“On our arrival at the Compound, Sergeant Phillips told me that a search of the Compound perimeter had detected no signs of surreptitious entry. He said there were no footprints, or any other sign of disturbance of the snow. He then gave me a silenced Colt Woodsman .22 long rifle cartridge semi-automatic pistol that he had found in the snow outside the bedroom window.”
“What kind of a gun?” General Schwarzkopf asked.
Wallace opened the desk drawer and, using a pencil, raised the weapon by its trigger guard and laid it on the desk.
“What the hell is that?” General Greene asked.
“We had them in the OSS,” Wallace replied. “They were issued to our agents, primarily the Jedburgh people, but to others as well. They were dubbed ‘assassination specials.’ They are barely audible when fired. The last time I saw one was when OSS Forward was in Paris.”
“‘Jedburgh people’?” Schwarzkopf parroted.
“Three-man teams we dropped into France and other places. They were trained in Jedburgh, Scotland. The question now becomes where did Lieutenant Moriarty’s assassin get such a weapon? Not, I think, from the OSS. They were kept in safes in London and Paris, and I know for a fact that before OSS Forward moved to Schlosshotel Kronberg, all the pistols had been issued. That suggests this pistol came into the hands of the Germans, or the Italians, the Serbians, et cetera, via a lost Jedburgh. General Gehlen?”
“We had two of them,” Gehlen replied. “We turned them—all our weapons—over to Colonel Mattingly when we arrived at Kloster Grünau. I’m sure there’s an inventory somewhere.”
“I think I know where it is,” Claudette Colbert said. “And last week I was going over our current inventory of weapons and I’m sure—but I’ll c
heck—that nothing like that pistol is on it.”
“Do that as soon as you can, please, after we break up here,” Wallace said.
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ve got a gottverdammt mole,” Major Konrad Bischoff said. “Most likely one of those gottverdammt Poles.”
“What makes you think it’s one of the Poles?” Wallace asked.
“I think we can presume the NKGB has rosters of Free Polish Army, or Air Force, officers and enlisted men. The NKGB was all over London during the war. The NKGB connects a family in Poland with a name on a roster. Then they connect that name with a name on a roster of Polish Security Organization personnel. They find out what the PSO man is guarding and where from that same roster. And they establish contact with him. ‘Do what we tell you, or we kill your family.’”
“Possibly, Bischoff,” General Gehlen said. “But equally likely one of our own. Personally, with nothing to go on, I suspect the mole—or moles—is one of us. Same scenario, but run by Odessa.”
“But why would either want to assassinate this lieutenant?” Schwarzkopf asked.
“They wanted to take out Cronley, Norman,” Greene said. “To show us what happens to someone who has gotten in their way. That fits the NKGB—Cronley got Bob Mattingly back and they didn’t get their defected polkovnik—”
“Colonel Sergei Likharev,” Wallace furnished.
“—whom Cronley turned back, or his family. Or, so far as Odessa is concerned, DCI—Cronley—was responsible for the capture of SS-Brigadeführer Heimstadter and Standartenführer Oskar Müller, whom Odessa had spent a lot of effort to get out of Germany and to Spain. Both wanted to kill Cronley. Lieutenant Moriarty happened to be in Cronley’s bed.”
“But as much as they might want to assassinate Cronley,” Schwarzkopf asked, “why would they want to cause the stink this is going to cause? As soon as Cronley’s friend Miss Johansen hears about this, it’ll be on the front page of Stars and Stripes.”
“Miss Johansen is not going to hear about this,” Wallace said. “Or what she’s going to hear is that a tragic accident took Lieutenant Moriarty’s life. You understand that, Cronley?”
“I heard what you said,” Cronley replied.
“If we accuse, or even suggest, the NKGB is involved, and it gets in the newspapers or on the radio, (a) the Russians will deny everything, and (b) the world will learn that the NKGB, despite to-be-expected denials, killed one of us and got away with it. They’d like that. Same thing with Odessa. They’d like the word to get out that they got away with murdering a DCI officer.”
“How do you plan to keep what happened a secret?” Greene asked.
“We can’t keep it a secret, but what we can do is put out the story that it was an accident, and get his body, and his widow and their baby, out of Germany as soon as possible. At seven in the morning, Moriarty’s body will be taken by one of our ambulances to Rhine-Main. It will be placed aboard the ten-o’clock MATS flight to Washington. Accompanied by Lieutenant Winters, Mrs. Moriarty and the baby will be on the plane. Admiral Souers and Mr. Schultz will meet the plane, and the party will then proceed to Texas on Admiral Souers’s aircraft.
“The family will be told, in confidence, that Lieutenant Moriarty died in the line of duty while engaged in a classified operation. He will be posthumously decorated with the Legion of Merit.”
“So that’s why you haven’t called in the military police,” Schwarzkopf said.
“Yes, sir,” Wallace said.
“General Gehlen,” Schwarzkopf asked, “whom do you suspect did this?”