"Well, we used to message back and forth about girls. And then, right before you came back from Sicily, he messaged me about that girl he met there in Palermo."

Canidy looked at him for a long time.

Jesus, he's talking about Andrea Buda.

And Tubes was more than smitten with her.

And why wouldn't he be? Twenty years old, maybe five-seven with a perfect curved figure. Inviting, doe-like almond eyes. Rich chestnut brown hair that fell to her shoulders. And those perfect, magnificent breasts . . .

Yeah, small wonder he had a hard-on for her.

Wait. That one afternoon she just disappeared-is she the reason Tubes got caught by the SS?

That can't be possible. She hid from the SS.

Professor Rossi's sister taught her to pray the rosary in church.

And her father's a fisherman on one of Nola's boats.

Not to mention those morons Tweedle Fucking Dee and Dumb are her brothers. Stupid as a box of rocks, yes, but they did tell me where the Tabun was stashed. . . .

"Andrea," Canidy furnished.

John Craig van der Ploeg nodded.

"She is stunning," Canidy said.

"That's what he said. That and really . . . uh, horny."

Really!

Well, no surprise there. She exuded sex from her every pore.

"And?" Canidy said.

"Well, uh, he told me certain things that she liked, uh, when they were getting, well, you know, doing things only he would know."

I can only imagine what those were, Canidy thought. And I told that sonofabitch to keep his hands off her-that thinking with the little head could get him killed.

Shit. Maybe that is what happened . . .

"And when I alluded to them in the chickenfeed," John Craig went on, "whoever was working the W/T did not have a clue what I was talking about. Then there was talk about a brothel, which made no sense. Why would he pay for hookers if he had something as hot as Andrea? And for free."

"Don't kid yourself," Canidy automatically replied. "One way or another, you pay for the companionship of women. As a rear admiral at Pensacola once told me, 'Son, if it flies, floats, or fucks-rent it!' I'm not a hundred percent onboard with that. Deep inside this hard-ass persona is an old-school romantic who doesn't share women. But now, John Craig, you, too, are privy to that distinguished old sailor's sage advice and may apply it as you see fit."

Canidy glanced at Fine, who he saw was grinning, then said, "Anyway, so you created your own danger signal for a compromised station. Very nicely done."

"John Craig is good," Fine put in. "That's why I made him our station signal officer."

Canidy could see John Craig's face brighten at that.

"Tell him, son," Fine said.

"I'm in charge of all commo," John Craig said. "I maintain the facilities and the message center, oversee all the traffic from the agents, the procedures and ciphers, as well as the security, and the training of the agents at the Sandbox in W/T commo."

"Impressive," Canidy said, "but after what you just told me, not surprising. Clearly you're doing a fine job."

"Thank you," John Craig said. "But, uh . . ."

"But what? Spit it out."

"But . . . I want to go operational. I want to help find Tubes."

Canidy grunted.

"What about you being station signal officer here?"

"I've already established all the procedures and protocols. I have two candidates who easily can step in and follow them."

Canidy glanced at Fine, who just perceptibly shrugged and nodded, then looked back at van der Ploeg.

"That's all well and good, John Craig, but what the hell about your claustrophobia? You're suddenly miraculously cured?"

"Not suddenly. I've been working on that. I've been forcing myself to stay locked up in the commo room-you've seen it, no windows, no nothing but walls-which has helped. And also when I've been out at Dellys, I've been going to your throat-cutting school every spare moment I have. Ask anyone out there. I'm ready."

"Look, why the hell should I take you and not someone else more experienced?"

"Easy. Because no one else is more experienced than me. I can track Tubes's radio."

"How do you mean?"

"Whoever is running his station is accustomed to me at the other end. I can keep him on the radio long enough for us to triangulate on his signal."

Canidy considered that.

If we find the radio, he thought, there's a damn good chance Tubes is nearby.

And if he's not, I'm sure I can get whoever is running the radio to talk.

"Won't they know we're close because of your signal strength?"

