Death at Nuremberg (Clandestine Operations 4)

“In the prisoners’ mess, sir.”

“Doing what?”

“Mostly listening, sir. And looking for anything that looked funny—out of the ordinary.”

“And who told you to go to the prisoners’ mess to listen and look for things out of the ordinary?”

“Captain Cronley di

dn’t order me to do that specifically—”

“What does he do for you, Captain Cronley?” Colonel Thomas asked.

“Let him talk, Tom,” Colonel Rasberry said.

“Whatever I tell him,” Cronley said. “Go on, Casey.”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Justice Jackson, sir, when Captain Cronley suspected that messages and other stuff were being smuggled in and out of the prison, he sent me in there to see what I could find out. That’s what I was doing in the prisoners’ mess.”

“And what happened there? What did you see happen there?” Jackson asked.

“All of a sudden, Stauffer grabbed his throat and fell backwards off the bench at his table.”

“How did you know it was Sturmführer Luther Stauffer?”

“Mr. Cronley told me who he was, and asked me to watch who he talked to. He said he was connected with Odessa.”

“Am I hearing,” Colonel Thomas interrupted, asking incredulously, “that Captain Cronley believes that Odessa nonsense and has passed that nonsense on to this boy?”

“Colonel, I don’t mean to be rude,” Justice Jackson said icily, “but that was the last time you will say a word that is not in reply to a question that either I or Mr. Cronley have posed to you. Do you understand?”

Thomas’s face flushed.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Go on, son,” Jackson said.

“Yes, sir. So I took a look at him, and he was . . . bubbles were coming out of his mouth, and I remembered what I had heard about what cyanide pills do to you. So I went to the kitchen door and called for the sergeant of the guard and told the PFC on the door to call for the medics—”

“The sergeant of the guard wasn’t in the prisoners’ mess?” Cronley asked.

“No, sir.”

“Why not? Are you saying you were the only American in there?”

“There was a PFC at the door, and when I opened it to yell for help, there was another one outside.”

“Where was the sergeant?”

Wagner shrugged.

“And then what happened?” Cronley pursued.

“Well, when the sergeant—Sergeant Brownlee—came, he—”

“How long did it take him to come into the mess?” Colonel Cohen asked.

“I guess two, three minutes, sir. Maybe a little longer.”