[Icelander]

Big Bill wished profoundly that if this World War was ever going to come, it could hurry up and do it any time now. At least soon enough so that he does not have to visit the bathroom again, on account of being composed only of vaporised particles rapidly leaving each other’s vicinity. Nothing could be worse than having to go through that again, he thought. Leaking from not one, but two ends at the same time was not only undignified, it was also hellish torment. Harvey is too sick to be able to drink and that means he’s far too sick to be able to work, but when he saw Connor’s message, he called the boy in to his living quarters for a meeting nonetheless.

He was prepared; you had to give him that. He answered every question quickly and concisely, having expected and overcome every objection that Harvey could reasonably make. He was aware of the likelihood that a changed meeting place meant treachery, but felt that the potential reward justified taking that risk. The new location didn’t invalidate using the French embassy car to take Franck out of the Soviet sector and he had already made arrangements to have the smugglers pick the rest of the team up at another location closer to the meeting place. Connor had also had already drawn heavy weaponry for himself and wanted Harvey’s approval for getting assigned a team of competent men and a blank check for kit.

For his security team, he chose two of Harvey’s best Watchers, the cherubim, an angelic little Gypsy fellow with haunted eyes and a sharp knife who went by the codename Cherub and a deadly former guerrilla from the Carpathian mountains who’d sniped down Russians, Poles, Germans and Ukrainians in his unending quest for self-determination for some tribe no one could remember but him. For his mop of blond hair and the Arcadian simplicity of his trustworthy face, he’d been codenamed Cupid. For his German interpreter, Connor wants the fellow whom the Company used to train Balkan émigrés in small unit tactics and infantry skills, codename Hessian. Harvey grins at the thought. The boy is bringing a bloody German shock trooper along and calling him an interpreter. Still, it’s just good sense to be prepared. The damn war might break out while he’s there and then he’ll be glad to have someone who can use a gun instead of someone who can quote bloody Heine and bloody Goethe.

Under normal circumstances, Harvey would direct the extraction himself. But in his current condition, he’d be more help to the Stasi than to Connor and Hans Franck. Harvey tries to convince Connor to accept someone else in command of the operation, but Connor is adamant. He’d have lain down for Harvey, secure in the knowledge that under his command, nothing could possibly go wrong, but he wasn’t about to let any of the other officers in BOB take this away from him. This was his defector, his operation and his spurs to win. Besides, both men knew that the temperament to run a risky op like that resided in only a few men and none of them had the advantage of having already met the defector.

The Deputy Chief of Station, who in the legitimate absence of Bill Harvey had the authority to take over the operation, that is, if they decided to share the fact of its existence with him, had not yet been informed. In Davey Connor’s case, this was because he was fully aware that DCoS David Murphy was a cautious man who was likely to weigh the risks of the operation against the unknown rewards and scotch the venture entirely. In the case of Bill Harvey it was because he’d be damned if he gave up even an inch of command, no matter how sick he might be. And, thinking about it, he couldn’t see a reason to bring in a new officer. Sure, someone might be more experienced and even more capable, but he’d still require time to get caught up and Connor was ready to go today. And with things as they are in Egypt and Hungary, who can say how much time anyone has?

Harvey would rather have a precocious pup in command, one whom he could trust try to grab the golden goose and get out of there before the Russkies even knew why they should be going ape, than he’d trust this mission to an ass-covering time-server, who’d probably go over the Vopo checkpoint with a memorandum filled with bureaucratese already written, explaining how coming back with nothing but his Wiener in his hands should be construed as a long-term strategic success. There was a time for caution, but that time was sure-as-shooting not when Armageddon was heading for you at terminal velocity.