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Obviously, his naïve hope of an hour before that he had gotten lucky again and was going to be able to get out of their relationship before it exploded in his face was just that, a naïve hope born of desperation.

Rachel got to her feet. Jimmy stepped out of the trousers and shorts gathered at his ankles. He walked to the bathroom, shedding his Ike jacket as he reached it. He went into the bathroom, took off the rest of his clothing, and got into the shower.

As the cold water poured down on him, the conclusion he was forced to draw was that Rachel was bonkers.

There were a number of facts to support this theory, starting of course with the simple fact that she had enticed him into the relationship. It was not his Errol Flynn–type woman-dazzling persona that had made him irresistible to her, which would have been nice to believe, but something else, and that something else was that she was not playing with all the cards normally found in a deck.

Now that he thought about it, he had known that something was wrong from the beginning. He had again thought of this—that Rachel was irresponsible, which is a polite way to say bonkers—at lunch.

Shortly after his lunch had been laid before him, the colonel and his formidable lady who had been at the adjacent table finished their lunch and left. With no others close to them, Rachel decided she could speak freely.

“I suppose it’s too much to hope that when you were at the Pullach compound with your Russian friend, you found someplace we can go?”

“I was out there alone, Rachel. Major McClung sent an officer down with some communications equipment and I had to show him where it was to be installed.”

“Then I guess we’ll have to go to your room here. Do you always eat so slowly?”

“Going to my room would be dangerous. Maybe we could go to yours.”

“What are you talking about, dangerous?”

He had then explained, in great detail, why going to his room would be dangerous, and to her room, only slightly less so:

His room, Suite 527, was at the far end of the fifth-floor corridor, the interior end, so to speak. Away from the front of the hotel. The rooms at that end of the corridor, suites 501 and 502, the windows of which looked out upon Maximilianplatz, were permanently reserved for the use of Brigadier General H. Paul Greene, chief, Counterintelligence, European Command, and Colonel Robert Mattingly, his deputy. Neither officer was in Munich.

Suites 503 through 505 came next. Suite 503 was assigned to Major Harold Wallace, and 504 and 505 had been set aside for the use of senior officers of the ASA/CIC community visiting Munich. Such as Lieutenant Colonel and Mrs. Schumann, who had been placed in Suite 504.

The two-door elevator bank came next, replacing Suite 506. Next came Suite 507, which served both as the offices of the XXVIIth CIC Detachment and quarters for Special Agent/Sergeant Friedrich Hessinger.

“So going to either my room or yours, Rachel, would be dangerous . . .”

“We have to go somewhere, sweetheart.”

“. . . my room more so because to get to it, when we got off the elevator, to get to my room, 527, we would have to walk past the door to 507, which is where Major Wallace and Special Agent Hessinger work. They often leave the door open, and they frequently leave the suite for one reason or another. Our chances of being seen going from the elevator to your room, 504, would be much less as we wouldn’t have to walk past 507.”

“Well, we can’t go to my room, silly boy. What if Tony came back early and walked in on us?”

Since Cronley knew that the northbound Blue Danube, the only way he knew that Colonel Schumann could get to Munich from Vienna, didn’t arrive until 1640, he didn’t think this posed as much of a threat as Rachel did. But it was possible. And he didn’t think arguing about it would be wise.

They had gone to his room, slipping undetected down the corridor past Suite 507’s closed door. Getting back on the elevator—in other words, again passing Suite 507, without attracting Freddy Hessinger’s attention—was something he had not wanted to think about.

—

Cronley stayed in the shower until he realized he was shivering and only then, reluctantly, added hot water to the stream to get rid of his chill.

So, what do I do now?

The first problem is getting Rachel out of here without getting caught.

No. That’s the second problem. The first is getting back in bed with her and performing as she expects me to.

And what else?

As he warmed himself in the shower, and then as he dried himself, he considered all of his options, all of the potential disasters that could—and were likely to—happen.

And then he summed it up, in sort of an epiphany:

The worst thing that’s going to happen is not that Tiny Dunwiddie and Freddy Hessinger will learn that I’m incredibly stupid and an asshole, or that Mattingly will know that he’s been right all along about me being grossly incompetent, or that Clete will learn that I’m a three-star shit for fucking a married woman before, almost literally, the Squirt was cold in her grave. It will be that I’ve failed to follow the oath I took the day my father pinned my gold bar onto my epaulet at College Station.