She forced a smile, and turned again to leave. "Of course. It's quite all right."

Bruce added, "And bring some coffee, please. We are going to need a fresh pot."

"Right away," Bruce heard her call back as he turned in his high-back leather chair to look out the window at the gray day. He thought over the conversation just now that had triggered his uncharacteristic outburst.

I don't know what aggravates me more-his arrogance, or me letting his arrogance get under my skin.

There was the sound of knuckles rapping on the wooden doorframe. David Bruce spun his chair back around.

A tall, thin, silver-haired forty-four-year-old wearing a perfectly tailored worsted uniform of a U.S. Army officer stood in the doorway.

"Helene said you wanted to see me a week ago yesterday?" Lieutenant Colonel Edmund T. Stevens, deputy chief of OSS London Station, said. "What's going on, David?"

Unlike Bruce, Stevens was not a diplomat with an assimilated military rank. He was a graduate of West Point, and had been personally recruited by the head of the OSS, William "Wild Bill" Donovan.

Before the war, Stevens had resigned his commission so that he could live with his family in England and help his wife run her wholesale food and wine import-export business. Part of Stevens's duties had been to serve as the face of the business when dealing with the difficult upper-crust English businessmen. When Donovan had seen that Stevens handled them with remarkable ease, he decided those skills would well serve the OSS. Having military experience was icing on the cake.

Bruce waved for his deputy to come in, motioning for him to take one of the wooden armchairs in front of his desk.

He glanced at the phone and said, "I just got off the line with Winant."

There had been no love lost between David Bruce and the Honorable John Gilbert Winant. Bruce held himself to the highest standards-some suggested impossibly high standards-and had no patience for those who did not meet the same. He considered Winant, the ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the Court of Saint James's, to be a weakling of the first order, which he believed was the absolute last thing they needed during wartime. But Winant was the personal representative of the President of the United States of America-the embassy at One Grosvenor Square was a few blocks from OSS London Station's Berkeley Square headquarters-as well as one of FDR's buddies, and accordingly had long enjoyed FDR's generosity.

Bruce realized that what really annoyed him about Winant was the fact that having an ineffectual envoy in such a high-profile position-especially after FDR essentially had called home Winant's immediate predecessor, Joseph P. Kennedy, for being a defeatist-reflected poorly not only on America but also on its other representatives.

David K. E. Bruce, for example.

Bruce believed that America had a long history of fine ministers to the Court of Saint James's-beginning in 1785 with its first, John Adams, who would become President of the United States-and it needed another strong one. And needed it now.

Bruce had old friends in the State Department who out of school told him that the Brits had approached FDR about the subject, whispering that they would be happy with Donovan assuming the position. But Bruce knew that there was no way in hell Wild Bill would give up being spymaster, and certainly not to be tied to an embassy desk and making cautious happy talk.

Donovan can be diplomatic. But as a rule Medal of Honor winners don't suffer fools gladly. Wild Bill would much rather unleash that Irish temper and, borrowing his language, ream someone a new anal orifice than attempt to kill them with kindness.

"Winant," Bruce said, "called inquiring what the hell is going on with General Sikorski. Apparently the Polish Government-in-exile is making it known at the embassy that it doesn't feel it's getting its due from the Allies."

The sixty-two-year-old Wladyslaw Sikorski, who had served as commander in chief of the Polish Armed Forces and chief of the Polish General Staff, was prime minister of the Polish Government-in-exile in London.

Stevens raised his eyebrows. "After being trampled by the Germans and the Russians, I cannot say that I blame the Poles. But telling Winant anything about what we are doing to support Sikorski and the resistance is the last thing we need to do. Ironically, despite his position, he simply cannot keep his mouth shut."

"Agreed," Bruce said. "And Sikorski is tough. He smells Winant's weakness and knows he can pressure him. To what end he will be successful, however, remains unclear. Because Winant, after the diplomatic firestorms that Joe Kennedy caused, won't do anything without FDR signing off on it personally. And likely not even then."

"Which is why he called you? To find out what we're doing, and then tell Sikorski that that's all he's going to get?"

"That's my take, except I'm not going to tell him because Sikorski has been valuable to us. We obviously want to keep it that way."

He took from his desktop a decrypted message from OSS Bern Station and passed it to Stevens.

"This is the response to my message to Allen Dulles about those SS identity papers."

"The ones Sausagemaker got when they tried rescuing that trainload of prisoners?" Stevens said.

