In Danger's Path

by W. E. B Griffin

  “I think that Management Analysis should stay right where it is,” Pickering said.

  “Is that so?” Donovan said coldly. “Why?”

  “It’s up and running,” Pickering said. “I don’t want to see it swallowed by the OSS bureaucracy.”

  “You’re now part of that OSS bureaucracy, General,” Donovan said, his face whitening.

  “I am going to ask Colonel Rickabee if he will give me a couple of people over there,” Pickering said. “And there are several other people I’d like to have. But I oppose taking the Office of Management Analysis away from Frank Knox.”

  It was obvious that Donovan didn’t like the response, but he didn’t press it.

  If I had any tact, and the brains to use it, I would have used words like “think,” “suggest,” et cetera. Fuck it. Let Donovan know what I think.

  “Why don’t we reschedule your arrival at the office until, say, half past twelve tomorrow?” Donovan said. “That would give you time to ask Rickabee who he’s willing to give you.”

  “Fine,” Pickering said.

  “We’ll have to do some schedule shuffling to move them through the Country Club,” Donovan said. “We’ll need your list as soon as possible. This Gobi operation is on the front burner.”

  “Excuse me?” Pickering asked, confused.

  “The OSS training base. Before the war, it was the Congressional Country Club. Everybody who comes into the OSS has to go through it. With very rare exceptions, like you.”

  My God, McCoy comes home from his third rubber-boat trip onto hostile shores and Donovan wants to send him to basic training?

  Senator Fowler saw the look on Pickering’s face. “Are you two about ready to eat?” he asked quickly.

  This is not the time, Pickering decided, to debate the wisdom of sending McCoy and Jake to—what did he call it?—the “Country Club.”

  “Anytime, Dick,” Pickering said.

  “Actually, I was hoping the subject of eating would come up soon,” Donovan said. “I’ve got a couple of more stops to make tonight.”

  “And I have a telephone call to make,” Fowler said. “Our mutual friend across the street is staying close to the telephone, waiting for my report on how this went.”

  “I was right, then?” Donovan chuckled. “You’re to be the referee?”

  “What he did, Bill, was wave his cigarette holder at me, and smile that smile of his, and ask me—since he and I have a civilized gentleman’s armistice—if he was being unreasonable in expecting you two to do the same.”

  “I knew it,” Donovan said.

  “I will now be able to happily tell him that you two have kissed and made up.”

  “Good God!” Pickering said.

  VIII

  [ONE]

  The Foster Lafayette Hotel

  Washington, D.C.

  0805 25 February 1943

  Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR, the Washington Star in hand, was sitting in the marble walled bathroom of his apartment, waiting for his bowels to move, when the telephone rang. He dropped the Star onto the floor and gazed, with a sense of moral triumph, at the telephone mounted on the wall.

  Men of less imagination and determination, he thought, in a similar circumstance, would be nonplussed. They would be forced to decide between hastily abandoning their attempt to vacate their bowels, or just letting the damned telephone ring.

  They would not have installed a phone in the john, as he had, over Patricia’s firm objections. For reasons he did not pretend to understand, Patricia thought using a telephone in the bathroom was tantamount to using the facilities with the door wide open.

  The telephone, which was mounted on the wall beside the water closet, was equipped with a red light, a green light, and a switch. The green light indicated the incoming call was from the hotel switchboard; the red that it was coming in over the private, unlisted line.

  The red light was blinking.

  With a little bit of luck, that will be my bride, and I can open the conversation by asking her if she can guess where I am.

  He flipped the switch to the private line and picked up the receiver.

  “Good morning!” he cried cheerfully.

  “General Pickering, please,” a male voice he didn’t recognize replied.

  Who the hell is this? Not ten people have this number.

  “Who is this?”

  “Am I speaking with General Pickering?”

  It’s that goddamned Wild Bill Donovan, that’s who it is! A little demonstration of his ability to do things like get unlisted telephone numbers. And that he’s too important to dial the number himself and has some flunky to do it for him.

