Webber nodded. “Then we must move quickly to turn you into a National Socialist official.” He laughed. “Though you need no training. God knows the real ones have none.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

He heard only static at first. Then the scratchy sounds coalesced into: “Gordon?”

“We don’t use names,” the commander reminded, pressing the Bakelite phone to his ear furiously so that he could hear the words from Berlin more clearly. It was Paul Schumann, calling via radio patched through London. The time was just before 10 A.M. on Sunday morning but Gordon was at his desk at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C., where he’d been all night, anxiously waiting to hear whether the man had succeeded in killing Ernst. “Are you all right? What’s going on? We’ve been checking all the press, monitoring the radio broadcasts and nothing’s-”

“Be quiet,” Schumann snapped. “I don’t have time for ‘friends in the north’ and ‘friends in the south.’ Just listen.”

Gordon sat forward in his chair. “Go ahead.”

“Morgan’s dead.”

“Oh, no.” Gordon closed his eyes momentarily, feeling the loss. He hadn’t known the man personally but his information had always been solid, and any man who risks his life for his country was okay in Gordon’s book.

Then Schumann delivered a bombshell. “He was murdered by somebody named Robert Taggert, an American. You know him?”

“What? An American?”

“Do you know him?”

“No, never heard of him.”

“He tried to kill me too. Before I could do what you sent me for. The guy you’ve been talking to for the past couple of days was Taggert, not Morgan.”

“What was that name again?”

Schumann spelled it and told Gordon that he might have some connection with the U.S. diplomatic service but he wasn’t sure. The commander wrote the name on a slip of paper and shouted, “Yeoman Willets!”

The woman appeared in the doorway a moment later. Gordon jammed the note into her palm. “Get me everything you can find about this guy,” he said. She vanished instantly. Then into the phone: “Are you all right?”

“Were you part of it?” Despite the bad connection Gordon could feel the man’s anger.

“What?”

“It was all a setup. From the beginning. Were you part of it?”

Gordon felt the swampy July morning air of Washington, D.C., float in and out of the open window. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

After a pause Schumann told the whole story – about the murder of Morgan, Taggert’s masquerading as him and the betrayal of Schumann to the Nazis.

Gordon was genuinely shocked. “My God, no. I swear. I’d never do that to one of my men. And I consider you one of them. I honestly do.”

Another pause. “Taggert said you weren’t involved. But I wanted to hear it from you.”

“I swear…”

“Well, you’ve got a traitor somewhere on your end, Commander. You need to find out who.”

Gordon sat back, shattered at this news. He stared, numb, at the wall in front of him, on which were a number of citations, his Yale diploma and two pictures: President Roosevelt and Theodorus B.M. Mason, the solid-jawed naval lieutenant who’d been the first head of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

A traitor…

“What does this Taggert say?”

“All he said was that it was ‘interests.’ Nothing more specific. They wanted to keep the boss here happy. The overall boss, I mean.”

“Can you talk to him again, find out more?”

A hesitation. “No.”

Gordon understood the implication; Taggert was dead.

Schumann continued. “I got the pass phrases about the tram when I was on the ship. Taggert got the same phrases we did but Morgan didn’t know them. How could that happen?”

“I sent the code to my men on the ship. It also went separately to where you are now. Morgan was supposed to pick it up there.”

“So Taggert got the right message and had a different one sent to Morgan. That German-American Bund spy on board didn’t transmit anything. It wasn’t him. So who could’ve done that? Who knew the right phrase?”

Two names came immediately to Gordon’s mind. A soldier before everything else, Gordon knew that a military commander had to consider all possibilities. But young Andrew Avery was like a son to him. He knew Vincent Manielli less well yet he’d seen nothing in the young officer’s record that would make him doubt his loyalty.

As if he were a mind reader, Schumann asked, “How long have you worked with those two boys of yours?”

“It would be next to impossible.”

“‘Impossible’ has a whole goddamn different meaning lately. Who the hell else knew about the code? Daddy Warbucks?”

Gordon considered. But the moneybags, Cyrus Clayborn, only knew in general what they had planned. “He didn’t even know there was a pass code.”

“Then who came up with the phrase?”

“We did, together, the Senator and me.”

More static. Schumann said nothing.

But Gordon added, “No, it can’t be him.”

“Was he with you when you sent the codes?”

“No. He was in Washington.”

Gordon was thinking: The moment he hung up with me, the Senator could have sent a message to Taggert in Berlin with the right code and arranged for the wrong one to go to Morgan. “Impossible.”

“I keep hearing that word, Gordon. That doesn’t cut it with me.”

“Look, this whole thing was the Senator’s idea in the first place. He had some talks with people in the administration and he came to me.”

“All that means is he’s been planning to set me up from the beginning.” Schumann added ominously, “Along with those same ‘people.’”

Facts cascaded through Gordon’s mind. Could this be? Where could the betrayal lead?

Finally Schumann said, “Listen, you handle that situation the way you want. Are you still going to get me that plane?”

“Yes, sir. You have my absolute word on that. I’ll contact my men in Amsterdam myself. We’ll have it there in about three and a half hours.”

“No, I’ll need it later than that. About ten tonight.”

“We can’t land in the dark. The strip we’re using’s abandoned. It doesn’t have lights. But there should be enough daylight left to set down around eight-thirty. How’s that?”

“No. Then make it dawn tomorrow.”

“Why?”

There was a pause. “I’m going to get him this time.”

“Going to…?”

“Do what I came here for,” Schumann growled.

“No, no… You can’t. It’s too dangerous now. Come on home. Get that job you were talking about. You earned it. You-”

“Commander… you listening?”

“Go on.”

“See, I’m here and you’re there, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me, so all of this jawing now’s just a waste of time. Make sure that plane’s at the field at dawn tomorrow.”

Yeoman Ruth Willets appeared in the doorway. “Hold on,” Gordon said into the phone.

“Nothing on Taggert yet, sir. Records’ll call as soon as they find something.”

“Where’s the Senator?”

“In New York.”

“Get me on any plane you can going up there now. Army, private. Whatever it takes.”

“Yessir.”

Gordon turned back to the phone. “Paul, we’ll get you your lift out of there. But please listen to reason. Everything’s changed now – you have any idea what the risks are?”

The noise on the line rose and swallowed most of Schumann’s words but it seemed to Bull Gordon that he heard what might’ve been laughter and then the button man’s voice again. Part of the phrase was something like “six to five against.”

Then he was listening to a silence that was far louder than the static had ever been.

In a warehouse in eastern Berlin (which Otto Webber called “his” despite the fact they had to break a window to get inside) they found racks of National Labor Service uniforms. Webber pulled a fancy one off a hanger. “Ach, yes, as I said, the blue-gray becomes you.”