The Double Agents

by W. E. B Griffin

He dramatically moved the bottle of vermouth far away from the glasses, then, holding the cork between forefinger and thumb, he swiftly passed the cork over the top of the glasses.

  He then quickly returned the cork to the open neck of the bottle and pushed it in noisily with a smack of the palm of his hand.

  Charity Hoche let loose a pleasant peal of laughter.

  “Very nicely done,” she said. “I believe that would be what is called a dry martini.”

  “Very dry,” Niven said, smiling.

  “And it should be noted,” Fleming added, “shaken, not stirred.”

  Niven picked up one glass, raised it to his lips, took a sip, then sighed.

  “Perfection!” he exclaimed.

  He motioned to the other glasses.

  “Please, enjoy.”

  After the first of the martinis disappeared, Major David Niven instructed Private Peter Ustinov to begin preparing a second round using the Prime Minister’s personal martini recipe.

  Lieutenant Ed Stevens emptied his glass, then got up from his chair. He walked around the table to where First Lieutenant Charity Hoche sat conversing with Commander Ian Fleming.

  Stevens touched her lightly on the shoulder.

  “Excuse me for interrupting,” Stevens said. “Charity, before we get too deep into this next round, could I please have a word with you?”

  She looked up at him, as if awaiting some explanation.

  Stevens added, “Just a bit of housekeeping before the night gets away from us.”

  He nodded toward the main door.

  Charity Hoche stood, and everyone else at the table still seated also stood.

  “If you’ll please excuse me,” she said.

  As Stevens and Charity left, everyone but Ustinov, counting aloud as he stood shaking the shaker, returned to their seats.

  Stevens and Charity walked to the doorway, then went through it.

  Outside the pub, in the main corridor of Whitbey House, the noise level dropped noticeably.

  “Good,” Stevens said. “Now I can at least hear myself.”

  “What’s this all about?” Charity asked.

  “This is not something that David or Ian could not hear,” Stevens explained. “I just wanted to make sure that you heard it, that it didn’t get lost in the noise in there, and you could have time to think about it.”

  “Okay.”

  “This situation with Operation Mincemeat. David Bruce still is smarting about having been left out of the loop for the Manhattan Project. Now that wound has been reopened because he thinks he’s also been kept in the dark on Mincemeat. He thought that I knew about the op, and it took some real work from David to convince him otherwise.”

  Charity nodded.

  “I had no idea about it before David and Ian called yesterday after they had run into John Ford.”

  Ford, at forty-seven, was a real heavy hitter in Hollywood. Now he was using his award-winning filmmaking skills on the front lines—and getting injured in the process. The documentary he’d made in 1942, The Battle of Midway, had won an Academy Award.

  Stevens went on: “He’s the chief of our Field Photographic Branch. He has been helping set up shop at London Station and getting ready to go back into the field. When Niven found out that he was there, he took the idea of Mincemeat to him. Next thing I know, I’m involved.”

  “And so you moved the op out here.”

  “It was the logical thing to do,” Stevens said. He paused, then went on. “But there’s another pressing problem that brings me out here.”

  Charity’s face was questioning.

  Stevens explained: “I need you to find Ann Chambers as soon as possible.”

  “I have no idea where she is,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about her, wondering, but I don’t have a clue.”

  “No one does. And that’s the problem. Her father is demanding to know what we know, to know what Dick Canidy knows.”

  Charity’s eyebrows went up.

  “Dick,” she said, “doesn’t know anything. He’s in Algiers.”

  Charity felt for Dick and Ann; she damn sure knew what it meant to be in love…and separated by war.

  “I know,” Stevens said. “And Ann Chambers’s father—”

  “Brandon. He’s got real clout,” Charity interrupted.

  “Brandon Chambers does have real clout. And he’s been on the phone to the FBI trying to find the OSS and Canidy.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” Stevens said. “Oh.”

  “I wonder if he’s tried to get to him through Eddie Bitter,” Charity said. “And couldn’t, and that’s why he’s gone to the FBI.”

