“I couldn’t quite pick up on who it was let alone what it was about,” Stevens said. “Winant?”
Bruce nodded. “I could almost hear him without benefit of the telephone.”
The U.S. embassy at One Grosvenor Square was but blocks away from the Berkeley Square building that housed OSS London Station. The embassy stood near the house on the corner of Duke and Brook that was where America’s first minister to the Court of St. James’s—John Adams, later President John Adams—had lived, beginning in 1785.
Bruce was not particularly fond of John G. Winant, the ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary. He did not necessarily dislike the man—Winant had twice served as governor of New Hampshire and was, like Bruce, a product of Princeton—but was quite wary of him.
He could not put his finger on what exactly it was about Winant that caused the caution flags. There were his quirks, as might be expected of such a high-profile politician, but Bruce recognized something else—some disturbance, some imbalance, deep down. Something as yet not fully developed that could—and probably would—erupt at some point.
And Bruce was wise enough to maintain a healthy distance so as not to get caught in any aftereffects when it did.
David Bruce was not playing pseudo shrink in his analysis of the man. The very intelligent—some said brilliant—Bruce had personal experience with the oddities of the human condition. His wife suffered from mental illness. They had thrown a lot of money at the problem—Bruce had made his own fortune before marrying Alisa Mellon, one of the wealthiest women in the world—and in the hiring of the best medical minds, and the picking of said minds, he’d in his own way come to be somewhat of an expert layman.
Yet whatever the problem there may or may not be, David Bruce knew that Winant had a direct line to the Oval Office. (Literally. Word was that AT&T billed the embassy a small fortune—more than ten dollars a minute—for his calls over the transatlantic line.) Not only was Winant, as the Ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s, the personal representative of the President of the United States of America, he was also one of his buddies. He had long enjoyed FDR’s generosity. Roosevelt, before appointing Winant to his current position in London, had in 1935 made him the first leader of the newly formed Social Security Board.
Colonel David Bruce looked at Lieutenant Colonel Ed Stevens.
“Ambassador Winant informs me, as a courtesy, that his legal attaché has been contacted by Brandon Chambers.”
The legal attaché, Stevens knew, was the agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation attached as a liaison between the embassy and the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.
“No doubt Chambers is looking for Ann,” Stevens said. “Can’t blame him for that.”
“No, but we can blame Canidy.”
“How so?”
“Because the father wants to know how he can find Canidy. He figures, reasonably, that if he finds Canidy, he finds Ann. It did not help—actually, it hurt, as he took offense—when the FBI agent professed ignorance of something called ‘the OSS.’”
Stevens whistled softly. “Wish it were that simple. I know Dick does.” He paused, then wondered aloud, “I wonder how he came to look for Dick in London?”
He was immediately sorry he had said it when he saw Bruce make a face.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Bruce said, “when your daughter lets you in on a secret or two along the way. Even without benefit of Canidy’s indiscretions, Chambers can put two and two together. He’s a man of considerable resources. And, apparently, temper. The ambassador said that Chambers demanded to be put in touch with the OSS office here—or, better, Canidy directly—or he’d take his request as high as he’d have to.”
There were many secrets in the OSS stations in London and in Washington, but the relationship between the stunning Southern blonde and Dick Canidy wasn’t one of them.
Ann Chambers, twenty years old, had gotten herself a job as a war correspondent for the Chambers News Service. It was obviously no coincidence that she shared her name with her employer’s; her father was the chairman of the board of the Chambers Publishing Corporation and the Chambers News Service was a wholly owned subsidiary of that. The corporation also held total interest in nine newspapers and more than twice that many radio stations.
Her employment, however, had not been a blatant bout of nepotism.
In the summers of her high school years, Ann Chambers had worked part-time at The Atlanta Courier-Journal, making herself useful in the family business as best she could. She did anything from moving mail and fetching coffee for editors to checking page proofs in order to edit out typographic and other errors. Occasionally, she had been given short features to write from her desk.
Human interest pieces came naturally to her, and she excelled at chronicling how newlyweds had come to meet, then fall desperately in love and marry. These articles appeared in the Sunday “Weddings” section. They became very popular with women readers—married and single alike—and thus with advertisers, too.
And it was there that Ann really began to better understand two very important things. One was the family business: bring in the readers and the ad dollars follow. And the other was: that she had a very marketable skill.
So when Ann decided that marrying Dick Canidy was to take precedence over her studies at Bryn Mawr, and to do that would require following him to London, and to get to London would require a legitimate civilian occupation deemed necessary in the eyes of the War Department, she had not had to look very far.
Brandon Chambers, however, did not think women in general should be in harm’s way—a veteran of War One, he embraced the idea of the fairer sex keeping the home fires burning—and he sure as hell didn’t believe his daughter should.
Brandon Chambers was a big man—both in business and, at two hundred thirty pounds, in girth—and not of the sort to give in easily. He was accustomed to getting his way. But when he balked at Ann’s idea, he found that he had met his match in his daughter.
She had explained to him in a logical manner that either he could hire her or his competition would.
“Mr. Cowles,” she had said in her soft, sweet Southern accent, “has kindly offered me a correspondent position i
n the London bureau of Look.”