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“Yes, it is classified,” Souers said. “Highly classified. Lieutenant Cronley is right, Miss Howell. This is very important stuff.”

“So you’re going to send him right back to Germany?” Marjorie said. “‘Thank you for all you’ve done, Lieutenant. Don’t let the knob on the airplane door hit you in the ass as you get on board.’”

“That’s quite enough, Marjorie!” her mother announced.

“Cool it, Squirt,” Cronley said. “I’m a soldier. I obey my orders.”

“I would like to send him back to Germany immediately, Miss Howell,” Souers said. “But unfortunately, that’s not possible. President Truman wants to see him before he goes back, and that’s it.”

“You’re going to explain that, right?” Cletus Marcus Howell said.

“What Colonel Mattingly suggested, and what we’re going to do, is put Lieutenant Cronley on ice, so to speak, until the President’s schedule is such that he can see him.”

“What does ‘on ice, so to speak’ mean, Admiral?” Marjorie said.

“Well, since we can’t put him in a hotel, or at Fort Myer, because J. Edgar’s minions would quickly find him, what we’re going to do is put him in the Transient Officers’ Quarters at Camp Holabird. That’s in Baltimore. Mattingly tells me junior CIC officers passing through the Washington area routinely stay there—it’s a dollar and a half a night—so he won’t attract any attention. Mattingly will arrange for them to misplace his registry card, so if the FBI calls for him they can say they have no record of him being there.”

“And how long will he be there?” the old man asked.

“Just until he sees the President. And on that subject, Mr. Howell, the President would like to see you there at the same time. And he would be furious with me if he later learned that your granddaughter and Mrs. Howell were here and I hadn’t brought you along to the White House for his meeting with Lieutenant Cronley.”

“And after he meets with the President, he gets on the plane to Germany?” Marjorie said.

Souers nodded.

“If Jimmy goes to Germany, I’m going to Germany,” Marjorie then announced.

“We’ll talk about that, dear,” Martha Howell said.

“If Jimmy goes to Germany, I’m going to Germany. Period. Subject closed.”

[ TWO ]

The Officers’ Club

U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center & School

Camp Holabird

1019 Dundalk Avenue, Baltimore 19, Maryland

1730 25 October 1945

The artwork behind the bar at which Second Lieutenant Cronley was sipping at his second scotch was more or less an oil painting. It portrayed three soldiers wearing World War I–era steel helmets trying very hard not to be thrown out of a Jeep bouncing three feet off the ground.

Rather than an original work, it was an enlargement of a photograph taken at Camp Holabird in 1939. The U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, which had then reigned over Camp Holabird, was testing the new Willys-designed vehicle. Some GI artist had colored the photograph with oil paints.

Cronley had heard the rumor that it was at Camp Holabird that the vehicle—officially known as “Truck, 1/4 Ton, 4×4, General Purpose”—first had been dubbed “Jeep,” from the G and P in General Purpose.

He wasn’t sure if this was true or just lore. Or bullshit, like the rumors circulating among the student officers and enlisted men about My Brother’s Place, the bar directly across Dundalk Avenue from the main gate. That lore, or bullshit, held that an unnamed “foreign power” had a camera with a long-range lens installed in an upstairs window with which they were taking photographs of everyone coming out the gate.

That, the lore said, would of course pose enormous problems for the students when they graduated and were sent “into the field.”

His thoughts were interrupted when a voice beside him said, “Cronley, isn’t it?”

He turned and saw the speaker was a major.

“Yes, sir.”