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“I’ll follow you over there,” he said.
—
“What was that comedy routine all about?” Cronley asked, as he taxied the Storch across the airfield. “You sounded like a combination of Jack Benny and Will Rogers.”
“Pay attention, Jimmy,” Frade snapped, his tone making clear that he was deadly serious. “The damned FBI showing up here poses a greater threat to what we’re doing—on several fronts—than the people the NKGB has turned. High on this list is the distinct possibility that when Mattingly hears about it—and we have to assume he will—he will immediately shift into Cover His Ass mode and decide to throw you to the wolves. And I won’t be here to protect you.”
“You think he may already have done that? How come the FBI was here in the first place?”
“I don’t know. They may have just put the SAA Connie under surveillance to see if I was going to sneak Nazis onto it. That doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, because I’d be a fool to do that with Admiral Souers aboard. But on the other hand, the FBI does a lot of things that don’t make sense.”
“They asked, specifically, if I was James D. Cronley Junior.”
“Well, they’ve been looking for you since you were in Washington. Maybe they spotted you at the Schlosshotel Kronberg or the Vier Jahreszeiten. Anyway, they know you’re here. They regard you as the weakest link in the fence we’ve built around Operation Ost. And they really want to know about that. J. Edgar Hoover would really like to have that on Truman. And it would be almost as good—maybe better—for them to find out this renegade operation of the President is holding an NKGB officer they haven’t told Army G-2 they have. And are taking him, or have taken him, to Argentina.”
“Understood.”
“Yeah, I think you do.”
“Practically, what can happen? Say I can’t manage to dodge them? Say they show up at Kloster Grünau? I kept Colonel Schumann out of there, and he had, arguably, a right to know what’s going on in there. They don’t. What are they going to do? Complain to whom? Mattingly would have to tell them that what’s going on there is none of their business. Otherwise, he would be the guy who blew Operation Ost and that would be the same thing as betraying the President.”
“Okay. But they don’t know that, Jimmy. What they know is that there is a twenty-two-year-old junior Army officer who they think knows all about Operation Ost. With reason, they feel all they have to do is wave their FBI credentials in his face, he’ll piss his pants, then tell them anything they want to know.”
“You don’t think what happened just now might make them wonder about that?”
“You mean your wiseass crack? ‘What did this Cronley guy do, rob a bank?’”
“Yeah.”
“That was clever, but all it really did was make that FBI guy decide, ‘Okay, I can’t deal with this wiseass now. I’ll have to wait until Frade is gone. No problem. All things come to he who waits.’”
“I’m not going to blow Operation Ost, Clete.”
“Don’t underestimate the FBI. They’re not stupid, and right now they’re under a lot of pressure—if not from Hoover himself, then from Clyde Whatsisname, his deputy—to find out whatever they can about Operation Ost. You’re going to have to be very careful.”
“Clyde Whatsisname?”
“Hoover’s deputy director. Admiral Souers told me he’s the guy in charge of the private files—usually detailed reports of sexual escapades—Hoover uses to hold over people, especially politicians.” He paused and chuckled. “Jimmy, please tell me you’re not fucking somebody you shouldn’t be fucking. That would be all we need right now. The Federal Blackmail Institution would love to have something like that on you.”
Jimmy laughed, because he knew that was the reaction Clete expected.
But I am fucking somebody I shouldn’t be fucking.
And I can’t afford to have—what did Clete call it?—the Federal Blackmail Institution catch me doing it.
Okay. Auf Wiedersehen, Rachel! Affair over!
You go back to the colonel and the kiddies.
And I try to start thinking with my head instead of my dick.
It never should have started. What the hell was I thinking?
Then he repeated: “I’m not going to blow Operation Ost.”
“I wish I was as confident about that as you are.”
“What do you want me to do, say it again? Okay. I’m not going to blow Operation Ost.”
