First he looked at Helm. The Texan had worked for him for over a decade.
Completely reliable he was strong both physically and mentally and would
follow orders without question or qualms. Von Schiller had come to rely
on him. He could send him anywhere in the world, from Zaire to
Queensland, from the Arctic Circle to the steaming equatorial forests,
and Helm would get the job done with the minimum of fuss and with very
few unpleasant consequences. He was ruthless but discreet, and like a
good hunting dog he knew his master.
From Helm he looked at the woman. butte Kemper was his private
secretary. She ordered and directed the details of his life, from his
food to his block, from his medicine to his social calendar, No man or
woman was ever received into his presence without her prior arrangement.
She was also his communications expert. The mass of electronic equipment
that occupied one wall of the hut was her preserve. He was able to find
her way through the ether with the- infallible instinct of a homing
pigeon. From the archaic art of the keyboard and Morse code 'to burst
transmissions and random switching he had never known another person,
male or female, who could match her wizardry. She was at that perfect
age for a woman, forty, slim and blonde, with slanting green eyes over
high cheekbones, resembling the young Dietrich.
Von Schiller's own wife, Ingemar, had been an invalid for the last
twenty years, and Utte Kemper had stepped into the void she had left in
his life. Yet she was more than either secretary or wife to him.
When he had first met Utte, she had been holding a very senior position
in the technical section of the German national telecommunications
network, and moonlighting as a pornographic actress - not for the money
but for love of the job. Copies of the videos she had made at that time
were amongst von Schiller's most precious possessions, after his
collection of Egyptian antiquities. Like Helm, she had no qualms. There
was nothing she would not do to him, or allow him to do to her, to
fulfill his most bizarre fantasies. When he watched her videos and she
did some of these things to him, she was the only woman who could still
bring him to orgasm. Yet even this happened less frequently with every
month that passed, and each time the spasms of sexual release she could
evoke from his aging body were less intense.
Utte had her recording equipment set up before her on the table. It was
part of her multifarious duties to keep, accurate and complete records
of every meeting and conversation. Then von Schiller looked past these
two trusted employees to the two other men standing at the table.
Colonel Nogo he had met for the first time that morning, as he stepped
down from the Jet Ranger helicopter that had flown them down from Addis
Ababa to the base camp here on the summit of the escarpment of the Nile
gorge. He knew very little about him, except that Helm had selected him,
and was so far satisfied with his performance. Von Schiller himself was
not equally impressed. There had already been some bungling. Nogo had
allowed Quenton Harper and the Egyptian woman to slip through his
clutches. After a lifetime of operating in Africa, von Schiller placed
little trust or store in blacks and preferred to work with Europeans.
However, he realized that for the time being Nogo's services were
indispensable.
