The Assassination Option

by W. E. B Griffin

  Then Wallace asked, “And that applies to me, too?”

  “I was given the job, the title, because no one is going to think that something important like Operation Ost is going to be handed to a very junior captain. Or the corollary of that, DCI-Europe—and Operation Ost—can’t be very important if they gave it to a very junior captain.”

  “That makes a perverse kind of sense, I suppose.”

  “Which brings us to you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Nobody told me this either, but if—more than likely when—this blows up and I get thrown to the wolves—and they did tell me to expect getting thrown to the wolves—somebody’s going to have to take over from me.”

  “You mean me?” Wallace asked dubiously.

  “Think about it. You’re only a major, not a full-bull colonel. You’ve got an unimportant job running a small—actually phony—CIC detachment close to DCI-Europe. It would seem natural to give you something unimportant like DCI-Europe when the young incompetent running it, as predicted, FUBAR . . .”

  “‘Fucked Up Beyond Any Repair.’” Wallace chuckled as he made the translation.

  “The executive assistant to the director of the Directorate of Central Intelligence shows up here,” Cronley said. “He says, ‘I guess you heard how Cronley blew it.’ You say, ‘Yes, sir.’ El Jefe says, ‘Wallace, you’re ex-OSS. I would be very surprised if while you were sitting here with your thumb in your ass running this phony CIC detachment, you didn’t snoop around and learn a hell of a lot about what Cronley was doing.’

  “Then he says, ‘We were counting on this. So tell me what you know, or suspect, and I will fill in the blanks before I have you transferred to DCI, and you take over as chief, DCI-Europe.’”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Yeah. Anyway, that’s my take.”

  “If you’re right, why wouldn’t Schultz have told you to keep me up to speed on what you’re doing?”

  “Because he’s being careful. He knows you were Mattingly’s Number Two in the OSS. He didn’t tell me to tell you anything. This is my scenario.”

  “Schultz doesn’t know we’re having this little chat?”

  “I thought about asking him if I could, and decided not to because he probably would have said, ‘Hell, no!’”

  “But you’re going to tell me anyhow?”

  “I’ll tell you as much as I can, but there’s a lot going on you neither have the need to know, nor want to know.”

  “Like what?”

  “Next question?”

  “So what are you going to tell me? And for that matter, why?”

  “Despite Ludwig Mannberg’s theory that when you really want to trust a gut feeling, don’t—my gut tells me I can trust you.”

  “I realize I’m expected to say, ‘Of course you can.’ But I’ll say it anyway.”

  “There are two operations I think you should know about. One involves my cousin Luther . . .”

  “Your cousin Luther?” Wallace asked incredulously.

  “My cousin Luther and Odessa,” Cronley confirmed, and proceeded to relate that story.

  When he had finished, Wallace asked, “You realize that Odessa is the CIC’s business, and none of yours?”

  “I’m making it mine,” Cronley said. “And the second operation I think you should know about is our getting Colonel Likharev’s family out of Russia.”

  “Whose family out of Russia?”

  “The NKGB major Sergeant Tedworth caught sneaking out of Kloster Grünau turned out to be an NKGB colonel by the name of Sergei Likharev. We shipped him to Argentina, where Clete and Schultz turned him . . .”

  He went on to tell Wallace the details of that, finishing, “That’s what we were doing in Vienna, giving a Russian female NKGB agent, who also works for Mossad, a hell of a lot of expense money.

  “And just before our little chat with Dick Tracy Derwin, Claudette Colbert—”

  “Hessinger’s new, and I must say, very-well-put-together assistant? Is her first name really Claudette, like the movie star?”

  “Yes, but she prefers to be called ‘Dette.’”

  “And is Freddy dallying with her?”

  “No. Freddy sees her as his way out of being what he calls ‘the company clerk,’ and he’s not going to screw that up by fooling around with her.”

