The Assassination Option Part 11

Parsons considered that for a moment, and then said, "You're probably right. And now that I think about it, why should he have had problems with what the admiral asked him to do? Your suggestions make a lot of sense."

Yeah, I immodestly believe they do. But since your basic interest here is to get Operation Ost put under the deputy chief of staff for intelligence, and the only way you're going to be able to do that is to get me to f.u.c.k up royally, I don't think you're as pleased with my good suggestions as you're letting on.

"I find all of this fascinating," Parsons said. "And I suspect Warren does, too."

"Sir?"

"Warren and I have spent most of our careers in intelligence, Mr. Cronley, but just about all of it on the a.n.a.lytical side. Isn't that so, Warren?"

"Yes, sir."

"As opposed to the operational side is what I mean. What I suppose could be called the nitty-gritty side. So I find all these little operational details fascinating. I never would have thought of hiding a secret operation the way you're going to do it. A secret operation having absolutely nothing to do with the secret organization in which you're hiding it. Absolutely fascinating. Brilliant, even!"

Where the h.e.l.l is he going with this?

"So I'd like to ask a favor of you, Mr. Cronley."

"Anything I can do for you, Colonel, of course."

"Cut me a little slack when we start working together."

"I don't think I follow you, Colonel."

"When I said, before, that my wife regards my curiosity as my worst character flaw, she was right on the money. And I know myself well enough to know that when we are working together I'll come across things that I know are none of my business, but which will cause my curiosity to s.h.i.+ft into high gear.

"When that happens, and I ask you-or any of your people-questions that are out of bounds, I want you to feel perfectly free-and tell your people to feel absolutely free-to cut me off at the knees. Just say, 'That's none of your business,' and that will be the end of it. I won't take offense, and I'll stop asking questions. How does that sound, Mr. Cronley?"

Actually, you smooth sonofab.i.t.c.h, that's what I already decided to do if you and ol' Warren here got too curious. Cut you off at the knees.

"That's very gracious of you, Colonel," Cronley said. "Thank you. And I appreciate your understanding that there will be things going on around the Pullach compound that the fewer people know about, the better."

And I will now wait for the other shoe to drop.

Where's he going to go from here?

"Well, enough of this," Parsons said. "Why don't we change the subject?"

Cronley was so surprised at the other shoe that he blurted, "To what?"

"Women and politics are supposed to be forbidden subjects," Parsons said. "Either topic is fine with me."

He got the dutiful laughter he expected.

Then he grew serious.

"General Greene told me that he went to see General Patton shortly before he died. He said the scene was pretty grim."

Well, that's changing the subject, all right.

Where's he going with this?

"It just goes to show, doesn't it, that you never know what tomorrow will bring?" Parsons asked.

"Sir?"

"Losing your life, painfully, as a result of what General Greene said was really nothing but a fender-bender. And then your IG . . . or the CIC's . . . IG?"

Cronley felt his stomach tighten.

Jesus Christ, what does he know, what has he heard, about that?

"Sir?"

"The poor chap goes home for lunch, and his hot water heater blows up. Blows him and his wife up."

"I see what you mean," Cronley said.

And now where are you going to go?

"Let's get off those depressing subjects," Parsons said. "To what? Back to my curiosity, I suppose. I got the feeling, Mr. Cronley, from the way you rattled off 'General-Bros Sd-Deutsche,' et cetera, so smoothly that you're comfortable speaking German?"

"I speak German, Colonel."

"Fluently?"

"Yes, sir. My mother is a Strasbourgerin. A war bride from the First World War. I got my German from her. Colonel Mannberg tells me I could pa.s.s myself off as a Strasbourger."

"I'm jealous," Parsons said. "I got what little German I have from West Point, and I was not what you could call a brilliant student of languages. What about you, Captain Dunwiddie? How's your German?"

"I can get by, sir."

"You said before you're from an Army family. Do you also march in the Long Gray Line?"

"No, sir. I'm Norwich."

"Fine school. Did you know that General White, I.D. White, who commanded the 'h.e.l.l on Wheels'-the Second Armored Division-went to Norwich?"

"Yes, sir," Dunwiddie said. "I did."

"Warren, like General George Catlett Marshall, went to VMI," Parsons said. "That leaves only you, Mr. Hessinger. I'm not sure if I can ask General Gehlen or Colonel Mannberg, or whether that would be none of my business."

"I never had the privilege of a university education, Colonel," Gehlen said.

Cronley was surprised, both at that, and also that Gehlen had chosen to reply, to furnish information, however harmless it was, about himself.

"I wasn't bright enough to earn a scholars.h.i.+p," Gehlen went on. "My father, who owned a bookstore, couldn't afford to send me to school. Germany was impoverished after the First World War. So I got what education I could from the books in my father's store. And then, the day after I turned eighteen, I joined the Reichswehr as a recruit. My father hated the military, but he was glad to see me go. One less mouth to feed."

What the h.e.l.l is Gehlen up to? He didn't deliver that personal history lesson just to be polite.

"The what? You joined the what?" Ashley asked.

"The Reichswehr, Major," Hessinger furnished, "was the armed forces of the Weimar Republic. It was limited by the Versailles treaty to eighty-five thousand soldiers and fifteen thousand sailors. No aircraft of any kind. It existed from 1919 to 1935, when Hitler absorbed it into the newly founded Wehrmacht."

