"And thus the possible Connect Two," Stevens said, meeting Bruce's eyes as he handed back the sheet. Then, without thinking, he suddenly added, "Canidy called this."

David Bruce looked at Ed Stevens with a face of resignation.

"Canidy suggested the possibility when Donovan was here," Bruce clarified.

Stevens said: "What I recall he said was, 'It's possible, but is it probable?'"

Bruce looked at him for a long moment.

"Right. None of these bombs can be allowed to strike here, period, no matter what they might carry. Where is he, by the way?"

Captain Helene Dancy came in with a wooden tray that held a pot of coffee and four china mugs.

"Where's who?" she said as she put the tray on a table beside the couch.

"Canidy," Stevens and Bruce said almost simultaneously.

"Either on his way to see Stan Fine in Algiers," she said, reaching for the coffeepot, "or already there. Said he had unfinished business."

Stevens and Bruce exchanged glances.

"Ed here will pour us the coffee, Helene," Bruce then ordered, "while you go grab your message pad. We have an urgent for General Donovan."

[THREE].

OSS Algiers Station Algiers, Algeria 0923 30 May 1943 "That lying sonofabitch!" Major Richard M. Canidy, United States Army Air Forces, who was a big-boned, six-foot-tall twenty-six-year-old with close-cropped dark hair and deeply intelligent dark eyes, said, angrily waving a decrypted secret message. "Why is he saying that the Nazis never had a yellow fever lab in Sicily? I saw the damn thing, Stan. I blew it up."

Canidy looked at Captain Stanley S. Fine, USAAF-a tall, ascetic thirty-five-year-old who had a thin, thoughtful face framed with horn-rimmed glasses-sitting across from him on the main balcony of La Villa de Vue de Mer. The "Sea View Villa," an 1880s French Colonialstyle four-story mansion built high on the lush hillside, served as OSS Headquarters, Mediterranean Theatre of Operation.

The villa belonged to Pamela Dutton, the wealthy widow of one of Wild Bill Donovan's law school buddies. Wentworth Danfield Dutton had served in the United States legation to Algeria. Mrs. Dutton had made her own fortune in New York City importing Italian shoes for women. With Donovan's promise that the villa would be preserved and protected, she had let it to the Office of Strategic Services for the sum of ten dollars per annum.

Fine was wearing a U.S. Army tropical worsted uniform. Canidy-under his brown horsehide A-2 aviator's jacket with the gold leaves of a major pinned to its epaulets-had on a tan button-down shirt, brown woolen trousers, and calfskin chukka boots that he had pulled from the wardrobe in the master suite. It wasn't the first time he'd helped himself to the diplomat's clothing made at a local haberdashery-he'd done that for the missions to Sicily-and it wouldn't be the last.

Two piles of the typewritten messages were next to a dented stainless steel thermos on the massive Mediterranean teak table. Fine picked up the battered thermos.

"I know," he said, pouring rich aromatic Algerian coffee into one of Mrs. Dutton's fine china cups. "And that's not the first message to contradict what you did in Palermo."

Canidy shook his head as he looked out. The view was absolutely stunning. The capital city spread out below on a gentle slope that ended at the port some ten kilometers away. Beyond that, the vast Mediterranean Sea sparkled to the horizon. At anchor and moored at the docks in the circular harbor were military man-o'-wars flying the flags of the U.S. and England, and recently arrived American Liberty ships either off-loading their cargo or awaiting their turn to do so. Silver barrage balloons floated above the harbor, their steel cable tethers discouraging enemy aircraft from strafing the harbor and ships.

Major Canidy and Captain Fine each had an AGO card-a sealed identity card issued by the Adjutant General's Office-that stated they were members of the U.S. Army Air Forces. If anyone questioned their status, and checked military records, their names would be duly listed.

But of course both were attached to the OSS.

Fine, despite an appearance that some mistook as being possibly frail, was in fact absolutely fearless. And he efficiently accomplished his job-in and out of channels-using a creative ability that Canidy described as "beating back the rear-echelon bastards and their endless red tape and bureaucratic meddling."

Canidy would know. He, too, was expert at bending-and often outright breaking-rules in order to get done what had to be done, damn those who got in the way.

Until being sent on the missions to Sicily, he had served as chief of OSS Whitbey House Station-commonly known to the agents training there as Canidy's Throat Cutting and Bomb Throwing Academy-which was an ancient, massive eighty-four-room stone structure on a twenty-six-thousand-acre country estate outside London. That position had made him the OSS's number three man in England, after the chief and deputy chief of OSS London Station.

