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“I’m not familiar with that phrase, but I think I take the meaning. Yes, he threw me under the bus.”
“How’d you learn the NKGB is on to you?”
“I am not—was not—the only Mossad agent in the NKGB.”
“Okay. The question now becomes how do we get you out of here?”
“The NKGB has people on the staff of the hotel. They report when anyone is occupying the CIC’s home away from home,” Wasserman said. “If the NKGB is looking for . . . this lady, there’s a good chance—almost a certainty—they know she’s in here.”
“Then we have to get her out of here,” Cronley said. “As soon as possible.”
“Out of here to where?”
“To Schwechat. From which Tom will fly her and Wieczorek to the Compound and turn her over—without telling Wallace, Tom—to General Gehlen for safekeeping.”
“I think we need a word in private, Captain Cronley,” Wasserman said.
Captain Cronley?
Oh, shit! Is he going to cause me trouble?
Is he trying to cover his ass?
“Colonel Wasserman, I think everybody has the Need to Know what you want to say to me.”
Wasserman’s face whitened before he replied.
“Have you considered that the NKGB wants you, as well as this lady, dead? Or, now that I think about it, really would like to have both of you in a basement cell on Lubyanka Square in Moscow?
“And that they are probably perfectly willing to suffer the ire of the Americans—and maybe the English—on the Quadripartite Commission for doing one or the other in the lobby of the Bristol?”
“Or risk that ire by bursting into the suite here and blowing us away right here. Without witnesses,” Cronley argued. “That’s an even worse scenario.”
There was a long silence. Then Cronley sighed and spoke.
“This is what I’m going to do, presuming Tom and Oskar are willing to go along. If the NKGB or Odessa is finally successful in blowing me away, they’re going to cause a stink, hopefully a great big stink, when they do.
“They’re going to have to blow me—and Tom and Rachel and Oskar—away in the lobby of the Bristol Hotel. Or on the sidewalk outside as we get in a taxicab. Or on the way to Schwechat. They’re not just going to fade into the darkness.
“The NKGB guy—or the Odessa guy—who shot Bonehead Moriarty in the head with a silenced .22 thinking it was me disappeared into the darkness. Round One to the NKGB or Odessa. There were three Odessa people who tried to whack Tom and me on the airport road. I took out one of them, and wounded one. The other got away. In my book, that gives Round Two to the Good Guys.
“This is Round Three. If I’m going to go down—and that seems likely—I’m going to go down fighting. Remember the Alamo.”
“I can’t believe you actually said that,” Tom Winters said.
“What’s the Alamo?” Oskar asked.
“Pay attention, Oskar,” Cronley said. “Texas History 101, 1836. The bad guy t
hen was a Mexican general named Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón. He led an army into what is now the Great State of Texas—”
“That was really his name?” Tom asked, chuckling.
“I’m shocked they didn’t teach you this at Hudson High,” Cronley replied. “Yes, it was. Pray let me continue. This bad guy, commonly known as Santa Anna, led an army—a very large army—across the San Antonio River with the intention of quelling the restless natives—most of them Southerners, but with a sprinkling of Yankees—who had the odd notion they didn’t want to be Mexicans.
“He encountered one hundred sixty of them who had turned an old mission building called the Alamo into sort of a fort. He called upon them to surrender, pointing out that he outnumbered them about twenty-five to one, and that he had cannons and they did not.
“They gave him the finger.
