Curtain of Death (Clandestine Operations 3)

“Checking it out would be more difficult than it looks like,” Hammersmith said.

“Why?” Ziegler asked.

“Think about it, Augie,” Cronley said before Hammersmith could reply. “You’d have only one shot at it.”

“I don’t understand,” Ziegler confessed.

“Either do I,” Hessinger said.

“Because you’d have to stop and search every truck—and Hammersmith just said there are at least sixteen trucks—at the same time. These Odessa people are not putting one or more bastards in every truck every time they go onto the autobahn. I’d guess only one truck at a time is carrying one of these sonsofbitches, and that maybe a day or two goes by when they’re not carrying anybody . . .”

“And the chances of one of these Odessa people being on the one truck the CIC stopped are very slight,” Hessinger said, picking up Cronley’s chain of thought.

“. . . and once the CIC stopped and searched one newspaper truck, the game is up,” Cronley went on. “They’d stop using the Stripes trucks. The only way to do this would be to have credible intel—or at least a damn good suspicion—that Odessa was on that day going to move somebody. And then stop and search every truck at the same time. And be lucky.”

“Doing that would require,” Hessinger said, “sixteen trucks times four CIC people—and six or eight would be better—per truck. That’s at least sixty-four CIC people. Probably more. And we all know the CIC is short of competent people.”

“Especially since you, Finney, and I have left the CIC,” Cronley said, laughing, and then asked rhetorically: “And if you bagged one of the bastards, what would you have? Probably some SS sonofabitch whose sense of honor would prohibit him from implicating anybody.”

“Or who didn’t know anything beyond, ‘Get on the truck, Karl,’” Hessinger picked up. “I would think that a substantial percentage of people Odessa is trying to get out don’t know anything about how Odessa is organized. They’re being gotten out for what they know about SS operations before the surrender.”

“I’ll bet Greene told you something like this when you asked him about those assets he didn’t have, right?” Cronley asked. “That you’d be pissing in the wind, even if he came up with—what did you say, Freddy?—‘at least sixty-four CIC agents’?”

Hammersmith thought: What these two have just done—obviously off the top of their heads—is come up with the story I was going to give them why we haven’t stopped Odessa from using the Stars and Stripes trucks.

They’re the reasons General Greene gave me for not coming up with fifty or sixty agents to search the trucks.

And he actually used the same words—told me I’d be pissing in the wind.

And then he told me the real reason I was to stop working on the Stripes trucks.

Are these two a lot smarter than I’m giving them credit for?

“Actually, that’s pretty much what he did say,” Hammersmith said.

“Which brings us back to my wild idea,” Cronley said.

“Which is?”

“The Russians are looking for the people behind Odessa, too. So let’s turn to them for a little assistance.”

Hammersmith thought: Now where the hell is he going?

“Jean-Paul Fortin told me thirty-odd people set up the Spider—not counting the Vatican contingent.” Cronley pointed at the briefcase. “And Greene told me the same thing and said it was in the stuff he was giving me.” He paused, then added: “Going off at a tangent, Augie, get started on Leica-ing everything in there just as soon as we finish here.”

“Yes, sir.”

Cronley looked back at Hammersmith and said, “Fortin gave me his list to compare with Greene’s. As soon as we stop talking here, Dette will make up a combined list of names. We give this list to the general, who will mark off anybody we know has already escaped from Germany, and then we send the list via SIGABA to Polo—Colonel Ashton—in Argentina and ask him if any of them are there. And get him to start looking for any of them. Also, we get General Gehlen to come up with a list of these guys who may have gone the other way, into what Major Wallace calls ‘the Soviet sphere of influence.’ And we give Seven-K the list and see if she’s got any of them.”

“Good idea,” Hessinger said.

“Who is Seven-K?” Hammersmith asked.

Cronley looked at him for a long moment, and then turned to Hessinger.

“Do I tell him?”

“The possibility has to be considered that Mr. Hammersmith will feel he has to tell General Greene what we’re doing,” Hessinger said.