For the missions in Sicily, however, Canidy had reported directly to OSS Washington, to Director William "Wild Bill" Donovan himself. He knew that that had not moved him up to number two in all of the OSS-but it damn sure put him pretty high in the pecking order.

Which in itself was a remarkable achievement. Because Canidy had not exactly been a willful recruit into the world of espionage.

Dick Canidy's dream had been to be a pilot, and he'd attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, paying his way with a Navy scholarship. He graduated in 1938, cum laude, with a bachelor of science degree in aeronautical engineering.

He wasn't particularly excited about having to pay back the Navy with four years of service. It was no secret he felt constrained by the military and its starchy rules and regulations. Still, he pledged that he would honor his obligation-but not serve a single second longer. Having accumulated, in addition to his MIT degree, a commercial pilot's license, an instrument ticket, and 350 hours of solo time, he already was entertaining job offers, one in particular from the Boeing Aircraft Company in Washington State.

After three years in the Navy-with barely a year left on his obligation before he could pack his bags for Seattle-Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Richard M. Canidy, USN, was at Naval Air Station Pensacola when he was approached by a grizzled man named General Claire Chennault.

It was June 1941, and Canidy, an instructor pilot in the backseat of single-engine bi-wing Kaydet trainers, was with fledgling naval aviators day after day flying a mind-numbing circuit around the skies of the Florida Panhandle and southern Alabama.

Chennault was a legendary general known not to mince words with his gravelly voice. In short order, he bluntly laid it out to Canidy that the United States could not stay out of the world war much longer, that when it did join in the fight there would be an enormous demand for aviators, that there was no way the military was going to let skilled pilots out of the service-and that he, Canidy, would then be front of the line, assigned to flying missions God only knew where.

But, the general told him, there was an option.

Chennault-with FDR's approval, if not discreet direct order-was pulling together a group of volunteer pilots, really good pilots. Their mission would be flying Curtiss P40-B fighters to defend the two-thousand-mile-long Burma Road that was the critical route for getting Western aid to China from Japanese attack.

The contract with the Chinese was for one year, Chennault explained, and monthly pay came in at six hundred dollars-twice what Canidy got from the Navy. As further incentive, the general added, Canidy would also pocket a five-hundred-dollar bonus for each Jap he shot down.

Canidy, always quick to take care of Number One first, signed up. He could not decide which was better-making more money or getting an honorable discharge from the Navy that came as part of the package.

Being a Flying Tiger with Chennault's American Volunteer Group (AVG) in Kunming, China, turned out to be damn dangerous. But Canidy rose to the challenge. And he proved that not only had he been born to fly but-with five kills on a single sortie, making him a certifiable ace-he was a natural fighter pilot.

About the time he was counting out his twenty-five-hundred-buck bonus, a self-important bureaucrat type showed up on the AVG flight line. His name was Eldon Baker, and he wasted no time showing that he was a consummate prick. But when he produced from his suit coat pocket his orders personally signed by the President of the United States, Canidy paid attention.

It was December 1941, and Baker announced that with America now in the war, he was there to recruit Canidy into an outfit so secretive that he couldn't tell him anything about it, only that it was important enough for the President to send him clear across the world to bring Canidy back.

That did not exactly convince Canidy to go along-for starters, he did not like the fact that he would be leaving his buddies alone to keep shooting Japs out of the sky.

He was, however, realistic enough to know that, no matter how good of a fighter pilot he was, odds were that eventually he'd meet his match-or that he'd screw up or that a Jap just got lucky, or all of that-and he'd be sent to meet his maker courtesy of a hundred-plus 7.7mm rounds from a Mitsubishi A5M machine gun. And, getting back to taking care of Number One, accepting the asshole Baker's offer would mean he would be another step closer to being done with his military service obligations.

He soon discovered he was dead damn wrong.

Back in Washington, D.C., Baker finally revealed to him that the outfit was something called the Office of the Coordinator of Information, and its director, a Colonel Donovan, was answerable only to Roosevelt himself. Baker said COI needed Canidy-and certain of his connections-to help smuggle out of North Africa a French mining engineer who the Germans also were after-an engineer who both sides knew was critical to the building of a nuclear bomb that would win the war.

When Canidy idly inquired as to what would happen if he now decided that he didn't want any part of the COI in general, and the mission in particular, Baker practically shoved the answer down his throat.