  “She makes me really sorry there’s that sacred rule forbidding officers to fool around with enlisted women,” Wallace said, and then quickly added, “Just kidding, just kidding.”

  “Anyway, Dette told me just before we had our chat with Derwin that General Gehlen wants to see me as soon as possible. I think that’s because he’s heard from Seven-K . . .”

  “His Soviet asset?”

  Cronley nodded. “A/K/A Rahil. And I’ve started to think of her as our asset. So far we’ve given her a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “One hundred thousand?” Wallace parroted incredulously.

  Cronley nodded again. “And she’ll be worth every dime if she can get Likharev’s family out and he stays turned.”

  “You think he will stay turned?”

  “Yeah,” Cronley said thoughtfully after a moment.

  “Gratitude?”

  “A little of that, but primarily because . . . he’s smart . . . he will realize that once we get his family to Argentina, that’s not the end of it. The NKGB will know that he’s alive and turned and has his family with him. And the NKGB can’t just quit. Likharev knows they’ll really be looking for him to make an example, pour encourager les autres, of what happens to senior NKGB officers who turn, and we’re the only protection he has.”

  “Yeah,” Wallace said.

  “So, instead of going out to Schleissheim and removing the Storch from curious eyes, I’m going to have to go to Pullach.”

  “Can I ask about that?”

  “Ask about what?”

  “You and the Storchs. Now that EUCOM has been told to give DCI-Europe anything it wants, why don’t you get a couple, or three or four, L-4s and get rid of the Storchs? And all the problems having them brings with it?”

  “The Storch is a better airplane than the Piper Cub. And only Army aviators are allowed to fly Army airplanes, and I’m not an Army aviator . . .”

  “I’d forgotten that.”

  “. . . and I don’t want two, three, or four Army aviators out here, or at the Pullach compound, seeing a lot of interesting things that are none of their business.”

  “Understood,” Wallace said, then added, “You’re good, Jim. You really try to think of everything, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do. And one time in say, fifty times, I do think of everything. The other forty-nine times something I didn’t think of bites me in the ass.”

  Wallace chuckled.

  “Or something comes out of the woodwork, like Dick Tracy?”

  “Like Dick Tracy,” Cronley agreed. “Do you think you turned him off for good?”

  “Yeah. I think the more he thinks about it, the more he will decide the best way to cover his ass is to stop playing Dick Tracy.”

  “Jesus, I hope so,” Cronley said, and then stood up and walked out of his office.

  [TWO]

  “Where’s the car?” Cronley asked Hessinger.

  “Wait one, please,” Hessinger said, and then, raising his voice, called, “Colbert, are you about finished in there?”

  “Be right there,” she called, and came out of the supply room.

  “Claudette has finished four of the after-action reports,” Hessinger said. “I need you to look at them as soon as possible.”

  “Not now, Freddy. I have to see General Gehlen. Maybe after that.”

  “I propose to have Claudette drive you out to Pullach. She drives, you read the after actions, and tell her what, if anything, needs to be fixed.
Okay?”

  Cronley didn’t immediately reply.

  “And then,” Hessinger said, “she drives you wherever you have to go, Schleissheim, or back here, or even out to Kloster Grünau, when you’re through with the general.”

  “Don’t look so worried, Mr. Cronley,” Claudette said. “I’m a pretty good driver, for a woman, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  “Let’s go. Where’s the car?”

  “By now it should be out front,” she said. “Let me get my purse and a briefcase for the after actions.”

  “‘Individuals in possession of documents classified Top Secret or above must be suitably armed when such documents are being transported outside a secure area,’” Hessinger said.

  Obviously quoting verbatim whatever Army regulation that is from memory.

  “I’ve got my snub-nosed .38 in my purse,” Claudette announced.

  “Where did you get a snub-nosed .38?” Cronley asked.

  “I brought mine from the ASA,” Claudette said. “I thought I’d need it here. ‘The officer or non-commissioned officer in charge of an ASA communications facility where Top Secret or above material is being handled, or may be handled, shall be suitably armed.’”

