The Assassination Option

by W. E. B Griffin

  Cronley saw on Fortin’s face that he had heard the expression before.

  Which means he speaks English far better than he wanted us to think.

  Of course he speaks English, stupid! He spent almost four years in England.

  Both Hessinger and Finney looked at Cronley, who had his tongue pushing against his lower lip, visibly deep in thought.

  Finally he said, very softly, “My sentiments exactly, Sergeant Finney.”

  He turned to Fortin.

  “Commandant, I really don’t know what to say.”

  “I don’t expect you to say anything, Mr. Cronley,” Fortin said. “I just wanted you to understand my deep interest in your cousin, and in Odessa.”

  “Just as soon as we get back, I’ll find out what General Greene knows about it, and get back to you with whatever he tells me.”

  I will also go to General Gehlen, who probably knows more about Odessa than anyone else.

  But I can’t tell you about Gehlen, can I, Commandant?

  Even if Gehlen’s never mentioned it to me.

  And why hasn’t he?

  “I would be grateful to you if you did that.”

  “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Anything.”

  “You didn’t tell your cousin you’re an intelligence officer?”

  “Of course not.”

  “What did you tell him you do?”

  “Repair dishwashing machines,” Cronley said, chuckling.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Freddy, tell Commandant Fortin all about the 711th QM Mobile Kitchen Repair Company.”

  Hessinger did so.

  “I wondered,” Fortin said, when Hessinger had finished his little lecture. “The European Command has no record of the 711th anything. When you parked your car in front of Hachelweg 675 and the ambulance with the red crosses painted over down the street, it piqued my curiosity, and I had Sergeant Deladier”—he pointed to the outer office—“call Frankfurt and ask about it.”

  “I hope Frankfurt . . . I presume you mean EUCOM . . . didn’t have its curiosity piqued,” Cronley said.

  Fortin shook his head.

  “Deladier’s a professional. He’s been with me a long time,” Fortin said. “And you would say your cousin accepted this?”

  “I think he did.”

  “You would think so. What about you, Sergeant? Do you think Herr Stauffer thinks you’re dishwashing machine repairmen?”

  “Yes, sir. We had our act pretty much together. I think Stauffer believed us.”

  “Your act pretty much together?”

  “We were all . . . not just me . . . in uniform. Mr. Cronley as a Quartermaster Corps second lieutenant, Mr. Hessinger as a staff sergeant. Stauffer had no reason not to believe what we told him.”

  “In addition to you being dishwashing machine repairmen, what else did you tell him?”

  “We told him our next stop was Salzburg,” Hessinger answered for him. “He seemed to find that very interesting.”

  “Because it would take you across the border into U.S. Forces Austria from EUCOM,” Fortin said. “Crossing borders is a major problem for Odessa. Tell me, Sergeant, how much talking did you do when you were in the house?”

  Finney thought it over for a moment before replying, “Commandant, I don’t think I opened my mouth when I was in the house. All I did was carry the black market stuff.”

  “In other words, all you were was the driver of the staff car?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let me offer a hypothetical,” Fortin said. “Let us suppose you were too busy, Second Lieutenant Cronley, to yourself deliver more cigarettes, coffee, et cetera, to your cousin Luther and instead sent Sergeant Finney to do it for you.

  “Do you think your cousin might either prevail upon Sergeant Finney to take something—maybe a few cartons of cigarettes, or a canned ham—to, say, Salzburg as either a goodwill gesture, or because he could make a little easy money doing so?”

  “I see where you’re going, Commandant,” Hessinger said.

  “Start out more or less innocently, and then as Sergeant Finney slid down the slippery slope of corruption, move him onto other things such as moving a couple of men—‘going home, they don’t have papers’—across the border. Und so weiter.”

  “Yeah,” Cronley said.

  “These people routinely murder people who get in their way. With that in mind, would you be willing to have Sergeant Finney do something like this?”

  “That’s up to Sergeant Finney,” Cronley said.

  “Hell yes, I’ll do it. I’d like to burn as many of these moth— sonsofbitches as I can,” Finney said.

  “Thank you for cleaning up your language, Sergeant Finney,” Cronley said. “I really would have hated to have had to order Mr. Hessinger to wash your mouth out with soap.”

  Finney smiled at him.

  “I would suggest that in, say, a week Sergeant Finney deliver another package to Herr Stauffer,” Fortin said. “How does that fit into your schedule?”

  “Not a problem,” Cronley said. “We have to be in Vienna on the fourteenth.”

  “Vienna?” Fortin asked.

  “So we can be back at the monastery on the sixteenth. Finney could deliver a second package the next day, the seventeenth. That’s a week from today.”

  “Why do I think you’re not going to tell me what you’re going to do in Vienna?”

  “Because you understand that there are some things simple policemen just don’t have the need to know,” Cronley said.

  “That’s cruel,” Fortin said, smiling, and put out his hand. “I’m perfectly willing to believe you’re a second lieutenant of the Quartermaster Corps.”

  “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Simple Policeman,” Cronley said. “I look forward to seeing you soon again.”

