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“Kramer.”

“. . . looks up Cousin Luther, tells him what they want him to do, hands him a lot of money—and probably documents that will allow him to get through the SS checkpoints looking for deserters—and sends him off to Strasbourg.”

“That doesn’t explain how he found out you’re DCI,” DuPres said.

“Let’s say Kramer is still around,” Cronley said. “Maybe still in Germany, maybe in Switzerland, but still running things. By things, I mean what has become Odessa. He has been watching General Gehlen, for the obvious reasons. He has a mole in the Compound, or Kloster Grünau, or both. The mole learns that the South German Industrial Development Organization is now under the DCI, and that the guy really running it is a young captain named James D. Cronley Junior. This word is passed to Cousin Luther.

“The name rings a bell. His aunt Wilhelmina had been kicked out of the family for marrying an American with that name. Long enough ago to have produced a son who could now be a young captain. Cousin Luther decides—and Kramer, whoever is running Odessa—agrees that a relationship with the chief, DCI-Europe, could prove valuable.”

“Set him up for blackmail, for example.”

“But how to establish contact? He could hardly walk up to me and say, ‘Howdy, I’m your cousin Luther, and I’d like you to meet this nice fräulein . . .’”

“Who will give you a blow job while we take moving pictures . . .”

“But he could get me to come to him, his poor starving cousin, if he wrote a begging letter to my mother. He’d set me up in the black market and use that to blackmail me. Or use the fräulein you mentioned.”

“But then you showed up at his door pretending to be a Quartermaster Corps second lieutenant, and since he already knew you were DCI, he thought, My God, the DCI is onto me.”

“And so he gave Finney the cold shoulder when Finney went there to let your cousin corrupt him.”

“Yeah,” Cronley said. “It all fits, Pierre and I just had another pleasant thought. If Serov knows as much about Odessa as I think he does, he’d probably like to have a long chat with someone high up in Odessa. What I’m thinking is that he might be willing to swap Colonel Mattingly for Cousin Luther.”

“He’d have to be convinced that Luther really knows all of Odessa’s secrets. How are you going to do that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe just tell him what Luther has told us.”

“He hasn’t told us anything.”

“That brings us back to Sergent-chef Ibn Tufail.”

“You’re willing to . . .”

“Yeah, I am,” Cronley said.

The door opened and Florence Miller walked in.

“Goddammit, I told Sergeant Martin we didn’t want to be disturbed,” Cronley exploded.

“So he said,” she replied. “But I told him you’d think this was really important.”

She handed him a SIGABA printout.

Priority

Top Secret Lindbergh

Duplication Forbidden

From Polo

via Vint Hill Tango Net

2210 Greenwich 7 February 1946

TO Altarboy

Copy to El Jefe