“First let me say how happy I am to find you at your post, and not cavorting shamelessly with some naked blond Fräulein…”
“Don’t tell me where you are,” Hessinger said.
“What? Why not?”
“Because the FBI is here, and if they’re listening to the telephone, and I think they are, they’ll learn where you are and go there.”
“The FBI is in your office?”
“No. Not anymore. They were here. They were here at eight o’clock this morning.”
“Were there?”
“They left. But there’s two of them in the lobby, another in the garage, and I would be surprised if they’re not at Schleissheim Army Airfield. So I wouldn’t go there, either, if I was you.”
“What did they want?”
“You.”
“Did they say why?”
“They told Major Wallace it concerned a matter of national security they were not authorized to share with him.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“He’s not here. After he told them to get the fuck out of his office, and they did, he got in the Admiral and left.”
“Where did he go?”
“If I told you that, the FBI would know, too. You can probably guess where he went.”
One of two places, Cronley thought.
Either Kloster Grünau to warn me. Or the Farben Building to see Mattingly.
Cronley was silent a moment.
“Freddy, if they’ve tapped your phone,” he said, finally, “the FBI will know you’ve told me all this.”
“So what? They can’t do anything about that. If they say anything, they’re admitting they tapped this telephone line. They’re not authorized to tap it, and I know that, and they know that I know that.”
“Under those circumstances, I suppose I could safely say something myself, couldn’t I? Like, ‘FBI agent eavesdropping on this private conversation, go fuck yourself!’”
“That wasn’t very smart,” Hessinger said.
“No. It was, however, satisfying. And on that cheerful note, I will say goodbye, Special Agent Hessinger.”
“No. Not yet. There’s more.”
“What?”
“Mrs. Colonel Schumann wants her Leica camera back.”
“What Leica?”
“The one she says she left in the Kapitän when you took her to the bahnhof to meet her husband the colonel.”
“I know nothing about a Leica.”
“She says you have to have it. She’s so sure you have it that she didn’t go to Frankfurt this morning with the colonel. She says she wants it back before she gets on the train to Frankfurt at four-forty.”
“She’s still at the hotel?”
“Waiting for you to give back her Leica.”
That’s not what she’s waiting for.
“You call Mrs. Schumann, tell her I’m in Berlin, that I don’t have her goddamned Leica, and that I will get in touch with her as soon as possible.”
“I would rather not do that.”
“That wasn’t a suggestion.”
“Would it bother you if I told you that sometimes I like you less than I do at other times?”
“Not at all. Goodbye, Special Agent Hessinger.”
—
What I have to do now, obviously, is get General Gehlen back to Kloster Grünau. The one thing I can’t afford is the FBI asking him questions.
Tiny will want to get his people settled, and then Kurt Schröder can fly him home.
No. What I have to do first is let Clete know about the goddamned FBI. Then I can get the hell out of Dodge.
“Sergeant Mitchell, let me at the keyboard, please,” Cronley said, and when Mitchell had, he sent:
PRIORITY
TOP SECRET LINDBERGH
DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN
FROM BEERMUG
VIA VINT HILL TANGO NET
1000 GREENWICH 5 NOVEMBER 1945
TO POLO
URGENT PASS FOLLOWING TO TEX IMMEDIATELY ON HIS ARRIVAL
1-AT LEAST SIX FBI APPEARED VIER JAHRESZEITEN 0800 THIS DATE LOOKING FOR ME. FAILED TO DO SO.
2-BELIEVE WALLACE HEADED TO TELL MATTINGLY.
3-DEPARTING NOW FOR VATICAN WITH GEHLEN.
4-ELEMENTS 10TH CAV HAVE TAKEN OVER SECURITY OF COMPOUND.
5-URGENTLY REQUEST QUICKEST DISPATCH OF HELP.
ALTARBOY
END
TOP SECRET LINDBERGH
PART XIII
[ONE]
Staff Sergeant Harold Lewis Jr.’s jeep followed Cronley’s Storch down the runway when it landed. Lewis was waiting for him when he climbed out of it.
The first question Cronley put to him was had Lewis seen or heard from Major Harold Wallace.
Lewis said he had not.
“How’s our friend in das Gasthaus?”
“He’s still not talking to us, sir. He did, though, really wolf down his breakfast.”
“Well, he didn’t eat much for dinner last night.”
Jesus, was that only last night?
“And this just in, sir,” Lewis said, handing him a SIGABA printout.
Cronley read as far as the first paragraph before deciding that Major Ashton was not good at following — or more likely didn’t want to follow — the prescribed literary rules for messages, which called for the messages to say what had to be said formally and in as few words as possible.
PRIORITY
TOP SECRET LINDBERGH
DUPLICATION FORBIDDEN
FROM POLO
VIA VINT HILL TANGO NET
1000 GREENWICH 5 NOVEMBER 1945
TO VATICAN ATTENTION ALTARBOY
BEERMUG ATTENTION ALTARBOY
1-FBI LOOKING FOR YOU HERE TOO. OUR FRIEND THE ARGENTINE J. EDGAR TOLD THEM NOTHING BUT ASKED ME IF YOU HAVE BEEN ROBBING BANKS.
2-LEAVING MOUNTAINTOP VERY SHORTLY TO WELCOME TEX ON HIS ARRIVAL.
3-OUR JESUIT FRIEND WILL ALSO BE IN THE WELCOMING CROWD.
POLO
END
TOP SECRET LINDBERGH
Cronley handed the printout to General Gehlen.
“The Argentine J. Edgar?” Gehlen asked.
“J. Edgar Hoover heads the FBI. The Argentine version of that is the BIS. He’s talking about General Martín, who heads the BIS.”
“I should have thought of that,” Gehlen said. “Mountaintop, I assume, is the establishment in the Andes?”
“The foothills of the Andes. Mendoza.”
“And the Jesuit will be in Buenos Aires when Colonel Frade arrives. I hope he’ll do what Frade asks.”
“I think the problem was in finding him. I’m sure he’ll do what we want him to do, it’s in his interest as well as ours.”
“And a final question. Why is the FBI so interested in finding you?”
“I’ve thought about that,” Cronley said. “The best scenario I can come up with is that J. Edgar himself, probably because someone told him there was a young second lieutenant on Clete’s grandfather’s airplane, said, ‘Get to him.’
“That makes sense. If you’re going to break someone, it makes more sense to go after a twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant than it does someone like Colonel Mattingly or Colonel Frade or Major Wallace. If he knew about Dunwiddie, Hoover would have sent his people after him, for the same reasons.
“So Hoover is waiting to hear what the young second lieutenant said after they broke him, and all that these guys can report is they haven’t been able to break him because they can’t even find him. They’re embarrassed and under a hell of a lot of pressure.”