She turned onto a dirt road and drove far enough down it so the Kapitän could not be seen from the paved road.
“You’re not supposed to sit with the engine idling in a Kapitän,” she said, almost as if to herself. “But it’s as cold as that witch’s teat we hear so much about, so to hell with it. I’ll leave it running.”
“You were telling me how you met Freddy,” Cronley said.
“Before you moved the ASA Munich station into the Pullach compound, Freddy started hanging out around it. Around me. I thought he wanted to get into my pants. I knew who he was—that he was in the mysterious, not-on-the-books CIC detachment—and I thought just maybe he could help me to get out of the ASA at least into his branch of the CIC, so I didn’t run him off.
“Finally, when he thought it was safe, he took me to the movies. After the movie—it was They Were Expendable. You know, Robert Montgomery and John Wayne? About PT boats in the Philippines?”
“I remember the movie,” Cronley said.
“So after the movie, when Freddy was driving me back to my kaserne—in this car, by the way—he pulls off onto a dark street, and I thought, here it comes, and started asking myself how much I really wanted out of the ASA and into the intelligence business.
“But what he whipped out was his CIC credentials. He said what he was going to say to me was classified. Then he said he had reason to want to bug two offices, and he didn’t want anyone to know he was doing it.”
“Why did he go to you for that?” Cronley asked.
“The ASA—Army Security Agency—started out making sure nobody was tapping Army telephones. It went from that to making sure nobody was bugging Army offices, and finally to intercepting radio signals. Freddy knew that. You didn’t?”
“I must have slept through that lecture at the CIC School. Or chalk it up to my all-around naïveté, innocence, about things I ought to know.”
“Oddly enough, some women find naïveté and innocence to be charming, even erotic, characteristics in younger men. But to fill in the blanks in your education, the ASA teaches ASAers courses in how to find bugs. It therefore follows if you know how to take them out, you know how to put them in. Verstehen Sie?”
Actually, she should have said du. Du is the intimate form of Sie. And God knows we have bee
n intimate.
This is not the time for language lessons.
“Okay, so where did you get the bugs you put in for Freddy?”
“There’s a rumor going around that the ASA sometimes installs bugs, too. Anyway, I got half a dozen bugs from the supply room. And installed them in what was then Mattingly’s office, now yours, and in Wallace’s. And Freddy promised to see what he could do about getting me transferred out of ASA.”
“When did you put these bugs in?”
“A long time ago. Or what seems like a long time ago. You were then a second lieutenant in charge of the guards at the mysterious Kloster Grünau.”
“That does seem like a long time ago, doesn’t it?” Cronley said. “Which means Freddy regularly bugged both Mattingly and Wallace.”
“He did. You didn’t know this?”
Cronley shook his head.
“And today he ordered you to . . . what’s the word, transcribe? . . .”
Colbert nodded.
“. . . my conversation with Major Derwin?”
“Right. Which is the original source of my loyalty dilemma. And it gets worse.”
“Explain that to me, now that we’ve already established that I’m naïve and innocent.”
“When Freddy said, ‘Derwin worries me. Get in there and get a record of what’s said, and don’t let Cronley know,’ that put me in a hell of a spot. Freddy lived up to his end of his deal with me—there I was in triangles—and I obviously owed my loyalty to him.
“On the other hand—and this has nothing, well, almost nothing, to do with you sweeping me off my feet with that innocence and naïveté I find so erotic—you got me out of the ASA, you’re my boss and Freddy’s boss . . . Getting the picture? So what do I do? Who gets my loyalty?”
“You did the right thing to tell me about this,” he said.