  And, if he senses this has annoyed me, he will have accomplished his purpose.

  “This is General Pickering,” he said as charmingly as he could manage under the circumstances.

  “One moment, please, General,” Donovan’s flunky said.

  “Certainly,” General Pickering said graciously.

  And before that sonofabitch comes on the line, he’ll keep me waiting as long—

  “I didn’t get you out of bed, I hope, Fleming?”

  This voice Pickering recognized, and it wasn’t that of Wild Bill Donovan.

  “No, Mr. President, I’ve been up for some time. Good morning, Mr. President.”

  “I just called to tell you how delighted I was to hear from Dick Fowler that you and Bill Donovan have established an amicable relationship.”

  “We had a very pleasant dinner, Mr. President.”

  “So Dick told me. There’s one other thing, Fleming. I meant it when I said that my door will always be open to you, if you have something you wish to share with me.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr. President.”

  “Bill and I have been friends for years,” President Roosevelt said. “And I therefore know better than most people how obdurate he can be.”

  “I defer, of course, to your greater knowledge, Mr. President.”

  Roosevelt laughed. “As soon as it can be arranged, you’ll have to come for dinner.”

  “I know how you busy you are, Mr. President.”

  “Never too busy for you, Fleming,” Roosevelt said, and the line went dead.

  Pickering put the handset back in its cradle.

  What the hell was that all about?

  You know what the hell that was all about.

  Roosevelt being Machiavellian again.

  During dinner the night before, Donovan had spoken, with barely concealed anger, of his relationship with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. It wasn’t that he disliked Hoover—he had been instrumental in having Hoover named head of the FBI—but that Roosevelt refused to clear up a jurisdictional dispute between the FBI and the OSS.

  The FBI was charged with intelligence and counterespionage in the Western Hemisphere. The OSS was charged with the same thing worldwide, with the exception of the United States. So far as Donovan was concerned, that meant exactly what it said. So far as Hoover was concerned, the FBI was in charge of espionage and counterespionage everywhere in the Western Hemisphere, which meant that the OSS was marching on the FBI’s turf when it operated anywhere in Canada, Central America, or South America.

  “Franklin just wants you and Edgar to compete, Bill,” Senator Fowler had said, “to see who gets the gold star to take home for Mommy.”

  “It’s not funny, Dick,” Donovan had said.

  “I know. What it is, is Franklin Rooseveltian,” Fowler had said. “And only God can change that.”

  And now Roosevelt’s consciously setting up the same kind of competition between Donovan and me.

  Pickering looked at his watch, then at the telephone again.

  What I am about to do is absolutely childish.

  But on the other hand, one does not have this sort of splendid opportunity every day.

  He picked up the telephone, dialed O for operator, asked for long distance, and when the long-distance operator came on the line, gav
e her a number in San Francisco.

  “Is this call essential, sir?” the operator asked.

  “Operator, the entire outcome of the war depends on this call getting through.”

  “You don’t have to be sarcastic, sir.”

  The number in San Francisco rang four times before an operator came on. She sounded as if she might have been asleep at her post.

  “Pacific and Far East Shipping.”

  “This is Fleming Pickering,” he announced.

  “Good morning, Commodore,” the operator said, now fully awake.

  “I’d like to leave a message for my wife when she comes to work this morning,” he said.

  “Of course, Commodore.”

  “You have a pencil?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The message is, ‘Guess where I was at eight oh five this morning when the President of the United States called. Love, Flem.’ Got that?”

  “Yes, sir. Commodore, you don’t want to tell her where?”

  “She’ll know, thank you just the same,” Pickering said, and hung up.

  As he did that, he noticed, a little surprised and confused, that the green light was illuminated, indicating an incoming call from the hotel switchboard. He shrugged, flipped the switch, and said, “Hello?”

