The Secret Warriors - By W.E.B. Griffin Page 0,100

opened it two minutes later.

“I’ll handle this,” she said to the guard. “Come in, Ann.”

She led her no farther into the house than the vestibule.

“Now, what’s all this?” Cynthia said.

“I thought it was understood I was sort of an honorary Dilettante,” Ann said.

“What was understood was that you would write nothing and ask no questions. You should know better than to come here.”

“Where’s Dick?” Ann said.

“You thought he was here?” Cynthia asked. “What gave you that idea?”

Ann didn’t reply. To do so would have been an admission that Dick had called her from Deal and told her that he had been ordered to come to Washington with enough clothes for two weeks. He’d said he couldn’t promise he would be in Washington, but if she could get away and wanted to take the chance . . .

Cynthia took the meaning of the silence.

“He’s not here, Ann,” she said. “And he won’t be.”

“Where is he?” Ann asked.

“I really don’t know,” Cynthia said.

“You mean you won’t tell me,” Ann said.

“I mean he’s not here,” Cynthia repeated, and then she took just a little pity on Ann. “And he won’t be here, Ann, for some time.”

“You mean he went overseas,” Ann challenged.

The reporter in her saw she had hit home.

“I said nothing of the kind,” Cynthia said.

“Well, thanks for nothing,” Ann said, and turned around and started to leave.

“Wait a minute,” Cynthia said. “I’ll have Charity take you back downtown.”

“Don’t bother,” Ann said.

“Don’t be any more of a fool than you already are,” Cynthia said, then called Charity.

Despite her best efforts—including what she hoped were credible sobs—Ann got nothing out of Charity in the station wagon on the way downtown.

But then she thought that Dick’s whereabouts weren’t completely the mystery they at first seemed to be. He was almost certainly overseas. And he was involved in Europe and Africa, not the Far East. That French admiral was somehow connected, and so was that Fulmar character.

The American headquarters for Europe was in London. It was going to be difficult finding him in London, but there was absolutely no way she was going to find him if she was in Memphis, Tennessee.

“Charity,” she commanded, “drop me at Woodward and Lathrop’s.”

The landmark Washington department store was several blocks from the Washington bureau of the Chambers Publishing Company. Two could play at the Big Secret, she thought. She did not want Charity to report to that damned Cynthia Chenowith that she had gone directly from the Secret Mansion to a news bureau.

“I’m really sorry,” Charity said when she dropped her off.

“I know,” Ann said.

There was a good omen at Chambers Publishing. When she went into the newsroom and called her father’s office on the tie-line to Atlanta, his secretary told her he was in Washington.

He was right there in the office—and torn between pleasure and annoyance when he saw her.

“You’re a little off your beat, aren’t you, honey?” he asked.

“Well, since you got me the job, Daddy,” Ann said, “I thought it only fair that I hand my resignation to you.”

“May I ask why?”

“Since you won’t send me overseas, I’m going to get a job that will.”

“We’ve been over this before,” he said.

“I remember.”

“This has something to do with Dick Canidy?”

“Yes, it does.”

“He went overseas and you want to follow him, is that it?”

“I didn’t say that,” she said.

“You didn’t have to,” he said. “But the point is, I simply cannot send you overseas. The War Department allocates the spaces. Every war correspondent has to be housed and fed. I’ve got good men I’d love to have over there, and I cannot justify sending you in place of one of them.”

“I thought that’s what you would say,” she said. “Which is why I’m resigning.”

“And you think you can get someone else to send you?” he asked. His clear implication was that she was dreaming.

“I’ll send you a postcard from London,” she said.

“Who’s going to send you to Europe?”

“Lots of people,” Ann said.

“Hey, for every guy you might charm into giving you a job,” he said, “I know two senior editors who will be happy to do me a favor by not giving you a job. Don’t get too big for your britches, missy.”

“How about Gardiner Cowles?” she said immediately. “You think he’d do you that kind of favor?”

She saw from his look that the lie could not possibly have been a better choice. The Cowles Publishing Company published, among others, a Life-like photo magazine called Look. Since her father and Gardiner Cowles had been warring for years,