Memorial Bridge (25 page)

Colonel Cheever sat forward. "General Donovan
has
been traveling the Med. He is in Turkey now, deliberately making his presence known to the Abwehr.
He
is going on to Cyprus and Cairo, as if visiting staging areas. He thinks
he
is launching Noah's Ark."

"Doesn't matter who smashes the champagne, does it?" Crocker asked mildly. "As long as the Krauts maintain their southern front?"

But Lawrence was unable to restrain himself any longer and slapped both his hands down on the polished black arms of his chair. "Noah's Ark explicitly falls under General Strong's purview. Not General Donovan's, and, with all due respect, not yours, Mr. Secretary."

Crocker did not blink. "Lothrop is the man at bat, and he is my explicit responsibility."

Lawrence started to reply, but Crocker cut him off, and all pretense of gentility disappeared. "I've had it with you people! Joint Security, OSS,
K-2, G-2, ONI, CIC, CID, Special Branch—you're all like novice skippers panicked by the warning gun into trying to nose your boats up to the starting line in a yachting race! Don't you know how important it is to hang back? You take what opening you get and
then
move into it!"

The well-bred officers could only stare at this strange lawyer, a cripple giving them a lesson in strategy.

But in the Penobscot Bay of Maine Randy Crocker and his crew of Deer Island boys were famous for always sailing away from the fleet, looking for their own wind and often finding it. Crocker hated jostling, because to him the race was never against other boats but against nature and against himself.

"Who is the woman?" General Forbes asked.

"I thought you'd never ask," Crocker said. "The woman is the point, gentlemen. And like it or not, the woman falls outside the 'purview' of each of your organizations for the simple reason that none of you uncovered her. Which is why I'll let the people who did introduce her to you, as they did to me." He raised his eyes to Dunlop, who in turn looked at Dillon.

Dillon withdrew a manila folder from his satchel, and from that he took half a dozen glossy copies of the same photograph. He passed them out.

"Her name is Sylvia Yergin," Dunlop said. "She is a Danish national, employed by the Central Coordinating Committee of the International Red Cross. In effect, she serves as liaison between Geneva and the American headquarters on Eighteenth Street, where she has an office." Dunlop paused while the others studied the photograph. It showed a stolid middle-aged woman standing at attention in the unglamorous nubby blue uniform, including hat and shoulder patch, of a Red Cross functionary. Only her fierce eyes, fixed squarely on the camera lens, indicated that she was a woman of exceptional energy. "She is an agent of the Abwehr."

"Impossible!" Lawrence blurted out. "A German agent across the way from the White House? Impossible!"

"Why do you say impossible?" Cheever countered. "Isn't CIC responsible for vetting the auxiliaries? That's General Strong's—"

"The Red Cross is an entirely civilian—"

"It is charged with care and support of military personnel, prisoners of war—"

"I won't have General Strong disparaged—"

"Gentlemen!" Crocker barked, but his glare was aimed at Lawrence. "General Strong could be here to defend himself, Colonel, as I asked him to be. But apparently there are other, more important items on his schedule." Crocker let the full weight of his displeasure fall on Lawrence, then he brought Cheever in under it. "You two are out of order. If you have questions or comments, direct them to Mr. Dunlop."

General Forbes said with overelaborate casualness, "Perhaps Mr. Dunlop could tell us who tipped him to the fact that this Yergin woman is a Kraut agent?"

"No tip," Dunlop answered. "Simple police work. My agents tracked her from an Argentine embassy party last April. We found that she frequented social functions at various embassies beyond what a woman in her position would reasonably be expected to do. We also found that she was, shall we say, generous in her affections. In both the Canadian and British chanceries, she has been friendly with cipher clerks and signals personnel. Among Americans, she has had a special knack for cultivating military staff workers."

"That hardly proves—"

Dunlop abruptly held a hand out toward Dillon, who took another set of photographs out of his folder and gave them to Dunlop, who passed them around. This showed Yergin standing next to a man in a crowded public square. The man, dressed in a bowler hat and frock coat, had his hand on Yergin's shoulder and seemed to be admonishing her.

Dunlop said, "That is Major General Helmut Reinhardt, head of the Abwehr regiment which refers to itself as
Amt Ausland.
"

"A German general operating in Washington?"

Before Dunlop could reply to Forbes, Cheever said, "Not Washington!" He stood up at his place to peer across Lawrence's head at the FBI division chief. "Where was this photograph taken?"

Dunlop did not answer.

Cheever slapped the photograph. "That automobile behind them is a Peugeot. Where was this? France? No, Switzerland. That license plate is Switzerland." Cheever whipped around toward Crocker. "This is a violation of the President's explicit order! FBI operations are restricted to this hemisphere." Cheever faced Dunlop once more. "Geneva! Your people tracked her to Geneva!"

"Sit down, Colonel," Crocker said icily.

"I will not sit down. OSS by its charter has—"

"Then get out!" Crocker bellowed as his arm shot toward the door of his office. "And when Donovan asks why he wasn't brought into this operation, you tell him you stalked out of the initial briefing to protest the infringement of precious OSS prerogatives. Go ahead!"

Cheever was immobilized.

After a moment, his lips pressed thin and white, he resumed his seat.

Crocker prided himself on an economy of emotional expression, and to have been driven to such a display was even more infuriating to him than the petty squabbling that prompted it. He leaned back in his chair, taking his pipe and tobacco pouch with him. He would reclaim his detachment by pretending already to have it. "And tell us about Lothrop, Mr. Dunlop. How does he come in?"

"As you said, sir, she picked him up at a party."

"Where?" Crocker began popping the flame above his pipe bowl.

Dunlop stared blankly back at the undersecretary, unable to answer.

"The Sulgrave Club," Sean Dillon put in. "On Dupont Circle. The occasion was a New Year's reception for war-relief workers. Mr. Lothrop was present to bring greetings from Secretary Stimson."

"Yes, that's the sort of thing he does."

Dillon continued, "We did not know who Lothrop was. We were outside. When he and Yergin came out together and drove away in his car, we noted the registration. When we ran a check and discovered the car belonged to a deputy undersecretary of war, we realized that Yergin had finally landed her fish."

Crocker said, for the officers' benefit, "And that is when they came to me. I confronted Lothrop, told him who she is and offered him a chance, finally, to join the war effort. A chance, as I made clear to him, he had no choice but to accept. It has taken regular injections of spinal fluid, which, I believe, you, Mr. Dillon, have been administering, but Lothrop has conducted himself more or less admirably. His role, as you have all perhaps gathered, has involved both factual pretense—his LCI oversight, his trip to the Med—and a certain regular display of, what to call it, sexual enthusiasm. The woman seems to have been receptive on both fronts, and now perhaps is even convinced. Lothrop's success has brought us to the stage where we can offer each of you a chance to join up too."

"For sexual enthusiasm, Randy?" Lawrence asked, grinning.

Crocker smiled, but dismissively. "As the President hoped might happen, we have been given a major opportunity to reinforce Hitler's famous paranoia about the Balkans. Think of it, gentlemen. Nine panzer divisions! Forty-three infantry divisions! Sitting idle along the Danube! The balance of power in Europe depends on them staying there. If we do nothing else for the Allied cause, imagine what we do here! What Lothrop's pillow talk may have accomplished is just the start, and we can all be hugely grateful for it." Crocker's gaze fell for an instant on the photograph of his son, who would almost certainly be one of those going ashore at Normandy.

Dunlop said, "Yergin will see herself as providing the intelligence that will enable Germany to win the war. She will look everywhere now for other signs pointing to the Balkans, beginning with her own Red Cross."

"Right," Crocker said, and he aimed his gaze at General Alfred. "The chief has to issue orders to have the Red Cross blood reserve moved to the Mediterranean, incrementally beginning now, and completed by mid-May."

"That's ridiculous," Alfred countered, "the blood reserve—"

"I'm not talking about the blood reserve. I'm talking about
orders,
about paper. Paper that has to cross desks on Eighteenth Street beginning this week. Paper that refers to medical staging areas on Crete, Cyprus and Malta."

"But how will the woman get access to the paper?"

Dillon answered from his place by the conference table. "She is sleeping with the Red Cross director's assistant too, another man near retirement age named Keith Simon. He's a widower, and she goes with him to his apartment. He expects to marry her in June."

"But if you bring him and others at the Red Cross into this—"

"We do nothing of the kind," Crocker said. "Everyone in the Red Cross remains in the dark about the real blood reserves and where they are. They don't know now. The levers they pull are attached to nothing." Crocker looked at Cheever. "Which presumably violates the Red Cross charter, George. We're poking holes through charters right and left, aren't we?"

Forbes, the man in charge of security for the real invasion, said, "The Red Cross director hasn't known anything about the blood reserve for a year. When he gets an order from Marshall, he'll suspect it's a ruse, but he'll play along. He's no dummy."

"That's just one example of what we can do now to satisfy Fraulein Yergin's curiosity. We want to give her a full set of collateral indications, documentation if possible, things to take with her when she returns to Geneva in—?" Crocker raised his eyebrows toward Dunlop.

But it was Dillon who said, "Three and a half weeks."

"What if she doesn't buy it? What if—?"

"Lothrop will continue to see her," Dillon said with an authority he had not yet displayed. "And I will continue my surveillance. It is my job to assess whether Yergin has swallowed the hook or not. If I conclude that she hasn't, or that she is playing us along, I will call the operation off and arrest her."

"And
your
jobs, gentlemen"—Crocker swept them with the stem of his pipe—"is to provide support to Mr. Dillon. I'll expect an action plan from each of your shops on my desk when I arrive here in the morning."

"What time do you want us?" a thoroughly chastened Cheever asked.

"Not you, George. Just your plan. Tell me how OSS can support us in confirming the Balkans for this woman. Like it or not, until this phase of it is resolved, Noah's Ark is going to be run off of one desk. This desk."

Crocker slapped his hand down and a cup of paper clips jumped. "From here on you are each to be individually responsible to Mr. Dunlop. He speaks on this matter with my authority. Is that clear?"

Cheever leaned back in his chair, lifting its front legs off the floor, craning toward Dillon. "Where does Yergin live?"

"We are conducting this operation on a need-to-know basis, sir."

Cheever went white again, and he exchanged a look with Lawrence. For once they had something in common: neither would find it easy to brief his boss on this shit. Donovan and Strong would have something in common too: a reaction of sputtering rage to this incredible intrusion by Hoover.

General Alfred had his own reasons for finding this turn of events unbelievable. He said timidly, "Your authority, Mr. Crocker, I understand that. But General Marshall is going to ask me where your authority rests in this matter. Shall I tell him Secretary Stimson's?"

"No, General, you tell him President Roosevelt's. You tell General Marshall to feel free to call me or the President, either one."

Crocker stood up. His leg clicked, and the others seemed to take
that as their signal to rise too. Dillon thought of a nun's cricket, these eminences in a Canaryville parish school.

Dillon stepped forward, preempting his own chief. But he was not jostling for position on a racecourse. He simply stood there with his hand extended, facing General Forbes, who hesitated for a moment before understanding that Dillon wanted the photographs back. Forbes surrendered them, saying, "If this works, it will make my job easier. I can admit that."

Dillon went efficiently around the half-circle, silently collecting the pictures. Only Colonel Cheever refused. "I want General Donovan to see these."

"General Donovan will be welcome to see them, Colonel. I will bring them over myself whenever he asks. Or he can call Mr. Dunlop or Mr. Hoover."

Cheever looked to Crocker for support. But Crocker said quietly, "I'm sorry, Colonel."

Cheever turned and started to leave the room, the photographs under his arm. Dillon stepped around a chair to block him. "Colonel, these photographs constitute evidence in a criminal investigation. If you refuse to yield them, I will arrest you for obstructing a federal officer."

Cheever handed the photographs over and pushed roughly past to leave.

Dillon crossed back to the conference table to put the pictures back in his briefcase. He began to rewind the Dictabelt.

By the time he finished, the others were gone. Dunlop was waiting by the door. Crocker, from his desk, nodded at Dillon once.

Dillon started for the door.

"Mr. Dillon?"

"Sir?"

"Can David Lothrop hold himself together?"

"Yes, sir. I believe he can."

"You did a good job getting him ready."

Dillon hesitated, then said, "He's better at it than I would be. When he's with the woman, I almost believe him myself."