Brandon, of course, agreed: “Okay. Sure. Stay on him.”
Outside, snow fluttered down and wind rattled the panes of this large, shabby room—the office that didn’t exist.
It was situated in a six-story limestone walk-up in Times Square, overlooking the Brill Building, where so much wonderful music was made. Major, retired major, Tom Brandon loved music, all kinds. Tin Pan Alley—much of it written in the Brill Building—and classical and jazz and Glenn Miller, God rest his soul, who’d died just last month, flying to entertain troops. Jack Murphy liked, guess what, Irish tunes. Pipes, whistles, bodhrams, concertinas, guitars. He sang sappy ballads, too, after a round or two or three of Bushmills. He had a terrible voice, but he picked up the bar tab for all the boys, so Brandon and the rest of them in the office could hardly complain.
The office that didn’t exist.
Just like Brandon and Murphy and the other four men who shared this austere paint-peeling room didn’t exist. Oh, the Operation for Special Services, the intelligence agency, was as real as its colorful founder and head—Wild Bill Donovan (the name said it all)—but the OSS had been born from military intelligence and was supposed to take a backseat within the country’s borders. Here, spy catching was the province of J. Edgar and his not-so-special agents. The OSS’s bailiwick was overseas.
But a few years earlier, there’d been an incident. Once war broke out, Hitler wanted to strike Americans at home. He ordered his head of intelligence to come up with a sabotage plan, and Operation Pastorius was born, named after the first German settlement in America. In June of ’42, German U-boats dropped Nazi commandos on the East Coast. One team on Long Island, one in Florida. They had a large store of explosives and detonators with them. The saboteurs were to blow up economically important targets: the hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls, some of the Aluminum Company of America’s factories, the Ohio River locks near Louisville, the Horseshoe Curve railway stretch in Pennsylvania, Hell Gate Bridge in New York, and Penn Station in New Jersey, among others.
The plan fell apart and the spies were detected—though not by the FBI, which denied there was a conspiracy at first and then finally accepted the Coast Guard’s word that enemy troops were on U.S. soil. Still, the bureau had no luck whatsoever tracking the spies down. Indeed, they didn’t even believe the head of the German saboteurs when he confessed. It took him days to convince the agents that he and his men were the real thing.
Roosevelt and Donovan were furious over Hoover’s ineptness. Without telling the Justice Department, the president agreed that the OSS could open an office here in New York and run its own operations. Brandon handpicked the brash Irishman Jack Murphy and the others, and they set up shop.
He and the team had had some successes. They’d caught an Italian flashing an all-clear signal to a skiff bringing in a load of dynamite off Brooklyn, meant to sink ships taking Jeeps and other vehicles overseas. And stopped German and Japanese citizens from photographing military installations. There’d been an attempt to poison the Croton reservoir—a joint endeavor by Mussolini-and Nazi sympathizers.
They’d get Hauptman, too, if he was a spy and not simply too rude to take his hat off when he first sat down in the Rialto.
But now Brandon was tired of the movie theater incident and turned toward the Big Deal. He said firmly, “You said confirmation.”
“Our man just got to town,” Murphy said with a gleam in his eye.
“Well.”
Murphy was speaking of a German plan that he had uncovered a week or so ago, known as Betrieb Amortisations.
Or, in English: Operation Payback.
One of the wiry Irishman’s sources in the field had learned that a brilliant spy from Heidelberg, Germany, would soon be arriving in the United States. He was bringing in something “significant.” Whatever that was wouldn’t win the war for the Axis, but it could give Hitler bargaining power to sue for peace and keep the Nazi government intact.
“Swell, that’s swell!” Brandon wasn’t known for his enthusiasm, but he couldn’t contain himself.
Murphy pulled an apple from his pocket. He ate a lot of apples. Two or three a day. Brandon thought it gave him rosy cheeks, but that might have been because he associated apples with Norman Rockwell’s paintings on the Saturday Evening Post cover. Murphy explained, “Don’t know where he’s staying. But I do know that he’s picking up his special delivery tonight. I have an idea where.” He polished the apple on his sleeve and chomped down. Brandon believed he ate the stem as well as part of the core.
Brandon said, “I’ll get some boys together.”