The Double Agents (Men at War 6)

She unlocked the sturdy paneled door to the bedroom and entered, then locked the door behind her. After first removing her shoes, then her first lieutenant’s uniform, she took care in slipping off the fine silk stockings, panties, and brassiere. Then Charity pulled on a thick cotton robe, lifted her shoulder-length hair out from under its collar and made a ponytail, then padded barefoot into the adjacent bathroom.

She went directly to the huge black marble bathtub.

She turned on the tap and water began to gurgle into the tub. Then she walked to a cabinet, opened the door, and removed a jar of Elizabeth Arden bubble bath crystals. She had brought two dozen jars with her when she had come over from the States, not quite two months ago. Her stockpile was down to eighteen, as she had judiciously given jars—and some silk stockings—to the other women at Whitbey House.

She carefully poured two scoops of crystals into the running water, adjusted the taps, then returned the jar to the cabinet. When the tub was about half full, she dipped her right big toe in the water to test the temperature. She winced—it was quite hot at first touch, but then she became accustomed to it—and slid off her robe and stepped both feet into the tub. She slowly lowered herself in the water, the layer of bubbles swallowing every part of her body but her head.

“Ahhh,” she said, contentedly.

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A rumble of thunder rattled the windows.

As her body warmed and her muscles began to relax, her mind became less cluttered with the day’s mundane tasks that had driven her to numbness—and settled on the one thing that dogged her.

Charity desperately wanted to be of the frame of mind not to give a damn about what people thought of her.

Like Dick Canidy does, she thought, reaching for the oval bar of Pear’s Soap and the facecloth next to it. He couldn’t care less.

But Charity—reared on a twenty-acre estate in Wallingford, one of the plusher suburbs of Philadelphia, and educated at Bryn Mawr—couldn’t bring herself to do that.

I do care.

And she did not think that having a socialite’s image and being taken seriously had to be mutually exclusive.

It’s not either-or, dammit.

She felt tears welling, told herself they were from exhaustion, and wiped them from her cheek. She rubbed the soap bar in the facecloth, creating a lather, then softly began soaping herself.

Initially, when talk began of her coming to England, it was thought that she would simply do for Whitbey House what she had done so well for the House on Q Street in Washington, D.C.

The House on Q Street was used as an OSS safe house, as well as a hotel of sorts for transients the OSS could not put up elsewhere in D.C. Charity had run it and its staff—while acting as a sort of superhostess—with the precision of a Swiss timepiece, and there was no reason to believe that she could not do the same at Whitbey House.

And Whitbey House—and Bob Jamison—would soon desperately need the help.

First Lieutenant Robert Jamison, a pleasant, red-haired young man, was adjutant, working directly for Dick Canidy. He handled the requisitioning of everything for the OSS station from bedsheets to plywood sheets, laxatives to explosives. And he handled all the paperwork. All Canidy had to do was scribble his name in the signature block authorizing said requisitions—hundreds of them each month. Sometimes, Canidy didn’t have to do that; Jamison occasionally signed Canidy’s name in his absence. Canidy encouraged him to do so, having explained that that was in keeping with the true nature of his job, relieving Canidy of all the administrative burden that he could.

Bob Jamison had performed superbly—perhaps too well. While he was grateful to work for someone as decent (if demanding) as Dick Canidy, he wasn’t exactly thrilled to be stuck ordering laundry soap and such. He longed to contribute something more to the war than being what he called a chief clerk.

He wanted to go operational.

Both Dick Canidy and David Bruce thought that Jamison had the brains and talent for that. He had demonstrated it recently in the setting up of a target for a test of the B-17 drones. That mission had required working with regular military elements (army and navy) who did not have the Need to Know why they had been sent to build massive wooden frameworks on a remote English coastal cliff, nor how it was that almost to the minute the last nail had been hammered home a B-17 “accidentally” crashed into the framework, the aircraft’s “pilots” having safely parachuted out before impact.

Jamison had come up with plausible cover stories—in fact, had put together the whole project for the test of flying an aircraft by remote control into the phony “sub pen.” No one ever questioned the crash as anything but what Jamison had explained.

As more and more such OSS operations were mounted out of Whitbey House Station, someone had to procure—through channels or other unconventional methods—the matériel to carry them out. Jamison, of course, was the man, and, being damn bright, had over time put the details of so many missions together into a larger picture.

And that was what had ruined his chances of going operational.

The Rule One was that no OSS personnel with knowledge of OSS plans other than their own could go operational. And Jamison knew too much about what was going on in and out of Whitbey House Station—the very things that the damn Nazi Sicherheitsdienst gladly would carve him apart, little piece by little piece, in order to learn—and so he was left to do what he did best.

With Canidy disappearing now and again—Canidy being the exception to any rule that Canidy chose, including Rule One—Jamison had simply carried on with his own duties while filling Canidy’s as he was able. What he could not handle or did not have the authority to handle, Lieutenant Colonel Stevens took care of either from his office at OSS London Station or from personal visits to the safe house.

Charity Hoche’s arrival at Whitbey House, with the grand if somewhat vague title of “Deputy Director (Acting),” only served to solidify in Bob Jamison’s mind the fact that he was stuck as chief clerk.

Charity had sensed some friction from the start, particularly when she came to understand that the early word had quickly circulated through Whitbey House that she would be working for Jamison “taking care of the women.”

What followed was a subtle, behind-the-scenes tug-of-war between them for control.