The Assassination Option

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Once again, Cronley, please answer my question.”

  Cronley leaned forward and depressed the intercom lever.

  “Dette, would you ask Major Wallace to come in here, please? Right now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “At the moment, Cronley, I have nothing to say to Major Wallace,” Derwin said.

  Wallace put his head in the door sixty seconds later.

  “What’s up?”

  “Come on in and close the door,” Cronley said. “And then, when no one else can hear us, please tell Major Derwin what you know about my attempt to murder the late Colonel Schumann. He’s investigating that.”

  “What?” Wallace asked incredulously, chuckling. “Seriously?”

  “He sounds very serious to me.”

  “This is a serious matter,” Derwin said.

  “What should I tell him, Jim?” Wallace asked.

  “Everything . . . well, maybe not everything. And make sure he understands that whatever you tell him is classified Top Secret–Presidential.”

  “What I am about to tell you, Major Derwin,” Wallace said, with a smile, “is classified Top Secret–Presidential.”

  Derwin didn’t reply.

  “The penalty for divulging Top Secret–Presidential material to anyone not authorized access to same is castration with a dull bayonet, followed by the firing squad, as I’m sure you know.”

  “I have to tell you, Major, I don’t find anything humorous in this,” Derwin said.

  “Stick around, it gets much funnier,” Wallace said. “Well, one day Colonel Schumann—and a dozen associates—found himself on a back road not from here—I’ve always wondered what he was doing out in the boonies . . .”

  “Me, too,” Cronley said.

  Now I know, of course, what the sonofabitch was doing there. He was looking for it. He wanted to find out what was going on at Kloster Grünau so he could tell his handler in the NKGB.

  “. . . but anyway, there he was, and he comes up on a monastery, or what had been a monastery, Kloster Grünau, surrounded by fences and concertina barbed wire. On the fence were signs, ‘Twenty-third CIC’ and, in English and German, ‘Absolutely No Admittance.’

  “Colonel Schumann had never heard of the Twenty-third CIC, and he thought as IG for CIC Europe he should have heard of it.”

  “What was this place?” Derwin asked.

  “You don’t have the need to know that, Major,” Cronley said.

  “You’re not in a position to tell me what I need to know, Cronley,” Derwin snapped.

  “Yeah, he is,” Major Wallace said. “But anyway, Schumann, being the zealous inspector general he was . . . I shouldn’t be making fun of him, the poor bastard got himself blown up. Sorry. Anyway, Schumann drives up the road and is immediately stopped by two jeeps, each of which has a pedestal-mounted .50 caliber Browning machine gun and four enormous soldiers, all black, in it.

  “He tells them he wants in, and they tell him to wait.

  “A second lieutenant wearing cowboy boots shows up. He’s the security officer for Kloster Grünau. His name is James D. Cronley Junior.”

  “A second lieutenant named Cronley?” Major Derwin asked.

  “This was before he got promoted.”

  “I’d like to hear about that, too,” Derwin said.

  “That’s also classified Top Secret–Presidential,” Wallace said. “Anyway, Second Lieutenant Cronley politely tells Lieutenant Colonel Schumann that nobody gets into Kloster Grünau unless they have written permission from either General Greene or Colonel Robert Mattingly.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Schumann, somewhat less politely, tells Second Lieutenant Cronley that second lieutenants don’t get to tell lieutenant colonels, especially when he is the CIC IG, what he can’t do. And tells his driver to ‘drive on.’

  “Second Lieutenant Cronley issues an order to stop the staff car.

  “One of the .50s fires one round.

  “Bang.

  “Right into the engine block of Colonel Schumann’s staff car. It stops.

  “At that point, Colonel Schumann decides that since he’s outgunned, the smart thing to do is make a retrograde movement and report the incident to General Greene. He does so just as soon as he can get back to Frankfurt, dragging the disabled staff car behind one of his remaining vehicles.

  “General Greene tells him Second Lieutenant Cronley was just carrying out his orders, and for Colonel Schumann not only not to try again to get into Kloster Grünau, but also not to ask questions about it, and finally to forget he was ever there.

