The Assassination Option (Clandestine Operations 2)

“How do you mean ‘expendable,’ Colonel?” Dunwiddie asked.

“Available for sacrifice for the greater good,” Ashton said. “Consider this, please. To whom does Admiral Souers—with absolute justification—owe his primary loyalty?”

“The President,” Cronley said softly. “Oh, Jesus!”

“Who must be protected whatever it takes,” Ashton said.

“Why are you telling us this?” Dunwiddie asked.

“Well, after thinking it over, I decided that—as far as I’m concerned—it’s all right. What we’re doing is important. But I decided that it would be dishonest of me, now that I’ve figured it out, not to tell you. Before we go further, in other words, I wanted you to have the opportunity to opt out.”

“‘Before we go further’?” Dunwiddie parroted.

“What I’ve decided to do is live with the possibility, actually the probability, that Operation Ost is going to blow up in my face, and that when that happens, Souers, as he should, is going to throw me to the wolves to protect the President. And for that matter, Eisenhower and Smith. That’s one of the things I’ve decided.”

“And the others?” Cronley asked.

“That if Operation Ost blows up in my face, it’s going to be because of a bad decision of mine. Not because Mattingly or General Greene ‘suggest’ something to me and I dutifully follow their suggestion to do—more importantly, not to do—something and it blows up.”

“For instance?” Cronley asked softly.

“For instance, Colonel Frade suggested to me that I should act ‘with great caution’ in dealing with our traitor. I don’t intend to heed that advice. My first priority is going to be finding out who the sonofabitch is, and then putting out his lights. I don’t care if he spent three years holding Gehlen’s hand on the Russian front, and has Joe Stalin’s girlfriend’s phone number, he’s a dead man.”

“By traitor, you mean the man who let the NKGB know we were sending Colonel Likharev to Argentina?” Cronley asked.

“With all the details of when and how,” Ashton confirmed. “Gehlen has to be taught that he’s working for us, and that our deal with him is to protect his people from the Russians. The deal didn’t include protecting his people from us. He has to be taught, right now, that we won’t tolerate a loose cannon.”

“There are people in Gehlen’s organization who are working for the NKGB—”

“You already had figured that out, huh?”

“And we’re working on finding out who they are.”

“‘We’re’ meaning you and Gehlen, right? Isn’t that what’s called sending the fox into the chicken coop to see what happened to the hens? Frankly, Jim, I thought you had more sense than that.”

“You will be astonished, Colonel, when I tell you how little sense I have had.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Shortly after I returned from Argentina, I met a woman. The wife of the CIC-Europe IG. Shortly after that—”

“Wait a minute! You’re talking about this woman whose water heater blew up?”

Cronley nodded.

“There has to be a point

to this narrative of your sexual exploits.”

“I told her about Colonel Sergei Likharev, then known to us as Major Konstantin Orlovsky, about whom she had heard from her husband and was curious. And the night I put him on the plane to Buenos Aires, I told her about that.”

“And she ran her mouth?”

“I don’t think they call it running the mouth when an NKGB agent reports to her superiors the intelligence she was sent to get.”

Ashton looked at Cronley for a long moment.

“You’re saying the wife of the CIC IG was an NKGB agent?” he asked incredulously.