“Good,” Colonel Graham said. “We have a very narrow window of time.”
“Any questions, Captain Dooley?” the base commander asked.
“Actually, I have two, sir. Three, if I can ask this gentleman if he’s the pilot I saw when we made rendezvous.”
The tall civilian nodded.
“How long did it take you to come from England in that beautiful airplane?”
“Actually, we came by way of Belém, Brazil. It took us a little over eleven hours from Belém. That’s two questions.”
“Did anyone ever tell you you look like Howard Hughes?”
“I hear that all the time,” Howard Hughes said.
VII
[ONE]
Hotel Britania
Rua Rodrígues Sampaio 17
Lisbon, Portugal
1745 4 September 1943
The deputy director of the Office of Strategic Services for Europe cracked open the door of his suite, saw the deputy director of the Office of Strategic Services for the Western Hemisphere standing in the corridor, pulled the door fully open, and gestured for him to enter.
“Nice flight, Alex?” Allen Dulles asked as the two shook hands.
“Coming in here from Morocco on that old-fashioned Douglas DC-3 was a little crowded and bumpy. But the rest of the trip, on the Constellation, was quite comfortable,” Colonel A. F. Graham said.
Dulles chuckled.
“Howard knows how to take care of himself,” Graham added. “There’s a galley, and a couple of stewards, and bunks with sheets and pillows. And we flew so high, we were above the bad weather. What’s up?”
“Wild Bill know you’re here?” Dulles asked.
“You said don’t tell him, so I didn’t.” Graham met Dulles’s eyes, smiled, and asked, “What are we hiding from our leader?”
He took a long, thin, black cigar from a case, then remembered his manners and offered the case to Dulles, who shook his head.
“There’s been a very interesting development,” Dulles said. “What would you say, Alex, if I told you that the Germans know a great deal about the Manhattan Project?”
“You sound surprised,” Graham said.
“A very great deal, Alex,” Dulles said.
There was a battered leather briefcase on a desk. Dulles went to it, unlocked it, matter-of-factly took a yellow-bodied thermite grenade from it, set it carefully on the desk, then went back into the briefcase and came out with a stack of eight-by-ten-inch photographs, which he handed to Graham.
Graham read the photograph of the cover sheet carefully, then looked through the stack of photographs of the rest of the document.
“I have no idea what I’m looking at,” he confessed.
“You know about the Manhattan Project’s facility in Tennessee?”
“Oak Ridge?”