“If that were so, I’d have been so informed.”
An interior door opened. A fiftyish, trim man in a dark business suit stood there.
“Am I interrupting anything?” he asked.
“Sir, my name is Cronley.”
“They just bullied their way in here, Mr. Justice.”
“Well, Ken,” Jackson said, “consider yourself lucky to be alive. Mr. Cronley’s reputation precedes him. Please come in, Mr. Cronley.”
“Sir, may I bring my deputies with me?”
“Why don’t you leave them here with Ken while we have a private word? Would that be all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Jackson waved him into his office, closed the door, and then signaled that Cronley should take a seat on a leather sofa against the wall, behind a small table.
“Coffee?” he asked, and then without waiting for a response, bent over the table and poured coffee into two cups and then sat down beside Cronley.
“I knew you were coming, Mr. Cronley, because I had a telephone call from General Seidel. You know who I mean?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He said that he had just heard that you were being assigned to the trials and thought I should know something about you, and then went on to tell me that you, quote, were a poster child for Too Big for His Britches, end quote, and that, quote, that would be amusing were you not a dangerous loose cannon with two much authority for a twenty-two-year-old. End quote. Is that true?”
Oh, shit!
“General Seidel is not one of my admirers, sir.”
“I mean about you being twenty-two years old.”
“I’m twenty-two, sir.”
“Neither the President nor Admiral Souers mentioned that when they called me about you. The President said I needed protection, and that I was going to have it whether or not I wanted it, and he was sending me the best man he knew to protect me, and I should do whatever he—you—told me to do. Sid Souers said that you managed to get Colonel Mattingly back from the Russians when everybody else had written him off as lost, and that I should pay attention to what you had to say about my personal security. Inasmuch as I have had the privilege of the friendship—the close friendship—of the President and the admiral for many years, it wasn’t hard for me to accept their opinion of you, rather than General Seidel’s.”
Cronley didn’t reply.
“What’s the problem between you and General Seidel, Mr. Cronley?”
“Sir, how much do you know about the formation of DCI?”
“The President told me he had realized, just about as soon as he’d ordered it, that shutting down the OSS was a mistake. He said there were several reasons, including that everyone pressing for its dissolution wanted to take over its missions. And so he was establishing DCI and putting Sid Souers in charge.”
“Sir, does ‘Operation Ost’ mean anything to you?”
“Oh, you know about that, do you?”
“Yes, sir, I do. The President gave responsibility for that to DCI-Europe. And until three days ago, I was chief of DCI-Europe.”
“And what has that to do with your problems with General Seidel?”
“General Seidel and Army G-2 generally think DCI is a threat to their turf and want to either take it over or abolish it. I was—am—in their way.”
“So you know all about Operation Ost? Including what a threat it poses to the President?”
“Yes, sir.”