About the time he was counting out his twenty-five-hundred-buck bonus, a self-important bureaucrat type showed up on the AVG flight line. His name was Eldon Baker, and he wasted no time showing that he was a consummate prick. But when he produced from his suit coat pocket his orders personally signed by the President of the United States, Canidy paid attention.
It was December 1941, and Baker announced that with America now in the war, he was there to recruit Canidy into an outfit so secretive that he couldn’t tell him anything about it, only that it was important enough for the President to send him clear across the world to bring Canidy back.
That did not exactly convince Canidy to go along—for starters, he did not like the fact that he would be leaving his buddies alone to keep shooting Japs out of the sky.
He was, however, realistic enough to know that, no matter how good of a fighter pilot he was, odds were that eventually he’d meet his match—or that he’d screw up or that a Jap just got lucky, or all of that—and he’d be sent to meet his maker courtesy of a hundred-plus 7.7mm rounds from a Mitsubishi A5M machine gun. And, getting back to taking care of Number One, accepting the asshole Baker’s offer would mean he would be another step closer to being done with his military service obligations.
He soon discovered he was dead damn wrong.
Back in Washington, D.C., Baker finally revealed to him that the outfit was something called the Office of the Coordinator of Information, and its director, a Colonel Donovan, was answerable only to Roosevelt himself. Baker said COI needed Canidy—and certain of his connections—to help smuggle out of North Africa a French mining engineer who the Germans also were after—an engineer who both sides knew was critical to the building of a nuclear bomb that would win the war.
When Canidy idly inquired as to what would happen if he now decided that he didn’t want any part of the COI in general, and the mission in particular, Baker practically shoved the answer down his throat.
“You either agree to this ‘mission of considerable risk,’” Baker coldly replied, “or, now that you’re privy to information that’s classified as Top Secret–Presidential, you could be institutionalized for ‘psychiatric evaluation’ for a period of time—habeas corpus having no bearing on the mentally disturbed being protected from themselves—which, in the interest of ensuring that our secrets stay secret, will last for at least the duration of the war.”
Canidy was furious at himself for being caught in what he considered was little more than a high-level government con game. Yet intellectually he knew that what Baker said was more than a loosely veiled threat. He really had no option but to choose the mission—and then decided that, assuming he survived the damn thing, he could somehow figure a way to get the hell out of COI afterward.
Soon thereafter, Canidy was assigned the assimilated rank of a major in the United States Army Air Corps and given credentials that stated that. He also was given other credentials—ones to be used as a last resort—declaring that he worked for the Office of the Coordinator of Information, which carried a presidential priority.
Baker’s “considerable risk,” Canidy soon learned, was something of an understatement. The mission had required life-or-death decisions, ones that were cold and ruthless. And ones, somewhat surprising him at first, that he found himself perfectly capable of carrying out.
And Canidy then came to the realization that his experience in COI was not unlike what he’d had in Chennault’s AVG. Which was to say, Canidy not only rose to the challenge of being a spook, but was damn good at it.
Wild Bill Donovan also recognized that Canidy—having proven expert at espionage and sabotage, at the “strategic services” needed to win the war—was an extraordinarily natural operative. And over time, Canidy was given greater responsibility.
More missions included grabbing other engineers and scientists out of German hands, smuggling uraninite for those scientists to use in building the nuclear bomb in the President’s Manhattan Project, modifying B-17 Flying Fortress bombers as explosive-filled drones, even getting involved with the head of the New York City Mafia, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, leading Canidy to discover that the Germans held weapons of chemical and biological warfare in Sicily.
Donovan was said to be of the opinion—one which Stanley Fine agreed with—that Canidy had become almost the perfect spy.
Almost, because Canidy had managed to put himself in a position that no spy was supposed to be in: absolutely indispensable.
* * *
Canidy handed the message back to Fine, then gestured toward the taller of the two stacks on the massive teak table.
“And all of those are from Tubes?” Canidy said.
“All from Tubes,” Fine confirmed.
The first week of April, Canidy had set up in Palermo a clandestine OSS wireless telegraphy station, code-named MERCURY STATION. Its operator was twenty-four-year-old Jim “Tubes” Fuller.
“Well, at least all are from Mercury,” Fine went on. “Those, and there are others in the commo room files, a couple of which state that the crates you found with the nerve gas never existed either.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
Fine held up the thermos toward Canidy, making a more? gesture with it. Canidy glanced at his cup, made a face when he saw that it was empty, and pushed it to him.
“This is insane,” Canidy went on. “The station clearly is compromised. Because whoever is running it does not realize that Tubes would know that I was involved with destroying both. I just don’t understand why they’re denying that either was there in the first place.”
Fine took a sip of coffee, then offered: “Damage control? The SS knows that it was blown up—maybe not that you did it but that it did get destroyed—so the lie becomes it never existed to try to make all of it secret again.”
Canidy considered that for a long moment. Then his eyebrows shot up.
“And the reason to make it secret again,” he said, “is because they brought more in? Nerve gas and/or yellow fever?”
Fine met his eyes, then slowly nodded.