  And that, too, was quoted verbatim from memory.

  Then she added, “Don’t worry, Mr. Cronley, I know how to use it. Actually, I shot Expert with it the last time I was on the range.”

  “And where is your .45, Mr. Cronley?” Hessinger asked.

  “In my room.”

  “You should go get it, and not only because of the classified documents, if you take my meaning, as I am sure you do.”

  “I stand chastised,” Cronley said. “I’ll go get my pistol and meet you out front, Dette.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Five minutes later, when he walked through the revolving door onto Maximilianstrasse, the Opel Kapitän was at the curb, with the rear door open and Claudette at the wheel.

  He looked at the door, then closed it and got in the front seat beside Claudette.

  She didn’t say anything at first, but when they were away from the curb, she said, “I was trying to make it easy for you. Opening the rear door, I mean.”

  “How so?”

  “Officers ride in the backseat, when enlisted women are driving.”

  “But we are not an officer and an enlisted woman, Miss Colbert. We are dressed as two civilian employees of the Army are dressed, and hoping the people think we work for the PX.”

  She chuckled.

  “And I wanted to be sure that you didn’t think I was trying to get cozy when I shouldn’t.”

  “Never entered my mind. What you should be worried about—what we should be worried about—is Freddy, who is twice as smart as he looks, and he looks like Albert Einstein. Do you think . . . ?”

  “I don’t think he thinks anything. Read the after actions. That’s what’s on his mind.”

  He opened her briefcase and took out the after-action reports. There were four:

  LIKHAREV, SERGEI, COLONEL NKGB, CAPTURE OF

  LIKHAREV, SERGEI, COLONEL NKGB, RESULTS OF

  CAPTAIN CRONLEY’S INTERROGATION OF

  LIKHAREV, SERGEI, COLONEL NKGB, TRANSPORT TO

  ARGENTINA OF

  TEDWORTH, ABRAHAM L., FIRST SERGEANT, ATTEMPTED

  NKGB MURDER OF

  Cronley read all of them carefully, decided they were better than he expected they would be, and then made a few minor changes to each so that Freddy would know he had read them.

  “Very nice, Dette,” Cronley said, putting them back in her briefcase.

  “I got the details of Tedworth grabbing the Russian from Tedworth,” she said. “And the details of Ostrowski saving him from getting garroted from him and Ostrowski. The interrogation and transport stuff I got from Freddy.”

  “These are first class,” Cronley said. “I moved a couple of commas around so Freddy would see I’d really read them, but they were fine as done. You’re really good at this sort of thing.”

  “I’m also very good at Gregg shorthand,” she said. “Which is really causing me an awful problem right now.”

  What the hell is she talking about?

  “The reason Freddy wanted you to come to us from the ASA is because you can take shorthand. How is that a problem?”

  “You remember when you came out of your office, Freddy had to call me out of the supply closet?”

  Cronley nodded.

  “What I was doing in there was taking shorthand.”

  “Of what?”

  “What was being said in your office. What went on between you and Major Derwin and Major Wallace.”

  “What?”

  “As soon as I reported to Freddy, he told me about Colonel Mattingly, who he said absolutely could not be trusted, and that while he thought Major Wallace could be trusted, he wasn’t sure.”

  Freddy really brought her on board, didn’t he?

  “He’s right about Mattingly, but I can tell you Major Wallace is one of the good guys.”

  “So I learned when I was in the supply closet.”

  “I still don’t understand what you being in the closet has to do with you . . .” He stopped. “Jesus, Freddy bugged Mattingly’s office? My office?”

  “Actually, that’s how I met him,” she said.

  “Find someplace to pull off the road,” Cronley said. “We’re almost to Pullach, and I want to finish this conversation before we get there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sir”?

  She turned onto a dirt road and drove far enough down it so the Kapitän could not be seen from the paved road.

