Fine seemed first to notice the baby blue Plymouth not quite hidden behind the truck, then did see the excited motion from behind its steering wheel, and then figured out what-or, more precisely, who who-he was looking at.

A practiced lawyer of considerable skill, Fine kept his poker face, but still quickly returned his attention to the lieutenant colonel.

At that point, the lieutenant colonel apparently had at last reached the end of his speech. Fine nodded one last time, and they exchanged salutes.

The lieutenant colonel turned and moved toward the car door, which still was being held open for him. He looked up and down the street as he did so. Just as he started to climb in the backseat, he noticed the baby blue Navy staff car parked behind a big truck across the street.

He studied it for a moment, wondering if he actually was seeing a man slumped behind the wheel and napping under a Greek fisherman cap that was pulled down over his face. Then he decided that if that was indeed what it was-he'd seen his share of some strange things happening here in Algiers-it was a matter not worthy of his time. And he slid onto the Cadillac's backseat, allowing the door to be closed behind him.

The good-looking Motor Transport Corps driver ran around the front of the car and got in behind the wheel.

Fine stood by and watched as the Cadillac pulled away from the curb. When it had driven out of sight, he walked quickly across the street toward the Plymouth.

Canidy was already standing out on the sidewalk and in the process of opening the rear passenger door.

"Once again," Stanley Fine said by way of greeting, "your timing is impeccable and your luck apparently without limit."

"Was that who I think it was?" Canidy said, shouldering his rubberized duffel bag.

The bag was all that Canidy had carried into Sicily. It had held a change of clothes, a Johnson light machine gun, six magazines of .30-06 ammunition for the LMG, four mags of .45 ACP for his Colt pistol, ten pounds of Composition C-2 explosive, two packages of cheese crackers, a one-pound salami, and a canteen of water. With the exception of the C-2 and food gone, it still held the same items.

He offered his hand to Fine. "Good to see you, Stan."

"You, too," Fine answered fondly as he shook Canidy's hand, then gave a friendly pat to his shoulder. "Welcome back. And if you thought it was Ike's right hand, then your skills of deduction remain in top form, too."

"No," Canidy said with a straight face, "what I meant was, Ike's secret piece of ass?"

Fine laughed. "That was his driver, yes. Kay Summersby. Beautiful woman. Beautiful newly divorced newly divorced woman. But that's all I know. Rumors of Ike's activities are legion.... So who knows?" woman. But that's all I know. Rumors of Ike's activities are legion.... So who knows?"

"Divorced?" Canidy said with a smile. "That's interesting."

"Don't even think about it, Dick."

"Oh, even I don't live that dangerously."

He turned to the car.

Professor Rossi was expending some effort to sit upright, then slide himself and his suitcase out. Once finally on the sidewalk, Rossi awkwardly adjusted his burnous cape and rewrapped the cloth around his fez and head.

"Professor," Canidy said, "say hello to your new best friend, Captain Stanley Fine."

"My pleasure, Professor," Fine said, looking up and down the street suspiciously. Then he nodded toward the villa. "If you don't mind, let's get you out of sight."

The professor made a grunt and nodded, then started to grab the suitcase. He found Canidy's hand already lifting it. This time, there was no tug-of-war over who would carry it.

As Canidy started to lug the case across the street, he saw that Fine still was scanning the immediate area.

"Where's your driver?" Fine said.

"Oh, I expect he'll be along eventually," Canidy called over his shoulder and continued toward the villa without further explanation.

Fine just shook his head, then looked at the professor and motioned for him to precede him to the villa, where Monsieur Khatim waited at the door.

[THREE].

Drinking coffee from a heavy white china mug, Canidy stood looking out wooden slatted French doors that opened onto a balcony. A warm breeze blew in, lightly scented with sea salt and lilacs. The room before the war had served as the primary of two main dining areas of the Villa de Vue de Mer.

The grand, four-story Sea View Villa-a French Colonialstyle mansion solidly built of masonry in the 1880s high on the lush hillside overlooking the harbor-had been let to the Office of Strategic Services for the sum of ten dollars per annum and the promise that it would be preserved and protected. Its owner was the widow of one of Wild Bill Donovan's law school pals. Pamela Dutton-formerly of New York City, Capri, and Algiers, and now simply of Manhattan due to the war-had a line of designer women's shoes, once manufactured in Italy, that carried her name.

