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“We don’t shoot people who run off at the mouth about things like this, Lieutenant,” Graham said. “But what we do, instead, is confine them in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, where they stay incommunicado at least for the duration of the war, plus six months. If Colonel Ludlow trusts you, I’d like to have you, but I want you to be sure you know what you’re letting yourself in for.”

“In, sir,” Lieutenant Dalton repeated.

“Incommunicado means your family will be informed you are missing in action.”

“In, sir,” Dalton said after a just-perceptible hesitation.

Graham nodded, then introduced Frade, Hughes, and Frogger, then said: “All right. What we are going to do is give Colonel Frogger a polo shirt and long-legged khakis. Lieutenant Dalton, you are then going to back Colonel Ludlow’s staff car up to the back door and open the trunk. As the rest of us form as good a shield as we can, Colonel Frogger will then get in the trunk.

“Colonel Ludlow and Colonel Frogger will then get in that car. Major Frade and Mr. Hughes and I will get in the other car. We will follow you to the Jackson Army Air Base, where we will drive directly to our airplane, a Constellation. We then will again make as good a quick shield as we can while the trunk is opened and Colonel Frogger gets out, then goes up the ladder and into the aircraft.

“We will take off as soon as possible.” He looked between Ludlow and Dalton. “You two will return here, and at 2300 hours, you will—in addition to whatever else you do when there is an escape—notify your superior headquarters and the FBI that Colonel Frogger has escaped.”

He let that sink in, then added: “Don’t let anyone—especially the FBI—know we were here at all.”

“You’re asking me to lie to the FBI?” Colonel Ludlow asked.

“I’m ordering you to lie to the FBI. I have the authority from the chief of staff to do so. It is important that the FBI believes that Colonel Frogger has actually escaped. If I didn’t send them—and everybody else—on a wild-goose chase looking for Frogger, then someone will smell a rat.”

“God, Alex, you are really a master of the mixed metaphor,” Howard Hughes said.

Frade chuckled.

“What kind of an airplane did you say?” Lieutenant Dalton asked.

“A Constellation,” Frade answered. “A Lockheed 1049, a great big four-engine, triple-tailed beautiful sonofabitch.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen one,” Dalton said.

“Not many people have,” Colonel Graham snapped. “Now, if it’s not too much trouble, can we get this show on the road?”

[FOUR]

Office of the Deputy Director for Western

Hemisphere Operations

Office of Strategic Services

National Institutes of Health Building

Washington, D.C.

1630 8 August 1943

There came a quick knock at the door.

“I said ‘nobody,’ Alice,” Colonel A. F. Graham called. He was sitting behind his desk, his feet resting on an open drawer, holding a short squat glass dark with bourbon whiskey.

“Does that include me?” a stocky, gray-haired, well-tailored man in his sixties asked as he entered the room.

“I told you, Allen,” Graham said to the man sitting on his couch in the process of replenishing his martini glass, “that the other shoe was going to drop.”

Allen Welsh Dulles chuckled. He was in his fifties, had a not-well-defined mustache on his lip, somewhat unkempt gray hair, and was wearing what members of his class thought of as a “sack suit,” a black single-breasted garment with little or no padding on the shoulders. He also wore a white button-down-collar shirt and a bow tie.

“And Deputy Director Dulles,” the stocky, well-tailored man said, “my day is now complete. You were going to stop by my office and say hello, weren’t you, Allen?”

“Not today, if I possibly could have avoided it,” Dulles said. “Bill, you have this remarkable ability to cause it to rain on any parade of mine.”