  “Why Bitter?”

  “He and Ann are cousins,” Charity said. “Their mothers are sisters, Mrs. Chambers and Mrs. Bitter.”

  “That’s right. I’d forgotten that.”

  “But I doubt that Eddie would tell his Uncle Brandon much—if anything. About the OSS, that is. Does he know where Dick is?”

  “No,” Stevens said. “And Canidy sure wouldn’t have told him.”

  “Brandon Chambers won’t give up until he gets what he wants.”

  Stevens nodded. “And that’s why you’re going to find Ann—and give Brandon Chambers what he needs—before we get any more attention than we already have.”

  Charity nodded slowly.

  “Let’s go back in before our drinks spoil,” Stevens said with a smile. “We can pick this up in the morning.”

  They walked back into the pub.

  As they approached the table, Major David Niven noticed with some disappointment that Charity’s blouse was now dry.

  He held up a full martini for her to take, brought his up in a toast, and declared: “Tonight we drink, for tomorrow we ship our man to sea.”

  “Next week,” Montagu corrected.

  Niven looked at him over the top of his martini, said, “Whenever,” then swallowed half his drink.

  [ONE]

  Port of Algiers Algiers, Algeria 2135 30 March 1943

  Dick Canidy leaned against the side of the warehouse as he watched the unloading of a pair of forty-foot-long wooden-hulled fishing boats. The vessels were moored on either side of a T-shaped dock that was at the far eastern end of the port, a ramshackle area separate from the main military dockage. The longshoremen had been steadily off-loading wooden boxes filled with iced-down fish for longer than the ninety minutes that Canidy had stood there in the dark shadows.

  After Canidy had left Hank Darmstadter with the C-47 Gooney Bird at the airfield, he had stopped in at the OSS villa to drop off his duffel, which held his change of clothing and the Johnson light machine gun and ammo, and to get exact directions to Francisco Nola’s dock from Stan Fine.

  Fine had warned Canidy not to expect anything like a warm reception when he arrived and he’d been right. Almost to a man, the rough-looking longshoremen had given Canidy glares that clearly related that they did not like being watched by a stranger, even one supposedly known to Francisco Nola.

  Canidy caught himself yawning long and hard.

  Damn, it’s been a long day! he thought, when he’d finally finished. And it’s nowhere near being over.

  He once more checked the chronograph on his left wrist.

  Four hours! Where in hell is that boat?

  On the flight back to the airfield at Algiers, Canidy had calculated time and distance and come up with an ETA of the Stefania making it to the dock. According to his figuring, the boat was now was an hour and two minutes overdue.

  It was a rough figure but not that rough.

  Either my math’s faulty or something’s gone wrong.

  I’m guessing the latter….

  Beside each fishing boat, a boom mounted on the pier was being used to lift the boxes of iced fish from the holds. It was labor-intensive, as the block and tackle and the pivoting boom were manually operated.

  With two men pulling on the rope of the block and tackle, the boxes of fish were lifted out one by on
e. Then another man pushed on the boom to swing each box from above the boat to above the pier. Then the two men at the rope lowered the box to a wooden pallet waiting on the pier.

  This was repeated until the pallet had a load of four boxes. Then two other men used a manual lift with steel wheels that fingered into the openings of the pallet, then raised the pallet and its load. With one man pulling on the lift handle and one pushing on the boxes, they maneuvered the fish along the pier and up into the warehouse.

  As a load was wheeled past Canidy, he looked at the fish—Fair-sized blackfin tuna, he thought, maybe sixty-pounders—and studied the men, who he saw tried not to make eye contact. The one pulling on the handle stopped to open the wooden sliding door. Canidy noticed that he and the others looked less like they were Algerians and more like the Sicilians he’d seen in Palermo.

  Sicilian Mafia, like those on Nola’s boat.

  I really don’t like these guys, but I have come to understand them better.

  Ironically, the fact that they’re known as such miserable shits plays in my favor. No one would believe I’m connected—especially to the capo di tutti capi….

