The Assassination Option (Clandestine Operations 2)

n our Enigma code. We—and I include myself in ‘we’—were simply unable to believe you could do that. I had only heard rumors of your SIGABA system, rumors I discounted until Jim showed me the one installed at Kloster Grünau. And now here.”

He pointed to a closed door.

“The Soviet systems are by no means as sophisticated as either,” he went on. “They have therefore to presume that whenever they send an encrypted message, someone else is going to read it. So they use what could probably be called a personal code within the encrypted message. Making reference to something only the addressee will understand. ‘Herr Weitz,’ for example, immediately translated to ‘Café Weitz’ in my mind. Sometimes it takes a half dozen messages back and forth to clarify the message, but it works.”

“I’m with you,” El Jefe said.

“Rahil—or whoever is using her name—expressed concern that we might be trying to entrap her, and that the only proof she would accept that we were not would be for me to personally deliver to Herr Weitz the additional fifty thousand dollars he was demanding.

“Subsequent clarifying messages seem to confirm this interpretation. She wants me to meet with her, to give her the money, in the Café Weitz in Vienna.”

“No way,” Cronley heard himself saying.

“Excuse me?” Gehlen said.

Ashton and Schultz looked at him in mingled surprise and annoyance.

Is that my automatic mouth running away on me again?

Or am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing, commanding Operation Ost?

With overwhelming immodesty, the latter.

So I have to do this.

“The general is not going to meet with whoever’s going to be waiting for him in the Café Weitz. I’m not going to take the chance that the Russians’ll grab him.”

“You’re not?” Ashton asked, sarcastically incredulous. “Who the hell . . .”

El Jefe held up his hand, ordering Ashton to stop.

“. . . do I think I am?” Cronley picked up. “Until you relieve me—and I’m not sure you have that authority—I’m chief, DCI-Europe . . .”

And probably out of my fucking mind!

“. . . and as long as I am, I’m not going to take any chances of losing the general.”

“So how, hotshot, are you going to get this Russian lady the fifty thousand she wants?” El Jefe asked.

“I’ll take it to her,” Cronley said.

And how the hell am I going to do that?

“How the hell are you going to do that?” Ashton demanded. “Have you ever even been to Vienna?”

“No. But I know where the bahnhof is, and that a train called the Blue Danube goes from there to Vienna every day at 1640.”

“Oh, shit!” Ashton said disgustedly.

“Let him finish,” El Jefe said. “Let’s hear how the chief, DCI-Europe, wants to handle this.”

“Ludwig, do you know what this lady looks like?”

“I know what she looked like in 1943,” Mannberg said.

“Okay, so Ludwig, Lieutenant Max, and I go to Vienna,” Cronley said.

And do what?