Death and Honor (Honor Bound 4)

Frade looked at him for a moment until he understood, then chuckled.

“This is my first today, Colonel. There was water in my beer bottle. I didn’t want to set the wrong example for the troops.”

“Okay. Sorry. That puts us back to my thought that you would have been a good company commander.”

Frade didn’t reply. He handed Graham a stiff drink, then sat down at what had been his father’s desk.

He looked at Graham for a long moment, then shrugged.

“What do you want to hear first?” Frade said.

“Isn’t that obvious? What you made me come all the way down here to hear in person.”

“I thought maybe you’d ask, ‘So how’s Galahad these days?’ ”

“Okay, so how’s Galahad these days?”

“Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein is fine, thank you. He did not have to go to Valhalla after spreading himself—as an honorable officer and gentleman—all over the runway at El Palomar.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Frade did not respond directly. Instead, he said, “And when he told me why he was still among us, it came out that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris is one of the good guys—”

“Oh, come on, Frade!” Graham interrupted, thinking, My God, where did he get that? “The head of the Abwehr is a good guy? Somebody’s pulling your chain!”

“—which is why I wanted you to come down here,” Frade went on, immune to Graham’s sarcasm. “I didn’t want to send that in a message, for the obvious reasons. You really never know who’s reading your radio traffic, or whether somebody in the State Department is reading stuff in the diplomatic pouch before they send it over to the OSS.”

Graham looked at him in disbelief.

It was possible that something—anything from a train or airplane crash to a heart attack—would remove William J. Donovan from command of the OSS. That contingency had to be planned for. An immediate successor— someone who knew the most secret of all the secrets—would have to be named.

Two men had been selected.

One was Allen W. Dulles, who was running OSS operations in Europe from Switzerland. Dulles was the archetypical WASP Washington insider. A Princeton graduate, he was the grandson of John W. Foster, who had been secretary of State under President Benjamin Harrison, and the nephew of Robert Lansing, who had been President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of State.

Dulles was very good at what he did, and superbly qualified. As a State Department officer, he had been stationed in Bern, Paris, Istanbul, Vienna, and Berlin.

The other man was Graham.

Graham had been genuinely surprised when Donovan told him that he had been chosen—with President Roosevelt’s approval—as one of the two men who were to be prepared to step in immediately as Donovan’s successor should that be necessary. Surprised because he was the antithesis of a WASP Washington insider. He was a Roman Catholic Texan of Mexican heritage who had graduated from Texas A&M, and his only connection with politics had been to support—and make substantial financial contributions to—the 1940 presidential campaign of Wendell L. Willkie, whom Roosevelt had soundly beaten.

To be prepared to take over from Donovan, the three met whenever they could find the opportunity. Dulles could rarely get to Washington, so what most often had happened was that Graham would meet with Donovan in Washington, and then Graham would travel to Europe—most often to Portugal, which had air service to Switzerland—and personally tell Dulles what Donovan thought he should know. He had told Dulles of the Manhattan Project, the ultrasecret program to develop an atomic bomb.

And Dul

les would tell Graham what secrets he thought Donovan and his possible successor and no one else should know. Two of these secrets involved the identities of anti-Nazi Germans high in the hierarchy of the Thousand-Year Reich with whom Dulles was dealing.

One of these was a man named Fritz Kolbe, who provided Dulles with the identities of German spies around the world and had told him of the German development of a revolutionary German fighter aircraft, the Messerschmitt Me- 262, which, powered by a new type of engine—a “jet”—was capable of great speed and posed a real threat to the Army Air Forces’ plans to bomb Germany into submission.

And Graham had relayed to Donovan that Dulles was in contact with Vice Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr, who was dedicated to the overthrow of Adolf Hitler, and there had even been vague talk about a plot to assassinate Hitler.

Canaris’s and Kolbe’s activities were secrets as tightly held as was that of the atomic bomb.

And, Graham thought, looking at Frade, if I’m to believe what I’m hearing, Cletus Frade, a very junior and very amateur OSS operative on the pampas of Argentina, has uncovered the Canaris secret.

That’s incredible!

But maybe—even probably—he’s simply reporting gossip.