  “End of story,” Wallace concluded. “Did I leave anything out, Jim?”

  “No. That was fine. Thank you.”

  “Any questions, Major?”

  “That story poses more questions than it answers,” Derwin said. “What exactly is going on at this monastery?”

  “I told you before, Major, you don’t have the need to know that,” Cronley said.

  “And I’m more than a little curious, Cronley, how you became a captain so . . . suddenly.”

  “I’m sure you are,” Cronley said, and then: “Oh, hell, let’s shut this off once and for all.”

  He went to a door and opened it. Behind it was a safe. He worked the combination, opened the door, took out a manila envelope, and then took two 8×10-inch photographs from it.

  “These are classified Top Secret–Presidential, Major,” he said, as he handed them to Major Derwin.

  “Do I get to look, Jim?” Major Wallace asked.

  “Who’s the fellow pinning on the bars?” Wallace asked a moment later. “I recognize the guy wearing the bow tie, of course.”

  “My father.”

  “Why is President Truman giving you a decoration?” Derwin asked. “What is that?”

  Wallace answered for him: “It’s the Distinguished Service Medal.”

  “What did Cronley do to earn the DSM?”

  “The citation is also classified,” Cronley said.

  He took the photographs back, put them back in the envelope, put the envelope back in the safe, closed the door, spun the combination dial, and then closed the door that concealed the safe.

  “Are we now through playing Twenty Questions, Major Derwin?” Cronley asked.

  “For the moment.”

  “I want to play,” Major Wallace said.

  “Excuse me?” Major Derwin said.

  “I want to play Twenty Questions, too. What the hell is this all about, Derwin? You’re not a CIC special agent, you’re the CIC IG—without any authority whatever over the DCI—so why are you asking Cronley all these questions?”

  “That, as Cronley has said so often today, is something you don’t have the need to know.”

  “I’m making it my business,” Wallace said. “My first question is, who told you Cronley shot up Schumann’s staff car? No, who told you he tried to murder the poor bastard?”

  “I learned that from a confidential source.”

  “What confidential source?”

  “You don’t have the need to know, Major Wallace.”

  “Do you want me to get on the horn to General Greene, tell him what you’ve been doing, and have him order you to tell me all about your confidential source?”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “For a number of reasons, including Colonel Tony Schumann was a friend of mine, but primarily because the Army has handed me a CIC supervisory special agent’s credentials and told me to look into things I think smell fishy.”

  “You’re interfering with my investigation, Major,” Derwin said.

  Wallace reached for the telephone on Cronley’s desk, dialed “O,” and said, “Get me General Greene.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Der
win said.

  “Cancel that,” Wallace said, and put the handset into its cradle.

  Derwin went into his briefcase and pulled out a business envelope that he handed to Wallace.

  “This was hand-delivered to me at my quarters in the Park Hotel,” he said.

  “Hand-delivered by whom?” Wallace asked, as he took a sheet of paper from the envelope.

  “I mean, it was left at the desk of the Park, and put in my box there, not mailed.”

  “I never would have guessed,” Wallace said sarcastically, “since there’s no address on the envelope, only your name.”

  A moment later, he said, his voice dripping with disgust, “Jesus H. Christ!”

  He handed the sheet of paper to Cronley.

  DEAR MAJOR DERWIN:

  THERE ARE THOSE WHO BELIEVE THE EXPLOSION WHICH TOOK THE LIVES OF YOUR PREDECESSOR, LIEUTENANT COLONEL ANTHONY SCHUMANN, AND HIS WIFE WAS NOT ACCIDENTAL, AND FURTHER THAT THE PROVOST MARSHAL’S INVESTIGATION OF THE INCIDENT WAS SUSPICIOUSLY SUPERFICIAL.

  THERE ARE THOSE WHO WONDER WHY CAPTAIN JAMES D. CRONLEY JR., OF THE XXIIIRD CIC DETACHMENT, WAS NOT QUESTIONED BY THE CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION DIVISION IN THE MATTER, OR, FOR THAT MATTER, BY THE CIC, IN VIEW OF THE SEVERAL RUMORS CIRCULATING CONCERNING CRONLEY:

  THAT HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH MRS. SCHUMANN WAS FAR MORE INTIMATE THAN APPROPRIATE.

