I'm Holding Four Aces and a Weapon

This novel tells how two World War II spies, Dr. Lucretius Burke, lieutenant in the U.S. military intelligence, and Ms. Kateri Downs, secretary in the British foreign service, married, mended from war wounds, and continued to capture or kill enemies as civilians. They met when they were working together in Scotland to identify Communists embedded among the Greek Jewish refugees whom the British navy had rescued from the Nazis. Kateri was an Iroquois from New York fluent in all her tribal languages who then mastered Spanish and Arabic languages at Georgetown University. She was initially working in the embassy in Cuba when the German liner with Jewish refugees sought asylum. When the Cuban government refused, she learned that the United States planned to do the same. Desperate to save the refugees, she abandoned her post and joined them. When Britain offered to help, she gave up to them. The English foreign service saw that her languages could help them and stationed her in Madrid. There she participated in breaking up a network planning the German capture of Gibraltar. She was essential too in confirming the huge breadth of corruption surrounding her in Argentina enabling Nazi officers to escape capture. She and Lt. Burke were separated when she returned because he was assigned to a secret mission to destroy the network providing German explosives with which Irish Republican Army irregulars were to blow up factories in England. It was essential that he appear as a language professor doing sabbatical research. In addition he was assigned a partner, Paul, a cousin he had never met who grew up in a group home for patients with Asperger's syndrome. He was to bond with him, have him accompany him, and have him meet the same contacts overseas. This "cover" would enable them to begin by meeting in Ireland with with Seamus Burke, a suspected IRA contact. Paul also brought the asset of spotting incongruities and discrepancies that others would miss. And so, he saw how the network used homing pigeons to communicate with one another and spotted the "almost identical" fishing trawler that transported the explosives between Norway and Scotland. A member of the network overheard Paul describing this to Lucretius and murdered him before Lucretius killed the felon. He could not recover from feeling responsible for putting Paul in danger's way. Even though the network was destroyed, Lucretius asked for his release from the army. His superior saw to it and informed Kateri who lived now as a teacher on the reservation. She told her parents about this trauma and her mother taught her the tribal practices for helping to mend someone in such need. She had rented a two bedroom apartment for them in Brooklyn near the military airbase where he landed. The regimen they practiced included daily stays in the Botanical Gardens, rowing on Prospect Park lake, and long walks along Ocean Parkway. Those walks enabled them to witness every week the same older man meeting a teenager who hung on to the rear of the trolley both ways. It was an enigma that worried them. To determine that the boy was safe, they hired taxi to follow them and discovered that the boy was being abused. The man, however, realized he was being followed and in turn followed them to their address. He was able to slash Kateri's face before Lucretius killed him. The action brought him to recovery and they married in Syracuse. There, Lucretius obtained a position teaching Classics. A year later a son named Paul was born. Eight long years later the couple had identical quadruplets, a phenomenon that they struggled with to keep an ordinary home. Kateri earned her doctorate in Psychology and joined LeMoyne's Counseling Services. Upon their own graduate degrees, the quadruplets together joined Mother Teresa's order to be available to those most in need.