AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’m a simple soldier, Colonel. When I get an order, I salute and say, ‘Yes, sir.’”
“Are you going to tell me what you’re going to do next, Cronley?” Wallace snapped sarcastically “Or have you decided I don’t have the Need to Know?”
“Temper, temper, Harold,” Greene said.
“Sir,” Cronley said, “I’m going to Strasbourg to see what Cousin Luther has decided to do.”
“Take your bodyguard with you, Cronley,” Greene said.
“What bodyguard?” Wallace asked.
“Justice Jackson suggested Cronley needed a bodyguard, Harold,” Cohen said. “Somewhat reluctantly, Super Spook took this as an order.”
“Colonel, I need a minute in private with you and Ostrowski before I go,” Cronley said.
“Whatever your little heart desires, Super Spook,” Cohen replied, and followed Cronley and Ostrowski out of the sitting room and into the foyer.
[TWO]
Entzheim Airport
Strasbourg, France
1255 25 February 1946
“Who’s he?” Commandant Jean-Paul Fortin asked, as Cronley’s bodyguard handed him his Thompson before climbing down from the Horch.
“DCI Special Agent Cezar Zielinski is my bodyguard.”
“You need a bodyguard?”
“All very important Americans have bodyguards. I’m surprised you don’t know that.”
Zielinski reclaimed the Thompson.
“Cezar, this is Colonel—”
“Commandant,” Fortin corrected him.
“—Jean-Paul Fortin. You may have run into him in England, where he was in G-2 at Free French Army headquarters when you were doing the same thing at Free Polish Army headquarters.”
“Mon colonel,” Zielinski said, coming to attention.
“I like people who didn’t surrender,” Fortin said. “I also like people to think I’m a commandant. And I also doubt you’re my American friend’s bodyguard. Who are you really?”
“My chief assigned me to see that no harm comes to Mr. Cronley.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because Justice Jackson suggested I needed one,” Cronley said.
“And, prefacing this by saying I’m already growing weary of your American humor, why would Justice Jackson think you need a bodyguard?”
“Probably because when I returned to Nuremberg from here yesterday, Odessa tried to kill me and Tom Winters as Tom was driving me from the airport to the Farber Palast.”
“Somehow I think you are now telling the truth.”
“Boy Scout’s honor, Jean-Paul,” Cronley said. “First, they used a truck to stop us, and then an Audi pulled in behind us. Former SS-Obersturmbannführer Günther Kuhn got out of the Audi and let loose with his Schmeisser.”
