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Jesus! he thought. It’s always easiest to assign guard duty to those who really aren’t bright enough for more difficult work—but then you’re stuck having dimwits with weapons guarding the goddamn gates.

The sentry almost immediately recognized Sanderson—if not his voice and tone—then trotted to the gate and swung it open inward.

The diesel motor revved, and the Mercedes passed through into a courtyard.

There were two heavy wooden garage doors, and the left one then began to move upward. When it was more than halfway open, Geoff Sanderson saw that the man who was opening it was Eric Fulmar. Beyond him, at the back of the garage, was his BMW motorcycle. And resting on its seat was a single white Sprüngli confectionery bag.

That hadn’t surprised him.

But after the wooden door had been completely opened, and Sanderson had moved the Mercedes inside, the interior light gave him a better look at Fulmar.

What the hell?

Why is he covered in blood?

“What the hell happened to you?” Sanderson said as he got out of the car.

“Someone thought they wanted the bag more than I did,” Fulmar said with a shrug, then looked at Fritz stepping out of the car and added: “They were wrong. Had to use my knife after all.”

[TWO]

OSS Algiers Station

Algiers, Algeria

1003 30 May 1943

“Nice to see you again, Major Canidy!” John Craig van der Ploeg announced, his tone upbeat, as he walked up to the table with a handful of decrypted messages.

“You, too,” Dick Canidy said, “but how many damn times do I have to tell you not to call me ‘major’ or ‘sir’? I’ll throw you off this balcony if you even think of saluting.”

“Yes, si—” van der Ploeg began automatically before catching himself. He absently looked at the sheets of newly decrypted messages he held. “Right.”

* * *

Van der Ploeg was eighteen, with a youthful energy about him. He had olive skin and an unruly shock of wiry jet-black hair that stuck out at odd angles. He easily could pass as Sicilian—which was what Canidy was looking for in a team member for the second mission that ultimately set up MERCURY STATION—but even better for Canidy was the fact that van der Ploeg was a master at operating the SSTR-1 wireless telegraphy (W/T) set.

He’d readily accepted Canidy’s offer to join the mission—but when he showed up dockside at the Port of Algiers and saw the submarine that would be taking the team to Sicily, he admitted that he suffered from acute claustrophobia.

“A train, a plane, a ship—anything with windows I can do,” he had said with great resignation, his youthful energy clearly shot. “No one will be happy with me if I board that sub.”

With the Casabianca ready to sail, postponing the mission was not an option. That had forced Canidy to recruit one of the radio operators from the commo room at the Sea View Villa.

Twenty-four-year-old Jim Fuller was another master at W/T. Before the war, he and John Craig van der Ploeg had learned Morse code in the Boy Scouts and now had become fast friends as they practiced sending coded messages back and forth. The tall and easygoing Fuller, with shaggy blond hair and all-American features, looked and talked like the Californian that he was. He even had a surfer nickname—“Tubes”—which he earned at age ten from riding under the curl of the wave, where it formed a tube.

In early April, Canidy had been sitting in the same seat at the teak table on the balcony reading messages from MERCURY STATION when van der Ploeg came from the commo room and handed him another message that he’d just decrypted. In it, Tubes said that Nola wanted OSS Algiers to send weapons for them to stockpile and more money for bribes. Canidy responded by saying to send whatever they said . . . until van der Ploeg announced that he did not believe Tubes actually had sent the message.

“That’s not his hand,” he’d explained. “It’s Mercury Station’s radio frequency, but whoever is operating the W/T has all the finesse of a ham-fisted gorilla. Tubes is silky smooth.”

That Tubes had not sent the code for a compromised station only made it appear more suspicious.

* * *

“Have a seat,” Dick Canidy said to John Craig van der Ploeg, motioning to the chair nearest Stan Fine’s. “You should hear for your general wealth of knowledge what I was just telling Captain Fine.”

As John Craig van der Ploeg took his seat, he said, “What’s that?”

“That what the SS is up to in Poland is every bit as vicious as what I found them doing with the yellow fever experiment in Palermo,” Canidy said, then looked back at Fine. “Torture, slavery, slaughter—same as I saw in Sicily. It all boggles the mind. Even as you begin to comprehend what is happening, you are in denial. You can’t believe that humans—supposedly civilized man—could treat another with such cruelty.”