She hedged a bit, looked at her watch, then finally shrugged.
“Sounds charming,” she said. “But I only have an hour.”
The car was a chauffeur-driven Packard. Obviously, Sir Colin did rather well with his column. The bar was brass and enamel, its style ultra deco. They sat in a corner booth and sipped martinis. She studied him carefully. Ward Allenbee was a handsome man with pale blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses. His thin black hair was graying and archly widow- peaked and he wore a meticulously trimmed Prince Albert beard. His clothes were expensive and stylish, his speech perfect, his voice resonant. And he was intelligent and well informed. Quite interesting, she thought.
Twenty-seven saw a woman in her late thirties, handsome, well groomed, yet oddly cold and detached. Her posture was a little too correct, her classic features a little too perfect, from the angular nose and pale green eyes to the petulant mouth, her red hair a little too tightly combed, her eyes a little too cold and suspicious. A snob who covered priggishness with a veneer of sophistication. She was awesomely well informed and outrageously opinionated and she was a casual name dropper. Some men might have found her intimidating. Twenty-seven saw in her a frustrated and repressed woman of high caste, ripe for the picking, a widow whose husband had been dead for years. A wonderful diversion while he awaited the next step in the mission.
One drink became two drinks and then a third. The first hour passed and they were deep into the second when he suggested dinner at Delmonico’s. She eyed him momentarily, her eyes softened by vermouth and gin, then she smiled.
“Why not,” she said. “But we must stop by my place, first. I really must change clothes.”
She had an ample one-bedroom suite adjoining her father’s larger quarters in the Waldorf North Tower. It was pleasantly furnished but hotel furniture was hotel furniture no matter what one did with it.
“I won’t take long, I promise,” she said. “I’ll make you a drink before I change.” She went to the bar in the corner and stirred him another martini.
He sipped the drink and nodded emphatically.
“Excellent,” he said. “You are really something. You’re a walking journal of events, you’re quite beautiful and you make a great martini. You’re full of surprises, Lady Penelope.”
He reached out, very lightly stroked her hair, then her throat. Stepping closer, he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her gently on the mouth. She responded hungrily, a woman who had been chaste, untrusting of men, for years.
She wanted him desperately, feeling he was a safe port in her otherwise stormy life. But that could wait. As he wrapped his arms around her, she buried her face in his neck, then raising her lips slightly, she whispered in his ear:
“Das Gespenst ist frei.”
Twenty-seven was astonished when he heard her whisper the code phrase. Was she really his contact, this rich, tided Englishwoman whose father, the internationally famous journalist, had taken so many pot shots at Hitler through the years? Taken completely unaware, he stood flabbergasted as Lady Penelope walked across the room and opened the door to her father’s suite.
“Daddy,” she said.
The tall, trim, impeccable Englishman strode into the room. He wore a red velvet smoking jacket and a blue ascot. He was a handsome man, his mustache trimmed and waxed, his fingers manicured, his silver hair perfectly trimmed, his posture military. There was about him a cool, tailored, untouchable air. So this was the author of the famous “Willow Report.” Looking at them together, Allenbee saw the family resemblance in the painfully correct posture, the classic features, the snobbish air.
Willoughby thrust his hand out.
“Well, well,” he said. “At last we meet. We’ve waited a long time for this moment.”
“Sir Colin,” Allenbee said cautiously. The Britisher leaned toward him and spoke a simple code phrase, “Wilikommen Siebenundzwanzig, der Gespenstschauspieler.”
They shook hands.
“So.. . time to make our contribution to the Third Reich, eh?” Willoughby said with a smile.
“How did you recognize me in the bank?” Allenbee asked Lady Penelope.
“Since you wouldn’t leave a picture, I watched who went to the safe deposit room. You picked up your credentials yesterday so I had a rough idea what you would look like as John Allenbee, although I must admit, the beard threw me. Actually, it was just luck. I was looking for a man I might feel comfortable engaged to.
“Engaged?”
“We’ll get to that,” Willoughby said. “You know, old man, you gave us a start when we saw the personal in the paper and knew you were on the run. What happened?”
“Somebody got on to me.”
Willoughby turned ashen for a moment but quickly regained his composure.
“Who?” he asked, his eyebrows arching with the question.
“Someone at a government department called White House Security.”
Willoughby shrugged. “Probably something to do with the guards on the gates and halls . .
“I don’t think so,” Allenbee said. “They knew my name, address, occupation. They asked for the sheriff first, then a park ranger to go with them to my place.”
“Where was this?”
“Aspen, Colorado.”
“What did you do?”
“I helped set up ski lodges there, Mapped out trails, set up base camps, ran avalanche patrols. It was a good job until these two showed up from Washington.”
“How did you get away?” Lady Penelope asked.
Allenbee stared at her for a moment, then smiled.
“With great difficulty.”
“What did they want, the two from Washington?” Lady Penelope asked.
“I have no idea. I didn’t wait to find out.”
“Well, never mind,” Willoughby said with a grin. “You made it. You are here. The time is now. Ready to go to work, Herr Swan?”
“Not Swan, Willoughby,” he said sternly. “My name is Allenbee. Erase Swan from your mind. He no longer exists. And can the German expressions. You’re English, I’m American.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” said a flustered Willoughby. “I’ll be more careful in the future.”
“See to it,” Allenbee said. “So ... what is this plan that we’ve waited six years to implement?”
“Shall we go to my suite? Everything is there. Actually, the whole gambit is quite simple to explain.”
Allenbee followed them both into Sir Colin’s suite. Unlike Lady Penelope’s hotel decor, his living room had obviously been redecorated in oak paneling and leather furniture. One wall was dominated by an enormous Degas painting. Allenbee stared at it for several moments.
“Early Degas,” he said.
“You know your art, John,” Sir Colin said.
“It’s Ward. I prefer to be called Ward. John is too common.”
“Very good, Ward.”
“I once had a Degas,” Allenbee said. “That was years ago. Willie Vierhaus has it now.”
“Help me, would you, please?” Willoughby said, walking over to the painting. With Allenbee’s help, he took the painting down, turned it around and leaned it against the wall. Brown wrapping paper was stretched across the back. Willoughby took a sharp letter opener, scored the edges of the paper and tore it off. Beneath it, glued to the back of the painting, were two maps and a detailed blueprint. One of the maps was the eastern seacoast of the United States; the other was a blowup of a small section of the larger map, with an arrow pointing to a spot on the Georgia coast near the Florida border.
“This is where we are going,” Willoughby said, tracing his finger down the larger of the two maps to the town of Brunswick, Georgia. “About fifty miles north of the Florida line there is an island called Jekyll Island. This smaller map is a close-up of it. It’s just across the marsh from the mainland. Actually, a very short boat ride. The island just to the north of it is St. Simons Island. They are separated by a sound—probably a quarter of a mile wide.