He noticed that Bruce made a face when he used the code name for the Polish resistance leader, Mordechaj Szerynski, and decided it was because it reminded Bruce that Major Richard M. Canidy had come up with it. Stevens knew that the diplomatic-minded Bruce was solidly in the camp of those who considered Canidy a reckless agent, and Canidy's choice of flippant code names-among other unconventional acts-seemed only to reinforce that opinion.

Stevens, however, because his background was military and not diplomacy, understood Canidy's actions as an OSS operative and thus held a far higher opinion of him.

Bruce nodded. "The ones that Sikorski passed to us two days ago."

Stevens read the message:

TOP SECRET.

OPERATIONAL IMMEDIATE.

X STATION CHIEF.

FILE.

COPY NO. 1.

OF 1 COPY ONLY.

30MAY43 0730.

TOP SECRET.

FOR OSS LONDON.

EYES ONLY COL BRUCE.

FROM OSS BERN.

BEGIN QUOTE.

DAVID,.

MY ABWEHR SOURCE CONFIRMS THAT THE SS IDENTITY CARDS LISTED IN YOUR MESSAGE OF 28MAY ARE IN FACT GENUINE.

THE SS-SCHARFUHRER BABYSITTERS, WHILE LEGIT, ARE OF COURSE SMALL FRY.

BUT SS-STURMBANNFUHRER KLAUS SCHWARTZ -- SS MEMBERSHIP NO. 3,154, NSDAP NO. 10,654 -- IS A VERY BIG FISH. WITH VERY BIG TEETH.

THIS IS ONE OF THOSE RARE APPROPRIATE TIMES ONE CAN INVOKE THAT NEW FIGURE OF SPEECH THAT IT DOES NOT TAKE A ROCKET SCIENTIST TO UNDERSTAND THE IMPORTANCE OF SCHWARTZ HAVING SERVED AS CHIEF ASSISTANT TO SS-STURMBANNFUHRER WERNHER VON BRAUN -- SS MEMBERSHIP NO. 1,254 -- SINCE JANUARY 1943.

THEIR SS RANKS AND MEMBERSHIP NUMBERS ARE HONORIFIC, PERSONALLY MADE BY HIMMLER. AS A POINT OF REFERENCE, HITLER'S RIGHT HAND MAN, MARTIN BORMANN, HAS SS MEMBERSHIP NO. 555, ALSO HONORIFIC AND ASSIGNED BY HIMMLER.

SCHWARTZ, PRIOR TO JOINING VON BRAUN IN JANUARY, WAS HEAD OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT AT CHEMISCHE FABRIK FRANKFURT A.G. -- A MAJOR PRODUCER OF AGRICULTURAL CHEMICALS, PARTICULARLY PHOSPHATES FOR PESTICIDES -- FOR THREE YEARS.

CHEMISCHE FABRIK FRANKFURT IS OWNED BY RUHR VALLEY INDUSTRIALIST WOLFGANG KAPPLER, WHO I BECAME WELL ACQUAINTED WITH IN THE EARLY 1930S AT SULLIVAN AND CROMWELL BERLIN. I AM PRESENTLY TRYING THROUGH MY CHANNELS TO REACH KAPPLER TO GET HIS INSIGHTS ON SCHWARTZ. WHEN I KNOW SOMETHING, YOU WILL KNOW.

YOU DID NOT ASK, BUT AS TO SCHWARTZ'S PRESENT WHEREABOUTS, THEY ARE UNKNOWN. HE HAS GONE MISSING, OR AT LEAST NO ONE IS TALKING IF THEY DO KNOW WHERE HE IS. MY SOURCE WILL PROVIDE UPDATES AS AVAILABLE.

I MUST SAY YOU HAVE MY ATTENTION WITH THIS. CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT OUR INTEREST IS IN SCHWARTZ? YOUR LAST MESSAGE WAS QUITE CRYPTIC, EVEN BY OUR HUMBLE OSS STANDARDS.

FONDLY,.

ALLEN.

END QUOTE.

TOP SECRET.

"You know that this," Stevens said, holding up the message, "is one of those instances where we provided the weapons and C-2 and-"

"I do know," Bruce interrupted, nodding.

"And not only to Sausagemaker," Stevens went on, "but to the Sikorski Tourists who smuggled it in as well."

"Yes. And it was through their pipeline that the SS identity papers were brought back here. And Sikorski fed them to us-after, I'm sure, making detailed copies for himself."

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Sikorski and his troops escaped through Hungary and Romania while the Polish Navy sailed the Baltic Sea for Britain. The routes of escape were kept open for his men-who, in a respectful nod, called themselves Sikorski's Tourists-to go back in and support the resistance.

