Page 24

“Yes, sir,” Cohen said, cleared his throat, then began. “At approximately oh-six-ten on the sixth, I received a telephone call from Lieutenant Lewis J. Feller, telling me there had possibly been an escape from the Tribunal Prison.”

“Who is Lieutenant Feller?” Jackson said.

“An officer of the Twenty-sixth Infantry, which is charged with guarding the Tribunal Prison. He had, he said, just come on duty as officer of the day when he found the on-duty OD, the sergeant of the guard, and maybe seven soldiers, sprawled unconscious in the guard shack just outside the prison cellblock. I asked him if he had notified Colonel Rasberry. He said he had.

“So, I put my pants on and went to the prison. When I got there, Rasberry told me he had run a bed check and found more soldiers unconscious—and that Burgdorf and von Dietelburg were missing.”

“These were prisoners awaiting trial?”

“Yes, sir,” Colonel Cohen said.

“Do you know, from personal knowledge, how they came to be incarcerated in the Tribunal Prison?”

“Yes, sir. Super Spook and company arrested them in Vienna and flew them to Nuremberg.”

“And, for the record, Super Spook is?”

“Captain Cronley, sir.”

“Let the record show,” Jackson said, “that I started calling Captain Cronley Super Spook following his outstanding intelligence efforts in the past. The fact that other intelligence officers have taken up referring to him by that nickname shows they share my admiration of his performance.” He paused to allow Mrs. Rogers time to record all that, then went on. “Now, from your personal knowledge, Colonel Cohen, was Cronley made aware of these events at the prison?”

“No, sir, he was not.”

“Again, from your personal knowledge, Colonel, why wasn’t he?”

“He was in Argentina, sir. I had heard that as rumor, and you later confirmed it.”

“Had Captain Cronley not been in Argentina, would he have been notified, and would he have participated in your subsequent investigation?”

“Absolutely. He’s thoroughly familiar with the prison. Not only that, but with the assistance of Super Spook Junior—”

“Does Super Spook Junior have a name?”

“Yes, sir. Captain Cronley calls him Casey—initial K, initial C—Wagner.”

“And Casey Wagner is?”

“A DCI agent, sir.”

“And he is called Super Spook Junior why?”

“Well,” Colonel Cohen said, “he works with Captain Cronley. He’s also very young.”

“How young?”

“I believe he’s eighteen, sir.”

“And he’s an agent of DCI? Isn’t that a little unusual?”

“Yes, sir, it is. But he is a very unusual young man. Cronley took him into the DCI after Wagner had determined how Odessa was getting Nazis on the run over the Franco–German border and then to Spain. We bagged two really bad Odessa Nazis—”

“For the record, would you please define ‘Odessa’?”

“Organisation Der Ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen. In English, that’s Organization of Former SS Personnel. I think it’s forty percent probable that they’re involved in this prison break.”

“And the Odessa Nazis bagged because of this young man Wagner were whom?”

“Former SS-Brigadeführer Ulrich Heimstadter and his former deputy, Standartenführer Oskar Müller. Among other things, what we wanted them for was the massacre of slave laborers at Peenemünde, the German rocket laboratories.”