The Assassination Option (Clandestine Operations 2)

“I see where you’re going, Commandant,” Hessinger said.

“Start out more or less innocently, and then as Sergeant Finney slid down the slippery slope of corruption, move him onto other things such as moving a couple of men—‘going home, they don’t have papers’—across the border. Und so weiter.”

“Yeah,” Cronley said.

“These people routinely murder people who get in their way. With that in mind, would you be willing to have Sergeant Finney do something like this?”

“That’s up to Sergeant Finney,” Cronley said.

“Hell yes, I’ll do it. I’d like to burn as many of these moth— sonsofbitches as I can,” Finney said.

“Thank you for cleaning up your language, Sergeant Finney,” Cronley said. “I really would have hated to have had to order Mr. Hessinger to wash your mouth out with soap.”

Finney smiled at him.

“I would suggest that in, say, a week Sergeant Finney deliver another package to Herr Stauffer,” Fortin said. “How does that fit into your schedule?”

“Not a problem,” Cronley said. “We have to be in Vienna on the fourteenth.”

“Vienna?” Fortin asked.

“So we can be back at the monastery on the sixteenth. Finney could deliver a second package the next day, the seventeenth. That’s a week from today.”

“Why do I think you’re not going to tell me what you’re going to do in Vienna?”

“Because you understand that there are some things simple policemen just don’t have the need to know,” Cronley said.

“That’s cruel,” Fortin said, smiling, and put out his hand. “I’m perfectly willing to believe you’re a second lieutenant of the Quartermaster Corps.”

“It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Simple Policeman,” Cronley said. “I look forward to seeing you soon again.”

[FIVE]

Suite 307

The Bristol Hotel

Kaerntner Ring 1

Vienna, Austria

1600 14 January 1946

It was time to go to what everybody hoped would be a meeting with Rahil, A/K/A Seven-K, at the Café Weitz, and Cronley and Schultz had just finished putting the fifty thousand dollars intended for her in former Oberst Ludwig Mannberg’s Glen plaid suit when there came a knock at the door.

Putting the money into Mannberg’s suit had proved more difficult than anyone had thought it would be. It had come from the States packed in $5,000 packets, each containing one hundred fifty-dollar bills. There were ten such packets, each about a half-inch thick.

Mannberg’s suit was sort of a souvenir of happier times, when young Major Mannberg had not only been an assistant military attaché at the German embassy in London, but in a position to pay for “bespoke” clothing from Anderson & Sheppard of Savile Row.

Cronley had not ever heard the term “bespoke” until today, but now he understood that it meant “custom-tailored” and that custom-tailored meant that it had been constructed about the wearer’s body, and that meant room had been provided for a handkerchief, wallet, and maybe car keys, but not to accommodate twenty packets of fifty $50-dollar bills, each half an inch thick and eight inches long.

When they had finished, Mannberg literally had packs of money in every pocket in the suit jacket, and every pocket in his trousers. He also had a $2,500 packet in each sock. The vest that came with the suit was on the bed.

Ostrowski was larger than Mannberg and just barely fit into one of Mannberg’s suits, providing he did not button the buttons of the double-breasted jacket. But to conceal the .45 pistol he was carrying in one of the holsters Hessinger had had made, he was going to have to keep his hand in the suit jacket pocket to make sure the pistol was covered.

“Who the hell is that?” Cronley asked, when the knoc

k on the door came.