“I don’t think I want to hear what this man did to Mr. Stauffer,” White said. “Do I?”
“Probably not what you’re thinking, General,” Finney said. “What he did was let Cousin Luther know that he found him . . . very attractive.”
“Clever!” White said after a moment.
“Yes, sir. I thought so. Captain DuPres and Ibn Tufail make a very effective interrogation team. I don’t think the CIC School at Holabird will start teaching the ‘I think I’m in love with you’ technique, but they should.”
Second Lieutenant Douglas’s eyes widened as comprehension dawned on him.
White saw this and, failing to suppress a smile, said, “Get on with it, Mr. Finney.”
“Yes, sir. Well, Sergeant Deladier came back with two Nicaraguan passports.”
“Here you are, sir,” McMullen said, and walked down the table to White and handed him the passports.
White examined them carefully.
“It’s not what it says in here,” he said. “But the real names of these two are Heimstadter and Müller.”
“SS-Brigadeführer Heimstadter seems to have grown a mustache,” McMullen said.
“Not a Hitler mustache, but a real soup-strainer,” Cronley said. “The rest of his disguise is probably lederhosen and one of those green felt hats with a feather.”
“Well, whatever it is, so far it’s worked,” McMullen said. “This is as close as we’ve ever gotten to the bastard.”
“What else did you learn from Herr Stauffer?” White asked.
“That they plan to cross the border on a Stripes truck on February tenth, two days from now. Stauffer will meet them a couple of miles inside France with the passports and a car. They will then drive to the Spanish border.”
“Sir, the Stripes truck will leave Pfungstadt about three in the morning,” DCI agent Karl-Christoph Wagner said. “That should put them at the border at daylight.”
Cronley saw that Wagner was no longer uncomfortable being in the presence of the august General White.
“Anything else about the trucks we should consider, Wagner?” White asked.
“I think I told you where these people hide on the trucks?” Wagner asked.
“Tell me again,” White said.
“Yes, sir. Up in front of the truck bed. They make a place for them by laying planks between stacks of Stripes. Five or six stacks. They bundle Stripes in packages about so big.”
He demonstrated the size of the packages with his hands, and then went on: “They make sort of a cave, in other words.”
“I get it,” White said. “And?”
“The trucks are pretty full of newspapers. Which means that when they put these guys in the cave, first they have to unload stacks of papers to get to the back, then make the cave, and then load the newspapers back on. I don’t think they can do that in less than ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”
“Unless they have a lot of people doing it,” White said.
?
??You can’t get a lot of people on the truck,” Wagner argued.
“Point taken,” White said. “So tell me what you’ve come up with, Dick.”
“Yes, sir,” McMullen said. “If the general will have a look at the map?”
White got out of his high-backed chair and walked to where several maps were laid out on the table.