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“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 . . .”
“‘Fucked Up Beyond Any Repair.’” Wallace chuckled as he made the translation.
“The executive assistant 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 ass running this phony CIC detachment, you didn’t snoop around and learn a hell 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, ‘Hell, 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 . . .”
“Your cousin Luther?” Wallace asked incredulously.
“My cousin Luther and Odessa,” Cronley confirmed, and proceeded to relate that story.
When he had finished, Wallace asked, “You realize that Odessa is the CIC’s business, and none of yours?”
“I’m making it mine,” Cronley said. “And the second operation I think you should know about is our getting Colonel Likharev’s family out of Russia.”
“Whose family out of Russia?”
“The NKGB major Sergeant Tedworth caught sneaking out of Kloster Grünau turned out to be an NKGB colonel by the name of Sergei Likharev. We shipped him to Argentina, where Clete and Schultz turned him . . .”
He went on to tell Wallace the details of that, finishing, “That’s what we were doing in Vienna, giving a Russian female NKGB agent, who also works for Mossad, a hell of a lot of expense money.
“And just before our little chat with Dick Tracy Derwin, Claudette Colbert—”
“Hessinger’s new, and I must say, very-well-put-together assistant? Is her first name really Claudette, like the movie star?”
“Yes, but she prefers to be called ‘Dette.’”
“And is Freddy dallying with her?”
“No. Freddy sees her as his way out of being what he calls ‘the company clerk,’ and he’s not going to screw that up by fooling around with her.”
