But no sweat, we’ll run through this and get a jump on what we need.”
“Blow?” Doug offered.
“You wouldn’t like me on coke,” Kelly said with a grin that widened like that of a wolf launching itself toward prey. “I wouldn’t like me on coke.”
He opened the folder and let his face smooth. “Quicker we get to work,” he said, speaking into the frozen silence, “the quicker I get to sleep.”
Elaine gestured Doug through the door, but he was already moving that way of his own accord.
“Well, what’ve we got here,” Kelly murmured, not a question, as Elaine set a straight-backed chair against the doorknob to jam the panel if anyone tried to power through it from the hallway. She damned well was more paranoid than the agent she was running. . . .
What they had was a sheaf of gatefold paper, the sheets still articulated, printed on a teletype or something with an equally unattractive typeface. Each page was headed with an alphanumeric folio line, but beneath that the first page was headed: Romer, Gisela Marie Hroswith. Good enough.
Kelly began to read, tearing each sheet off when he finished with it and laying it facedown on the desk. The woman, sitting on the bed, leaned forward and took the pages as Kelly laid them down. Neither spoke.
Gisela Romer was thirty-one, an inch taller than Kelly, and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. At five-ten, that didn’t make her willowy by Western standards, but it was as exotic a touch as her blond hair in a Turkish culture where a beautiful woman five feet tall would weigh as much. The telecopied newspaper photograph appended to the file was indistinct enough to have been Jackie Kennedy, but the high, prominent cheekbones came through.
As Elaine had said in the elevator, Gisela Romer was a Turkish citizen; but her father and mother were part of a sizable contingent of Germans who had surfaced in Turkey in the late forties, carrying South American and South African passports that might not have borne the most careful scrutiny. By that time, Berlin was under Soviet blockade and the Strategic Air Command was very interested in flight paths north from the Turkish bases they were constructing. Nobody was going to worry too much about, say, a Waffen-SS Oberfuehrer named Schneider who might now call himself Romer.
Information on Gisela was sparse through the mid sixties – no place of residence and no record of schooling, though her father was reaching a level of prominence as a power in what was variously called the Service League or simply the Service – der Dienst.
“Is there an annex on the Dienst?” Kelly muttered when he got to the reference in Gisela Romer’s bio.
“You’ve got the file,” Elaine noted simply. “I can give you a bare bones now if there isn’t. An import-export cooperative for certain expatriate families. Almost certainly drug involvement, probably arms as well in the other direction.”
“There’s an annex,” Kelly said as he thumbed forward from the back of the clumsy document.
The printout on the Dienst was obviously a synopsis. The organization had been penetrated decades before, possibly from the very date of its inception. The file was less circumspect than Elaine had been about drug and arms trafficking. CIA used the Dienst as one of the conduits by which it increased its unreported operating budget through worldwide drug dealing. Drugs were not, by the agency’s charter, its problem; and morality became a CIA problem only when one of its officers became moral and went public with the details of what he had been doing while on the agency payroll.
Clients for the Dienst’s gunrunning were a more catholic gathering, though various facets of the US government were prominent among them. A brief notation brought to Kelly’s mind the shipment of automatic rifles with Columbian proof markings which he had issued to his Kurds. It was useful – generally – to carry out policy through channels which permitted bureaucrats to deny government involvement. The Dienst was indeed a service organization, and not merely on behalf of the war criminals it had smuggled out of Germany.
“These guys are a bunch of Nazis,” Kelly said wonderingly as he tossed the annex on the desk and returned to the main file.