Canidy was convinced that the very nice clothes he'd borrowed two weeks earlier from the vast closet off of the villa's master bedroom-and that he now wore-had belonged to Mr. Dutton...or perhaps one of Madame Dutton's recent suitors.

Hell if I care who they belonged to. They're comfortable, and they help me blend in damn better than any Army uniform. And I intend to help myself to more while I'm here.

The villa's eight bedrooms were on the two upper floors. The master had its own bath. There were shared baths for the others, one on each floor at the end of the main hall. The second floor, which actually was at street level, had the two dining areas, a kitchen, a pair of lavatories, and a large living area. The bottom floor, tucked into the hill yet with its own view of the sea, had been for entertainment, complete with a formal ballroom.

Now an OSS station, the Villa de Vue de Mer had a permanent staff of about twenty, most wearing U.S. Army tropical-worsted uniforms, some with and some without insignia. There was a transient group of another fifteen or so who wore anything but military outfits. These latter ran the training camps and came and went on irregular schedules, using the villa only as their base.

Three of the four bedrooms (including the master) on the top floor had been filled with rows of folding, wooden-framed cots. Close to the roof and the small forest of antennae newly erected there, and situated in the middle of the floor, the fourth bedroom had become the commo room. It was crammed with tables holding the wireless, two-way radios and teletypes and typewriters and chairs for the operators who encrypted and decrypted the W/T messages. Its wooden door had been reinforced with steel, a wooden beam with brackets added on the inside, and an armed guard posted outside at all times.

The third-floor bedrooms had been made into basic offices for the permanent staffers, with mismatched chairs placed in front of makeshift desks, rows of battered filing cabinets, and, on the walls, frameworks that held charts detailing the Mediterranean Theater of Operations and current and future OSS ops therein.

The first-floor ballroom had been converted into a warehouse storage area, heavy wooden shelving and stacks of crates containing everything from the necessities of an office (typewriters, typewriter papers and ribbons, safes with gold, silver, and the currencies of half a dozen countries, et cetera) to field equipment (W/T radios with their assorted parts, wooden racks holding a small armory of weapons of both American and British manufacture, crates of appropriate calibers of ammunition, Composition C-2 plastic explosive, fuses, even a large wardrobe featuring a variety of enemy uniforms taken from prisoners of war captured in North African campaigns).

With the exception of the two dining rooms doubling as conference areas, the second floor remained mostly unchanged.

Canidy looked at Fine and Rossi seated opposite each other at the room's large, round, wooden dining table. Fine also held a china mug steaming with coffee. Professor Rossi sipped tea from a glass cup. On the table in front of Fine was a short stack of papers.

Canidy gestured toward the stack with his mug. He said, "As I wrote in my after-action report, Stan, there were three distinctive explosions, each one larger than the last. Then came a fantastic plume of fire that lit the night."

He stopped, swallowed a swig of coffee, then added, "It was an impressive sight. Wouldn't you agree, Professor?"

Fine studied Rossi. With the fez and its cloth wrap now on a nearby chair, he could get a good look at the fifty-five-year-old's slender, thoughtful face.

"The explosions were as the major says," he said evenly, his English thick with a Sicilian accent. "The inferno had to have totally consumed the vessel."

"Including the Tabun?" Fine asked.

Canidy said, "I would think so, Stan-"

"Including the T83," Rossi interrupted. "However, the burning would not necessarily have rendered the agent ineffective. In fact..."

His voice trailed off. He took a sip of his tea.

"In fact what, Professor?" Fine pursued. "I know you've been through all this with Major Canidy, and it's in his report, but I'd like to hear it again. From you. You might think of something you forgot before."

Rossi nodded.

"My area of expertise is metallurgy, I believe you know, Captain," the professor went on conversationally. "Not chemicals, per se. But it is commonly understood that a cloud created by such a fire would serve as a method of dispersal, a rather rapid one, in effect carrying the T83 across everything in the near distance...and farther, depending on winds and the size of the cloud."

"Jesus," Fine said softly.

