The Assassination Option Part 39

"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 a.s.sistant 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, f.u.c.k 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 pa.s.s because you're a r.e.t.a.r.d," 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.

f.u.c.k you, I don't like you, either, you s.a.d.i.s.tic, arrogant sonofab.i.t.c.h!

"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 doc.u.ments, 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 doc.u.ments, would be safer than travel by truck. What is an obviously upper-cla.s.s 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 ma.s.sive ignorance has just raised its head."

"The German state, the East German state, which borders on Hesse in the Ka.s.sel-Hersfeld area. Do you know that area?"

"I've been to both Hersfeld and Ka.s.sel. When I first came to Germany, I was a.s.signed 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].

En Route to Schleissheim Army Airfield 1255 16 January 1946 "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 G.o.dfather, will a.s.sume 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."