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“Once Bill Wilson landed that Piper Cub, I was in it in about twenty seconds, tops, and we took off,” Wallace said. “That’s not going to happen with Mrs. Likharev and her two kids.”

“Point well taken,” Gehlen said.

And now these guys are sitting around, cheerfully remembering the day Wallace almost, but not quite, got caught behind enemy lines.

Almost like friends.

Almost, hell, really like friends.

Thank God that I got Wallace involved in this.

“It’s entirely possible, even likely,” Gehlen said, “that the Likharev children, and perhaps even Mrs. Likharev herself, have never been in an airplane before.”

“And the children will see they are about to be separated from their mother and handed over to strangers,” Mannberg added.

Cronley actually felt a chill as the epiphany began to form.

Oh, shit, it took me a long time even to start figuring this out.

I never even questioned how come an OSS veteran, a major, a Jedburgh, who had been Mattingly’s Number Two, got himself demoted to commanding officer of a CIC detachment with no mission except to cover DCI.

Jesus, there were three majors in the XXIInd CIC in Marburg. It would have made much more sense to send any one of them to a bullshit job in Munich, and it makes no sense at all for them to have sent somebody like Wallace, who—what did he say that he should be doing, “advising Greene or maybe General Clay”?

Who is “them” who sent Wallace here?

“The obvious corollary of that is that Mrs. Likharev, already distressed by her situation,” Gehlen said, “will be even more distressed at the prospect of her being separated from her children.”

Mattingly?

Wallace knows (a) that what he was ordered to do here is a bullshit job, and (b) who ordered him here.

So why did he put up with it?

Because what he’s really doing here is keeping an eye on me and Gehlen and company.

And Gehlen knows that. That’s why he told El Jefe he’d rather not have either Mattingly or Wallace at DCI. He’d rather have me. So El Jefe had Wallace assigned to the bullshit job.

Why?

To keep Gehlen happy.

And to put Wallace in a place where he’d have plenty of time and opportunity to keep an eye on both Gehlen and me.

And since Wallace has to know this, that means he’s working for Schultz, has been working for Schultz all along.

“They, the Likharev woman and the children, will have to be tranquilized,” Bischoff said matter-of-factly.

“I can see that now,” Wallace said sarcastically, “the Boy Wonder here, hypodermic needle in hand, chasing Russian kids all over some Thuringian field, while your agent tries to defend him from their mother.”

So that’s what you think of me, “the Boy Wonder”?

Why not?

You know what a fool I am.

“There are other ways to sedate people,” Gehlen said, chuckling. “But getting the Likharevs onto, into, the airplanes is a matter of concern. I suggest we think about—not talk about—the problem while we have our dinner.”

“I suggest,” Wallace said, “that until we get the aerials, and their coordinates, from Bill Wilson tomorrow, there’s nothing much to talk or think about. One step at a time, in other words.”