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“Juan Domingo,” Cranz began, “you were right about Tandil. I’m almost positive Frade has the Froggers there.”

Perón nodded just perceptibly.

“Cletus Frade has arrived in Los Angeles,” he said. “At the Lockheed airplane factory. There was a Mackay radiogram. De Filippi called me yesterday.”

Guillermo de Filippi was chief of maintenance of South American Airways.

Cranz did not regard that as especially good news; a great many of his problems would have been solved if the Lockheed Lodestar that Frade was flying had lost an engine—preferably both—and gone down somewhere—anywhere—during the hazardous six-thousand-mile flight from Buenos Aires, never to b

e heard from again.

But unfortunately, the airplane was brand new, his copilot was the very experienced chief SAA pilot Gonzalo Delgano, and Frade himself was both a superb pilot and someone who apparently had more lives than the nine of the legendary cat.

Cranz’s predecessor as the senior SS-SD officer in Argentina had not only botched a very expensive attempt to remove Cletus Frade from the equation, but had shortly thereafter died when a rifle bullet fired by one of Frade’s men—or perhaps by Frade himself—had caused his skull to explode on the beach of Samborombón Bay.

Cranz had taken great care to make sure that his arrangements to eliminate Frade would not fail this time.

“Juan Domingo, something has to be done about the Froggers,” Cranz said.

Perón didn’t reply.

“And we both know that Cletus Frade has them.”

Cranz felt sure he knew (a) why Frogger, the German Embassy’s commercial attaché, and his wife had disappeared, and (b) why Frade had them.

Frogger was privy to many details of Operation Phoenix, the plan conceived by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler; Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party; Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of German Military Intelligence; and other very senior members of the Nazi hierarchy, who understood that the war was lost and had no intention of facing Allied vengeance.

Cranz knew all about Operation Phoenix: Hundreds of millions of dollars were to be spent to purchase South American sanctuary for high-ranking members of the Nazi establishment—probably including Der Führer, Adolf Hitler, himself, although Cranz wasn’t sure about this—from which, after some time passed, National Socialism could rise, phoenixlike, from the ashes of the Thousand-Year Reich.

Cranz had been sent to Argentina to make sure nothing went wrong with the plan—after something had gone terribly wrong.

An attempt had been made at Samborombón Bay, on the River Plate, to smuggle ashore a half-dozen crates stuffed with English pounds, American dollars, Swiss francs, gold coins and bars, and thirty-odd leather bags heavy with diamonds. The transfer was made on boats from the Comerciante del Océano Pacífico, a Spanish-registered freighter. But someone had been waiting. Cranz suspected Cletus Frade and members of his OSS team, though he wasn’t absolutely sure of this; it could have been Argentines.

There had been a brief burst of gunfire from a concealed position near the beach. Two of the three German officers—SS-Oberst Karl-Heinz Grüner, the military attaché of the German Embassy, and his deputy, SS-Standartenführer Josef Luther Goltz, had been dropped in their tracks, their skulls exploded by the rifle fire.

The snipers had missed the third officer, Major Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, the embassy’s deputy military attaché for air. Von Wachtstein had managed to get the crates—“the special shipment”—and the bodies of Grüner and Goltz onto the Comerciante del Océano Pacífico’s boats and back out to the ship.

The captain of the Océano Pacífico, who had been in one of her boats, had been more than effusive in describing von Wachtstein’s cool courage under fire. Courage was something to be expected of an officer who had received the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross from Hitler personally, of course, but Cranz wasn’t really sure if von Wachtstein had been extraordinarily lucky or whether the snipers had intentionally spared him.

What Cranz was sure of was that the attack made clear that the embassy housed a traitor. And he was just about certain that that was the reason Frogger had deserted his post, taking his wife with him.

Not that Frogger was the traitor. So far as Cranz knew, the Froggers were—or until their desertion, had been—patriotic Germans. They had lost two of their officer sons in Russia, and the third, the eldest, Frogger’s namesake, Oberstleutnant Wilhelm Frogger, had been captured when General von Arnim had surrendered the Afrikakorps.

Furthermore, Cranz knew that Frau Else Frogger secretly had been on the payroll of the Sicherheitsdienst, the Secret Police of the SS, and had been charged with reporting on the other Germans in the embassy to Oberst Grüner.

There was a downside to these faultless patriotic credentials. The Froggers had seen enough of the functioning of the SS-SD to know that with as much at stake as there was, if the actual traitor in the embassy could not be found, one would be created. Himmler and Bormann would want to be told the problem had been dealt with.

The Froggers knew that if Cranz, who had replaced Grüner, and Naval Attaché Kapitän zur See Karl Boltitz, who had come to Argentina with Cranz, and almost certainly was working for Admiral Canaris, could not find the traitor, they would be replaced. In which case, they would be sent—if they were lucky—to the Eastern Front. Or to a concentration camp.

Furthermore, Frogger was aware that while he was privy to the secrets of Operation Phoenix, he was by no means a member of the inner circle. He knew too much.

Worse, he was privy to many of the details of an even more secret operation—which didn’t have a code name—run by SS-Brigadeführer Ritter Manfred von Deitzberg, first deputy adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Himmler. Von Deitzberg had charged Cranz with making sure that this operation—in which senior SS officers were enriching themselves by arranging the release of Jews from concentration camps, and their subsequent movement to Argentina, on payment of a substantial ransom—was kept running and kept secret.

Cranz therefore thought it very likely that when the Froggers had been ordered to return on the next Condor flight to Berlin, Frogger had decided—or his wife had decided, or the both of them—that they had been set up as the scapegoats. And knowing what that meant, they had deserted their posts.

Now they were going to have to be killed before they could barter their knowledge of Operation Phoenix and the ransoming operation for their own sanctuary.

Perón said: “While I am fully aware of the problem the Froggers pose, Karl, I don’t want anything to happen to Cletus Frade. He is my godson. His father—my dearest friend—died unnecessarily and I don’t want the death of Cletus weighing on my soul as well.”