“A couple of weeks after that,” Hughes went on, “I was in Washington and ran into an old pal of mine—”
“Whose name you are not at liberty to divulge,” Graham interrupted.
Hughes nodded. “—who has a lot of stars on his shoulders and I know personally admires Charley. And I asked him if he knew what Charley had done on Guadalcanal, and he said he didn’t want to talk about that, so I asked him what did he think would happen if I went to Colonel McCormick and told him what I knew.
“He said that after Yamamoto had been shot down, he’d tried to bring up the subject of Charley to—”
“Watch it, Howard,” Graham said.
“—to a man who lives in a big white house on Pennsylvania Avenue—”
“Oh, God, Howard!” Graham said, shaking his head.
“—and was, so to speak, shot down in flames. This unnamed man told him—and this is where it gets interesting—that he was going to tell him what he had told Juan Trippe no more than an hour before: ‘It would be ill-advised to ever raise Lindbergh’s name to me again.’
“ ‘Me,’ of course, meaning—”
“He knows who you mean, Howard,” Graham said with a sigh.
“So, cleverly assembling the facts, Alex and I concluded that Juan Trippe went to this unnamed man and told him, considering what Charley had done to knock the head Jap admiral out of the war, that it was time to forgive him. An hour later, Ha . . . my friend went there and offered the same argument. This man is not known to appreciate being shown where he has made an error in judgment.
“And the next day, or maybe the day after, he told Wild Bill Donovan to set up an airline in South America, no reason given,” Hughes concluded.
“Does General Donovan know about this?” Clete asked.
“General Donovan is very good at figuring things out,” Graham said.
“But he hasn’t said anything to you, right?” Hughes asked Graham.
“He probably knows that Juan annoyed FDR and is being punished with South American Airways,” Graham said, “but I don’t know if he knows Hap— oh, hell, the cow’s out of the barn—if he knows Hap Arnold also went to Roosevelt. And he hasn’t told me because I would be liable to tell Howard—Wild Bill refers to Howard as my Loose Cannon Number One—”
“Guess who’s A. F.’s Loose Cannon Number Two, Clete,” Hughes interrupted, laughing.
Graham finished: “—who would be capable of going—even likely to go— to Colonel McCormick and telling him (a) what Lindbergh did vis-à-vis Yamamoto and (b) what FDR did in grateful appreciation.”
“What I’d like to do is go whisper in Alphonso’s ear,” Hughes said.
"God damn it, don’t even joke about something like that,” Graham said furiously.
“ ‘Alphonso’?” Clete asked.
“The A in Senator Robert A. Taft’s name stands for Alphonso,” Hughes said. “That’s a secret right up there with Leslie Groves’s superbomb.”
Graham looked at Hughes almost in horror, then his eyes darted to Clete.
Clete said, “I don’t know who—what did you say, ‘Leslie Groves’?—I don’t know who she is, but I know about the superbomb.”
“Who she is?” Hughes said, laughing. “Clete, the guy who runs the Manhattan Project is a barrel-chested gray-haired major general named Leslie Groves.”
“Allen Dulles told you about the Manhattan Project?” Graham asked.
Clete nodded.
“He somehow neglected to mention that to me,” Graham said.
“Maybe he thinks you’re a loose cannon,” Hughes said.
Graham flashed him an angry look.