"Not really; my being green and nauseated all of the time could give it all away. What have we got this morning?"
Templeton instantly toggled over to her professional mode. "The Trent Bravo insertion appears to be going well. The team leader is reporting that his personnel and equipment are on the ground inside of Myanmar and that his point man has successfully made contact with the leadership of the Karen National Union."
Klein nodded. Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, he polished a few fog droplets from his glasses. "Anything new with the Wednesday Island operation?"
"Jon will be linking up with the American members of his team in Seattle tonight and with his Russian liaison in Alaska tomorrow. The equipment set has been pre-positioned, and the helicopter procured from Pole Star."
"Any problems with Langley seconding Ms. Russell to us?"
"Only the usual moaning, whining, bitching, and complaining." Maggie looked up from her screens. "If I may make a point, sir. President Castilla is really going to have to make some decisions about our working relationship with our former employers in the near future."
Klein sighed and redonned his glasses. "Very possibly, Maggie, but in the words of the immortal Scarlett O'Hara, 'I'll think of it tomorrow.' Anything else for today?"
"A planning meeting with the South American Operations group at ten hundred, and you might want to have a look at your 'For your consideration' file. I've compiled a list of known illicit armament dealers believed to have both the potential interest and available resources to deal themselves into the Wednesday Island situation. It makes for interesting reading. I've also red-flagged these men and their organizations with all of our available intelligence resources. Any unusual activity on their part is to be reported."
"Well done, Maggie, as usual."
Every director should have an executive assistant who could both read minds and foresee the future.
His office, smaller and far less elaborately outfitted, lay beyond Maggie's. The few personalized decorations-the framed poster-sized photo of the Earth from orbit, the Elizabethan-era map prints, the large eighteenth-century globe of the world-served him as a reminder of his zone of responsibility.
There was only a single workstation monitor on his mid-grade desk, along with a tray bearing a coffee service for one, a steaming stainless steel thermos, and a single buttered English muffin on a covered dish.
Klein smiled. Removing his suit coat, he draped it neatly over the back of his chair. Settling behind his desk, he poured himself his first cup of coffee and tapped the space bar on his keyboard, calling the monitor to life.
As he sipped, a series of file headings flashed past on the screen. Maggie would have stacked the files in what she viewed as their order of priority.
A photograph followed, computer enhanced and apparently taken using a long-range telephoto camera. It showed a man, a big, ruddy-featured man, standing on the deck of what appeared to be a large private yacht, scowling in the direction of the camera.
There were many contradictions built into Anton Kretek. The thinning of his rust-colored hair contrasted with the wild profusion of his gray-tinged beard. There was obvious power in his broad shoulders and wiry, long, muscled arms, countered by the furry pot gut of dissipation that bulged over the waistband of his minimal swimming trunks, and while there were thick clusters of laugh wrinkles gathered around his eyes, those eyes were as cold and opaque as those of a hooding king cobra.
Klein decided that this man might indeed laugh a great deal, but it would be at things most normal human beings would not find amusing.
One of Maggie Templeton's deft file summaries followed, a distilled essence of the documentation on Kretek, her instincts targeting what Klein would actually want and need to know about the man and his organization:
Interpol and the other Western intelligence agencies concerned with Anton Kretek are unsure if this is the arms dealer's true name or an alias. That datum had been lost in the chaos of a disintegrating Yugoslavia. It is known that he is Croatian, from somewhere near the Italian border of that failed nation.
In the tangled eugenic lexicon of the Balkans, a "Croat" is theoretically a Roman Catholic Southern Slav who uses the Latin alphabet, as opposed to a "Serb," who is a Southern Slav following the Greek Orthodox religion and who uses Cyrillic.
Kretek, to the best of anyone's knowledge, follows the tenets of no organized religion. The arms dealer