“Sit,” Cronley said, and made a royal gesture.
Williams saw Serov’s book on the table and picked it up.
“What’s this?” he said, reading the cover. “A brief biography of Saint Heinrich the Divine? By Serov?”
“Let the record show that nothing gets past CIC Berlin,” Cronley said.
Williams opened the book, and said, “Well, let’s see what Serov knows about that son of a bitch that I don’t.”
He then rapidly ran his finger down the first page and almost immediately turned it and repeated his finger-down-the-page scan.
The fourth time he did it, Cronley said, “Fascinating. I’v
e never seen a real-life speed-reader in operation before.”
Williams raised his eyes to Cronley, smiled, and said, “It’s convenient, I admit. But it’s only one of the character traits contributing to my genius.”
Soon, Williams closed the book and gently placed it back on the table.
“You see anything you didn’t know before while zipping through that?” Cohen asked.
“I didn’t know how well the NKGB had infiltrated the Brits’ Second Army. They had to be all over, otherwise Serov wouldn’t know that released Russians were the first to grab Himmler. Or the names of the British officers there. Or how he died and where they buried him.”
“You know what I didn’t see in there?” Ginger said, her tone furious. “Not one mention of Himmler’s number two.”
“Von Dietelburg?” Cronley asked.
“SS-Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg,” she said, practically spitting out the name.
“She’s right,” Williams said. “And now that it has come up, I find that very interesting.”
“So do I,” Cohen said.
“What should be considered more important,” Ginger demanded, “Himmler’s heir or the Vatican’s money?”
She waited for an answer and, when none was offered, went on. “Since I don’t think the Vatican is any happier with Saint Heinrich and his new religion than we are, you should be working with them, not stealing their money.”
“What would you suggest we do,” Williams asked, his tone sarcastic, “go to the Pope and say, ‘Your Holiness, we’re on the same page vis-à-vis von Dietelburg’?”
Ginger glared at him.
“Maybe not the Pope,” she said, “but the cardinal. Let the cardinal go to the Pope.”
“I think Ginger is onto something,” Father McGrath said.
There was a long silence.
“Facts bearing on the problem,” Cronley then said, formally, using the phase that begins every U.S. Army staff study. “One, Father Jack knows more about Holy Mother Church than any one of us, and we’re going to take his advice—”
“Well, I’m glad that he agrees with me,” Ginger said. “But I am going to mention in passing that making friends with the Vatican, instead of royally pissing them off, is my idea.”
After a long pause, Cronley went on, “Fact two: Serov told me he arranged for von Dietelburg and Burgdorf to escape from the AVO in Budapest and that he has had people on them. He said yesterday they were headed for Helmstedt, on the Autobahn crossing between the Russian Zone and ours, where they intended to bribe a truck driver to smuggle them into Berlin.”
“How about this for fact three?” Williams put in. “We have an ongoing investigation into those Berlin-bound truck drivers. A lot of paperless people are using them to get across the Russian Zone into Berlin. We have heard, credibly, that once the truck gets into a relatively empty area in East Germany, the smuggled passengers are killed and their bodies left a hundred yards or so from the Autobahn. The truck then proceeds to Berlin with their luggage.”
“Is this organized,” Cohen said, “or random?”
“I don’t think a truck driver is going to be able to successfully take on von Dietelburg and Burgdorf,” Cronley said. “So, by now, they’re in Berlin. But where? Serov’s people couldn’t get on a truck with them.”