“I d
on’t know what to think,” Cronley said.
“Think about candidates for the letter writer,” Wallace said. “I think we can safely remove Colonel Mattingly and myself from the list of suspects . . .”
I’ll be goddamned. Maybe it wasn’t the Russians. Maybe it was Mattingly. Wallace, no. Mattingly, maybe.
“. . . but who else can you think of who is green with jealousy that you’re now the chief, DCI-Europe?”
Cronley shook his head, and then his mouth went on automatic.
“Be glad they didn’t give you the job,” he said.
Wallace looked at him curiously.
What the hell, why not tell him?
Screw Ludwig, I’m going with my gut feeling about Wallace.
Wallace’s one of the good guys.
“I had lunch with General Smith yesterday,” Cronley said. “And General Greene. And Lieutenant Colonel Ashton. And Lieutenant Schultz, who is really not Lieutenant Schultz, by the way, or even Commander Schultz, which is what he really was when he was working for Cletus Frade, but executive assistant to the director, Directorate of Central Intelligence.”
“Interesting.”
“And I raised the subject of why was I named chief, DCI-Europe, when there were so many fully qualified people of appropriate rank and experience around. And Schultz told me.”
“Like Bob Mattingly, you mean?”
“And you.”
“And what did Schultz tell you?”
“Mattingly, first. Schultz didn’t come right out and say this . . .”
“But?”
“I got the feeling the admiral thinks Mattingly is more interested in his Army career than the DCI.”
“Explain that.”
“That since he’s thinking of his Army career, he’d be more chummy with the assistant chief of staff for intelligence—with the Pentagon generally, and ONI, and the FBI—than the admiral wants his people to be. He was in ONI, and he knows how unhappy they were when Truman started up the DCI to replace the OSS, which they thought they’d buried once and for all.”
Wallace didn’t reply to that immediately, but Cronley thought he saw him nod just perceptibly, as if accepting what Cronley had told him.
Then Wallace asked, “And that applies to me, too?”
“I was given the job, the title, because no one is going to think that something important like Operation Ost is going to be handed to a very junior captain. Or the corollary of that, DCI-Europe—and Operation Ost—can’t be very important if they gave it to a very junior captain.”
“That makes a perverse kind of sense, I suppose.”
“Which brings us to you.”
“Oh?”
“Nobody told me this either, but if—more than likely when—this blows up and I get thrown to the wolves—and they did tell me to expect getting thrown to the wolves—somebody’s going to have to take over from me.”
“You mean me?” Wallace asked dubiously.