.”

“No, I’m not. Do you remember seeing that newsreel of General Mark Clark landing in a Piper Cub on the plaza by the Colosseum in the middle of Rome when he took the city?”

She nodded.

“Hotshot Billy was flying the Cub. And I guess you know that General Gehlen surrendered to the OSS on a back road here in Bavaria?”

“I heard that story.”

“Wilson flew our own Major Harold Wallace, then Mattingly’s deputy, there to accept the surrender. And Mattingly got Wilson to turn over his Storchs to me when the Air Force didn’t like the Army having any. Wilson is the aviation officer of the Constabulary. As soon as he gets here, which may be very soon, any day, Major General I.D. White, whom Tiny refers to as ‘Uncle Isaac,’ because White is his godfather, will assume command of the Constabulary. And before he went into the OSS, Mattingly was sort of a fair-haired boy in White’s Second Armored Division.”

“That’s a lot of disjointed facts.”

“That occurred to me as I sat here thinking about it. So, thinking aloud: Presuming we can find someplace to land in Thuringia, someplace being defined as a small field — the Storch can land on about fifty feet of any kind of a runway, and get off the ground in about a hundred fifty feet — near a country road, getting Mrs. Likharev and her kids out in our Storchs makes a lot more sense than sending people into East Germany on foot to try to, first, find them, and then try to walk them back across the border.”

“Storchs, plural? Who’s going to fly them?”

“I’ll fly one, and maybe Max Ostrowski the other one.”

“Maybe?”

“I won’t know if he’ll be willing to take the chance until I ask him,” Cronley said simply. “So the question is, where can I find, just over the Hesse/Thuringia border, a suitable field near a suitable country road? I don’t have a clue, but I think Colonel Wilson will not only be able to get this information for me, but have other helpful suggestions to make.

“Or he may not. He may decide to pick up the phone and call Mattingly and say, ‘You won’t believe what Loose Cannon Cronley’s up to.’

“You’re going to take that risk?”

Cronley didn’t reply directly, instead replying, “Mannberg has a saying, ‘Whenever you really want to trust your intuition, don’t.’ In this case, I’m going to trust my intuition about Colonel Wilson. I don’t see where I have any choice.”

“Where is this Colonel Wilson? At Sonthofen?”

“Yeah. It’s about a hundred miles, a hundred and fifty kilometers, from Munich. Take me about an hour to get there.”

“And then you’re coming back here?”

“If there’s enough time, I’ll go out to Kloster Grünau. I want to keep the Storch out of sight as much as possible.”

“Well, if you need anything, you know where to find me.”

Fifteen minutes later, as he began his climb-out from Schleissheim, he realized that as he climbed into the Storch, Miss Colbert had repeated the same words she had said to him in the Kapitän.

And he concluded that the repetition had not been either coincidental or innocent.