Free Descendant by Graham Masterton Page B

threatened.
    The officer in the eyeglasses said, “According to ourrecords, you were in Antwerp, Belgium, in the winter of 1944, searching for a Romanian national by the name of Dorin Duca.”
    “That’s right. I never found him, though. Or
it
, I should say. I always assumed that he was killed by a V-2.”
    “In actual fact, sir, Duca escaped to the Netherlands. He was located by another operative from Operation Screecher and detained.”
    I frowned at him. “I didn’t know there
were
any other operatives in Operation Screecher. I thought that I was the only one.”
    “No, Captain, not exactly. Other operatives were occasionally brought in as and when the situation called for it.”
    “Well, that’s news to me. Besides, what do you mean by ‘detained’? You can’t ‘detain’ Screechers. All you can do is eliminate them. Knock nails into their eyes and cut their heads off.”
    “This particular operative had special abilities which allowed her to take Duca into detention.”
    “This was a
woman
?”
    The officer nodded. “She confined Duca to a casket and the plan was to fly him to England and then ship him back here to the United States to see if we could learn anything useful from him as regards counterintelligence operations.”
    I shook my head. “I can’t believe this. We were going to bring a Screecher to America?
Deliberately?
Didn’t anybody have the first idea how dangerous those creatures can be?”
    “Oh, I think so, sir. After all, Screechers wiped out practically the entire resistance movements in Bessarabiaand Bulgaria during the war, and they did some major damage to the French and Dutch underground movements. The Nazis even used them in Warsaw, during the Uprising—sent them down the sewers to hunt down members of the Home Army.”
    “But what possible use could a Screecher be to
us
, once the war was over?”
    The officer took off his eyeglasses. “The opinion was that we needed to maintain our edge over the Russkies, Captain. It was all part of Operation Paperclip.”
    “I don’t know what Operation Paperclip was.”
    “That was the code name we used for bringing Nazi scientists and intelligence experts to the United States after the war. Not even the State Department knew about it, to begin with. None of them had visas, and most of them had their files altered to conceal the fact that they were hundred percent Nazi sympathizers, or worse.”
    “You’re talking about people like Wernher von Braun?”
    “Exactly. Von Braun developed the V-2 for Hitler, and now he’s developing rockets for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. Then there’s Hans von Ohain, who used to design jet engines for Heinkel—he’s Director of the US Air Force Aeronautical Laboratory—and Alexander Lippisch, who did the same for Messerschmitt—he’s in Cedar Rapids, designing jet fighters for Convair. Reinhard Gehlen used to be in charge of intelligence for the Wehrmacht, and he’s set us up with the most effective counter-espionage network that we’ve ever had. Kurt Blome—he used to test plague vaccines on concentration-camp victims. Now he works for the US Army Chemical Corps.”
    “There were seven hundred sixty of them altogether,” put in the sandy-haired officer.
    “But
Duca
? Duca isn’t even human!”
    “We’re aware of that, Captain, but it made good military sense to bring him over here, too. If the Russkies got hold of him, think of the damage that they could do to our intelligence-gathering.”
    Louise was standing in the sunshine, not clipping roses any more, but raising her face to the sky, with her eyes closed, as if she were enjoying the warmth of the sun, or praying. I had a terrible sinking feeling that I was about to let her down, and very badly, but not through any fault of my own. I stood up and walked to the French windows and lifted my hand up, pressing it against the glass. But her eyes were still closed and she didn’t see me.
    “You’d better tell me what