"I'll have to dial down my transmit power, but that's a piece of cake." He paused, then added, "I really want to go."

Canidy met his eyes.

"Why this all of a sudden, John Craig? Didn't you hear what I said the SS is doing? If you're captured-"

"That's why I want to go," John Craig interrupted. "Because I'm the reason Tubes is there . . . out there somewhere. When I didn't go the first time, he had to go in my place, so now it's 'If not now, when? If not me, who?'"

Canidy glanced at Fine, who was looking up from the stack of messages he'd been handed. Fine made a facial expression that Canidy, having known him since the day he showed up at the boarding school in Iowa, read as Whatever you decide, I'm with you.

Then Canidy looked away, out across the harbor, in the direction where Sicily, some six hundred miles away, would be over the horizon.

He felt his throat tighten.

Fine recognized what was happening, and after a long moment changed the subject: "You might want to look at a couple of these, Dick. They are all somewhat related."

Fine handed him the messages.

"The top one's from Dulles to Donovan. Dulles says Tiny is saying the Kriegsmarine is about to make major changes."

Canidy, who knew Allen Dulles was OSS deputy director for Europe, raised his eyebrows, then looked at the sheet and started to read.

"Jesus!" he exclaimed after a moment.

He looked back at Fine.

"So, Herr Grossadmiral," Canidy said, "is going to order all U-boats out of the North Atlantic? After a campaign of-what?-almost four years? Jesus!"

"Good news . . . ?"

"Damn good news," Canidy said, looking down at the half-dozen Liberty ships at anchor in the harbor. "Especially now that we're gearing up for invading Sicily. Can never have too heavy of a supply line."

"Not when, as in last year alone, some seven-point-five million tons of critical war materiel gets sent to the bottom of the ocean. Already, we're noticing the difference. More than twice the number of Liberty ships are actually making it here."

The 441-foot-long vessels-known as EC2 (Emergency, Cargo, Large Capacity)-each transported the equivalent of three hundred railroad freight cars in cargo, everything from jeeps and tanks and trucks to munitions and medicine to C rations and soldiers. They were being built-the first in March 1941, with more than three thousand ordered-at eighteen shipyards on every U.S. coast.

Before his first EC2, master engineer Henry J. Kaiser had never built a ship. But using mass-production theories-some that had helped him construct the Bonneville and Hoover dams in record time-he learned, by his seventy-fifth EC2 completed at an Oregon shipyard, how to turn out a finished vessel only ten days after the laying of her keel.

Which became critical, because as the convoys, each with scores of ships heavy with materiel, steamed at eleven knots eastward across the Atlantic Ocean, the Nazi U-boats attacked.

Seeking to choke off the supply line and starve England and the Allied forces, the submarines hunted down the sluggish ships in "wolfpacks," a deadly tactic devised by Karl Donitz, whom Hitler just months earlier had promoted to grand admiral and named commander in chief of the German Navy.

Wolfpack torpedoes sunk hundreds upon hundreds of the Liberty ships-many within sight of the U.S. coast, made easy targets when silhouetted by the lights onshore-to the point that the Allies considered a Liberty ship had earned back her cost if she completed just one trip across the Atlantic Ocean.

"Thanks to Ultra?" Canidy said.

"Yeah, the tide changed, also last year, thanks to Bletchley Park finally cracking the U-boat Enigma."

Canidy knew that the Government Code and Cypher School, the British code-breaking operation, was at Bletchley Park, forty miles northwest of London. Also known as GCCS, insiders said it stood for Golf, Cheese, and Chess Society.

Different German services used different Enigma machines, the Kriegsmarine's being among the hardest to decode.

"When Bletchley Park did that," Fine went on, "it changed everything. In November '42, the high for our losses was seven hundred and twenty-nine thousand tons. That fell to just over two hundred thousand tons this past January-about the same time Hitler made Donitz head of the navy."

"Down half a million tons. That is one helluva change."

