The Honor of Spies

He was pleased that he had decided to bring Inge with him for several reasons, in addition to the carnal. He had decided, telling himself he had to be honest about it, that her enthusiasm was probably because she was both afraid of him and needed him, rather than because of his masculine charm and good looks.

It didn't matter why she was willing to do all sorts of things the instant he ordered them--or even suggested them--only that she was.

But aside from that, Inge proved to be a fountain of information regarding the investments of both the Operation Phoenix funds and those of the confidential fund. She had spent a good deal of the trip explaining details to him, often taking the appropriate documents from those he'd liberated from von Tresmarck's safe, as well as the ones he had ordered Cranz to bring him from the embassy in Buenos Aires.

He had learned that Oberst Schmidt had been very useful in locating and dealing with the middlemen necessary to the acquisition process. Until Inge had uncovered this, he had thought Schmidt had been useful only in the military matters, providing security at Samborombon Bay and putting up the SS men Himmler had insisted on sending to guard the special shipments.

Von Deitzberg had come to San Martin de los Andes primarily to avail himself of Schmidt's military assets; eliminating the Froggers had to be accomplished as quickly as possible. But what he had learned driving across the pampas made him think very seriously about the whole operation.

What had been done from the beginning of Operation Phoenix, when Oberst Gruner, the military attache, had been running things, was first to hide the cash and gemstones and gold in the safety-deposit boxes of reliable ethnic Germans who held Argentine citizenship.

Step two was to systematically turn the gemstones and gold into cash and then, slowly, so as not to attract attention, get the cash out of the safety-deposit boxes and into the bank accounts of the ethnic Germans.

Step three, using the money now in the ethnic Germans' bank accounts, was to purchase the businesses and real estate that were the rock upon which Operation Phoenix would stand. The deeds to all the property were held by the same reliable ethnic Germans.

The ethnic Germans could be trusted for two reasons. First, it was jokingly said that the Auslandischer Deutsch tended to be better Nazis than, say, Goring or Goebbels, if not the Fuhrer himself.

Second, perhaps of equal importance, the Auslandischer Deutsch knew that Oberst Gruner, in addition to his military attache duties, had been secretly the highest-ranking member of the Sicherheitsdienst in South America. That meant they knew that anything less than total honesty when dealing with the assets of Operation Phoenix would be rewarded with the painful death of everybody in the family in Argentina, and with the even more painful deaths of any relatives of the Auslandischer Deutsch who happened to be fortunate enough to be still living in the Fatherland.

Gruner's death on the beach at Samborombon Bay had of course taken some of the glitter from the notion of German invincibility, and with that the certainty of punishment. Cranz was good, but not nearly as menacing a figure as Gruner had been.

The current situation would prevail, of course, but only until it looked to the Auslandischer Deutsch that the Germans were about to lose the war--or, God forbid, had actually lost it--when they would begin to consider that the property and money placed into their care was now theirs.

The honesty of people depends in large part on their judgment of whether or not they will be caught stealing.

The next step in that line of thinking, should the unthinkable happen, would be for them to ask themselves, "How likely is it that Hermann Goring will show up at my door and ask for directions to, and the keys to, the estancia I bought for him? Bought for him in my name."