“I asked who he was, Mr. Cronley,” White snapped. “What are his qualifications for doing something like this?”
“I don’t think there’s anybody around who’s qualified to do something like this. But Honest Abe comes highly recommended.”
“By whom?”
Gotcha! You’re probably going to go back to Highly Pissed on the Edge of Apoplexy, but I got you!
“By Captain Dunwiddie, sir. Tedworth and Tiny—and Mr. Finney, now that I think of it—were in Charley Company when it got nearly wiped out in the Battle of the Bulge. Tiny made Abe first sergeant when he took his commission. There’s no doubt in my mind that Colonel Wilson and Honest Abe can train Tiny’s Troopers to carry this off.”
“I wondered where the hell Hotshot Billy was,” White said, in almost a mutter. Then he raised his voice. “Greg, have you been paying attention to all this?”
Second Lieutenant Douglas replied, “Yes, sir.”
“Pay close attention to this. It doesn’t happen very often. General officers too often tend to think of themselves as all wise and incapable of making a mistake.”
“Sir?”
“Colonel McMullen and Mr. Cronley, please accept my sincere apology for underestimating you. Wagner and Finney, you can include yourself in my apology.”
“General, no apology is necessary,” McMullen said.
“If I didn’t think an apology was necessary, Dick, I goddamn sure wouldn’t have offered one. Accepted or not?”
“Accepted under duress, sir.”
“Cronley?”
“Unnecessary, but accepted, sir. Thank you.”
White grunted and then said, “Now that we’re back to being pals bubbling all over with mutual admiration and comradely affection, I’ve got a couple more questions, Jim, if you don’t mind.”
“Yes, sir?”
“What did the Frenchmen get out of Stauffer vis-à-vis the mole we suspect is in your organization?”
“Nothing, sir,” Finney said.
“Anything about how he found out that Jim is head of DCI?”
“No, sir. When I called off the interrogation, he was still saying he knew nothing about either subject.”
“Why did you call off the interrogation?”
Finney hesitated a moment before replying.
“Sir, I didn’t want to have to tell Mr. Cronley that his cousin had passed away after falling down in the shower.”
“If the mole we suspect—hell, know—is around here learns about this operation, it’s dead,” White said.
“Yes, sir,” Finney said. “Well, we’re going to try again when we have Stauffer at Kloster Grünau.”
“You took him there?”
“Captain DuPres suggested that we take away what comfort Stauffer was taking from being in familiar surroundings by moving him somewhere where he would be uncomfortable,” Finney said. “And we wanted to give him time to think.”
“And recuperate a little so that he doesn’t fall in the shower?”
“Yes, sir. That too. And I thought we’d give Major Bischoff a shot at him, and we could do that in the monastery.”