  The “boss of all bosses,” Charles “Lucky” Luciano, was in the big house, New York’s Great Meadow Prison in Comstock. The Guinea thug could have been serving time for any crime on his lengthy rap sheet—running booze, heroin, numbers, not to mention murder.

  But, of course, it had been a woman—women—who’d done him in.

  Luciano was doing time on a record sentence of thirty to fifty years for prostitution racketeering. His hookers had testified against him on charges that finally had stuck—ensuring that the son of a bitch was the one who ultimately got screwed.

  Major Richard M. Canidy, U.S. Army Air Forces, had a connection with the ruthless Charlie Lucky because Luciano—ever the savvy operator—still was running his very big, very effective, and very illicit syndicate from his cell.

  When OSS Director Wild Bill Donovan had decided to send Canidy into Sicily—first to find, and then to extricate, Professor Arturo Rossi before some German SS officer put two and two together and came up with Rossi’s connection to Professor Frederick Dyer, whom Canidy had just smuggled out through Hungary—it had been suggested that Canidy would need help from some type of underground resistance group there.

  And without question the underworld of the Mafia was the best connected, both in Sicily and in New York City.

  As it happened, there in fact had been a recently established relationship—one kept very quiet—between Charlie Lucky and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).

  The Battle of the Atlantic was raging, and German U-boat wolf packs were being damn deadly in their attempt to strangle England by shutting down the supply lines sailing from America. Convoys of 441-foot-long Liberty ships ferried food, fuel, munitions, men, and more to war. Each convoy contained scores of ships, each ship the equivalent load of some three hundred railroad cars. And Nazi torpedoes were blasting more and more of them to the Atlantic Ocean bottom.

  It was thought that there existed the very strong possibility that the so-called fifth column of German sympathizers in New York City was giving aid and comfort to the wolf packs—anything from sending the U-boats signals that contained intelligence on the convoys to providing boats with food and bladders of fuel for replenishing U-boats in the night.

  ONI’s Third Naval District was responsible for securing the waterfront in New York, Connecticut, and part of New Jersey. But it was no secret that the Mafia really ran the docks, just as it had its presence in the bars, the restaurants, the hotels—in damn near every business.

  Nor was it any sort of secret that Charlie Lucky, despite the mob’s runins with law enforcement, enjoyed this lucrative position. Clearly, he would not want that balance upset, that control lost. He had whacked many enemies—and more than a few former associates—to obtain it. And, if necessary, he could order hits from his jail cell.

  ONI approached Murray Gurfein—the extremely bright thirty-year-old head of the Rackets Bureau of the New York County district attorney’s office—with an idea: They should get the mob to root out the subversive elements.

  Gurfein agreed. He personally and professionally knew Moses Polakoff, the high-powered lawyer who counted among his deep-pocketed clients one Charlie Lucky. He arranged to meet him for drinks at the Oak Bar of the Plaza.

  There, looking out the hotel’s enormous plateglass windows overlooking Central Park, Gurfein made his point: Luciano should cooperate, or he could wait for the Nazi Fascists to arrive.

  With the glow from the flames of the torpedoed Liberty ships off Long Island clearly visible at night from New York City, the implications of this were not lost on the very intelligent Polakoff.

  Before long, Luciano had agreed to help—some said for special considerations, such as a reduction in his sentence, which Gurfein vehemently denied.

  The Mafia began keeping its own watch for Germany sympathizers. It also provided union cards to men from Naval Intelligence as cover, getting them jobs, for example, as dockhands (where they could monitor fuel sales), aboard fishing boats (to spy on waterway traffic), and in hotel cloakrooms (to dig through the pockets and briefcases of suspected fifth column types).

  Wild Bill Donovan, who, of course, had made his fortune as a New York lawyer, and who was accustomed to acquiring the best and the brightest for the OSS, tapped Gurfein. And when Donovan prepared Canidy to go into Sicily, he had had Gurfein brief Canidy on the mob, and make arrangements for Canidy to begin his own relationship with them.

