car with flashing red lights; then a black Chevrolet full of Secret Service agents; a 1939 Packard limousine (not the presidential limousine); and finally another Chevrolet packed with Secret Service agents.
The gate in the wall was already open when the convoy arrived. The police car and the tailing Secret Service car pulled to the curb and stopped. The lead Secret Service car and the Packard drove through the gate, which closed immediately after them.
When the two cars stopped, two burly Secret Service agents half trotted to the limousine. One of them reached in and swung the President’s feet outward. Then he hauled him from the car and erect. Then he and the other agent, with an ease born of practice, made a cradle of their locked arms and carried him to and up the kitchen stairs. By the time they got there, a third Secret Service agent had taken a collapsible wheelchair from the trunk of the Chevrolet, trotted with it to the kitchen, and had it unfolded and waiting when the President was carried to it.
“One of you,” the President of the United States said, “smells of something that didn’t come out of an after-shave bottle. ‘My Sin’?”
The burly Secret Service agent now pushing the wheelchair chuckled.
“No comment, Mr. President,” he said.
The other agent trotted ahead and pushed open doors until he reached the double sliding doors to the library, both of which he slid open.
“Is this the place with the booze?” the President asked as he was rolled in.
Donovan and Whittaker, who had been sitting on identical couches at right angles to a carved sandstone fireplace, stood up.
“Good evening, Mr. President,” Donovan said.
“That’ll be all, Casey,” the President said. “If I need it, the Colonel can push me around.”
The Secret Service agent left the room, closing the double doors carefully behind him.
“Well, Jimmy,” the President said. “You look a hell of a lot better than the last time I saw you.”
“Good whiskey and fast women, Uncle Frank,” Whittaker said.
He went to Roosevelt and offered his hand. Roosevelt ignored it. He gripped his arms with both hands, and with strength that always surprised Whittaker, forced his body down so that his face was level with Roosevelt’s. Roosevelt studied him intently for a moment, and then, nodding his head in approval, let him go.
“Chesty would be very proud of you,” the President said. “I am.”
He let that sink in a moment, then changed the tone. “I had a letter from Jimmy,” he said. “You know about Jimmy?” James Roosevelt, the President’s eldest son, was commissioned in the USMC. He was second in command of the Marine Raiders in the Pacific.
“Somebody talked him into joining the Marines,” Whittaker said. “I thought he was smarter than that.”
Roosevelt laughed heartily.
“I think he was taken with the uniform,” he said. “Anyway, he asked about you.”
“Give him my regards,” Whittaker said.
Donovan handed the President a martini glass.
“I think you’ll like that, Franklin,” he said. “Basically, it’s frozen gin.”
Roosevelt sipped the martini and nodded his approval.
Roosevelt asked about England, first generally, and then specifically about David Bruce, the OSS Chief of Station in London, and finally about Canidy.
“Your friend Canidy’s all right?”
“Just fine,” Whittaker said.
“I’m sorry that Bill and I can’t tell you why, Jimmy,” Roosevelt said, “but that Congo mission the two of you flew was of great importance.”
“I thought it probably was of enormous importance,” Whittaker said.
“Why did you think that?” Roosevelt asked. His famous smile was just perceptibly strained.
“The airplane Canidy and I flew was a brand-new C-46, fitted out like the Taj Mahal, and intended to fly Navy brass around the Pacific.”
“Nothing is too good for our boys in the OSS,” Roosevelt joked, exchanging a quick glance with Donovan.
The mission, ordered by Roosevelt himself, had been to bring ten tons of bagged ore from Kolwezi in the Katanga Province of the Belgian Congo. Only four people—the President; Donovan; Capt. Peter Douglass, Donovan’s deputy; and Brig. General Leslie R. Groves, director of something called “The Manhattan Project”—knew that the ore was uraninite. The Manhattan Project was intended, in the great secret of the Second World War, to refine the uraninite into uranium 235, and from the uranium 235 to construct a bomb, an “atomic bomb” that would have the explosive equivalent of twenty thousand tons of TNT.
Roosevelt’s, and Donovan’s, great fear was that the Germans, among whose scientists were some of the greatest physicists in the world, and who were known to be conducting their own nuclear research, would learn of the American