not old buddies. And that I think he thinks I’m even more stupid than is the case. Which sort of annoys me. That promotion is bullshit. I don’t suppose you know how the FBI works?”
“I don’t have a clue.”
“Well, for one thing, they don’t pay a hell of a lot of attention to civil service rules.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, just about everybody is a special agent, except for a favored few like inspectors and the directors. Special Agents in Charge are what it sounds like. But that’s a position title, not a rank. They get extra money—how much depending on the circumstances, which are determined by the assistant directors. A SAC in charge of an office with fifty agents gets paid more than a SAC in an office with five—as long as they hold that office. If they screw up, they are reassigned to another office as a special agent and get paid as a special agent with so many years of service.”
“And if they don’t screw up?
“Then they’re transferred from being a SAC of a five-man office to being SAC of one with, say, fifteen agents. That raises their pay. Knowing that they can get transferred at the whim of a deputy director upward, or downward, tends to keep people in line. You getting the picture?”
“I always thought the FBI was like the post office, cradle-to-grave security under civil service rules. How does the FBI get out from under the civil service?”
“First of all, no one complains. In large measure, the FBI system is basically fair; it rewards good work and punishes bad. Second, if some special agent decides he has been treated unfairly and goes to the Civil Service Commission, the investigator is shown pictures of him with some hooker and the suggestion is made that they will not be shown to his wife because he is known to be a friend of the FBI. Getting the picture?”
“I’m shocked. Really shocked. I’ve always thought of the FBI as Boy Scouts with guns.”
“A great many of them fit that description, Clete.”
“What you’re saying is that if your buddy found out you didn’t tell them the whole truth, you would have stopped being the SAC here and become . . .”
“A special agent in the Bullfrog Falls, Kansas, office, with a corresponding reduction in pay. Which would also have happened if my old buddy even knew I had been talking to you. And which will happen, I strongly suspect, however this thing turns out. I will be transferred to the Bullfrog, Kansas, office and encouraged to take my well- earned retirement. Retired special agents, like dead men, tell no tales.”
“Jesus, Milt!” Stein said.
“So, why are you here?” Frade asked.
Leibermann held up his hand and moved it back and forth.
Frade looked at him curiously.
“I’m waving the flag,” Leibermann said. “The last refuge of the scoundrel.”
“Explain that.”
“There’s a lot in Holmes’s letter that I agree with. Especially the threat the Russians pose. I don’t like them any more than I like the Germans. Even with what we hear about German concentration camps, the Russians have probably killed more Jews over the years.”
“My father used to say that,” Stein said softly. “When the Germans started in on the Jews, he said, ‘Germany is getting to be no better than Russia.’”
“I think the Russians have to be stopped, and it looks to me as if the only people who understand that, and are in a position to do anything about it, are J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles.”
He waved his hand again.
“So, Clete, that explains why I’m here. Questions for you. Are you willing to go to Dulles with this?”
“Of course.”
“The first thing Dulles is going to think—correctly—is that Hoover, in addition to wanting everything Dulles has gotten, or is going to get from Gehlen, wants to take over the OSS. How’s he going to react to that?”
“I dunno,” Clete said. “Why doesn’t Hoover just make a play to take over the OSS himself? If they’re going to shut it down, the FBI would seem to me a logical place to put it.”
“I don’t think you understand that the reason the Army and the Navy want to take over the OSS is because that when it’s in their tent, they can really kill it. They don’t want it ever to come back. The OSS, running loose, has been a nightmare for them.”
“But Hoover doesn’t think it would be?”
“Hoover, rightly or wrongly, believes he could control it. And he thinks it would be useful. The Army and the Navy believe—I think they’re wrong—that they could have done whatever the OSS has done, and done it more efficiently, and under the wise thumb of the chief of staff and/or the chief of naval operations.”
“I don’t know when I’ll see Dulles again,” Clete said. “And I can’t go to Washington—he’s in Washington— because I have to go to Germany tomorrow. When I get there, I’ll get word to him that I’d like to see him. That’s the best I can do right now.”
“Well, if that’s it, that’s it,” Leibermann said.
“What are you going to tell this Holmes guy?” Clete asked.
“That when I went to see you tomorrow, I just missed you. That I was told you were flying to Lisbon and would be back in a week or ten days.”
“Okay,” Clete said.
“Max, are you about through doing that?” Leibermann asked.
Ashton was making a nice stack of all the pages of the letter from Deputy Director Holmes. After he had tapped it a final time on the arm of his chair, he carefully handed the stack to Leibermann.
Leibermann took one page, held it up, and then set it on fire with a Zippo lighter. When it was almost consumed, he took a second page from the stack and lit it from the first.
He continued this process until all the pages had been burned. No one on the verandah said a word while this was going on.
Then Leibermann turned to Frade.
“I will now have that Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks that you offered a while ago,” he said.
V
[ONE]
Executive Suite, South American Airlines Aeropuerto Coronel Jorge G. Frade Moron, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina 1725 16 May 1945
When the telephone on the desk of the managing director of South American Airways rang, Don Cletus Frade, with a grunt and some difficulty, took his feet from the desk and reached for it.
“Why do I think our diplomats may have finally decided to show up?” he asked of no one in particular.
There were six men in the room. Moments before the telephone rang, Frade had idly thought he couldn’t remember ever having seen so many people in his office. All but one of them were wearing some variation of the SAA flight crew uniform.
Chief Pilot Delgano was there, in the most spectacular version thereof. Frade was wearing the uniform of an SAA captain. Hans-Peter von Wachtstein and Karl Boltitz were wearing the only slightly less spectacular uniforms of SAA first officers. And Master Sergeant Siggie Stein was wearing the uniform of an SAA radio officer/navigator.
The man not in uniform was retired Suboficial Major Enrico Rodriguez, who, Clete had decided—after going so far as to put him in a steward’s uniform—was just not going to look like a member of an SAA flight crew no