  THAT COLONEL SCHUMANN NARROWLY AVOIDED BEING MURDERED BY CRONLEY AT THE SECRET INSTALLATION, A FORMER MONASTERY, CRONLEY RUNS IN SCHOLLBRUNN.

  THAT AMONG THE MANY SECRETS OF THIS INSTALLATION, KLOSTER GRÜNAU, ARE A NUMBER OF RECENTLY DUG UNMARKED GRAVES.

  It took Cronley about fifteen seconds to decide the author of the letter had NKGB somewhere in his title, or—considering the other Rahil—her title.

  “I have determined both that this letter was typed on an Underwood typewriter, and the paper on which this is typed is government issue,” Major Derwin said.

  “You’re a regular Dick Tracy, aren’t you, Derwin?” Wallace said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, that really narrows it down, doesn’t it? There are probably twenty Underwood typewriters here in the Vier Jahreszeiten and twenty reams of GI paper. I wonder how many Underwoods there are in the Farben Building, but I’d guess four, five hundred and three or four supply rooms full of GI typewriter paper.”

  “I was suggesting that it suggests this was written by an American.”

  “You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes, aren’t you, Derwin?”

  “There’s no call for sarcasm, Major Wallace,” Derwin said.

  “That’s coming to me very naturally, Major Derwin,” Wallace said. “Permit me to go through this letter one item at a time.

  “Item one: The explosion which killed my friend Tony Schumann and his wife was thoroughly—not superficially—investigated, not only by the DCI, but also by the Frankfurt military post engineer and by me. And I was there before the DCI was even called in. The gas line leading to his water heater developed a leak. The fucking thing blew up. Tony and his wife were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Period. End of that story.

  “So far as Cronley’s ‘intimate’ relationship is concerned, I was here when Cronley was ordered, ordered, to take Mrs. Schumann to dinner. He was as enthusiastic about doing so as he would have been . . . I don’t know what . . . about going to the dentist for a tooth-yanking.

  “I’ve already dealt with that nonsensical allegation that Cronley attempted to murder Colonel Schumann at Kloster Grünau. That brings us to the unmarked graves at the monastery. What about that, Cronley? Have you been burying people out there in unmarked graves?”

  Truth to tell, which I obviously can’t, there are three I know about, those of the three men, almost certainly NKGB agents, that Max Ostrowski killed when they damn near killed Sergeant Abraham Lincoln Tedworth.

  And then I suspect, but don’t know—and I don’t want to know—that former Oberstleutnant Gunther von Plat and former Major Kurt Boss are looking up at the grass in the cloister cemetery. They disappeared shortly after Clete turned Colonel Sergei Likharev in Argentina, and he told Clete, and Clete told me to tell General Gehlen, that they had been the bad apples in Gehlen’s basket who had given him the rosters of Gehlen’s people Tedworth found on Likharev.

  “Every Friday afternoon,” Cronley said. “We call it ‘the Kloster Grünau Memorial Gardens Friday Afternoon Burial Services and Chicken Fry.’”

  Wallace laughed, then turned to Major Derwin.

  “What have you done with this thing, Derwin? Have you shown it to anybody else? The DCI, maybe? Anybody else?”

  “I was not at that point in my investigation—”

  “Your investigation?” Wallace asked, heavily sarcastic. “Derwin, were you ever a CIC agent in the field?”

  “Of course I was.”

  “Where?”

  “What has that got to do with anything?”

  “I can check your records.”

  “I was the special agent in charge of the Des Moines office.”

  “That’s all?”

  “And then I was transferred to CIC Headquarters.”

  “You mean the CIC School?”

  “The school is part of CIC Headquarters.”