  [FIVE]

  Suite 307

  The Bristol Hotel

  Kaerntner Ring 1

  Vienna, Austria

  1600 14 January 1946

  It was time to go to what everybody hoped would be a meeting with Rahil, A/K/A Seven-K, at the Café Weitz, and Cronley and Schultz had just finished putting the fifty thousand dollars intended for her in former Oberst Ludwig Mannberg’s Glen plaid suit when there came a knock at the door.

  Putting the money into Mannberg’s suit had proved more difficult than anyone had thought it would be. It had come from the States packed in $5,000 packets, each containing one hundred fifty-dollar bills. There were ten such packets, each about a half-inch thick.

  Mannberg’s suit was sort of a souvenir of happier times, when young Major Mannberg had not only been an assistant military attaché at the German embassy in London, but in a position to pay for “bespoke” clothing from Anderson & Sheppard of Savile Row.

  Cronley had not ever heard the term “bespoke” until today, but now he understood that it meant “custom-tailored” and that custom-tailored meant that it had been constructed about the wearer’s body, and that meant room had been provided for a handkerchief, wallet, and maybe car keys, but not to accommodate twenty packets of fifty $50-dollar bills, each half an inch thick and eight inches long.

  When they had finished, Mannberg literally had packs of money in every pocket in the suit jacket, and every pocket in his trousers. He also had a $2,500 packet in each sock. The vest that came with the suit was on the bed.

  Ostrowski was larger than Mannberg and just barely fit into one of Mannberg’s suits, providing he did not button the buttons of the double-breasted jacket. But to conceal the .45 pistol he was carrying in one of the holsters Hessinger had had made, he was going to have to keep his hand in the suit jacket pocket to make sure the pistol was covered.

  “Who the hell is that?” Cronley asked, when the knoc
k on the door came.

  “There’s one way to find out,” El Jefe said, and went to the door and opened it. Ostrowski hurriedly shoved his pistol under one of the cushions of the couch he was sitting on.

  There were three men at the door, all wearing ODs with U.S. triangles.

  The elder of them politely asked, “Mr. Schultz?”

  El Jefe nodded.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask you a few questions,” the man said, and produced a set of CIC credentials. “May we come in?”

  El Jefe backed away from the door and waved them in.

  The three of them looked suspiciously around the room.

  “What’s the nature of your business in Vienna, Mr. Schultz, if you don’t mind my asking?”

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

  “Please, just answer the question.”

  “Why don’t you have a look at this?” Schultz said, extending his DCI identification. “It will explain why I don’t answer a lot of questions.”

  “Don’t I know you?” one of them, the youngest one, asked of Cronley.

  “You look familiar,” Cronley said, and found, or thought he did, the name. “Surgeon, right?”

  “Spurgeon,” the man corrected him.

  “I never saw one of these before,” the CIC agent said, after examining El Jefe’s DCI credentials.

  “I’m not surprised,” El Jefe said.

  “Major, I knew this fellow at Holabird,” the younger agent said.

  “What?”

  “We took Surveillance together,” the younger agent said. “Right?”

  “Under Major Derwin,” Cronley confirmed.

  “Terrible Tommy Derwin,” Agent Spurgeon said. He put out his hand. “Cronley, right?”

  “James D., Junior.”

  “Are you working?”

  Cronley nodded.

  “Doing what?”

  “I’m sort of an aide-de-camp to Mr. Schultz.”

  “You’re CIC?” the older agent asked.

  Cronley produced his CIC credentials.

  “I should have known it would be something like this,” the older agent said.

  “What would be something like this?” Schultz asked.

  “Well, we encourage the people in the hotel to report suspicious activity, and one of the assistant managers did.”

  “Did he tell you what I did that was suspicious?” El Jefe asked.

  “Well, he said he heard your men speaking Russian.”

  “Guilty as charged,” Ostrowski said. “He must have overheard Ludwig and me.”

  He nodded toward Mannberg.

  “You sound English,” the older CIC agent said.

  “Guilty as charged,” Max repeated, and showed him his DCI credentials.

  “Gentlemen, I’m sorry,” the older agent said, “but you’re in the business, and you know how these things happen.”

  “Not a problem,” Schultz said. “You were just doing your job.”

  “You going to be in town for a while, Cronley?” Agent Spurgeon asked.

  “We’re leaving tomorrow,” Schultz answered for him.

  “Pity,” Spurgeon said. “I was hoping we could have a drink and swap tales about Terrible Tommy Derwin and other strange members of the faculty of Holabird High.”

  “Sorry, we have to go,” Schultz said.

  “I guess you know that Derwin is here,” Cronley said.

  “He’s here?”

  “He’s the new CIC/ASA inspector general for EUCOM,” Cronley said.

  “Oh, yeah,” the senior agent said. “The old one, Colonel Schumann, blew himself up, didn’t he?”

  “Him and his wife,” Cronley confirmed.

  “Well, we’ll get out of here,” the senior agent said. “I’m really sorry about this, Mr. Schultz.”

  “You were just doing your job,” El Jefe repeated.

  “If there’s ever anything we can do for you, just give us a yell.”

  “Can’t think of a thing, but thanks.”

  Hands were shaken all around, and the Vienna CIC team left.

