The Assassination Option Part 36

"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.

DEAR MAJOR DERWIN:.

THERE ARE THOSE WHO BELIEVE THE EXPLOSION WHICH TOOK THE LIVES OF YOUR PREDECESSOR, LIEUTENANT COLONEL ANTHONY SCHUMANN, AND HIS WIFE WAS NOT ACCIDENTAL, AND FURTHER THAT THE PROVOST MARSHAL'S INVESTIGATION OF THE INCIDENT WAS SUSPICIOUSLY SUPERFICIAL.

THERE ARE THOSE WHO WONDER WHY CAPTAIN JAMES D. CRONLEY JR., OF THE XXIIIRD CIC DETACHMENT, WAS NOT QUESTIONED BY THE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION DIVISION IN THE MATTER, OR, FOR THAT MATTER, BY THE CIC, IN VIEW OF THE SEVERAL RUMORS CIRCULATING CONCERNING CRONLEY:.

THAT HIS RELATIONs.h.i.+P WITH MRS. SCHUMANN WAS FAR MORE INTIMATE THAN APPROPRIATE.

THAT COLONEL SCHUMANN NARROWLY AVOIDED BEING MURDERED BY CRONLEY AT THE SECRET INSTALLATION, A FORMER MONASTERY, CRONLEY RUNS IN SCHOLLBRUNN.

THAT AMONG THE MANY SECRETS OF THIS INSTALLATION, KLOSTER GRNAU, ARE A NUMBER OF RECENTLY DUG UNMARKED GRAVES.

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

"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 d.i.c.k 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 f.u.c.king 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' relations.h.i.+p 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 Grnau. 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 d.a.m.n 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 gra.s.s 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 Grnau 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 j.a.panese 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 cla.s.sified information. We are checking to see if he can be trusted with it. Which of his s.e.xual 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 sonofab.i.t.c.h 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 s.h.i.+pped your a.s.s to the Aleutian Islands to count s...o...b..a.l.l.s, which he would do, and which you would deserve for your d.i.c.k Tracy bulls.h.i.+t, the p.r.i.c.k 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d and nail him to the wall.

"So what you are going to do, Major Derwin, is put that G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 s.h.i.+pped 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 att.i.tude-"

"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 a.s.sure 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned. 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 h.e.l.l, 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 a.s.sistant 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 a.s.sistant 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 t.i.tle, 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?"

"n.o.body 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 . . ."

"'f.u.c.ked Up Beyond Any Repair.'" Wallace chuckled as he made the translation.

"The executive a.s.sistant 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 a.s.s running this phony CIC detachment, you didn't snoop around and learn a h.e.l.l 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, 'h.e.l.l, 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 . . ."