"How is she?" ffolkes asked.
Carter related the doctor's findings, then described his conversation with Mike herself.
ffolkes nodded, smiling.
"Good girt, that one," he said. "Wish I had a dozen like her."
"Any more information about Silver Dove?" Carter said.
"Still don't know whether it's a code, or whether it directly refers to a person, a place, or an organization. Your Hawk says Silver Dove is new to you, too."
"Whatever it is, it must be plenty big to bring Blenkochev out of Russia." There was something faintly familiar about the phrase Silver Dove. Perhaps from another operation…
"Yes. Blenkochev."
ffolkes's ruddy face was a study in disinterest. He'd disciplined himself well. Still, the body sometimes betrayed the will. A vein on the intelligence chief's temple pulsed with agitation or excitement, or maybe both.
"You've met Blenkochev?" Carter said.
"I've had the misfortune," ffolkes admitted.
He drummed his fingers on the desk as memories flickered in his eyes. The disintegration began around the edges of the face. The muscles softened. Then he laughed, a series of mighty guffaws that broke his disciplined severity and resounded infectiously in the small room.
Carter smiled, waiting while the New Zealand chief wiped his eyes with a large white handkerchief.
"If he weren't so dangerous, I'd allow myself to enjoy him more often," ffolkes explained. He blew his nose, then stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket.
"You were in the field with him too?" Carter said, stubbing out his cigarette.
"We all knew each other," ffolkes said and leaned back in his chair. "Hawk, Blenkochev, March from Scotland Yard, Parateau from Interpol, the others. Graduates of the secret services of World War Two." He took out one of his own cigarettes, and Carter lit it for him. "I was younger, had more to learn, and Blenkochev looked upon New Zealand as a potential Soviet ally. He took an interest in me. That was before Korea. Before the Cold War. Back when the Soviets were at least in name the friends that helped us win the war."
"That didn't last long."
"Interesting that we called it a world war. More accurate would have been a world civil war. One world, yet we all fought one another as if we were from different planets. "The disciplined composure was coming back.
"And Blenkochev?"
ffolkes smiled. Laughter returned to his voice.
"He and Hawk were like two dogs after the same bitch in heat. Snarling and snapping at one another, but so busy pursuing the bitch that they didn't want to spare the lime to fight a decisive battle. Their countries always came first. Yet, in their own ways. I think they liked one another. Maybe respected is a better word," ffolkes rolled the cigarette in the ashtray.
"What made me laugh was Blenkochev," he said. "One night on the Konigsallec in Dusseldorf, Blenkochev got drunk on beer. That in itself isn't remarkable, but you have to understand the kind of man we're talking about. This man carried a toothbrush even when he had to abandon everything else. He ordered his underwear starched. He read and reread Julius Caesar's famous battle campaigns. He was fastidious, meticulous, and his attention to detail made him a formidable enemy."
"Then he got drunk."
"Yes. He met German beer. He was a vodka drinker, of course, and vodka is so much stronger than any beer that he thought he could drink the beer like water. An enormous error. He ended the evening stripped to the waist, his pant legs rolled up, frolicking across the beer hall tables with pink-checked whores and waitresses."
Carter grinned, picturing in his mind the sight of stout, drab Blenkochev as a dancing maniac.
"Embarrassing," Carter said, "but not fatal."
Then Blenkochev discovered mere were photographs," ffolkes said, enjoying the memory of Blenkochev's tirade of horror. "And a German photographer who wouldn't be bought or threatened off. The photographer had survived the war. After that, even Blenkochev couldn't terrify him. Poor Blenkochev was beside himself. He could fulfill the most difficult assignment from Moscow — planting moles or arranging clueless assassinations — but he couldn't convince the photographer to not publish the photographs. And obviously he didn't dare kill him."
"So?"
"The morning the photos were to appear in Dusseldorf, Blenkochev went to the newspaper building with a check for five hundred thousand Deutsche marks. He bought the newspaper on the spot, had the pressmen trash the edition, watched the head photographer destroy the prints and negatives, and then left town. As far as I know he's never been back."
"I'm not surprised," Carter said.
"The newspaper went bankrupt shortly after. No one would run it. But there was never a word of complaint from Blenkochev. How or where he got the money no one knew. The rumors were that it came from profits on watered-down black market penicillin, but who knows?… The irony, of course, was that poor Blenkochev had betrayed his ideology. He'd been forced to use capitalist means to solve a question of ethics," ffolkes laughed merrily. "Poor Blenkochev. No matter how many times he would wash his hands, the stain would remain."
"Reality is a tough teacher," Carter smilingly agreed, and lit another cigarette for himself.
"Don't get me wrong, Carter," the New Zealand intelligence leader went on thoughtfully. "I laugh at Blenkochev now only because he hasn't caused any trouble here… that we know of. He's about as friendly to the West as a pit viper is to a mouse, and as trustworthy. He has idiosyncrasies, but he uses them in his work. Perseverance. Ruthlessness. Cunning. I'd never want to face him off."
"No one relishes that idea."
Then we understand one another," ffolkes said, again smiling. "And that brings us back to our business at hand." He blew a smoke ring into the air. His gold-capped teeth glowed in the fluorescent lighting. "And a simple question. Are you sure your missing American pilot exists?"
"Positive," Carter said, relating the information he'd received earlier that day from the AXE computer. "Some of his former employers have been putting pressure on Hawk to find him. Diamond's reliable when there's enough money involved, and these employers don't want to lose his valuable future services."
"They sound like illegal services to me."
It was Carter's turn to laugh.
"Probably," he said, "but now we're grateful because tracing him may lead us to why Silver Dove is important, and what caused the earthquake that jarred Blenkochev loose from the Kremlin. Our sources arc reliable. They're dead positive Diamond was in New Zealand, although they don't know what his job was, or for whom he was working."
ffolkes smoked reflectively.
"We have a major problem with following mat up," he told Carter. "There are no records that show Philip Shelton, alias Rocky Diamond, ever arrived in or left New Zealand. No flight plans, no cargo manifests, nothing. As far as the official records go, we've never had a man by either of those names in our country. Just like the mysterious illness mat killed the Russian attaché. We wouldn't have any evidence of that cither except Mike and our doctors saw it with their own eyes. You don't have such a lucky break with Diamond. How do you plan to trace a nonexistent person?"
Carter smiled.
"If you know enough about someone," he said simply, "they always leave evidence of passage, no matter how hard they — or anyone else — tries to hide it."
Using one of his several identification cards with matching credit references, Carter checked into the Wellington Arms, a red-brick Victorian building with white gingerbread, located off Adelaide Road near the heart of downtown Wellington. He dropped his fortieth cigarette of the day into a flat box near the reception desk politely marked Smokers Please, pressed the foot lever, and the cigarette disappeared into a second level.