Mom did. As usual. She recalled a relative on her mother's side who had married a guy who'd gone to West Point and worked himself up to general. He worked a staff job at the War Plans Division in that new building down in Washington D.C. The Pentagon. She was sure he'd like a nice young relative with police experience to be a security officer on his staff.
She had suggested the Military Police at first, but Dad hated their guts from his days in France. He said they weren't real cops, just guys with clubs who kept an honest doughboy from his drinks and the ladies on those few occasions when he got a pass. So, no Military Police for me.
Mom called her cousin and Dad called his congressman who owed him a favor or two, and pretty soon I was going to OCS and then to Washington, D.C. to join Uncle Ike's staff. Maybe Dad had kind of oversold me. True, I was a detective on the Boston PD, but I had only been in plainclothes for a few weeks. I had worn a bluecoat and walked a beat for five years right out of high school and although Dad had me detailed to help out around crime scenes a lot, I wasn't the experienced investigator Uncle Ike thought I was. It was kind of unusual for a cop to make detective at my age. While I can usually figure things out sooner or later, I'm no scholar, and the exam they gave was real hard. A few of the sheets from the test happened to find their way into my locker one day, and I managed to pass. My Uncle Dan is on the Promotions Board, so I was in. That's the way it works. I'm not saying I'm proud of it, but it doesn't mean I'm not a good cop either. I'm not just some stranger who got the job because he was smart enough to answer more questions than the other guy. That doesn't mean a damn thing when your partner is counting on you for backup.
I had to do my best and figure things out as we went along. I hate to admit it, but I didn't want to disappoint Uncle Ike either. The guy had such a big job and such a nice smile, it seemed that it wouldn't be fair to fail and add to his burdens. He's family, after all. We were all sure he and I would sit out the war at the Pentagon. Little did we know that he had been tapped to head up the U.S. forces in Europe. And that he liked the idea of having a former cop on his staff-a family member to boot-to work as his secret special investigator. There's all kinds of crime during wartime involving top brass and politicians, and Uncle Ike doesn't like anyone getting away with anything that hurts the war effort. He also doesn't like stuff like that getting in the news. Too embarrassing for Allied unity. That's where I come in. I'm supposed to look into things for him. Quietly.
The only thing quiet about this mission was this jail cell. Everything else was loud, from the artillery fire to the gunshot that killed Georgie. Nothing I could do about that now, though. I stretched my sore back and tried to get comfortable on the hard floor.
Major Samuel Harding was not "family," not even close. West Point graduate, decorated combat veteran in the last war, professional soldier. My complete opposite and worst nightmare. He worked in the Intelligence section at U.S. Army Headquarters, and Uncle Ike had detailed me to be his aide. That was my cover story and my job between assignments from Uncle Ike. Such as now. Which is why I'm sitting in a jail cell in Algiers, in the basement of the Vichy secret police headquarters, wondering if some French homicidal maniac is going to shoot me before or after he shoots Diana.
Diana. Now that's a whole other story. Diana had had a sister, Daphne Seaton, Second Officer in the Women's Royal Naval Service, attached to the U.S. Headquarters in London when I got there last June. She's dead now, but I don't want to think about that. I met Diana just before it happened. She knocked my socks off. Diana and I saw each other pretty regularly until I was sent to Gibraltar with Harding and she was recalled to the SOE.
She had enlisted, at the start of the war, in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. It was a women's outfit, and they weren't actually nurses, or yeomen either. Diana had ended up as a switchboard operator for the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium in 1940. She was nearly captured, and made it out of Dunkirk only to have the destroyer she was on sunk in the Channel. It was filled with wounded. She made it, they didn't. That's when she volunteered for the SOE.
I understood that. She needed to find out if she deserved to live after everyone around her died. I just didn't understand what possessed her to get herself in that position in the first place. I was here under protest, like any sane person, but Diana had no one to blame but herself. I got mad at her while I thought about it, which was at least a distraction from worrying about her.
I stood on the stone floor and stretched. The cell was empty, if you didn't count a sleeping Harding, me, and a rusty bucket. The walls were a flaky white limestone that crumbled easily and smelled like mold and piss. The iron bars were coated with rust, and my hands were the color of dried blood and white chalk. My head throbbed as I stood, and I remembered some of that rust color was my own dried blood.
A door clanked and I heard footsteps coming down the stairwell. Harding opened his eyes and got up instantly. He probably slept at attention. We both went to the bars and tried to peer down the hall, just like guys in the cells back home. I liked the view better from the other side.
Remke and another German officer strolled into view. They were both dressed in full-length leather coats, with goggles pushed up over their caps. If this was going to be an interrogation, it looked like it was going to be a messy one.
"Well, gentlemen," Remke said, "it appears there is not time for our little chat. Conditions are changing rapidly, and we must depart at once. While we can."
"We?" I asked. Remke smiled slightly, and glanced at his companion.
"Lieutenant Boyle is worried we might take him with us, Gerhardt," Remke said. "What do you say? Would he be better off as our prisoner or as an ally of the French?" Remke looked like he was enjoying himself. His pal didn't.
"Major, all I know is that we must leave immediately." Gerhardt looked calm, every part of him except his right hand, which held the grip of the Schmeisser submachine gun slung over his shoulder. He kept flexing it, opening and closing it over the hatch-marked grip like a nervous gunsel at a bank heist.
"My aide, gentleman," Remke said, as if we were being introduced at the officer's club. "Lieutnant Gerhardt graf von Neiderlander. Major Harding and Lieutenant Boyle."
Gerhardt snapped out a crisp salute. "Major Harding, I am pleased to meet you. Major Remke regrets he cannot discuss events further with you, since we must leave immediately." He spoke perfect English, with an accent that would have fit in at Oxford.
Harding returned the salute and looked Gerhardt up and down. He was tall and tanned, with white patches on his face where goggles had shaded his skin from the sun. A white scar ran down his right temple. His blue eyes and blond hair made him look like a high school kid, but his unusual tan, and the leather trench coat with a Schmeisser held at the ready, said he was a hardened soldier, an Afrika Korps killer.
Harding looked at me, then back to Gerhardt.
"I don't suppose you'd trade aides, Major?"
Remke laughed and said something in rapid German to Gerhardt, who cracked a smile.
"No, Major Harding. While I would like to learn more about you Americans, I cannot leave Gerhardt here. After all our difficulties working as allies with the French, I could not allow him to miss the opportunity of fighting them!"