Death and Honor (Honor Bound 4)

“Your credentials. Your badge.”

“Now I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then how do I know you’re who you say you are?”

“I suppose you’ll just have to take my word for it. May I continue?”

Frade raised both hands in a Have at it gesture.

“Your name came up,” Dulles went on. “We talked of other things, of course, but your name came up.”

Frade didn’t reply.

“The President said that Alex had a loose cannon running around in Argentina, who—believe it or not—refused to share the name of his mole in the German embassy in Buenos Aires with his commander in chief.”

Frade continued to keep his mouth shut.

“I told the President (a) that I knew who Galahad was, and (b) I wasn’t going to tell him or Donovan either. Which predictably set off Wild Bill’s Irish temper. Then I told them why. I told them Galahad’s identity was too important a secret—right up there with the Manhattan Project, in my judgment—”

“The what?”

“The Manhattan Project. I’ll get to that in a minute. Far too important a secret to be shared with everyone in the intelligence community, and that if I didn’t identify Galahad for them, they could truthfully tell the Chief of Naval Operations, the Chief of Staff, and J. Edgar Hoover that they didn’t know.”

“You say you know it’s von Wachtstein. How do you know that?”

“Because I am privy to a secret known to no more than eight or nine Americans, one of whom, Cletus, is you.”

“What secret is that?”

“General von Wachtstein intends to assassinate Adolf Hitler,” Dulles said. “We are in communication. One of his co-conspirators is a chap, a lieutenant colonel, named Claus von Stauffenberg, Count von Stauffenberg, who is a close friend of young von Wachtstein.”

Jesus! He’s got to be who he says he is!

Otherwise, he couldn’t know any of this.

Frade, carefully choosing his words, said, “Peter told me he’d gone to see von Stauffenberg in Munich. But until just now, I thought this ‘regicide’ that his father was talking about was just wishful thinking.”

“It is not.”

“And they’re calling this operation the Manhattan Project?”

Dulles laughed.

“No, it is not. The Manhattan Project involves the development of a bomb of enormous power, incredible power. It involves nuclear energy and an element known as uranium. One of my jobs in Berne is to see how far along the Germans are with their development of what is now called an ‘atomic bomb.’ And to do whatever I can to throw a monkey wrench in their works. Whoever creates this bomb first is going to win the war. It’s as simple as that.”

“My God!”

“Indeed,” Dulles said. “And one of your tasks when you get back to Argentina, almost as your first priority, is to report immediately anything you hear about uranium or a superbomb or heavy water—”

“Heavy water?”

“I don’t understand much of this, but apparently when an extra atom, or several extra atoms, are added to water it becomes deuterium oxide—or ‘heavy water’—and this heavy water is somehow necessary to create a nuclear explosion. The Germans had a facility to make heavy water in Denmark. The British trained some Danes as commandos and sent them in to destroy the facility or render it inoperative. I’m not privy to the details, but their mission was successful and so set back the Germans somewhat.”

“This is all new to me.”

“It’s all new to all of us,” Dulles said. “Anyway, David Bruce told me that he’s just parachuted an OSS team into Denmark—run by a fellow Princetonian, Lieutenant Bill Colby, a chap about your age, Cletus—ostensibly to do commando-type things with the Norwegian resistance, but actually to see what the Germans are doing with their now partially destroyed heavy-water plant. So keep your eyes and ears open vis-à-vis anything nuclear but—importantly— without anybody noticing.”

Frade nodded.