Miss Charity Hoche, Bruce suspected, would wake them up and get their blood flowing to an undesirable degree.
"Mr. Bruce," Charity said in a low and sexy voice, "I'm Charity Hoche.
Daddy said when I saw you to give you his best regards."
She thrust the envelopes at him. They were of lightweight, airmail paper, double enveloped, the outer envelopes stamped top secret.
They were warm to the touch. After a moment, he figured that out. She had been carrying them on her person. In her girdle, specifically; there was no other place where they could have been carried unfolded. It made sense, of course, but there was still something unsettling about it.
Bruce forced his thoughts from Charity's girdle to the pistol. The way she was holding it--upside down, her finger nowhere near the trigger, not waving it around, the muzzle pointed safely toward the floor--showed that she was quite at home with firearms. But one did not expect to see a snub-nosed revolver in the soft white hands of a long-haired blonde with a face that brought to mind candlelight dinners.
Charity Hoche saw the surprise in his eyes. She flashed Bruce a dazzling smile "I didn't mean to startle you, Mr. Bruce," she said.
"But I... I can't tell you where I've had the damned thing for the last thirty-six hours.. just had to get it out of there I'm scarred for life."
David Bruce had been a little chagrined at how eagerly his mind considered in glorious Technicolor the various places Miss Hoche might have had the pistol concealed on her person for the past thirty-six hours.
"Not at all," David Bruce said, somewhat lamely.
Charity handed him next three Receipt for Classified Top Secret Documents forms, and watched as he compared the numbers of the forms with the numbers on the outer envelopes, then signed them. When he gave them back , to her, she folded them into a small wad and stuffed them inside her uniform blouse. He averted his eyes in a gentlemanly fashion as she did this.
"Let me take a quick look at these," David Bruce said, furious with himself;
for acting like a high-school boy before this stunning young woman.
"And then we'll have a little chat" "Yes, Sir," said Charity Hoche.
"Helene," Bruce heard himself say, "why don't you get us some coffee?"
She went to get the coffee, but he saw the look on her face and reminded | himself again that although she was functioning as his secretary, she was a ' commissioned officer of the United States Army, and aware that captains are ] not sent to fetch coffee. | The first of the three Personal--Eyes Only messages from the Director of'| the Office of Strategic Services dealt with logistic matters He glanced at it, then opened the second. That dealt with the suspicions held by the FBI that a technical sergeant recruited for the OSS (and, he recalled from a remote portion of his memory, about to finish training at Whithey House) had uncomfortably close connections with the Communist Party, USA. As he replaced that one in its envelope, he thought he would have to read that one very carefully indeed. Then he opened the third Eyes Only. It dealt with Miss Charity] Hoche:
Dear David:
While I would suggest that we leave intact the in-houst gossip that Charity Hoche has been sent to you because she-.
batted her eyes at Uncle Bill, and the old softie gave io the truth of the matter is something else.
Beneath the very attractive facade is an unusually bright genius' level IQ) young woman with a master's degree in political science earned in four years, suiaiaa cum laudfi. As this came out, first as Charity proved tar more useful working at the house on Q Street than frankly I thought she would be, and then officially, from a belatedly administered background investigation, Pate Douglass and I began to involve her in more and more higher-level operations.
The last time I was in England, I brought Ed Stevens into one such operation, together with a direct order that he was not to tell you X had done so. I should not have to tell you the decision to keep you out of this was not in any way a reflection on you, I will tell you that i
t is the only operation currently under way in Europe to which you are not fully privy, and that those, including Charity, who are privy to it are a very BTOall number of people personally approved by the President.
And neither Ed nor Charity is privy to all the details.
I brought Bd into it, with the President's permission, because the operation is of such importance that nothing else being done can be permitted to interfere with it. He was told what he has been told aolely so that he can make sure nothing that happens over there will get in the way.
His orders are to reason with you, first, to see if he can talk you out of whatever it is you plan to do that might get in the way, and, failing that, to communicate directly with either myself or Pet Douglasa. We would then, without explanation, cancel the planned operation. We have done that twice.
Charity was brought into it, again with Franklin Roosevelt's specific permission, for the simple reason that this operation's in-house administration cannot be conducted through our normal channels, as secure as we believe them to be. Pete and I needed, in other words, a clerk-typist and file clerk with not only a Top Secret--Presidential clearance, but on with the intellectual ability to comprehend the implications of the project, and to deal with the people involved.
It was only, frankly, after I pointed out to the President that none of the other people he proposed, in particular one Navy captain of our mutual acquaintance, to assume responsibility for in-house administration and liaison for this project could type or file, and that adding the Navy captain to the cleared list would leave us no better off than we then were, that he approved adding Charity to the list of those cleared for the project.
That situation has now changed, as a result of growth in the project. We now have the Havy captain, and he has an administrative staff of two. And as both the project, and your operations, have grown, so has the possibility that you will undertake something that could get in the way, and that it would somehow slip past Ed Stevens's attention.
We cannot take that risk. My recommended solution to the problem was what I thought to be the obvious one, to add your name to the list. Unfortunately, I made it hours after the President bad become aware that, on his own, one individual on the list had made his deputy privy to some details of the project.
Roosevelt was enraged... at the time I didn't know why... at my suggestion that we add "every Tom, Dick, and Harry" to the list, and, at my persuasive best, when I told him what I considered to be the risk of something slipping past Ed Stevens in London, all I could get from him was permission to send someone already on the list over there to keep that from happening.