"That we're supplying them with as much as a stick of chewing gum is something Winant doesn't have the need to know," Bruce said. "I'm certainly not going to give him any information that he'd use to rub in Sikorski's face."

"How are you going to handle his request, then?"

"By adhering to something that Winant would appreciate, the unofficial maxim of the Corps Diplomatique."

"I'm confident I can make a reasonable stab at that, but I'll ask anyway: Which is?"

David Bruce said: "Quote Take no action on absolutely anything today that can be reconsidered tomorrow-or next month unquote."

Stevens nodded.

"Yeah, particularly with Winant, that would've been one of my first guesses," he said, then looked back at the message.

"The magnitude of this just gets worse by the moment," Stevens said after a moment.

"Unfortunately so. As Allen rather drily notes, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to connect von Braun's work with this Schwartz's."

Major Wernher von Braun was thirty-one years old, a darkly handsome German of aristocratic heritage. His mother traced her royal heritage to France's Philip III, England's Edward III, and Scotland's Robert III. In his finely tailored suits, von Braun looked more like a well-to-do corporate businessman than the absolutely brilliant scientist that he was.

It was well known that even before the war von Braun had been working on new technology involving rockets-including having discussions with Robert Goddard, the top American physicist-and that he now was making major advances for Adolf Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich.

The OSS-through Allen Dulles's source in the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service-had been told that one of von Braun's projects was running the manufacturing and testing facilities for a range of new, almost secret weapons of his design. The self-propelled flying bombs were being called "aerial torpedoes"-the latest of which were reported to be able to carry a ton of TNT-based high explosive for two hundred miles at more than three thousand miles per hour.

They were "almost secret" weapons because Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels already was threatening that the V-1 and V-2-Vergeltungswaffe, or retaliation weapon-would first target London, wiping it out as payback for the Allied bombings that were devastating German cities.

"Before Ike went back to AFHQ last week," Bruce said, referring to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander in chief at Allied Forces Headquarters, "he told Donovan and me that he was extremely concerned about the impact, if you will forgive the poor choice of words, of these new bombs."

"Goebbels is broadcasting that the attacks will begin this coming December," Stevens said.

Bruce shrugged.

"Let's say, for the sake of argument, that that time frame is pure propaganda at this point."

"But our intel tells us that the first, smaller version of these bombs is being tested."

The Fieseler Fi-103 had a thirty-foot-long sheet metal fuselage, wooden wings, and a new jet engine that pulsed fifty times a second, creating a buzz sound. The Luftwaffe had flown-and crashed-the first one under its own power in December 1942.

"And that's what worries Ike. He's afraid that London under siege-whether six months from now or early next year, which would be far worse-will severely interfere with the cross-channel invasion now set for May."

In 1942, thenMajor General Eisenhower had written the plans for OPERATION ROUNDUP that he tried to get approved as the spring 1943 invasion of northern France. The British, however, wanted nothing to do with it. Prime Minister Winston Churchill favored attacking the Axis through the Mediterranean, what he called "Europe's soft underbelly." Now that that was happening-the Allies, having just captured North Africa, expected to have Sicily and Italy taken within a matter of months-additional plans were being hammered out for the invasion of France, this time at the coast of Normandy in spring 1944.

"Ike says keeping secret an operation on the massive scale that they're planning-they're building on his Roundup, mobilizing more than a million troops-is a challenge in and of itself. It follows, then, that the actual invasion would be impossible to ramp up and launch from England if London is being leveled at the same time."

Stevens nodded solemnly.

"Now," Bruce said, motioning toward the message, "getting back to Allen's point of connecting why Schwartz has been working for von Braun. Those agriculture fertilizers he mentioned use concentrated amounts of phosphoric acids-"

"As do incendiary bombs," Stevens interrupted.

"Exactly. And the same plant making chemicals for firebombs can make a high explosive like TNT. So call that Connect One."

David Bruce then tapped his finger on a manila file folder on his desk.

"And here's where it gets worse. I had Helene dig out this background on nerve gas that Professor Rossi put together before he left for the States," he said, referring to the University of Palermo scientist whom Dick Canidy recently had rescued from the SS in Sicily. "Rossi writes that thanks to a Herr Doktor Gerhard Schrader, who developed the industrial process for mass production of T-83, any facility capable of producing such chemicals can easily be converted to produce components for the nerve gas." He paused, then added, "Thousands of metric tons of it."

Tabun, code-named T-83, was colorless, mostly odorless, and, as far as chemists were concerned, relatively easy to make. It also was effective. It quickly attacked the central nervous system, causing intense convulsions, restricted breathing-and painful death.