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“Sir, with respect, you seem to find some of this amusing. May I ask what?” Wallace asked.
“Some things I’ve heard here are amusing. Cronley sleeping in the Duchess Suite in the Palast makes me smile. And Janice Johansen turning down Colonel Ivan Serov’s invitation to buy dinner for Cronley and her by giving him the finger and asking, ‘Why, so you can put cyanide in his soup?’ I wish I’d been there to see that. And some things I’ve heard are the direct opposite of amusing. Frightening. Sickening.”
“Ivan Serov offered to buy Cronley dinner?” Wallace asked incredulously.
“Oh, you haven’t heard that Morty, Cronley, and Serov have become pals? You’re really in the dark, Harold.”
“I’d like to come into the light, sir. Can we start the debriefing? I’d like to get the facts to Mr. Schultz as soon as possible.”
“Done deed,” Greene said. “I just got off the SIGABA with him. Cronley thought he’d place more credence in my report than in his.”
Wallace gave Cronley a dirty look.
“Obviously, Cronley didn’t think I would be interested.”
“Sir, Major Henderson suggested that since we didn’t have any intel but the basic facts, i
t would be better to wait until you got here,” Cronley replied.
“Where is Henderson? And where is Winters?”
“Henderson is taking a tour of Wewelsburg Castle, and Winters is at the Compound telling his wife what happened.”
“That obviously means Conroy and I are the only ones in the dark.”
“You won’t know how dark, Harry,” General Greene said, “until Morty brings you up to date on Wewelsburg Castle, a.k.a. the Heinrich Himmler Cathedral.”
“I’ve heard those rumors, General, and found them hard to believe. Is there something I don’t know?”
“Yes, indeed,” Greene said. “Not some thing, Harold. Lots of things.”
“So what happened, Cronley?” Wallace said. “Tell me what I don’t know.”
“Yes, sir. When I came back from Strasbourg—”
“What the hell were you doing in Strasbourg? You were sent here to protect Justice Jackson, nothing else.”
“I guess one of the things you didn’t know is that Schultz told him to take down Odessa,” Greene said.
“How do you know that?”
“Oscar told me,” Greene said. “I wonder why he didn’t tell you?”
“I have no idea.”
“Cronley, hold off telling Colonel Wallace why you were in Strasbourg and tell him what happened when you came back,” Greene ordered.
“Yes, sir. Winters met me in the Horch at the airport. We were taking a shortcut to the Palast on a back road. We came up behind a slow-moving truck Winters couldn’t get around. An Audi, headlights out, came up behind us. The truck stopped. Winters bumped it hard. The Audi pulled behind us, a guy got out and started shooting at us with a Schmeisser.”
“And?”
“I got out of the Horch and took him down.”
“Is he still alive?”
“Yes. He’s in stable condition at the 385th Station Hospital,” Cohen answered for him. “He is former SS-Obersturmbannführer Günther Kuhn. The girl is—was—his daughter Elfriede.”
“What girl?” Conroy asked. “And how did you identify him, them, so quickly?”