  No matter how much Canidy could intellectually rationalize what Donovan had described as “dancing with the devil,” he was still unsettled—Maybe “disturbed” is a better word, he thought—by his dealings with the Mafia.

  Canidy’s rationalization included the understanding that most people seemed satisfied with the simplistic mind-set of Them vs. Us that defined who fought on which side of the Allied–Axis struggle. He knew, however, that the reality of the situation was not that clear-cut.

  You had to be able to use whatever resources you could in order to achieve the ultimate goal of winning the war.

  And that means dancing with the devil.

  Quoting Churchill, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”

  Canidy’s first dance—his first meeting—had been with Joe “Socks” Lanza.

  The forty-one-year-old street-tough wiseguy was the business agent of Local 124, United Seafood Workers Union. As such, he controlled the Fulton Fish Market—in lower Manhattan, in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, and across the East River from the Brooklyn Army Base and Terminal that loaded Liberty ships. This made him an important man in the mob—the enormous market moved fish from the entire eastern seaboard, Maine to Florida—and he took his orders from Luciano.

  Charlie Lucky got word to Joe Socks that he considered Canidy’s request for help to be in line with what they already were doing, and almost immediately Canidy found himself aboard a fishing boat talking to a Sicilian named Francisco Nola.

  Nola had made profound declarations of his dedication to fight Hitler and the Berlin-Rome Axis. His reasons, he said, were many.

  For one, Nola’s wife was Jewish, and they had had to flee from Sicily to America for her safety. Then the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, fearful of the power of the Mafia, ordered his vicious secret police OVRA—the Organization for Vigilance Against Anti-Fascism—to sweep through Sicily and systematically arrest suspected mafiosos. Some of Nola’s relatives had wound up in the penal colonies on the small volcanic islands north of Sicily, in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  Nola offered to aid Canidy in any way he could. And he more or less had been a man of his word, ultimately helping Canidy find Professor Rossi in Palermo, then shuttling them by fishing boat to the submarine that took them to Algiers.

  That had been in just the last week. And in that time, Nola and Canidy had come to le
arn about the Nazis in Palermo having chemical and biological weapons.

  And that the latter involved injecting yellow fever into the human hosts taken from the island prisons.

  The men who had wheeled the pallet of fish into the warehouse were now coming out. The hand truck had another pallet on it, this one empty.

  Canidy yawned again, then glanced at this watch.

  Now one hour thirty minutes past due.

  Aw, to hell with it, he thought, and was just about to head back up the hill to the OSS villa. He would try to arrange for some boat to take him out and look for the damn missing fishing boat, either tonight or at the crack of dawn tomorrow.

  But then the longshoreman pulling the warehouse door closed pointed toward the dock.

  “There,” he said to Canidy, his rough voice emotionless. “The Stefania.”

  Canidy looked and, sure as hell, there he saw the silhouette of the fifty-footer sliding up to the top of the T-dock. There was a burst of diesel exhaust after the transmission had been bumped into reverse to slow the vessel, then the deck crew jumped down onto the pier, threw lines around the rusted iron mooring cleats, and secured the boat.

  Canidy forced himself not to appear too anxious to reach the boat but still managed to nudge aside the longshoreman who had pointed out the boat’s arrival to him.

  On the pier, he maneuvered around the men unloading the first two boats and their gear and finally made it out to the Stefania.

  Her diesel engine was now shut down. The door to the main cabin slid open and out stepped Francisco Nola. He was a tall, solidly built man, with an olive complexion, thick black hair and mustache, and a rather large nose.

  “I thought that that was you,” Nola said warmly.

  “Frank,” Canidy said with a wave from the pier, “I cannot tell you how good it is to see you.”

  Nola looked at him a bit oddly. “I appreciate the kind words, Dick. But…why?”

  “I was worried that you—” Canidy paused and looked around cautiously.

  Nola noticed that. “Come on board,” he said.