The Assassination Option Page 9

  “Ask away. Isn’t that what this is all about? Finding out about each other?”

  “Why is it you’re not wearing your uniform now? I mean, isn’t that civilian attire?”

  “As a special agent of the CIC, I’m allowed to wear ‘civilian attire’ when I think it’s necessary.”

  “But you’re not a CIC special agent, are you?”

  “Until January second, I am a special agent of the CIC, assigned to the Twenty-third CIC Detachment,” Cronley said, and then indicated Dunwiddie and Hessinger. “We all are.”

  “And on January second?”

  “Then we will all be transferred to DCI-Europe. I would have thought General Greene or Colonel Mattingly would have explained that.”

  “It’s not clear in my mind,” Parsons said.

  “And after that, you and the sergeant here will have to wear your uniforms?” Major Ashley asked. His tone of voice made it a challenge.

  “Who told you Special Agent Hessinger is a sergeant?”

  “You don’t use the term ‘sir’ often, do you, Captain?” Ashley snapped.

  “I guess I don’t. Sorry. Blame it on the OSS.”

  “‘Blame it on the OSS’?” Ashley parroted sarcastically.

  “The OSS was—and I suppose the DCI will be—a little lax about the finer points of military courtesy,” Cronley said. “My question to you, Major, was who told you Special Agent Hessinger is a sergeant?”

  “As a matter of fact, it was Colonel Mattingly.”

  “I’m surprised. He knows better.”

  “My question to you, Captain,” Ashley snapped, “is whether after Two January you will wear the prescribed uniform.”

  “After Two January the chief, DCI-Europe, will prescribe what DCI-Europe personnel will wear,” Cronley said. “Right now, I don’t think that will often be a uniform revealing our ranks to the world.”

  Ashley opened his mouth to reply. Cronley saw Parsons just perceptibly shake his head, which silenced Ashley.

  Two waiters appeared and handed out menus.

  They ordered.

  “You understand, of course, Mr. Cronley,” Colonel Parsons said, “that Major Ashley was understandably curious.”

  “Mister Cronley”? Was that a slip of the tongue?

  Or is he being nice?

  If he’s being nice, why is he being nice?

  “Absolutely,” Cronley said. “Curiosity’s a common affliction of intelligence officers, isn’t it?”

  “Absolutely,” Parsons agreed with a smile. “My wife says, aside from my drinking, it’s my worst character flaw.”

  Everyone laughed dutifully.

  “Truth to tell, I’m a little curious about what you’re going to do after Two January.”

  “Do about what, Colonel?”

  “Identifying yourself, yourselves.”

  “To whom?”

  “Hypothetical situation?”

  “Why not?”

  “You and Mr. Hessinger and Captain Dunwiddie—in civilian attire—are riding down the super highway here—what’s it called?”

  “The autobahn.”

  “The autobahn, in that magnificent German automobile Major Wallace drives . . .”

  “The Opel Admiral,” Dunwiddie furnished.

  “Thank you. And, deep in conversation about how to repel the Red Threat to all we hold dear, you let the Admiral get a little over the speed limit. The ever-vigilant military police pull you over.”

  “Don’t let it get around, Colonel, but your hypothetical situation actually happened several times to Colonel Mattingly.”

  “Really?”

  “He was driving me from Kloster Grünau to Rhine-Main to catch the plane to Buenos Aires. In his magnificent German automobile, his Horch. Have you ever seen his Horch? That’s a really magnificent car.”

  “I don’t think I’d recognize a Horch if one ran over me.”

  “Between the monastery and Rhine-Main, the MPs pulled him over three times for speeding. The last citation was for going three times the speed limit.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “No, I am not. Three times the speed limit is a hundred and seventy KPH, or a little over a hundred miles an hour—”

  “Cronley,” Major Ashley interrupted him, “why don’t you let the colonel continue with his hypothetical?”

  “Sorry,” Cronley said. “Go ahead, Colonel.”

  “So there you are, by the side of the road, and the MP says, ‘Sir, let me see your identification, please.’ What are you going to do?”

  “Follow the example shown me by Colonel Mattingly,” Cronley replied. “Dazzle him with my CIC special agent credentials. Telling him I am rushing somewhere in the line of duty.”

  “But you won’t have CIC credentials after One January,” Ashley said.

  “Oh, but I will.”

  “No, you won’t,” Ashley snapped. “You’ll then be in the Directorate of Central Intelligence, not the CIC.”

  “I’m sure Colonel Parsons has his reasons for not telling you about that,” Cronley said.

  “Not telling him what about that?” Parsons asked.

  “Now I’m in a spot,” Cronley said. “Maybe this hypothetical wasn’t such a good idea after all.”

  “What are you talking about, Cronley?” Parsons asked.