  When they had, Cronley asked, “What the hell was that all about?”

  El Jefe shrugged, then looked at his wristwatch and said, “We’d better get going.”

  [SIX]

  Café Weitz

  Gumpendorferstrasse 74

  Vienna, Austria

  1650 14 January 1946

  When Cronley, El Jefe, and Finney walked into the Café Weitz, several of the waiters were drawing heavy curtains over the large windows looking out on the street. This would keep people on Gumpendorferstrasse, and on the trolley cars running down it, from looking into the café.

  The curtains were drawn every night as darkness fell. During the day, the curtains were open, so Café Weitz patrons could look out onto Gumpendorferstrasse and the trolley cars.

  But drawing the curtains did something else. During the day, looking out from the café gave the patrons a look at the empty windows of the bombed-out, roofless five-story apartment buildings across the street. With the curtains drawn, they were no longer visible.

  And with the drawn curtains shutting out any light from the street, the only light in the café came from small bulbs in wall fixtures and in three chandeliers and small candles burning in tiny lamps on all the tables. This served to hide the shabbiness of the café’s curtains and walls and everything else, and to offer at least a suggestion of its prewar elegance.

  In one corner of the room, a string quartet (or quintet or sextet, it varied with the hour) of elderly musicians in formal clothing played continuously, mostly Strauss, but sometimes tunes from Hungarian light opera.

  Cronley knew all this because he had come to the café three times before. So had everybody else. Cronley thought of it as reconnaissance, but Schultz called it “casing the joint.”

  After the first visit, they had gone back to the hotel, then, at Mannberg’s suggestion, drawn maps of the café from memory. Very few of the first maps drawn agreed on any of the details except the location of the doors and the musicians, but the third, final maps drawn were pretty much identical.

  It was decided that Cronley, El Jefe, and Sergeant Finney, who were all wearing OD Ike jackets with civilian insignia, would enter the café first and take the closest table they could find to the musicians. This would give them a pretty good view of most of the interior. Then Mannberg would enter, alone, and take a table that would be in clear view of anyone coming into the café. On his heels, but not with him, would be Maksymilian Ostrowski, who would take the closest table he could find to the door of the vestibule outside the restrooms, which, they were guessing, would be where, presuming she showed up, Seven-K/Rahil would take the money from Mannberg.

  Or where agents of the NKGB would attempt to steal the fifty thousand dollars from Mannberg. Ostrowski’s job was to see that didn’t happen.

  Cronley pointed to a table near the musicians, and a waiter who looked like he was in his mid-eighties led them to it and pulled out chairs for them.

  A dog yipped at Cronley and he turned to see a tiny hot dog, as they called dachshunds back in Midland, in the lap of an old lady. About half the old women in the place had dogs of all sizes with them.

  Cronley barked back at the tiny dachshund, wondering if it was a puppy or whether there was such a thing as a miniature dachshund.

  Then he ordered a pilsner, the same for Finney, and El Jefe said he would have a pilsner and a Slivovitz.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Hungarian plum brandy. Got a kick like a mule.”

  Cronley was tempted, but resisted. If they were going to meet a top-level agent of both the NKGB and the Mossad, he obviously should not be drinking anything that had a kick like a mule.

  “And ask
him if they have any peanuts,” El Jefe said.

  “I brought some, when they didn’t have any last night,” Finney said, and produced a tin can of Planters peanuts, opened it, and put it on the table.

  The tiny dachshund barked.

  Cronley looked at him.

  “Franz Josef,” the old lady said in English, “likes peanuts.”

  Cronley offered Franz Josef a peanut, which he quickly devoured.

  “Is that a full-sized dog, or is he a puppy?” Cronley asked in German.

  He felt Finney’s knee signal him under the table, and saw that Mannberg had come into the café.

  “Franz Josef is four,” she said, this time in German.

  “He’s so small,” Cronley said, and fed the dog another peanut.

  He took a closer look at the woman. She wasn’t as old as he had originally thought, maybe fifty-something, or sixty-something, but not really old. She had rouged cheeks and wore surprisingly red lipstick.

  “Good things come in small packages,” the old lady said.

  “So they say,” Cronley said. “Would you like a peanut? A handful of peanuts?”

  “You are very kind,” the old lady said in English. “A kavalier.”

  Cronley offered her the can of peanuts.

  “A what?” he asked.

  “You know, a man in armor on a horse. Thank you for the peanuts.”

  “My pleasure,” Cronley said, and fed Franz Josef another peanut.

  Finney’s knee signaled him again, and he saw Max Ostrowski walk across the room, take a table near the door to the restroom vestibule. Then he leaned a chair against the table to show it was taken and walked into the restroom vestibule.

  Cronley saw an old woman wearing an absurd hat and two pounds of costume jewelry march regally across the room and enter the restroom vestibule.

  Shit!

  Whatever is going to happen in there is now going to have to be put on hold until the old lady finishes taking her leak.

  “Let me taste that,” Cronley said, pointing to Schultz’s Slivovitz.

  El Jefe handed him the glass, and Cronley took a small sip.

  His throat immediately started burning, and he reached quickly for his beer.