Page 27

"I'll go out there in the morning," he said.

"Is my car here?"

"It is, but I'm not sure they allow you to have a car out there," Charity said.

"I'll take my chances," he said.

"Now, if you will give me some whiskey to drink, I'll brief you on the competition you're going to face when you get to England. And just for the record, Charity, I came here over the very strenuous objections of this gentleman."

"Staley's my name, Captain," Staley said, and offered his hand. Staley liked Whittaker. Ellis had said he would. He himself hadn't been so sure. Officers are officers. But there was something about this guy that made him special.

"Over the strenuous objections of Mr. Staley," Whittaker said.

"And now can I have some booze?"

He woke early, his body clock confused by the distances he'd covered, and aware that sometime around two in the afternoon, he would get very sleepy.

Worse, he thought, his mind would be dulled. And he wanted to be sharp when he saw Cynthia.

He took a shower in the large, tiled, two-headed shower where legend had it that Chesley Haywood Whittaker, his uncle "Chesty," had died of a stroke.

The truth was that Chesty Whittaker had died in the saddle, on Pearl Harbor Day, and that Chief Ellis had manhandled the body over here so that it could be "found" in his own shower rather than in the bed of a young woman, the daughter of a college classmate, with whom he had had a two-year affair. The young woman's name was Cynthia Chenowith.

Only a few people knew what had really happened: Wild Bill Donovan-who had been Chesty's lifelong crony and with whom he had flown to Washington when Donovan had been summoned to the White House--knew. And Captain Douglass knew. And Chief Ellis. And Dick Canidy, Whittaker's school chum and now number-three man in London for the OSS. And, of course, Jimmy Whittaker knew. He didn't think

Cynthia knew he knew, and that was the way he wanted to keep it. It didn't matter to him, he told himself--and most of the time, he believed, it didn't.

But he thought about it in the shower, and he thought about it when he backed the Packard out of the garage. The 1941 Packard 280 convertible coupe had been Chesty's. Presumably, Chesty and Cynthia had been in it together on many happy occasions. He didn't think they had made the beast with two backs in the backseat, but it was reasonable to presume that they had held hands, and kissed, and that sort of thing.

Despite the cold, when he was out of the District, he pulled to the side of the road and put the roof down. He had the heater going full blast, and he left the windows up, and it was really rather pleasant.

A quarter of a mile off the state highway into the Virginia property, well out of sight of the highway, a guard post had been erected, and Whittaker learned that Charity had been right about the car. They expected him, but not at the wheel of a car.

"I really don't know what the hell to say," the guard, wearing the uniform of a member of the National Park Service police, said.

"I got your name on the list. Captain, but as a trainee, and trainees can't have private cars."

"But as I've shown you, I'm not a trainee," Whittaker said.

"Look, call Baker and tell him I'm here, and driving a car."

The guard went into his little shack and a moment later came out again, and said, "Mr. Baker says come right to his office, Captain. It's in the main house. You can't miss it."

The road wound through a stand of pine trees, and as he was coming out of it, he passed a group of twelve or fifteen trainees taking a run. They were carrying, in front of them, at "Port Arms," Springfield Model 1903 caliber.3006 rifles, not that it was expected they would ever use one, but to make the physical conditioning a little tougher.

He slowed down, and glanced out the side window at them as he passed them. And saw Cynthia Chenowith. She had her hair hidden under a GI fatigue habit, and the truth was that he saw her breasts flopping around under her fatigue jacket and marveled at that for a moment before he recognized her.

"Oh, shit! "he said with great disgust, then stepped on the accelerator.

Eldon Baker's office was in what had been the breakfast room of the mansion, a rather small room whose floor-length doors opened onto a flagstone patio, and beyond that to a flat grassy area that Whittaker remembered as having been a putting green.

Baker was sitting behind a government-issue gray metal desk when Whittaker walked in. He was a pudgy-faced man in his thirties. He was wearing fatigues, but where an officer would have worn the insignia of his rank and branch of service, there was a square insignia embroidered in blue: a triangle within the square, and the letters "U.S." It was the insignia worn by civilian experts attached to the U.S. Army in the field. Baker had been a State Department intelligence officer before joining the OSS, where he was listed on the OSS Table of Organization as "Chief, Recruitment and Training." So far as Whittaker knew, he had never been in the service.

"Well, hello, Jim," Baker said.

"We rather expected you last night."

"You look very military, Eldon," Whittaker said.