  Not only am I no longer “Mister Cronley,” but he’s using the tone of voice lieutenant colonels use when dealing with junior captains who have done something to annoy them.

  “Colonel, I’m just surprised that General Greene—and especially Colonel Mattingly, after all, he did tell you Hessinger is a sergeant—didn’t tell you about this. But they obviously had their reasons. But what the hell, they didn’t ask me not to tell you, so I will.”

  Colonel Parsons gave Major Ashley another don’t-say-anything shake of the head, but it was too late.

  “Ask you not to tell us what?” Ashley snapped sarcastically.

  Three waiters marched up to the table carrying their dinner.

  Serving it was an elaborate ceremony, but finally everything was served and the waiters left.

  I am now going to pretend I think the hypothetical is closed.

  “Do you know the officers’ clubs import this beef from Denmark?” Cronley asked. “It seems they’re leaning over backwards to avoid any suggestion that the clubs are taking the best beef from the Quartermaster—”

  “You were saying something, Mr. Cronley,” Colonel Parsons interrupted him, “about General Greene not telling me something?”

  “Right,” Cronley said.

  He paused before going on: “Oh, what the hell. I don’t want to be stuffy about this—God knows there’s a hell of a lot classified Secret and Top Secret that shouldn’t be classified at all—but this is justifiably classified . . .”

  “Meaning you’re not going to tell us?” Ashley asked, rather nastily.

  “No, Major, I’ve decided you have the need to know about this, so I’m going to tell you. But I also have to tell you this is classified Top Secret–Presidential.”

  “You are aware, Cronley, are you not, that both Colonel Parsons and myself hold Top Secret–Presidential clearances?” Ashley said, angrily sarcastic. “We’re entitled to know.”

  Well, I finally got you to blow up, didn’t I?

  And I ain’t through.

  “What you and Colonel Parsons are entitled to know about the DCI, about Operation Ost, Major, is what I decide you have the need to know.”

  If that doesn’t set Parsons off, nothing will.

  Greatly surprising Cronley, it didn’t.

  “Warren, Mr. Cronley is right,” Parsons said. “Why don’t we let him tell us what he thinks we should know?”

  I’ll be damned.

  But why is it th
at I don’t think I’ve won?

  “I’ll tell you what I can, sir, about the DCI and the CIC,” Cronley said. “The basic idea is, as you’re fully aware, to hide Operation Ost from just about everybody who does not have a genuine need to know. Everybody, in this sense, includes the FBI and that part of the CIC engaged in looking for Nazis. As well, of course, as just about everybody else.”

  “Admiral Souers explained that to me in some detail,” Parsons said.

  “Yes, sir, he told me that he had. But what he didn’t tell you, and what General Greene apparently hasn’t told you—and I really wish he had—and what I’m going to tell you now, is how the admiral decided the concealment could best be accomplished.”

  “And how is that?” Ashley demanded.

  “Warren,” Colonel Parsons said warningly.

  Now Parsons’s on my side?

  What the hell is going on?

  “When Admiral Souers told me that, at his request, and with the President’s approval, the Army was going to task EUCOM-CIC with the logistical support of DCI-Europe, I suggested to him that I’d like to use EUCOM-CIC for more than that.”

  “You suggested that you’d like?” Ashley demanded sarcastically.

  “Warren, shut up!” Parsons ordered curtly.

  Well, if nothing else, I really have Parsons’s attention.

  “I suggested to the admiral that we could conceal a great deal of DCI-Europe within the CIC,” Cronley went on. “For example, if we let people think that the Pullach compound is a CIC installation, and that General Gehlen’s people were being employed by the CIC to track down Nazis . . .”

  “But you’re calling it the South German Industrial Development Organization Compound,” Parsons said.

  “Admiral Souers raised the same objection, sir. I suggested that if the Pullach compound was actually being used by the CIC as a Nazi hunting center, they wouldn’t put that on the sign. The sign would say something like the General-Büros Süd-Deutsche Industrielle Entwicklungsorganisation.”

  “Clever,” Colonel Parsons said thoughtfully. “And, I gather, Admiral Souers and General Greene went along with your ideas?”

  “Admiral Souers did. I don’t think General Greene was unhappy with them.”

  “And, in any case,” Parsons said, “what General Greene might think is moot, isn’t it?”

  “Colonel, I don’t know this, but I think that if General Greene didn’t like any of this, he would have told Admiral Souers, and I know the admiral would have listened. What I’m guessing is that General Greene didn’t have any major objections.”

  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 fuck 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 analytical 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 hell 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 shift 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 sonofabitch, 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-Büros Süd-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 pass 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 ‘Hell 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.”

&nbs
p; “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 scholarship,” 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 hell 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-Universität 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 Brüderschaft—fraternity.”