"And as of this month, we've lost only thirty-four ships in the Atlantic. Even better, the wolfpacks are now the hunted ones. Donitz, with his subs being targeted and blasted-he's lost forty-three this month, which we're told is twice the replacement rate-is pulling them all back. He's calling this 'Black May.'"

Canidy looked at Fine and motioned with the message from Dulles. "And if Dulles is getting this kind of rich intel from Tiny on what the Krauts are doing next, then . . ."

Fine nodded.

Canidy was deep in thought for a moment, then said: "Okay, we've got to go in there and get Tubes the hell out. I'm not leaving him at the mercy of the SS with Husky's D-day around the corner. We also can see if there's anything from a pack of Hitler Youth to a half-million troops amassing. And if there's any of that goddamn nerve gas."

"We?" Fine said. "And how do you plan to deal with Eisenhower?"

"No one else has been able to find Tubes. I know my way around. And as for Ike, no one knows I've been there twice, so why the hell not a third time?"

"You said 'we.'"

"John Craig and me and whoever we need. Right, John Craig?"

John Craig van der Ploeg's face brightened, and he excitedly said, "Thank you, sir!"

Canidy's eyes narrowed.

"And that is the last goddamn time!" he snapped. "You call me 'sir' when we're over the fence, and we'll both get killed."

The look on John Craig's face showed that he understood.

[TWO].

OSS Bern Station Herrengasse 23 Bern, Switzerland 2250 27 May 1943 OSS Chief of Station Allen Welsh Dulles was in the library of his mansion in Old City Bern, sitting in one of four deep-cushioned leather armchairs. The seating was arranged in a semicircle at a low round marble table before the enormous stone fireplace.

Dulles, who in April had turned fifty years old, had the calm, thoughtful appearance one might expect of perhaps a Presbyterian minister-warm, inquisitive eyes behind frameless round spectacles, thinning silver hair, a neatly groomed gray mustache. He was in fact the son of a Presbyterian minister and grandson of a Presbyterian missionary. He'd joined the diplomatic corps in 1916, right after graduating Princeton University.

He was wearing what members of his social standing called a sack suit, a two-piece woolen garment with cuffed baggy pants and no padding in the shoulders of the jacket. His closet held more than a dozen such suits-all very much of the same cut, varying only in color, either gray or black, with or without pinstripes, and all from the clothier J. Press-which he invariably wore with a crisp white dress shirt and a striped bow tie.

Herrengasse 23 was a four-story classic baroque-style residence that had been built in the seventeenth century. The richly appointed oak-paneled high-ceiling library-dimly lit by the flickering flames of the crackling fire and a single torchiere lamp glowing in a near corner-had the comfortable smell of old leather and fine tobacco. With Bern's blackout rules in effect, and strictly enforced to avoid aerial attacks by Axis forces, the great room's massive crystal chandelier remained darkened and the heavy fabric draperies were pulled tightly across the tall casement windows.

A German-manufactured Braun radio-phonograph combination was tuned to 531 kilohertz to pick up Landessender Beromunster, Switzerland's national public station. Earlier, Dulles had been listening to a news broadcast in German, then a rebroadcast of a BBC-produced report, its reader having the markedly distinct clipped accent of the British.

Now, with the Braun's volume turned low, the radio station was playing a performance of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. It had been recorded in German at the Stadttheater, which was a half-dozen blocks away, not far from the Zeitglocke, which would sound its massive bronze bell in ten minutes.

Dulles appreciated the works of Mozart; he just could not decide which held more irony during wartime, the playing of a comic opera heavy with sex or the la folle giornata-day of madness-story line of the opera itself.

Especially on a radio station whose signal reaches far into Nazi territory, where the penalty for listening to Beromunster's broadcasts gets one charged with sedition-and the death sentence of getting thrown in a concentration camp.

Dulles picked up a Zippo lighter that was on a silver tray on the marble table. The tray also held two bottles of Remy Martin VSOP cognac and four snifters. One of the crystal glasses was nearly half-full. Beside the tray sat a large wooden humidor heavy with Honduran cigars and a thick manila envelope rubber-stamped in red ink: TOP SECRET.