  “I hope I didn’t wake you,” Senator Richardson K. Fowler said, his tone suggesting he didn’t mean that at all.

  “You mean you’ve been waiting for me to answer?”

  “Only for the last twenty or thirty minutes,” Fowler said.

  “Actually I was on the phone, having a little chat with the President,” Pickering said.

  Fowler groaned.

  “And how may I help you, Senator?”

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” Fowler said. “I was about to ask you to breakfast.”

  “Give me five minutes, Dick,” Pickering said.

  “Anything special?”

  “Something simple. How about a breakfast steak, and a couple of eggs, sunny-side up?”

  “Five minutes, Flem,” Fowler said, and hung up.

  Pickering, tieless and in his shirtsleeves, arrived at Fowler’s down-the-corridor door just as the floor waiter was rolling in a food cart.

  “That wasn’t five minutes, Flem,” Fowler greeted him. “I have a full day ahead of me.”

  “More than you know,” Pickering said, as he followed Fowler into his dining room. The table was set for three.

  “Good morning, Commodore,” Fred said.

  “Call me General today, Fred,” Pickering said, touching his shoulder. “I have been up most of the night thinking General-type thoughts.”

  “I need some of that coffee,” Fowler said, snatching a silver coffeepot from the floor waiter’s cart. He sat down at the table and poured himself a cup. Then he remembered Pickering’s recent words.

  “‘More than I know’? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Put a little something in your stomach,” Pickering said. “It’ll put you in a better mood.”

  “Just put the plates on the table please,” Fowler said to the floor waiter, “and then, thank you, that’ll be all. I have a terrible suspicion that the breakfast-table conversation will concern topics that nice people shouldn’t have to hear.”

  Pickering waited until the waiter transferred the plates, uncovered them, and left. Fred saw him through the door, locked it, and then sat down at the table with Pickering and Fowler.

  “I thought you would be beside yourself with curiosity about my conversation,” he began.

  “Your conversation with who?”

  “Take a wild guess. He smiles a lot—lots of teeth—and smokes his cigarettes in a long ivory holder.”

  Fowler shook his head.

  “And what did our beloved leader have to say?” Fowler asked, and then, before Pickering could begin to answer, added: “Flem, who called who?”

  “He called me,” Pickering said. “On my unlisted line.”

  “He is the President. What did he have to say?”

  “Because he and Colonel Donovan are old friends, he told me, he knows better than most people how obdurate…I love that word; I thought I knew what it meant, but when we hung up, to be sure, I looked it up in the dictionary—”

  “Hardened in wrongdoing,” Fowler said.

  “Or wickedness,” Pickering said. “According to Mr. Webster, ‘wrongdoing or wickedness.” I told you I looked it up.”

  “And, Flem?” Fowler said, smiling.

  “And because he knows how obdurate the good Colonel can be, his door is always open to me.”

  “That’s nice,” Fowler said. “You remember our conversation last night about J. Edgar Hoover?”

  “How could I forget?” Pickering said.

  “Interesting,” Fowler said, and stared at his breakfast steak with disdain. “I don’t know why I ordered this. If I eat this, I’ll fall asleep before lunch.”

  “I will, of course, take the President at his word, and go knocking at his door. Today, if I have to. Unless you can fix it so that I won’t have to.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You remember what Donovan said last night? ‘I’d like to have the Office of Management Analysis. Lock, stock, and barrel’?

  “And I remember that you told him no.”

  “And I remember he took my ‘no’ too easily, as if he expected that reaction and was going to ignore it.”

  “Yeah,” Fowler said, remembering. “Frank Knox wouldn’t at all like losing Management Analysis,” he added. “He is very fond of his private, personal OSS.”

  “Which performs a number of valuable functions, and which should not be swallowed up by the OSS.”

  “I agree,” Fowler said.

