AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The lieutenant colonel watched as the goddamned major who had bumped his buddy off of the C-54 approached the chief.
When the major barked, “Ellis!” the chief quickly looked up from his paper, scanned the line of arriving passengers, then even more quickly folded the Star and tossed it in the Packard, and saluted the major crisply.
“Major Canidy, sir!”
The major tossed his duffel to the chief, who caught it, then moved ahead of the major and opened the passenger door of the coupe. Once the major was in the car, the chief closed the door, put the duffel in the trunk, slid in behind the wheel, and began to drive away.
The lieutenant colonel stood stiffly as the car passed, the major saluting smartly and smiling from its passenger’s seat. It took a moment or so for the stunned lieutenant colonel to answer with barely a wave of a salute.
“How the hell are you, Chief?” Canidy said as the Packard turned left onto South Capitol Street, SE, then started to cross the bridge into the city.
“Doing pretty good, Dick,” Ellis replied with a warm smile. “That light bird with you have a bug up his ass or what?”
Canidy picked up the copy of the Star and scanned the headlines. “I had to bump his buddy off the flight at Gander, and, if that wasn’t enough, the AOD refused to tell him why. And then I wouldn’t, either.”
Ellis grinned, shaking his head. “Damned good to see you. Didn’t think that I would.”
Ellis worked for Colonel Donovan as special assistant to the director. He und
erstood that to mean that he was to do “everything and anything” to make the life of the head of the OSS easier and that kept him going round the clock. He was privy to ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of everything the director read, wrote, uttered, or otherwise transmitted, and knew all about Canidy having been in German-occupied Hungary.
He was also quite aware that Donovan had called Canidy back from London in a SECRET—EYES ONLY message—Ellis was the one who had hand-carried it to the commo room for encryption and transmittal. That duty of course naturally fell under the heading of doing everything and anything for the director. But, as far as Ellis was concerned, so did an errand to fetch Dick Canidy at the airfield.
Truth be known, Ellis had the greatest respect for Canidy, and would have done anything for him.
“Should I ask about the wheels?” Canidy said.
“I’ve got orders to drive it once a week so it don’t just sit and rot behind the house on Q Street.”
The house on Q Street, NW, a turn-of-the-century mansion that had long belonged to the wealthy Whittaker family, was being leased for one dollar a year to the Office of Strategic Services as a place to safely and discreetly house whomever—agents, politicians—was deemed necessary in the course of duty.
Whittaker Construction Company, which had begun by building and operating railroads before the Civil War, now included various areas of heavy construction (ports for ships and planes, hotels, office buildings), and continued to be quite prosperous.
With enormous wealth came very high connections and the majority shareholder of the firm—James M. B. Whittaker (Harvard ’39), presently a U.S. Army captain on an OSS mission behind enemy lines in the Philip-pines—had been known to address the President of the United States as “Uncle Frank,” and not always pleasantly.
“Sounds like something Jimmy Whittaker would say,” Canidy said.
“Yeah, and so I was doing just that, just about to go on my usual thirty-minute spin, when the boss, who didn’t want you looking for him in his office, said to go find you at Anacostia. ‘Why don’t you take the convertible out to the prodigal son?’ is what he said.”
“I’m not the prodigal son. Jimmy is. That’s why it’s his car. Hell, his house. Any word from Jimmy?”
Ellis looked at him blankly. He didn’t respond.
“I’ll take the absence of bad news to mean good news,” Canidy said with a smile.
Ellis, eyes on the road ahead, shook his head.
Canidy went on: “The boss have much to say about me otherwise?”
“Only that he’d meet us after he stopped by his town house in Georgetown.”
“That works,” Canidy said. “I definitely need a change of clothes.”
“A shower wouldn’t hurt, either,” Chief Ellis said, and smirked as he turned left onto M Street, headed for Rock Creek Parkway.
The house on Q Street, NW—a mansion on an estate—was surrounded by an eight-foot-high brick wall. Ellis brought the Packard to a stop with its bumper against the heavy, solid gate in the wall.
He was about to tap out “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits” on the horn—mostly because it drove the ex–Secret Service guys nuts, and Ellis didn’t much care for them or their holier-than-thou attitudes—when a muscular man in civilian clothing and a woolen overcoat stepped out from a break in a hedgerow and approached Ellis’s window, his shoes crunching the snow as he walked.
