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“You know, Jim, that you have my condolences,” Max Ashton said. “Tragic!”

Cronley saw the sympathy, the compassion, in their eyes.

[TWO]

Kloster Grünau

Schollbrunn, Bavaria

American Zone of Occupation, Germany

1340 2 January 1946

Lieutenant Colonel Maxwell Ashton III tapped the remnants of his steak on his plate with his knife and fork and then announced, “Not too bad. Not grass-fed on the pampas, of course, and—not to look the gift horse in the mouth—this red wine frankly does not have the je ne sais quoi of an Estancia Don Guillermo Cabernet Sauvignon. But one must expect to make certain sacrifices when one goes off to battle the Red Menace on foreign shores, mustn’t one?”

He got the dutiful chuckles he expected.

“Colonel Frade came to see me shortly before El Jefe and I got on the airplane—” Ashton began to go on.

“In Washington?” Cronley interrupted. “Cletus is in Washington?”

“He was there briefly en route to Pensacola, Florida, where he will be released from active service in the United States Marine Corps. I appreciate your interest, but I would appreciate even more your permitting me to continue.”

“Sorry.”

“Colonel Frade was kind enough to offer a few suggestions vis-à-vis my trip here. He recommended that should Colonel Mattingly not be able to find time in his busy schedule to meet me at Frankfurt, so that I might give him Admiral Souers’s letter—”

“Why did he think Mattingly was going to meet you at Rhine-Main?” Cronley interrupted again.

Ashton ignored the interruption and went on, “I should ask whoever met us to take us to the Schlosshotel Kronberg, where we could rest in luxurious accommodations overnight, to recuperate from our journey. Then, the following morning, I could go to the I.G. Farben Building to meet with Colonel Mattingly, deliver the admiral’s letter to him, and perhaps meet with General Greene and possibly even General Smith.

“Following that meeting, or meetings, Colonel Frade suggested we then reserve a compartment on a railroad train charmingly entitled ‘the Blue Danube’ and travel to Munich to meet with you, Captain Cronley, your staff, and General Gehlen, preferably at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, which he assured me would provide El Jefe and myself luxury accommodations equal to those of the Schlosshotel Kronberg.

“Instead . . . as someone once said, ‘the best-laid plans gang aft agley,’ which I suspect means get royally fucked up . . . Captain Cronley meets us at the airport, tells me he has no idea where Colonel Mattingly is, but that he hopes wherever he is it is far away. He then stuffs me into the really uncomfortable backseat of a little airplane and flies me through every storm cloud he could find to a medieval monastery in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

Cronley smiled, but he recalled seeing—a dozen times, more—Ashton wince with pain as the Storch had been tossed about by turbulence during the flight from Frankfurt.

“Now, one would suspect,” Ashton went on, “that, in normal circumstances, this deviation from the plan would annoy, perhaps even anger, your new commanding officer. These are not normal circumstances, however.

“I was given the opportunity, first while lying in my bed of pain in Walter Reed, and then whilst flying across the Atlantic, and finally as I flew here from Frankfurt, to consider what the circumstances really are.

“To start, let me go back to the beginning. The admiral came to see me at Walter Reed. Bearing my new silver oak leaves. He told me they were intended more as an inducement for me to stay on active duty than a recognition of my superior leadership characteristics.

“I then told him I didn’t need an inducement to stay on active duty, as I was determined to get the bastards who did this to me.”

He raised his broken arm.

“He immediately accepted my offer, which I thought surprised him more than a little. Not immediately, but right after he left, I began to wonder why. The cold facts seemed to be that not only was I going to have to hobble around on crutches for the next several months, but—more importantly—I was in fact no more qualified to take over Operation Ost from Colonel Frade than Jim was to handle Operation Ost in Germany.

“Certainly, I reasoned, although I had heard time and again that finding experienced people for the new DCI was going to be difficult, there had to be two or three or four experienced spooks—Colonel Mattingly–like senior spooks—who had joined the ranks of the unemployed when the OSS went out of business, who would be available. And Colonel Frade had made the point over and over that not all members, just an overwhelming majority of officers of the conventional intelligence operations, were unable to find their asses using both hands.

“I came up with a theory immediately, but dismissed it as really off the wall.

“And then I was given the letter—the carefully sealed letter in the double envelope—to deliver to Colonel Mattingly. ‘What,’ I wondered, ‘does the admiral wish to tell Colonel Mattingly that he doesn’t want me to know?’

“When I thought, at length, about this, my initial off-the-wall theory started coming back, and each time it did it made more sense.

“The conclusion I reached, after considering everything, is that Admiral Souers has decided that you and I, Jim—and of course Captain Dunwiddie—are expendable. I have also concluded that Colonel Frade—whatever his limitations are, no one has ever accused him of being slow—is, if not party to this, fully aware of it.”