The Double Agents (Men at War 6)

The professor made a grunt and nodded, then started to grab the suitcase. He found Canidy’s hand already lifting it. This time, there was no tug-of-war over who would carry it.

As Canidy started to lug the case across the street, he saw that Fine still was scanning the immediate area.

“Where’s your driver?” Fine said.

“Oh, I expect he’ll be along eventually,” Canidy called over his shoulder and continued toward the villa without further explanation.

Fine just shook his head, then looked at the professor and motioned for him to precede him to the villa, where Monsieur Khatim waited at the door.

[THREE]

Drinking coffee from a heavy white china mug, Canidy stood looking out wooden slatted French doors that opened onto a balcony. A warm breeze blew in, lightly scented with sea salt and lilacs. The room before the war had served as the primary of two main dining areas of the Villa de Vue de Mer.

The grand, four-story Sea View Villa—a French Colonial–style mansion solidly built of masonry in the 1880s high on the lush hillside overlooking the harbor—had been let to the Office of Strategic Services for the sum of ten dollars per annum and the promise that it would be preserved and protected. Its owner was the widow of one of Wild Bill Donovan’s law school pals. Pamela Dutton—formerly of New York City, Capri, and Algiers, and now simply of Manhattan due to the war—had a line of designer women’s shoes, once manufactured in Italy, that carried her name.

Canidy was convinced that the very nice clothes he’d borrowed two weeks earlier from the vast closet off of the villa’s master bedroom—and that he now wore—had belonged to Mr. Dutton…or perhaps one of Madame Dutton’s recent suitors.

Hell if I care who they belonged to. They’re comfortable, and they help me blend in damn better than any Army uniform. And I intend to help myself to more while I’m here.

The villa’s eight bedrooms were on the two upper floors. The master had its own bath. There were shared baths for the others, one on each floor at the end of the main hall. The second floor, which actually was at street level, had the two dining areas, a kitchen, a pair of lavatories, and a large living area. The bottom floor, tucked into the hill yet with its own view of the sea, had been for entertainment, complete with a formal ballroom.

Now an OSS station, the Villa de Vue de Mer had a permanent staff of about twenty, most wearing U.S. Army tropical-worsted uniforms, some with and some without insignia. There was a transient group of another fifteen or so who wore anything but military outfits. These latter ran the training camps and came and went on irregular schedules, using the villa only as their base.

Three of the four bedrooms (including the master) on the top floor had been filled with rows of folding, wooden-framed cots. Close to the roof and the small forest of antennae newly erected there, and situated in the middle of the floor, the fourth bedroom had become the commo room. It was crammed with tables holding the wireless, two-way radios and teletypes and typewriters and chairs for the operators who encrypted and decrypted the W/T messages. Its wooden door had been reinforced with steel, a wooden beam with brackets added on the inside, and an armed guard posted outside at all times.

The third-floor bedrooms had been made into basic offices for the permanent staffers, with mismatched chairs placed in front of makeshift desks, rows of battered filing cabinets, and, on the walls, frameworks that held charts detailing the Mediterranean Theater of Operations and current and future OSS ops therein.

The first-floor ballroom had been converted into a warehouse storage area, heavy wooden shelving and stacks of crates containing everything from the necessities of an office (typewriters, typewriter papers and ribbons, safes with gold, silver, and the currencies of half a dozen countries, et cetera) to field equipment (W/T radios with their assorted parts, wooden racks holding a small armory of weapons of both American and British manufacture, crates of appropriate calibers of ammunition, Composition C-2 plastic explosive, fuses, even a large wardrobe featuring a variety of enemy uniforms taken from prisoners of war captured in North African campaigns).

With the exception of the two dining rooms doubling as conference areas, the second floor remained mostly unchanged.

Canidy looked at Fine and Rossi seated opposite each other at the room’s large, round, wooden dining table. Fine also held a china mug steaming with coffee. Professor Rossi sipped tea from a glass cup. On the table in front of Fine was a short stack of papers.

Canidy gestured toward the stack with his mug. He said, “As I wrote in my after-action report, Stan, there were three distinctive explosions, each one larger than the last. Then came a fantastic plume of fire that lit the night.”

He stopped, swallowed a swig of coffee, then added, “It was an impressive sight. Wouldn’t you agree, Professor?”

Fine studied Rossi. With the fez and its cloth wrap now on a nearby chair, he could get a good look at the fifty-five-year-old’s slender, thoughtful face.

“The explosions were as the major says,” he said evenly, his English thick with a Sicilian accent. “The inferno had to have totally consumed the vessel.”

“Including the Tabun?” Fine asked.

Canidy said, “I would think so, Stan—”

“Including the T83,” Rossi interrupted. “However, the burning would not necessarily have rendered the agent ineffective. In fact…”

His voice trailed off. He took a sip of his tea.

“In fact what, Professor?” Fine pursued. “I know you’ve been through all this with Major Canidy, and it’s in his report, but I’d like to hear it again. From you. You might think of something you forgot before.”

Rossi nodded.

“My area of expertise is metallurgy, I believe you know, Captain,” the professor went on conversationally. “Not chemicals, per se. But it is commonly understood that a cloud created by such a fire would serve as a method of dispersal, a rather rapid one, in effect carrying the T83 across everything in the near distance…and farther, depending on winds and the size of the cloud.”

“Jesus,” Fine said softly.

Fine exchanged glances with Canidy—who appeared somewhat saddened when he raised his eyebrows in a Yeah, I know look—then turned back to Rossi.