Thomas Greanias - The 34th Degree

A second later, he was free-falling in space.

T he blast of the slipstream sent him somersaulting through the night skies, gasping for breath. He pulled for his parachute to unfold and felt the welcome tug of the black canopy snapping open. He swung like a pendulum toward the earth.

Looking down, he could see only the dim plains, no lights from the blacked-out Bern-and no lights from the signal fire.

There still seemed to be a long way to go when he hit the ground and had the wind knocked out of him as the canopy collapsed over him. When he pulled it from over his head, the Pegasus was gone. There was no sign of any signal fire or reception committee.

After making sure he was free of injury, Andros gathered up the parachute and searched for the trunk. He found it about fifty yards away.

Andros had shed his flight suit and jump boots and was tying the laces of his wing-tip dress shoes when he heard what sounded like the heel of a heavy jackboot on rock. He instinctively reached for his Colt. 45 automatic, which he did not have, only to discover that he was surrounded by several goats wearing wooden bells.

Apparently, he had jumped onto a large farm outside Bern; now he could make out the dim outline of a farmhouse cut against the distant horizon. He could also smell something foul in the air and looked down to find his wing tips ankle-deep in goat dung. He groaned.

His ears picked up the faint hum of an engine. He turned to see the shadow of a vehicle coming quickly up the road, which, along with the fence that ran beside it, became visible when the car flashed its two blue running lights as it rolled to a stop.

Andros left the trunk, hopped the fence, and ran over to what turned out to be a British Triumph.

“You made it after all, Sinon,” said the surprised driver, a compact, middle-aged man sporting a neat leather driver’s cap, jacket, and gloves. He then apparently remembered his signal. “I’m the Watchmaker.”

Andros leaned into the open window. “My trunk.”

The Watchmaker eyed the trunk by the side of the road and grimaced. “Too big for my Triumph, I’m afraid. Hide it in the bushes. I’ll come back for it later.”

A dog barked in the distance, and a light went on in the farmhouse.

“Hurry, let’s go,” said the Watchmaker. “The clock’s ticking.”

Andros did as he was told, climbed in, and they were off.

A half hour later, they entered the medieval city of Bern, passing through darkened arcades and streets invisible in the blackout. After crossing what the Watchmaker told Andros was the Kirchenfeld Bridge, they rolled to a stop along the bank of the river Aare.

“You’re going to 23 Herrengasse,” the Watchmaker said, handing Andros a map. “Just follow the directions and enter through the garden.”

Andros found himself in a picturesque part of town, knocking on a door with a sign outside that read: ALLEN W. DULLES, SPECIAL ASSISTANT

D ulles regarded him warily as they sat in front of the fireplace in the spacious club room of the Herrengasse flat. The Swiss station chief, known simply as Number 110 in the OSS message codebook, was younger than Andros had expected, a dapper fellow in his forties with slicked-back dark hair and a round, intelligent face. He was wearing an elegant silk bathrobe and leather slippers and was smoking a pipe.

“You’re certain you weren’t followed?”

Dulles’s sour expression made it plain that he did not appreciate receiving unexpected guests in the middle of the night, especially those with manure on their shoes. He seemed to regard Washington’s brutish intrusions into his delicate operations here in neutral Switzerland with visible disdain. Andros had felt unwelcome from the moment he walked through the door, and he resented it.

“You never know,” said Andros, loosening his tie and lighting a Varga.

Dulles shook his head. “This is another one of Wild Bill’s crazy ideas run amok,” he said. “Donovan’s attitude is to try anything that has even the slightest chance of working. His disregard for standard operating procedures is reckless. Reckless.”

The words did little to reassure Andros. “So you don’t think Prestwick’s plan will work?”

At the mention of Prestwick’s name, Dulles removed the pipe from his gaping mouth and stared. “Did you say Prestwick? Good Lord, don’t tell me he’s behind this!”

Andros wasn’t sure what to say, so he tapped his Varga over an ashtray and shrugged. “You know him?”

“The man used to report to me when I headed our OSS offices in New York,” Dulles explained. “Our psychological chief, Dr. Henry Murray of Harvard, spoke of him when he shared with me his fear that the whole nature of the functions of OSS is particularly inviting to narcissistic characters.”

“Narcissists?”

“You know, those types attracted to sensation, intrigue, the idea of being a mysterious man with secret knowledge.”

That certainly described Prestwick, Andros thought. Indeed, he was beginning to get the impression that outside of the sensible Dulles, the entire organization must be filled with Prestwicks-those paranoid misanthropes who read too many spy thrillers and whose tendencies toward the unconventional bordered on the psychotic.

“Now you must tell me what they told you,” Dulles went on, looking very grave. “What did Donovan and Prestwick say was your reason for coming to Switzerland?”

“You mean my cover?” asked Andros. “I’m here on a humanitarian mission to secure the safe passage of Red Cross food and medical supplies to the suffering people of Greece.”

“That’s not any sort of cover at all. The Germans would see through that in a second.” Dulles frowned. “You mean they didn’t tell you?”

Andros had a sick feeling in his stomach. “Tell me what?”

Dulles sighed. “Publicly, your ambitions may be humanitarian, Chris, but privately, you’re here in Bern for more selfish reasons. Specifically, you’re here to unblock Andros Shipping funds. Andros Shipping is a Swiss corporation, is it not? And quite a few Andros ships sail under Swiss registry?”

Andros, bristling with anger, could see once again that the OSS knew a lot more about him and his family than he knew about them. “My grandfather didn’t feel his funds were secure in Greece,” he explained, “considering the constant political turmoil.”

“Even Switzerland wasn’t safe enough for the Swiss when it looked like the Nazis were going to invade a few years back,” Dulles replied. “The banks transferred their assets and national gold reserves to New York. At the time, America was officially neutral. But Washington was concerned that many so-called Swiss corporations were nothing more than fronts for Nazis like Baron von Berg. Hence Executive Order

“Executive Order what?” repeated Andros.

“Signed by the president on April 10, 1940, it empowered the Treasury Department to draw up a blacklist of world firms doing business with Germany and to secretly prepare to block any of their funds that had been sent to New York. That in fact happened on June 14, 1941, when Washington froze all Swiss assets in the United States. It’s been almost two years that we’ve enforced the blacklist.”

“Which, I’m beginning to suspect, includes Andros Shipping.”

“Along with about thirteen hundred other Swiss firms that ever sold any goods or provided any sort of service to Germany.”

Andros could barely contain his rage. How dare Donovan and Prestwick entangle his family’s business with their intrigues!

Dulles simply puffed his pipe and looked into the fire. “It’s the perfect cover,” he said. “To unblock Andros Shipping funds, you naturally attempted to prove to Treasury that Andros Shipping is non-German. As this is impossible without a full register of shareholders, you contacted Swiss bank affiliates in New York. But when you tried to trace the actual ownership of Andros Shipping, you hit a brick wall.”