"You either agree to this 'mission of considerable risk,'" Baker coldly replied, "or, now that you're privy to information that's classified as Top SecretPresidential, you could be institutionalized for 'psychiatric evaluation' for a period of time-habeas corpus having no bearing on the mentally disturbed being protected from themselves-which, in the interest of ensuring that our secrets stay secret, will last for at least the duration of the war."

Canidy was furious at himself for being caught in what he considered was little more than a high-level government con game. Yet intellectually he knew that what Baker said was more than a loosely veiled threat. He really had no option but to choose the mission-and then decided that, assuming he survived the damn thing, he could somehow figure a way to get the hell out of COI afterward.

Soon thereafter, Canidy was assigned the assimilated rank of a major in the United States Army Air Corps and given credentials that stated that. He also was given other credentials-ones to be used as a last resort-declaring that he worked for the Office of the Coordinator of Information, which carried a presidential priority.

Baker's "considerable risk," Canidy soon learned, was something of an understatement. The mission had required life-or-death decisions, ones that were cold and ruthless. And ones, somewhat surprising him at first, that he found himself perfectly capable of carrying out.

And Canidy then came to the realization that his experience in COI was not unlike what he'd had in Chennault's AVG. Which was to say, Canidy not only rose to the challenge of being a spook, but was damn good at it.

Wild Bill Donovan also recognized that Canidy-having proven expert at espionage and sabotage, at the "strategic services" needed to win the war-was an extraordinarily natural operative. And over time, Canidy was given greater responsibility.

More missions included grabbing other engineers and scientists out of German hands, smuggling uraninite for those scientists to use in building the nuclear bomb in the President's Manhattan Project, modifying B-17 Flying Fortress bombers as explosive-filled drones, even getting involved with the head of the New York City Mafia, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, leading Canidy to discover that the Germans held weapons of chemical and biological warfare in Sicily.

Donovan was said to be of the opinion-one which Stanley Fine agreed with-that Canidy had become almost the perfect spy.

Almost, because Canidy had managed to put himself in a position that no spy was supposed to be in: absolutely indispensable.

Canidy handed the message back to Fine, then gestured toward the taller of the two stacks on the massive teak table.

"And all of those are from Tubes?" Canidy said.

"All from Tubes," Fine confirmed.

The first week of April, Canidy had set up in Palermo a clandestine OSS wireless telegraphy station, code-named MERCURY STATION. Its operator was twenty-four-year-old Jim "Tubes" Fuller.

"Well, at least all are from Mercury," Fine went on. "Those, and there are others in the commo room files, a couple of which state that the crates you found with the nerve gas never existed either."

"No shit?"

"No shit."

Fine held up the thermos toward Canidy, making a more? gesture with it. Canidy glanced at his cup, made a face when he saw that it was empty, and pushed it to him.

"This is insane," Canidy went on. "The station clearly is compromised. Because whoever is running it does not realize that Tubes would know that I was involved with destroying both. I just don't understand why they're denying that either was there in the first place."

Fine took a sip of coffee, then offered: "Damage control? The SS knows that it was blown up-maybe not that you did it but that it did get destroyed-so the lie becomes it never existed to try to make all of it secret again."

Canidy considered that for a long moment. Then his eyebrows shot up.

"And the reason to make it secret again," he said, "is because they brought more in? Nerve gas and/or yellow fever?"

Fine met his eyes, then slowly nodded.

"That is a real and distinct possibility," he said. "There is no doubt more Tabun-both stockpiled and being manufactured-and there certainly has been time for more shipments to arrive."

Canidy looked out across the Mediterranean Sea, in the direction of Sicily, and sighed audibly.

"Not fucking again!" he said.

[FOUR].

Almost two months earlier, on the moonless night of March 22, Canidy had smuggled Professor Arturo Rossi out of the Port of Palermo aboard a forty-foot wooden fishing boat, the Stefania. To suggest that Rossi-a metallurgist carrying a suitcase that contained no clothing but was instead packed with all his scientific papers from the university-was anxious to leave Sicily would have been akin to suggesting that the Pope might be a little bit devout.

Rossi was under no delusion as to what he could expect from the Nazis should he in some fashion disappoint them. He had seen one colleague executed by SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Hans Muller of the SD and watched another die slowly and painfully in the SS's yellow fever experiment that Muller oversaw.

Canidy, with the Stefania's engine idling and her lines already let loose, then learned from Rossi that the rusty ninety-foot-long cargo ship tied up alongside at the dock had arrived that morning with nerve gas munitions in her hold. Canidy made the split-second decision to sink the ship at its mooring, and had quickly rigged it with C-2 plastic explosive and a time-delay fuse.

