AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“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 assistant 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, Fuck 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 pass because you’re a retard,” 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.
Fuck you, I don’t like you, either, you sadistic, arrogant sonofabitch!
“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.
