“Who’s down there?” Frade said into his telephone, his tone incredulous, and, after there was a reply, said, “Send them up.”
He put the handset in the base and turned to the men in the room.
“Get your feet off the coffee table, Gonzalo. Your boss is on the way up. And so is the guy who thinks he’s mine.”
It was an open secret to those in the room that in addition to his role as SAA chief pilot, Gonzalo Delgano was a colonel of the Bureau of Internal Security. He had been keeping an eye on el Coronel Frade from the time he was a captain and ostensibly the pilot of el Coronel’s Beechcraft Staggerwing. Now he kept an eye on Cletus Frade and SAA.
The other reference was obviously to Richmond C. Flowers, USA, the military attaché at the American Embassy who was de jure but not de facto the senior OSS officer in Argentina.
The same question ran through both Frade’s and Delgano’s minds: I wonder what the hell this is all about.
El General de Brigada Martín, in civilian clothing, came into the office first, followed by Colonel Flowers and two muscular young men, also in civilian clothing, one of them carrying a bulging leather briefcase that clearly was stuffed full.
Frade thought: Clever fellow that I am, I suspect that those two are Marine guards.
How do I know? They’re muscular, bright-eyed—and nobody else in Buenos Aires has haircuts like that.
I wonder what the hell this is all about. . . .
“Good afternoon,” Martín said.
“Bernardo, if you’ll tell me who told you we were up here,” Frade said as he stood up, “I’ll have him dragged down Runway 28—that’s the long one—by his testicles.”
“Actually, it was a rather good-looking young woman,” Martín said, smiling.
“Then by her ears,” Frade said. He turned to Colonel Flowers. “Good afternoon, sir. I believe you know everybody?” Then, looking at the two muscular young Marines, he added, “Semper fi, guys.”
The younger of the two smiled back and said, “Semper fi, sir.”
Colonel Flowers raised his eyebrows.
Clete shrugged. “You know what we say, Colonel. Once a Marine, always a Marine.”
Colonel Flowers looked uncomfortable. He had known Kapitän zur See Boltitz and Major von Wachtstein when they had been respectively the Naval attaché and the assistant military attaché for air of the German Embassy.
Clete thought: And by now you’ve heard that I plucked them from durance vile at Fort Hunt.
“What’s going on?” Martín asked.
“Actually, we were just talking about you,” Frade said.
“Really?” Martín said as he walked around the room, shaking hands and exchanging embraces.
Flowers shook hands wordlessly with everyone.
“I said something to the effect that if el General was here we could ask him what this swap-the-diplomats mission is really all about,” Frade said.
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Martín said, walking finally to Clete, where he hugged his shoulder.
“May I say how elegant you all look in your uniforms?” Martín asked.
“Only if you say it without smirking,” Clete said, then added: “You really don’t know what’s going on? Or where our passengers are? I told Humberto to tell my Tío Juan we wanted to leave no later than four-thirty.”
“Colonel Frade, may I have a moment with you?” Colonel Flowers asked.
“Certainly. May we use your office, Gonzalo?”
“Certainly.”
When they had gone into the adjacent office, Flowers said, “Sergeant, leave the briefcase, please, and wait for me in the corridor.”
One of the Marines handed Flowers the briefcase, then both Marines left the office, closing the door behind them.
Flowers put the briefcase on the desk, then sat down in an armchair before it.
He looked at Clete and said, “May I ask where you’re going?”
Why not tell him?
“The Foreign Ministry has chartered a Connie to take a crew of Argentine diplomats to Germany and bring back the ones who are there.”
“Sort of a rescue mission?”
“I suppose you could say that. They were in Berlin while the Russians took it. That couldn’t have been much fun.”
“You’re going to Berlin?”
Frade nodded. “I’m flying the airplane. The mission will be led by someone from the foreign ministry.”
“And you’re taking the two Germans with you?”
“If you’re talking about von Wachtstein and Boltitz, Colonel, you’re getting into areas I’m not at liberty to discuss with you.”
That earned Frade the cold, tight-lipped expression he expected, but Flowers did not respond directly.
“I have half a million dollars for you,” Flowers said.
Half a million bucks? Frade thought. No shit?
Oh! Talk about government efficiency! It’s been damn near a year since I sent that invoice to Washington.
The actual idea of billing the OSS had been triggered by Doña Dorotea, who had been dealing with managers of various Frade enterprises going over their bills. She’d asked Clete, “Who’s going to pay for all the money we’re spending on the OSS? Us?”
After a moment’s hesitation, he had replied, “Who else?”
Then he’d realized that Dorotea’s question was one he had not previously considered. It had not taken him long at all, after his father had been assassinated and he had inherited everything he thought of as “el Coronel, Incorporated,” to stop thinking about money. He had other things on his mind, for one thing, and for another, the well of Frade cash seemed to be as inexhaustible as the pool of water at the bottom of Niagara Falls.
What happened next started out the next day as simple curiosity: How much am I spending on various things of interest to the OSS? And why the hell am I?
He had been astonished with his first, really rough partial estimate.
Over the next week or so, he prepared a more thorough listing of his expenses and losses on behalf of the OSS. The latter started with what it had cost him to repair—actually rebuild—the house at Tandil, which had been machine-gunned literally to rubble by troops of Colonel Schmidt’s Tenth Mountain Regiment.
When he had a more or less complete listing of things the OSS should have paid for but hadn’t, it was twenty-six pages in length.
In it, he had tried to err on the side of frugality—for example, he billed the OSS two hundred fifty dollars an hour for the “business use” of the Red Lodestar. That was half the ballpark figure SAA used for estimating the per-hour cost of flying SAA Lodestars on their routes.
He also had decided that ten dollars a day was a more than fair price for the OSS to pay for each “contract security operative”—the pressed-into-service ex-troopers of the Húsares de Pueyrredón.
Then, just as he had been genuinely surprised to see how often he’d used the Red Lodestar for OSS business, he really had been surprised to see how large his private army had grown. And how much it had cost to feed it and move it around.
At least a dozen times during the preparation of the invoice, he told himself that he was just wasting his time.
All this is going to do is piss off Donovan and Graham.
But, on the other hand, what if I didn’t have access to the overstuffed cash box of el Coronel, Incorporated?