When Wild Bill Donovan had read Canidy's after-action report, then met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to relay the information that the Nazis had sent nerve gas munitions to Sicily, FDR became furious. He wanted absolute proof. And so, nine days after seeing the moonless sky glow with the flames of the burning cargo ship, Dick Canidy, at the direct order of the President of the United States, was headed back to Sicily, this time leading a three-man team.

Aboard the submarine Casabianca, Canidy had briefed his team that their main mission was to find out if nerve gas had indeed been on the boat that he'd blown up at the dock and, if so, what damage had been caused by it.

"We're supposed to get in, get the intel, and, if the place is nothing but rotting corpses, get the hell out."

But it turned out that there had not been mass casualties. Canidy's team found only two dead in the harbor area. Agents of the Sicherheitsdienst had tortured a pair of Sicilian fishermen-bashed out their teeth with the steel-plated butt of a Mauser Karabiner 98 and gouged out their eyes with its bayonet-and left them hanging from a yardarm.

The mission then became threefold: One, to find out what had happened to the nerve gas munitions. Two, to ensure that the villa with the yellow fever experiment had been destroyed. And three, to establish MERCURY STATION-a clandestine wireless telegraphy station-that would send intel to OSS Algiers for developing underground connections in Sicily and building a resistance that could rise up when the Allies arrived with OPERATION HUSKY.

It had been Stan Fine's idea to use Roman mythology for the mission's code names-"There's so much of it here, who would think twice about it?" Thus, they code-named the radio station after the messenger god, Mercury, and the submarine Casabianca after the god of the sea, Neptune. Dick Canidy became Jupiter (the supreme god of Italy and Rome), Jim "Tubes" Fuller was Maximus ("the greatest"), and Franciso Nola was Optimus ("the best").

Canidy had first met Franciso Nola-a solidly built thirty-five-year-old with an olive complexion, thick black hair cut close to the scalp, a rather large nose, and a black mustache-in New York City, where he'd fled with his family mostly because his wife was Jewish but also because his cousins had been imprisoned by Mussolini's secret police. A commercial fisherman, he still owned boats in Palermo that worked the Mediterranean waters. He not only offered Canidy the use of these but volunteered to personally help fight the fascists in any way he could.

It had been through Nola that they learned what happened with the howitzer rounds with the Tabun in Palermo. The warehouses that Nola's fishing boats used for his import-export business were overseen by a pair of dense longshoremen. When Canidy met the Brothers Buda-Giacomo and Antonio were in their early thirties, around five-five and two hundred pounds, with bad bowl haircuts and belly fat rolls that stretched tight their dirty overalls-he quietly nicknamed them Tweedle Fucking Dee and Dumb.

With some effort, the Budas explained that their crews had off-loaded wooden crates of what they called "buh-lets," pallets of fuel, and field rations from the rusty ninety-foot-long cargo ship that Canidy had asked about-but of course had not said that he'd sunk with the plastic explosive.

Shortly thereafter, they said, two SS officers had arrived at the warehouse, had an argument with SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Muller, and then Muller had ordered the Brothers Buda to make certain that the wooden crates of buh-lets with the painted stencil marking of SONDERKART.6LE.F.H.18 T83 10.5-CM would get loaded aboard another cargo ship that was en route.

When Canidy had read through his binoculars the stencil markings, he decided that the "10.5-CM" signified the crates contained 105mm howitzer rounds. He sent that information via wireless message to Professor Rossi at OSS Algiers. Rossi confirmed that they were howitzer rounds-and, more important, that the "T83" was the code for Tabun.

Having finally met the mission's main objective-finding conclusively that the Germans did have ready munitions for chemical warfare-Canidy made plans to destroy them. Then he blew up the villa where the SS was conducting the yellow fever experiments. And he announced to Frank Nola and Tubes Fuller that they would be staying behind and manning the clandestine MERCURY STATION.

That night, Dick Canidy had been back aboard the Casabianca, awaiting the cargo ship now carrying the Tabun howitzers, when Captain Jean L'Herminier dialed it in and gave the command to fire the torpedo that sent the nerve gas to the bottom of the sea.

And the next day, back at OSS Algiers Station, the first of the message traffic from MERCURY STATION began coming in regularly. Including confirmation that the Germans were furious that the villa and cargo ship had been destroyed.

Stan Fine flipped through the taller stack of decrypted typewritten messages, found what he wanted, and handed it to Dick Canidy.

Canidy read it: