scored a major intelligence coup. Every bit of information checked and double-checked. The F.B.I. had penetrated a foreign spy service for the first time. The mission was a success.
Or, two: Cochrane had left Germany at the speed of light with every contact apparently-How? Why?- compromised and scrambling for cover. The mission was, in the end, a disaster.
As for domestic Bureau politics, Hoover had arm-wrestled increasingly plump sums of money out of the congressional coffers. Frank Lerrick had solidified his position as Hoover's top spear carrier and Big Dick Wheeler had come East from the Chicago and Kansas City outposts to act as Hoover's emissary to the rest of the world. This triumvirate-Hoover, Lerrick, and Wheeler-sat firmly astride the Bureau. And rumors, no, the truth of the situation, had it that the Democratic Roosevelt would no sooner challenge Hoover's flourishing authority than he would have his photograph taken in his wheelchair. The President had enough problems with his reelection -- a potential third term -- or in choosing a successor.
As for Bill Cochrane, time passed slowly as he engaged in mortal, silent combat with tiny Mr. Hay in the Bureau archives. Cochrane suffered the middle-aged and mid-life agonies of the grounded professional. He went about his work, but entertained debilitating self-doubts.
He knew he had done something wrong, but did not know whether it was a homicide in Berlin or a misplaced adjective during his debriefing. He did know that he had gone to Germany, done his best, become a killer for his country and had left Germany in his socks. And all this was rewarded by six weeks in a stuffy attic with a cranky elf.
The weeks were totally joyless, despite even a passionless quick affair with a bosomy, blond-haired sub literate secretary from Texas. Her name was Mary Sue and she was on the rebound from a bad first marriage and was looking for a second, better one. Bill Cochrane was not.
There was now something chilling about his relationship with women. Both the women he had loved were dead. Perhaps passionless affairs were what he deserved, he told himself, as well as what he was doomed to for the rest of his life. Love was much too dangerous. Trouble was, affairs like the one with Mary Sue left him feeling so empty.
So he tried to bury himself in his work, as he had done after his wife's death. But work only conjured up images of dusty wooden filing cabinets and the diminutive sourpuss who reigned in the archives. Further, the current image of Frank Lerrick, who could have changed the situation, was of a somber, preoccupied man who shuffled quickly, silently and without raising his eyes from one office of power to another. Dick Wheeler was inaccessible. The prevailing sound of the day was that of doors closing.
Cochrane might have stayed shelved in the Bureau attic forever, except the Bureau had work to do. Good men were eventually needed.
Frank Lerrick finally reassigned Cochrane to the Baltimore office, where First Maryland National Bank had uncovered a chamber of horrors in, of all places, their auditing room. Cochrane's reception by the other agents in Baltimore was downright frosty. It was common currency that Cochrane and Hoover had locked horns over something or other. No one, including Cochrane, knew exactly what. But whatever Cochrane had, none of the other agents wanted it, either.
So as the months passed in Baltimore, Bill Cochrane felt the final days of his youth slipping away. If his services were not appreciated, he could not give other adults lessons in common sense.
He sought a job in private enterprise. He was, after all, a banker by profession, spoke a foreign language or two, and knew he could count on the Bureau to barter him a fine letter of recommendation in exchange for his resignation.
In confidence, he applied for work at three New York banks. Morgan Guaranty made him an outstanding offer. That settled it.
He would move to New York. He would receive a salary that was more than fair. He would find himself a comfortable apartment and, he hoped against hope, a special woman. He would settle down, remarry, acquire an inch or two around the waistline probably, and mind his own business while the rest of the world tumbled sublimely into hell in a Fascist basket. He had made his contribution. Who could blame him in his position for now settling on a little peace and quiet?
So on a steamy summer afternoon, he typed out his letter of resignation from the Bureau, a chore he had been putting off for several days. And it was at that very moment, as luck would have it, that his secretary, Patricia, entered the room with an outlandish suggestion: J. Edgar himself was on the line, beckoning him, summoning him, no, ordering him to Washington as soon as humanly possible.
'Fine, indeed,' Cochrane thought to himself, setting down the telephone and gazing at the completed letter on his desk. He looked at the calendar and made a mental note. August 3, 1939. 'I'll deliver my resignation in person.'
PART FOUR
1939
TEN
'.. and captured as soon as he is discovered,' J. Edgar Hoover droned on into the night. 'This man must be put out of operation quickly and by whatever means possible. We are acting upon the orders of the White House, itself, Mr. Cochrane. This Bureau's very reputation is at stake.'
'Meaning,' thought Bill Cochrane as he listened to Hoover, 'your own reputation.' But after seventy-five minutes of briefing around the oak conference table at Bureau headquarters, Cochrane distilled Hoover's rumblings down to their most simple component: Cochrane was to perform a miracle. He was to catch the most dangerous and elusive of Hitler's spies in America. Period.
Cochrane could feel his letter of resignation sitting heavily in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. It had been his intention to let the Chief have his say, then present the letter.
It was eight o'clock. Cochrane searched the impassive faces of the two other men at the table, one to Hoover's right, the other to his left. He felt his mood darken. Two hours earlier he had had a great job lined up in New York. Now, this.
Directly on Hoover's right, appropriately, was Frank Lerrick, who still carried the lofty title of Assistant Director-Personnel. It was commonly known within official Washington that aside from Clyde Tolson, Hoover's lifelong friend and companion, Lerrick was the man closest to Hoover's ear and heart. Sometimes even literally, as at this moment. Lerrick, at age fifty, was six years older than Hoover and a product of the ever-malevolent New York office. He was said to be even-tempered-always in a bad mood-and if he had ever laughed, it was by accident and no one caught him. Frank Lerrick was tight, hard, and silent. He played his college football at Loyola of Chicago, had served with General Pershing in both Mexico and Flanders, and had since 1923 been married to a stunningly beautiful former debutante from Manhasset, Long Island, who was ten years his junior. Lerrick and his wife lived in a spacious remodeled farmhouse in Chevy Chase, where they raised their three children.
J. Edgar Hoover loved him; most everyone else in the Bureau hated him, for reasons real and imagined.
The other man in the room, Richard Wheeler, had left a strategically empty chair between himself and the director when he had chosen his own place. Wheeler was now in charge of budget appropriations within the F.B.I.. He had long held some cryptic title to match, but no one ever knew exactly what it was. Wheeler was the big, rugged, affable, round-shouldered Missourian who had graduated with honors from the Bank Robbery Division of the Indianapolis office seven years earlier and went on to become Cochrane's immediate superior in the fang-and-claw operations in Chicago and Kansas City. And, if Bureau rumor could be believed, it had been Wheeler's recommendation that had dispatched Cochrane to Germany in 1937.
At age forty-two, Wheeler was now in Washington because Hoover had needed a liaison between the Bureau
