Death and Honor (Honor Bound 4)

“I had hoped you would understand,” Boltitz said.

“It wasn’t a pistol the korvettenkapitän offered, Clete,” von Wachtstein said. “My suicide would have implicated my father. He would have been sent to a concentration camp, if not hung with piano wire from a butcher’s hook.”

“So what did he offer?” Frade asked.

“I was to crash on landing when I came back from Montevideo,” von Wachtstein said.

Frade looked at Boltitz.

“And if he flew into the ground, you were going to keep your mouth shut about your suspicions about him?” he asked.

Boltitz nodded.

“So why aren’t we scraping you off the runway at El Palomar, Peter?”

“Clete!” Dorotea Frade said, either in shock or as warning.

“I reported the korvettenkapitän’s visit to Ambassador Lutzenberger,” von Wachtstein said.

“How much had you told Lutzenberger about what you thought Wachtstein had done?” Frade asked Boltitz. “Before you went to his apartment, I mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Why not?”

“I considered it possible that the ambassador was—”

“The traitor the Sicherheitsdienst was looking for?” Frade interrupted.

Well, Boltitz thought, he knows enough about his enemy to make that distinction. Most people would have simply said “SS,” thinking there was no difference between the SS and the SD; that all in the SS were Secret Police.

Why am I surprised? Von Wachtstein told me he was good, and that the happy Texas cowboy image he presents masks a very professional intelligence officer.

“And I presume still are,” Boltitz said. “I’m not SS-SD, Major Frade.”

“You’re not? Then who do you work for?”

“Admiral Canaris,” Boltitz said.

“For him personally? Or you’re assigned to the Abwehr?”

The Amt Auslandsnachrichten und Abwehr—Abwehr—was the foreign espionage and domestic counterintelligence organization for the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the supreme headquarters of the armed forces. Its head was Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.

The question is insulting, Boltitz thought, suggesting I am trying to make myself out as more important than I am.

And the anger Frade experienced when von Wachtstein told him that he had admitted his treason, had told me everything, has had more than enough time to dissipate. He is being insulting with the purpose of making me lose my temper and say things I would not ordinarily say.

This happy Texas cowboy is a very dangerous man.

“I have the honor of working directly under Admiral Canaris’s direction, Major Frade.”

“There’s that word again, honor,” Frade said, and shook his head and chuckled. “Okay. What about Major General von Deitzberg? He’s from the OKW. Where does he fit into your chain of command? You’re telling me you don’t work for him?”

“Von Deitzberg is an SS officer,” Boltitz replied, “an SS-brigadeführer, seconded to the army for this mission. No, I don’t—”

“Define ‘mission,’ ” Frade interrupted, and then before Boltitz could open his mouth, added, “You and the deputy adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler didn’t come here just to find out who’s the traitor in your embassy, did you?”

Boltitz locked eyes with Frade and thought, He’s letting me know he knows who von Deitzberg actually is. That’s to impress me.