  “You’re not supposed to sit with the engine idling in a Kapitän,” she said, almost as if to herself. “But it’s as cold as that witch’s teat we hear so much about, so to hell with it. I’ll leave it running.”

  “You were telling me how you met Freddy,” Cronley said.

  “Before you moved the ASA Munich station into the Pullach compound, Freddy started hanging out around it. Around me. I thought he wanted to get into my pants. I knew who he was—that he was in the mysterious, not-on-the-books CIC detachment—and I thought just maybe he could help me to get out of the ASA at least into his branch of the CIC, so I didn’t run him off.

  “Finally, when he thought it was safe, he took me to the movies. After the movie—it was They Were Expendable. You know, Robert Montgomery and John Wayne? About PT boats in the Philippines?”

  “I remember the movie,” Cronley said.

  “So after the movie, when Freddy was driving me back to my kaserne—in this car, by the way—he pulls off onto a dark street, and I thought, here it comes, and started asking myself how much I really wanted out of the ASA and into the intelligence business.

  “But what he whipped out was his CIC credentials. He said what he was going to say to me was classified. Then he said he had reason to want to bug two offices, and he didn’t want anyone to know he was doing it.”

  “Why did he go to you for that?” Cronley asked.

  “The ASA—Army Security Agency—started out making sure nobody was tapping Army telephones. It went from that to making sure nobody was bugging Army offices, and finally to intercepting radio signals. Freddy knew that. You didn’t?”

  “I must have slept through that lecture at the CIC School. Or chalk it up to my all-around naïveté, innocence, about things I ought to know.”

  “Oddly enough, some women find naïveté and innocence to be charming, even erotic, characteristics in younger men. But to fill in the blanks in your education, the ASA teaches ASAers courses in how to find bugs. It therefore follows if you know how to take them out, you know how to put them in. Verstehen Sie?”

  Actually, she should have said du. Du is the intimate form of Sie. And God knows we have bee
n intimate.

  This is not the time for language lessons.

  “Okay, so where did you get the bugs you put in for Freddy?”

  “There’s a rumor going around that the ASA sometimes installs bugs, too. Anyway, I got half a dozen bugs from the supply room. And installed them in what was then Mattingly’s office, now yours, and in Wallace’s. And Freddy promised to see what he could do about getting me transferred out of ASA.”

  “When did you put these bugs in?”

  “A long time ago. Or what seems like a long time ago. You were then a second lieutenant in charge of the guards at the mysterious Kloster Grünau.”

  “That does seem like a long time ago, doesn’t it?” Cronley said. “Which means Freddy regularly bugged both Mattingly and Wallace.”

  “He did. You didn’t know this?”

  Cronley shook his head.

  “And today he ordered you to . . . what’s the word, transcribe? . . .”

  Colbert nodded.

  “. . . my conversation with Major Derwin?”

  “Right. Which is the original source of my loyalty dilemma. And it gets worse.”

  “Explain that to me, now that we’ve already established that I’m naïve and innocent.”

  “When Freddy said, ‘Derwin worries me. Get in there and get a record of what’s said, and don’t let Cronley know,’ that put me in a hell of a spot. Freddy lived up to his end of his deal with me—there I was in triangles—and I obviously owed my loyalty to him.

  “On the other hand—and this has nothing, well, almost nothing, to do with you sweeping me off my feet with that innocence and naïveté I find so erotic—you got me out of the ASA, you’re my boss and Freddy’s boss . . . Getting the picture? So what do I do? Who gets my loyalty?”

  “You did the right thing to tell me about this,” he said.

  “Even if that was betraying Freddy’s trust in me? Even if that means you will no longer trust him?”

  “Pay attention. Freddy didn’t tell me about the bugs because if he got caught, he could pass a lie-detector test saying I knew nothing about the bugs. And he told you not to let me know you were listening to the bugs because he had a good idea, was worried about, Derwin’s interest in me. And he really didn’t want me to know you heard either what Derwin asked me, or what my answers were.”