  “And since I don’t think there were many members of the Japanese Kempei Tai, or of Abwehr Intelligence, running around Des Moines, Iowa, what you were doing was ringing doorbells, doing background investigations? ‘Mrs. Jones, your neighbor Joe Glutz, now in the Army, is being considered for a position in which he will have access to classified information. We are checking to see if he can be trusted with it. Which of his sexual deviations would you like to tell me about?’”

  “I don’t have to put up with this . . . this being mocked and insulted.”

  “The first thing that comes to my mind is for me to go to General Greene and give him my take on you, which is that you saw when you were being sent to replace my good friend Tony Schumann, you decided it was going to give you a chance to be a real CIC agent. And then when whatever miserable sonofabitch in our ranks decided to stick it to Cronley sent you that letter, you saw it as your chance to be a hotshot.

  “But if I did that, and he shipped your ass to the Aleutian Islands to count snowballs, which he would do, and which you would deserve for your Dick Tracy bullshit, the prick in our midst who tried to stab Cronley in the back would hear about it and crawl back into his hole.

  “And I am determined to find that bastard and nail him to the wall.

  “So what you are going to do, Major Derwin, is put that goddamn letter back in your briefcase and then drop your quote investigation unquote. And forget investigations, period. You will keep that letter so that you take it out from time to time to remind you how close you came to getting shipped to the Aleutians. If you get another letter, or if there is any other contact with Cronley’s buddy the letter writer, I want to hear about it.

  “Now, if this is satisfactory to you, get out of here and get in your car, and go to Frankfurt or anywhere else and do what an IG is supposed to do. If this is not satisfactory to you, I am going to get on the horn and call General Greene and tell him what a bad boy you have been. Which is it to be?”

  “I really don’t understand your attitude—”

  “Which is it to be?” Wallace snapped.

  “I don’t seem to have much choice in the matter, do I?” Derwin said, mustering what little dignity he could. Then he turned to Cronley: “Captain Cronley, I assure you it wasn’t my intention to accuse you of any wrongdoing. I was just . . .”

  “If that’s intended as an apology, Major Derwin. Accepted.”

  Christ, I actually feel sorry for him.

  Derwin nodded at Wallace and walked out of the office.

  “Jesus Christ, Jim,” Wallace said. “Do you believe that?”

  “I d
on’t know what to think,” Cronley said.

  “Think about candidates for the letter writer,” Wallace said. “I think we can safely remove Colonel Mattingly and myself from the list of suspects . . .”

  I’ll be goddamned. Maybe it wasn’t the Russians. Maybe it was Mattingly. Wallace, no. Mattingly, maybe.

  “. . . but who else can you think of who is green with jealousy that you’re now the chief, DCI-Europe?”

  Cronley shook his head, and then his mouth went on automatic.

  “Be glad they didn’t give you the job,” he said.

  Wallace looked at him curiously.

  What the hell, why not tell him?

  Screw Ludwig, I’m going with my gut feeling about Wallace.

  Wallace’s one of the good guys.

  “I had lunch with General Smith yesterday,” Cronley said. “And General Greene. And Lieutenant Colonel Ashton. And Lieutenant Schultz, who is really not Lieutenant Schultz, by the way, or even Commander Schultz, which is what he really was when he was working for Cletus Frade, but executive assistant to the director, Directorate of Central Intelligence.”

  “Interesting.”

  “And I raised the subject of why was I named chief, DCI-Europe, when there were so many fully qualified people of appropriate rank and experience around. And Schultz told me.”

  “Like Bob Mattingly, you mean?”

  “And you.”

  “And what did Schultz tell you?”

  “Mattingly, first. Schultz didn’t come right out and say this . . .”

  “But?”

  “I got the feeling the admiral thinks Mattingly is more interested in his Army career than the DCI.”

  “Explain that.”

  “That since he’s thinking of his Army career, he’d be more chummy with the assistant chief of staff for intelligence—with the Pentagon generally, and ONI, and the FBI—than the admiral wants his people to be. He was in ONI, and he knows how unhappy they were when Truman started up the DCI to replace the OSS, which they thought they’d buried once and for all.”

  Wallace didn’t reply to that immediately, but Cronley thought he saw him nod just perceptibly, as if accepting what Cronley had told him.