The Honor of Spies

"Yes, sir. Sir, did Howard tell you I wouldn't know the sonofabitch if I fell over him?"

"He did mention something along those lines. Tell me, Mr. Frade, are you looking forward to the War Bond Tour? And teaching people how to fly?"

"No, sir."

"If I could get you out of both, would you accept a top-secret overseas assignment involving great risk to your life?"

"What kind of an assignment?"

"What part of 'top secret' didn't you understand, Mr. Frade?" Graham said.

Then he handed Frade a photograph of a man wearing what looked like a German uniform, including the steel helmet, standing and saluting in the backseat of an open Mercedes-Benz.

"That's what your father looks like. I don't want you falling over the sonofabitch without knowing who he is."

"Colonel, what's this all about?"

"I'll answer that, Mr. Frade, but it's the last question you get. What I want you to do is go down to Argentina and persuade your loving daddy to tilt the other way. Right now he's tilted toward Berlin."

He handed Frade a sheet of paper. The letterhead read: OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES, WASHINGTON, D.C. Clete had never heard of it.

"Sign that at the bottom. It's a formality. What it is is your acknowledgment that you fully understand all the awful things your government will do to you if you run off at the mouth."

There was too much small print to read. Frade looked at Graham.

"Or don't sign it, Mr. Frade. Your call. But I'm on a Transcontinental and Western flight to Washington in ninety minutes. With you or without you."

He extended a pen to Frade, who took it and scrawled his signature.

Graham then folded the sheet of paper and put it in his suit coat's inside pocket.

"Welcome to the OSS, Mr. Frade," Graham said. "And I bring greetings from your grandfather. If you're a good boy, I'll try to get you a couple of days with him before we put you on the Panagra flight to Buenos Aires."

"You know my grandfather?"

"He doesn't like your father very much, does he?" He did not wait for a reply, and nodded toward the bedroom. "Now, you'd better pack."

"That will be all, Amelia," el Colonel Peron said. "No calls, no visitors."

"Si, senor."

Cranz waited until the maid had closed the double doors to the library.

"Juan Domingo," Cranz began, "you were right about Tandil. I'm almost positive Frade has the Froggers there."

Peron nodded just perceptibly.

"Cletus Frade has arrived in Los Angeles," he said. "At the Lockheed airplane factory. There was a Mackay radiogram. De Filippi called me yesterday."

Guillermo de Filippi was chief of maintenance of South American Airways.

Cranz did not regard that as especially good news; a great many of his problems would have been solved if the Lockheed Lodestar that Frade was flying had lost an engine--preferably both--and gone down somewhere--anywhere--during the hazardous six-thousand-mile flight from Buenos Aires, never to be heard from again.