"Ed Howdershelt - Field Decision" - читать интересную книгу автора (Howdershelt Ed)

endured in northeast Texas.
Two men of student age were emerging from the building as he climbed
the steps. One of them asked him in German if he knew how to get to the
gymnasium.
Cade shook his head and said, "Weiss nicht. Ganz neu hier
auch."_-'Don't know. Completely new here, also.'_
The men nodded a _'thanks, anyway'_ and moved down the steps as Cade
entered the building and looked for the elevator. One of the guys commented to
the other on Cade's accent and speculated that he was from Mannheim. The other
thought maybe Munich.




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 Cade thought, _'Heh. Try Dallas, guys.'_
In actuality, Cade's German was the product of having had German
exchange-student friends in junior high and his one year of high school, as
well quick classes in Virginia and lots of local practice. He entered the
elevator, remembering the directions he'd been given.
_"Fourth floor, turn right from the elevator, sixth door on the left.
Be there promptly at eight, please. I want to handle this before the offices
open. Goodbye."_
The woman's instructions had been terse, as had all her comments during
their phone conversation. Not hurried; just brief. _Succinct_ was the word.
John had said that she might have a problem with asking his offices for
help in finding her seventeen-year-old daughter, who'd been AWOL from home for
over three months.
Cade's tiny branch of the agency was barely known outside their own
wing of the third floor, so everyone who knew about them at all usually
assumed that they were the same kind of down-and-dirty spooks that populated
the top two floors of the building in downtown Kaiserslautern. They weren't.
At least, Cade wasn't, and he didn't think any of those he directly worked
with were, either.
When Cade had first joined John's extraction crews, he'd wondered why
the hell they'd located their primary offices so far from the East German
border, but that had begun to make sense to him quickly.
Nearby Ramstein Air Force Base could provide state of the art air
support and transportations and the blast-proof Kindsbach facility could track
communications and aircraft all over Europe. Add to that the best-equipped US
Army hospital in Europe only a few miles south at Landstuhl, a place that
received almost as many transient covert visitors as it received actual
patients.
He then began to wonder why they bothered to maintain separate offices
in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Bonn, since the E-teams were all part of a much
larger agency network, but experience had quickly disabused him of any notion
that the branches of the agency could or would work well together without
coercion.
The politics in the other offices ranged from petty backstabbing
efforts and manipulation to gain promotions to phenomenally deceptive and