ASSOCIATED PRESS FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
Berlin, April 6—
Cronley said, “There’s nothing here.”
“Nothing gets past you, does it?”
“Why won’t it work?”
“Because that’s all there is.”
“A new NCO Academy is not news?”
“If I submitted that to Stars and Stripes, they would run it on page seventeen, somewhere buried under the WAC softball tournament highlights. Not that I would submit it to Stripes. The best I could do, sweetie, wasn’t good enough. It still read like what it was, a bullshit PIO press release, and ol’ Janice does not attach her name to bullshit press releases.”
“It’s important to me, to what we’re trying to do here.”
“And for that reason I’m off to Sonthofen.”
“For what?”
“To see if I can provoke good ol’ I. D. White into saying something outrageous onto which I can hang the rest of this lousy yarn.”
“If you ask me, that’s a really lousy idea.”
Janice forced a thin smile. “I don’t recall asking you, sweetie . . . See you when Casey and I get back from Sonthofen. He’s getting the car as we speak.”
“Whoa! You want to take Casey with you? I need him here.”
“More than you need that NCO Academy yarn on the front page of Stripes?”
After a pause, during which Cronley did not reply, Janice said, “I accept your surrender,” and walked out of the dining room.
“Interesting woman,” Father McKenna said.
“I thought people in your line of work weren’t supposed to notice things like magnificent boobs,” Cronley said, mock innocent.
“Why are you so determined to insult me, to pick a fight with me, Cronley?”
“To see what’s going on behind that white collar. In my profession, it’s called knowing your enemy.”
“While I don’t think I could claim to be your friend, even your ally, I most certainly am not your enemy.”
“Your primary purpose here, what the cardinal sent you to do, is to find out as much as you can about how much of a threat my organization poses to yours.”
“My ‘organization,’ as you put it, is the Church of Rome. And—I hope this isn’t too much of a blow to your ego—I don’t think you pose as much of a threat to it as a mosquito does to an elephant by stinging its hindquarters.”
“Got to you, haven’t I? Where’s that well-known I’m a Jesuit, there’s nothing you can say that will bother me attitude?”
Father McKenna didn’t reply.
“By now, Francis, you must understand that I’ve been spending a lot of time with General Serov and Colonel Cohen . . .”
McKenna nodded.
“. . . And I think you will acknowledge that both are senior intelligence officers with a great deal of experience . . .”
McKenna nodded again.