Fat Freddy delivered that little lecture because Gehlen delivered his history lesson. Which means he's figured out why Gehlen suddenly decided to chime in.

Why can't I?

Because I'm not as smart as either of them, that's why.

"You seem very familiar with German history, Mr. Hessinger," Parsons said.

"It is the subject of my-interrupted by the draft-doctoral thesis, Colonel."

"And you were where when you were drafted?"

"Harvard, sir."

"But you're German, right?"

"I am an American citizen, sir, who was born in Germany."

"And that leaves you, Colonel Mannberg," Parsons said.

"My university is Philipps-Universitt in Marburg an der Lahn, Colonel," Mannberg said.

"Well, truth being stranger than fiction," Parsons said, "I know something about your university, Colonel. Are you aware that your school has been training American intelligence officers since our Civil War? Maybe even before our Civil War? And that we plan to resume that just as soon as we can?"

"I didn't know that you were going to resume that program, Colonel, but I knew about it. When we were at Philipps, your General Seidel and I were in the same Brderschaft-fraternity."

Is that what Gehlen's been up to? Setting the stage for letting Parsons know that Mannberg and Seidel, the EUCOM G2, are old college fraternity buddies?

And how come Mannberg didn't tell me that?

"How interesting!" Parsons said. "And have you been in touch with General Seidel since the war ended?"

"Yes, I have," Mannberg said. "Actually, he tasked the CIC to find me. And, of course, they did."

And now I will sit here with bated breath waiting to see where all this goes.

It went nowhere.

As they talked, they had been eating.

When they had finished eating, they were through talking.

Parsons said something to the effect that while he hated to leave good company, he "and Warren have a lot on our plates for tomorrow" and that they were "reluctantly going to have to call it a night."

Hands were shaken all around, and thirty seconds later Colonel Parsons and Major Ashley had left.

When they were out of earshot, Gehlen asked, "Jim, would you think that talking this over while it's still fresh in our minds might be a good idea?"

Cronley nodded.

Gehlen, with his usual courtesy, is going to hand me my a.s.s on a platter.

"Why don't we go upstairs to my room?" he said.

[FOUR].

Suite 527 Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten Maximilianstra.s.se 178 Munich, American Zone of Occupation, Germany 2155 29 December 1945 Suite 527-an elegantly furnished bedroom, sitting room, bath, and small office-was Cronley's, although he rarely spent the night in it, or for that matter, used it at all.

He had inherited it, so to speak, from the OSS. When Colonel Robert Mattingly had commanded OSS Forward, he had requisitioned all of the fifth floor's right wing for the OSS when it had been decided to put-hide-General Gehlen's people at least temporarily in Kloster Grnau.

Mattingly had no intention of spending his nights on a GI cot in a cold, former, and until very recently, long-deserted former monastery in the middle of nowhere when the five-star Vier Jahreszeiten was available to him.

When the OSS was disbanded, and Mattingly became deputy chief, CIC-Europe, he had put Kloster Grnau under then Second Lieutenant Cronley. And turned Suite 527 over to him. At the time Cronley had thought it was a nice, if misguided, gesture. The very things that made the Vier Jahreszeiten appealing to Mattingly-it was a playground for senior officers and their wives and enforced a strict code of dress and decorum-made it unappealing to a young second lieutenant.

Cronley now believed that it was far less benevolence on Mattingly's part that gave him access to "the fifth floor" than Mattingly's desire to distance himself as far as possible from Kloster Grnau and what was going on there. There was a very good chance that Operation Ost was going to blow up in everyone's face, and Mattingly wanted to be far away when that happened.

"I don't know what's going on at Kloster Grnau. I turned the whole operation over to Cronley. I never went down there. Why, I even gave him my suite in the Vier Jahreszeiten because I never used it.

"Now, as far as FILL IN THE BLANK going so wildly wrong down there under his watch, I certainly don't want to belittle what Cronley did in Argentina, but the cold fact is that he was made a captain before he even had enough time in grade to be promoted to first lieutenant, and he really didn't have the qualifications and experience to properly handle something like Kloster Grnau."

Everyone filed into suite 527 and everyone but Cronley, who leaned against an inner wall, found seats.

The Louis XIV chair under Dunwiddie disappeared under his bulk.

If that collapses, it will add a bit of sorely needed levity to this gathering.

"Gentlemen," Cronley said in a serious tone, "if Captain Dunwiddie will forgo delivering the speech about the havoc a loose cannon can cause rolling about on a dinner table that he's been mentally rehearsing for the past hour, we can go directly to seeing if anything at all can be salvaged from that disastrous dinner."

Dunwiddie and Hessinger shook their heads. Mannberg and Gehlen smiled.

"I will admit, Jim," Gehlen said, "that if you had told us beforehand how you were going to confront Colonel Parsons, it might have gone a little better than it did. But it wasn't a disaster, by any means."

"As you may have noticed, General, I'm a little slow. You don't think that was a total disaster?"

Gehlen shook his head.

"'Know thine enemy,'" Hessinger quoted. "Sun Tzu, The Art of War."