Fine exchanged glances with Canidy-who appeared somewhat saddened when he raised his eyebrows in a Yeah, I know Yeah, I know look-then turned back to Rossi. look-then turned back to Rossi.

"And it would have been effective in that state?" Fine asked. It was more a statement than a question; Fine already had read in Canidy's report that that was the case.

Rossi nodded again.

"Not as much had the nerve agent been delivered undiluted from a munitions shell," he said. "But, yes, people, as well as animals, would have suffered the severe effects-would be suffering its effects." its effects."

Everyone was silent a moment.

"And if it did not burn?" Fine then said.

"I really don't think that this could be the case," the professor replied. "There could not have been anything left of the ship's contents."

"But, hypothetically," Fine pursued, "if the shells maintained their integrity in the fires and simply went down with the ship?"

Rossi shrugged.

"Very well," he replied. "Hypothetically, if it went to the sea bottom the salt water would corrode the metal of the shells. Eventually-probably years but possibly sooner-the shells' seal would fail. Then the T83 would leach into the water, then to the surface, possibly in such volume as to poison the harbor and anyone close to it." if it went to the sea bottom the salt water would corrode the metal of the shells. Eventually-probably years but possibly sooner-the shells' seal would fail. Then the T83 would leach into the water, then to the surface, possibly in such volume as to poison the harbor and anyone close to it."

He paused.

"Incidentally, it is a fact-not a well-kept one and not at all hypothetical-that the shells themselves are prone to leakage. Great care must be taken in their transport...and in their salvage, if your thinking is that they could be retrieved intact from the harbor bottom."

Fine and Canidy exchanged a long look. The instability of the shells was something that they had not known.

"And," Rossi said finally, "this was only the first shipment. I heard that more was coming from Messina, possibly already en route."

Fine glanced again at Canidy, then turned to Rossi and said, "Would you mind excusing us for a moment, Professor?"

Rossi nodded, then suddenly yawned, covering his mouth with his right hand.

"This has been quite exhausting," he said. "I'd actually like to lie down. Would that be possible?"

"Of course," Fine said, then raised his voice: "Monsieur Khatim!"

When the tough old man almost immediately appeared in the arched doorway, Canidy realized he had been standing a silent guard outside the door.

Khatim leaned slightly forward in a bow that conveyed At your service At your service.

Captain Stanley Fine said, "Monsieur Khatim, please show our guest to his room." He turned to Rossi, and added, "You'll please forgive the accommodations. When we got here, the beds were all infested. Now we have no more than cots."

"That will be fine," Rossi said, standing and putting down his teacup. "My alternative right now would be to be back in Palermo."

[FOUR].

"I know what you're going to say, Stan," Major Richard M. Canidy said after Professor Arturo Rossi had been made comfortable and Canidy had refilled their coffee mugs.

"You do?" Captain Stanley S. Fine said. "Then you're way ahead of me, Dick, because I don't know what the hell to say right now."

He sipped at his mug, watching Canidy return to the French doors, then look out in silence, his back toward Fine.

"There was no option, Stan," Canidy said finally. "I had to blow up the Tabun; I couldn't leave it for the Germans. Deadly cloud or not. It was a split-second decision, and-"

"And one that I agree with."

Canidy turned. He looked at Fine for some time, took a sip of coffee, then nodded thoughtfully. His eyes showed some relief.

"Thanks, Stan. I appreciate that. I hope we're not alone in holding that opinion."

He sighed.

"You know, all the way back on the sub, after Rossi told me about the deadly cloud, I was sickened at the thought..."

He stopped himself, then suddenly looked back out at the sea.

Jesus! What the hell is the matter with me?

I'm babbling.

Yeah, I'm sickened at the thought of all those people in Palermo in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But why does that bother me?

This is war. And I didn't put the goddamn gas there.

So why then am I suddenly concerned about innocent...

Oh, shit!

Ann!

Canidy heard Stan Fine's comforting voice behind him.

"Dick, you didn't know," Fine said loyally.

Canidy turned, and, as he looked at Fine, he said softly, "Ann?"

The look on Fine's face was shock, then anger.

"Dammit!" he said, and thrust his right hand into his tunic. "I'm sorry, Dick. I'd forgotten-"

"It's okay. Obviously, so had I."