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“For God’s sake, Dick,” Bruce asked, trying to keep his temper under control,“why did you get into the Q pill with him?”

“Maybe, David,” Canidy said, unrepentant, "I was hoping he would tell us to go fuck ourselves,” Canidy said.

“He still may,” Bruce said. “Presumably you’ve thought of that?”

“He’ll go,” Canidy said. “Ol’ Wild Bill is very good at recruiting people who will put their head in the lion’s mouth for God, Mother, and Apple Pie.”

Bruce stilled his reply at the last moment. Canidy was one of those who’d had his head in the lion’s mouth.

“Where is he now?” Bruce asked.

“He went to see his mother,” Canidy said.

"He did what?” Bruce asked, incredulously.

“He went to see his mother,” Canidy repeated.

“I don’t think that was a very good idea,” Bruce said, aware that it was a marvel of understatement.

“Neither do I,” Canidy said. “But he decided that he wanted to see her, and I decided that it wasn’t any of my business, our business.”

“From his dossier,” David Bruce said, “I would have thought—God, she has treated him like dirt from the moment he was born—I would have thought he would never want to see her.”

“You can kick dogs, David,” Canidy said,“and a lot of the time they keep coming back, hoping maybe this time you’ll scratch their ears.”

“Where is this touching reunion to take place?” Bruce asked after a moment.

“Her troupe is doing a show at Wincanton. I sent him up there—with Fine—in the Packard. Fine knows her. He’ll be able to handle anything that might come up.”

“You hope,” Bruce said.

“‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast,’ ” Canidy quoted. “You ever hear that, David?”

“I think that will be all, Dick,” David Bruce said. “If anything unusual comes up, I’ll expect you to let me know.”

Chapter TWO

Wincanton Air Corps Base

Kent, England

2330 Hours 21 January 1943

Captain Stanley S. Fine and Lieutenant Eric Fulmar got lost on the way to Wincanton, despite a map Fine had the OSS Motor Officer make up for him.

So it was late, nearly half past eleven, when they finally made it to the Wincanton Air Base Officers’ Club, an old stone barn jammed full of the drunken aviators who had come to be entertained by the fifteen or twenty young women in Monica Sinclair’s USO troupe.

As they made their way to where Monica was whooping it up with a handful of the base’s brass, Eric attracted her attention. His pink and green uniform, with the paratrooper patch sewn on his overseas cap, stood out from the way most of the Air Corps men were dressed, in leather flight jackets.

And then Fine saw in her eyes and in her smile that she was more than a little drunk, and knew there was going to be trouble.

Stanley S. Fine had never liked Monica Sinclair. Some of the dislike sprang from the way she had treated Eric—storing him out of sight like a piece of furniture that didn’t fit in with her present décor but couldn’t be thrown out with the trash because it was a gift from someone important.

But as Fine gazed at her now, and she looked at him with recognition dawning in her eyes, he realized that his dislike wasn’t based just on principle: He despised her personally. The phrase in the industry was that she believed her own press releases. But that was too simple. She wasn’t the only one guilty of that, certainly. But Monica Sinclair not only believed she was truly “America’s Sweetheart,” she was convinced that anyone who didn’t believe it was her enemy.

That belief meant tha

t “America’s Sweetheart” deserved to have her every wish indulged. Shooting schedules never called for her to appear before half past nine in the morning. She was not at her best before that. Her dressing-room trailer was a Taj Mahal on wheels. And she checked other dressing-room trailers to make sure no lesser star had a better one than she did.