“Just before the war ended, the SS was looking for them so they could hang them from butcher’s hooks like the others.”
“Who’s Oberst Niedermeyer?” Ziegler pursued.
“He’s the guy Gehlen sent to Cletus Frade in Argentina to keep an eye on the Nazis we sent there. He’s even more anti-Nazi than the others. Devout Catholic and a pal of von Stauffenberg.”
“So you didn’t pass any Nazis through the courts by faking their records?” Hammersmith asked.
“One we did. Major Konrad Bischoff. You met him. He was Himmler’s mole in Abwehr Ost, a dedicated Nazi who deserved to be hung from a butcher’s hook by his nuts.”
“I don’t understand.”
“When Gehlen caught him, early on, he realized that if Bischoff had some sort of fatal accident in the East, somebody would replace him. So he turned him. Instead of being Himmler’s mole in Abwehr Ost, Bischoff became Gehlen’s mole in the Sicherheitsdienst.
“And Gehlen trusts him?”
“Put it this way: Bischoff has been around Gehlen long enough to fully appreciate what happens to people who betray Gehlen.”
“Off the top of my head,” Hammersmith said, “the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency denazified hundreds, maybe thousands, of Nazis in questionable circumstances. Since they did, they probably assume you did the same thing. I mean, denazified a bunch of people. If they can prove that, and if—when—they get caught, they can say, ‘The DCI did the same thing.’ Therefore, they really want to catch you. And will do anything they have to in order to do so.”
“Off the top of my head, Comrade Hammersmith, I would judge that to be a splendid analysis of the plans of our enemy. Enemies.”
“Thank you, Comrade Cronley.”
“We’re getting off the subject,” Hessinger said. “I think you were about to tell Comrade Hammersmith about our friend in Russia.”
“So I was,” Cronley said. “Where did I get sidetracked?”
“You were about to tell Jack and Augie about Seven-K,” Claudette said.
“Right. Caveat, Jack and Augie: talking about Seven-K is right at the head of the list of things that you talking about will get you killed.”
“I took your point, Captain Cronley, the first time you made it,” Hammersmith said, his annoyance showing.
“Better safe than sorry, Mr. Hammersmith,” Cronley said. “Is your ego so sorely outraged that we can’t go back to ‘Jim’ and ‘Jack’?”
“That would be nice, Jim, if we could do that.”
“Well, Jack, Seven-K is an NKGB colonel with whom Gehlen has been doing business since the Wehrmacht was at the gates of Moscow. And probably before that. She’s also a Mossad agent . . .”
“She?” Ziegler said.
“. . . who during the war, and now, gets Russian Jews—Zionists—out of Russia so that they can go to Palestine. To do this, she needs money. Lots of money. Gehlen used to give it to her. Now we do. In exchange, she answers questions and does things for us.”
“What sort of things?” Ziegler asked.
“The last thing she did for us was get an NKGB colonel’s wife and two kids from their apartment in Leningrad to a field in Thuringia, where they could be picked up and then sent to join Daddy in Argentina.”
“Holy Christ!” Augie said. “What was that all about?”
“What the hell did that cost?” Hammersmith asked.
“Two hundred thousand dollars,” Cronley said matter-of-factly.
“That’s a hell of a lot of money!” Augie exclaimed.
“Not to put an NKGB colonel on the path of righteousness, it’s not,” Cronley said. “Anyway, I think we should ask Seven-K what she can tell us about Odessa. At the very least, I’m sure she can—more importantly, will—tell us which guys on the list Gehlen’s going to give us have gone to, as I have learned from the general to say, the East.”
“Yeah,” Hammersmith said thoughtfully, and then asked, “Who picked up this woman and her children in East Germany?”