  “I suspect that Donovan has tried to get it before, failed, and sees a new opportunity. He can tell the President I want it. Or, more likely, that he naturally presumed I would want to bring it into the OSS with me. Since the President has told me I can have anybody I want, he will see nothing wrong with this, and will tell Admiral Leahy to take care of it. Once it’s in the OSS, he takes it away from me.”

  “You don’t trust Donovan, do you?”

  “He’s a lawyer, Dick, of course I don’t trust him.”

  “So am I a lawyer,” Fowler said, not amused.

  “Yeah, but Donovan is a Democratic lawyer.”

  “That’s a little better,” Fowler said.

  Fred chuckled.

  “So what do you propose to do? Or propose that I do for you?” Fowler asked.

  “Get to Frank Knox, immediately, this morning, and tell him I’ll make a deal with him. If he’s willing to go along, I’ll go to the President with him and tell him I think Management Analysis should remain under Knox. If we both go to the President and tell him no, I think we can prevail over Bill Donovan, done deal or not.”

  “You understand how quickly Roosevelt’s open door is going to slam in your face if you go over Donovan’s head your first day on the job?”

  “I couldn’t do it alone, and I don’t think Frank Knox could,” Pickering said. “We’ll have to do it together. I’ll worry about the door slamming in my face later.”

  “You said ‘deal,’” Fowler said. “What kind of a deal? Frank Knox is not well-known for making deals. What do you want from Knox?”

  “I want Fritz Rickabee promoted to brigadier general,” Pickering said. “And Ed Banning promoted to lieutenant colonel. Incidentally, I’ve decided I need Banning more than Rickabee does.”

  “Why is this important to you?” Fowler asked.

  “Fritz needs a star to run Management Analysis. If I have to point this out, he is far more entitled to a star than I am. And when I have to ask him for help, I would like him, frankly, to remember where his star came from.”

  Fowler grunted.

  “And Banning?”

  “Several reasons. Some practical, some political. Banning knows China. He was an intelligence officer there for years.
God, he had to leave his wife behind him in Shanghai—”

  “I didn’t know that,” Fowler interrupted. “She’s a prisoner?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  Fowler shook his head.

  “Anyway, I need Banning’s brains and expertise. He has a MAGIC clearance, which will be useful.”

  “Why should he be promoted? That might be difficult. The Marine Corps likes to decide who gets promoted, and when.”

  “First of all, he’s deserving of promotion,” Pickering said. “Secondly, I suspect there are a lot of majors in the OSS—the guy Donovan sent to replace Killer McCoy in the Philippines was a major—and I want my deputy to outrank them. As far as that goes, I’m bringing Jake Dillon into the OSS, and I think it’s a good idea for him to be calling Ed Banning ‘sir’ and ‘Colonel.’”

  “Dillon?” Fowler asked doubtfully. “Your movie press agent friend?”

  “Not only is Jake an old China Marine, but he did a hell of a job for me on several occasions,” Pickering said, “and he’s loyal to me.”

  Fowler shrugged.

  “Don’t tell me it can’t be done, Dick,” Pickering said.

  “It can be done. I think Frank Knox will go along with you. And the price will be antagonizing both Donovan and the entire OSS—and the Marine Corps.”

  “I would worry a hell of a lot more about that if Archer Vandegrift wasn’t going to become Commandant of the Marine Corps.”

  Fowler grunted again.

  “But speaking of the Marine Corps: Do you still have ‘U.S. Senator’ license plates on your car?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I want to borrow your car this morning. I’m going to Eighth and I to see Jack Stecker, and—”

  “You would like the word to rapidly spread that Jack Stecker has a friend who is a friend of a senator.”

  “I’m just trying to save cab fare,” Pickering said.

  “Why do you want to see Jack?”

  “As soon as Vandegrift becomes Commandant, he’s going to hear a litany of complaints about the OSS, and probably me, personally, especially about the promotions. So when he asks Jack, ‘Just what the hell is your friend Pickering up to?’ I want Jack to be in a position to tell him.”

  “You’re going to tell him everything?”