Griffin W.E.B. - Honor Bound 01 - Honor Bound

"Earn your money, fellows," he said aloud.

[NINE]

Alicia Carzino-Cormano was delighted to see Clete walking toward their table in the lobby restaurant of the Alvear Palace. Her sister was not.

"Well, what a pleasant coincidence," Clete said. "Alicia. Isabela. Mi Capitan."

"Teniente," Peter said, standing up, bowing, and clicking his heels. "Perhaps you would care to join us?"

"I would hate to intrude."

"Nonsense," Peter said. "I insist."

"Well, if you're sure it will be no imposition," Clete said, and pulled up a chair.

He met Alicia's eyes as he sat down and then winked at her.

She smiled back.

"You really should be at the Duartes'," Isabela said.

"Why?" Clete asked simply.

“Jorge was your cousin. It was unseemly of you not to be there with the family."

"Isabela, I never met the man. I didn't even know I had a Cousin Jorge until a couple of weeks ago."

"If you had been there, your father might not have gotten so drunk."

"Isabela!" Alicia protested.

"Well, he is," Isabela said. "Disgustingly drunk. Weeping drunk. Telling everyone who'll listen it's his fault that Jorge is dead. Making a spectacle of himself. Humiliating Mother."

"My father," Clete said, coldly angry, "buried his nephew today. He loved him very much. Maybe that's why he got drunk."

"He had no right to make a spectacle of himself. To humiliate my mother. Everyone important in Argentina was there."

Clete stared hard at her, then stood up and looked down at Peter. "I had the feeling I shouldn't have come here."

"Oh, Clete, you're not leaving. Please don't leave!" Alicia said.

"Alicia, it's always a pleasure to see you," he said, and smiled at her. Then he extended a hand to Peter. "Sorry, mi Capitan," he said.

"Please," Alicia pleaded. "Isabela, say you're sorry!" Clete nodded at Peter and started down the corridor toward the lobby. As he reached the center of the lobby, Peter caught up

with him and touched his arm.

"Cletus, my friend, listen carefully to me. An attempt will be made on your life, probably tonight."

"What?" Clete asked incredulously.

"Don't go back to the Guest House tonight. Better yet, go to your father's estancia."

Clete looked into Peter's eyes.

"Jesus Christ! You're serious."

"On my word of honor."

Peter touched Clete's arm, then turned and walked back toward the restaurant in the corridor.

Chapter Seventeen

[ONE]

Bureau of Internal Security

Ministry of Defense

Edificio Libertador

Avenida Paseo Colon

Buenos Aires

2230 19 December 1942

Comandante Habanzo delivered the preliminary visual and communications surveillance reports ten minutes late, at 2210 hours. While he leafed through the five-inch-tall stack of papers, el Teniente Coronel Bernardo Martin kept Habanzo standing in front of his desk.

He wondered if he was doing this because Habanzo was late, or because he simply did not like the man. He decided it was the latter. He had often warned his agents that it was far better to turn in a report late than to turn it in inaccurate—but obviously not often enough, to judge by the quality of the visual surveillance reports in front of him.

The question then changed to why he disliked his deputy. First of all, obviously, because Habanzo was stupid. Stupid people did not belong in internal security. How Habanzo wound up there was one of the great mysteries of life. For a long time, he simply assumed that he never completely trusted the information Habanzo gave him because the man was so devastatingly stupid. But now vague, uncomfortable tickles in the back of his mind were suggesting other reasons as well.

Could Habanzo be taking small gifts—or large ones, for that matter—from some interested party or other? Could he be passing items of interest to them?

Could the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos, for example, have him on their payroll? The answer came swiftly: Not likely. Habanzo's limited mental abilities would be immediately apparent to the G.O.U. And they would be afraid of him, too; for they would see him as the loose cannon that he is. He was perfectly capable of having a sudden attack of conscience and confessing, for instance. Or of selling out to a higher bidder.

On the other hand, in the counterintelligence business, one was expected to consider the unlikely—even the absurdly unlikely— as a possibility.

The communications surveillance preliminary reports were typewritten. Almost all of the wiretappers came from Army and Navy Signals, where they'd been radio operators. Radio operators were trained to sit before a typewriter and almost subconsciously transcribe Morse Code signals. Now they sat before a typewriter in a basement somewhere, or in an office off the Main Telephone Frame Room in the Ministry of Communications, and pecked out a transcript of someone's telephone calls. Aside from minor corrections, and the elimination of abbreviations, their final reports would not be much different from what Martin had in front of him.

The visual surveillance preliminary reports were something else: They were handwritten, compiled from notes discreetly taken on site. And predictably, the syntax in these reports was often highly imaginative. More important, they were liberally sprinkled with question marks. This was done in the interest of fairness, so that El Coronel A's words would not become a matter of official record when the agent was not absolutely positive that it was El Coronel A who spoke them, or that these were his exact words. The idea was that questionable items would be verified in the final reports: that it was not El Coronel A, but in fact El Coronel B, and that he said he was not going to Cordoba, rather than that he was going to Cordoba.

By the time the preliminary reports were finalized, about ninety-five percent of the information verified was no longer of any interest whatever. It was a terrible system. But—as Winston Churchill said about democracy—el Teniente Coronel Martin could not think of a better one.

Nothing in the reports before him was especially interesting. That was not surprising. Just about all of the members of the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos attended el Capitan Duarte's funeral, but they were all far too intelligent to reveal anything worth paying attention to anywhere they might be overheard.

And though el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade solaced the loss of his nephew with a liter or so of Johnnie Walker, this did not yield useful information ... unless irreverent remarks about the funeral ceremony could be considered useful.

Visual surveillance of young Frade was a little more interesting. He did not follow the casket to Recoleta Cemetery, but instead returned to the Frade Guest House on Avenida Libertador, where two American men were waiting for him.

One of them, Pelosi, Anthony J., was ostensibly an oil-industry technical expert who came to Argentina with young Frade. The other, Ettinger, David, was a newly arrived employee of the Banco de Boston.

If one accepted the theory that young Frade was an OSS agent .. . and Habanzo is strongly convinced of this; I wonder why . . . then Ettinger would likely be the third member of a three-man team. But on the other hand, none of these three look like men any intelligence agency in its right mind would send anywhere. Which, of course, might be precisely what the OSS hopes someone like me will think.

Martin would have liked very much to know exactly what they talked about, but that was out of the question. At the same time, Martin was sure that his decision not to install listening devices in the house was correct. Tapping a telephone was relatively simple, and difficult to detect. Listening devices were the opposite, difficult to install and easy to detect. They were also very expensive and hard to come by. He had a budget to consider. If el Coronel Frade or his son came across a listening device—and they more than likely would—they would simply smash it. And a good deal of money, time, and effort would go down the toilet. All a listening device would accomplish would be to remind Frade and his son that they were under surveillance.