BY THE FIRST LIGHT of the new day the airport at Tirana presented a grubby appearance from above. The patchwork runways had been lengthened to accommodate the regular jet nights from Phnompenh and Shanghai, but otherwise little had been done to improve facilities since the last time Father Howard had passed through. That had been so many years ago, and now he was going home—to Paris and then to London.
But first there was the stop at Tirana, a sleepy little city set among the Albanian hills. It was the capital of the country, but somehow from the airport it reminded him more of the Chinese villages he’d known so well.
He’d expected the ring of alert soldiers that surrounded the big jet as it coasted to a stop. Things were like that in Albania today. Watching them now with their carbines poised, Father Howard reflected on the vagaries of a political climate that could ally two such nations as little Albania and giant Communist China.
Presently a gloomy little man in a long leather coat boarded the aircraft and followed the stewardess quickly down the aisle to his seat. “Your passport, please,” he said in thickly accented English.
Father Howard looked up at him, trying to smile. “I’m traveling from Shanghai to Paris,” he said. “My passport is not valid in Albania.”
“I must ask you to come with me to the Administration Building,” the gloomy man said.
“But—”
“Only a formality.”
Father Howard glanced out again at the grim circle of soldiers. Then he sighed, shrugged slightly to his traveling companion, and followed the man in the leather coat down the aisle. The dampness of the Albanian weather cut through him as soon as they stepped outside. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“You were a missionary priest in China?” the man asked as they crossed the long stretch of patchwork asphalt in the direction of the Administration Building.
Father Howard avoided a shiny puddle. “A long time ago. Things have not been easy for us in recent years.”
The man grunted and kept walking. It was then that Father Howard happened to glance back at the waiting plane and saw his battered old carpetbags being lifted from the luggage compartment. “You’re taking my baggage!” he gasped, and turned to retrace his steps.
He was striding purposefully toward the big jet when the two bullets hit him in the back of the head, and then he knew no more…
The meeting which had brought Rand to the divided city of Berlin was one of the strangest in his career as head of Concealed Communications. He’d hardly believed the first messages when they’d been decoded, and even now as he crossed into East Berlin in an unmarked sedan, he knew he might be heading into a well-baited trap.
It was April in the city, and the misty rains of springtime sent a shiver down his spine. He left the car not far past the checkpoint and went the rest of the way on foot, as instructed.
Finally he reached the corner and stopped to light one of his American cigarettes, wondering vaguely if the sudden pale circle of sun meant that the rain was nearly ended. Berlin had always seemed damper than London to Rand, though he knew it was not the case. Perhaps it was only the mood of the place, with its great gray wall splitting the face of the city’s daily existence.
“Mr. Rand, please?” a young boy asked at his elbow. “Follow me, sir.”
Rand followed without a word as the tassel-haired youth led him into a shabby structure halfway down the next block. It was a store of sorts, selling tobacco and magazines, in a dank building that still bore visible scars of a war a generation past. The boy motioned to a back room and departed.
Rand stepped carefully through the doorway, trying to still the throbbing of his heart. There was only one man in the room, seated at a low table facing him. “Ah! And you would be Mr. Rand!”
“Taz?” Rand seated himself and studied the face of the man who had asked to meet him here. It was a face that British Intelligence would once have paid a fortune to see, the face of a Russian named Taz who headed up the Moscow equivalent of London’s Department of Concealed Communications.
It was a thin face, with a pointed jaw and deep blue eyes, and Rand judged the man to be about his own age—in his early forties, perhaps a bit older. He had thin smooth fingers to match the face, and graying hair that swept back from his forehead. When he spoke, his English was accented but quite intelligible.
“I had never thought we would some day meet, Mr. Rand.”
“Nor I. You’ve given me many sleepless nights.”
“I have tried,” Taz admitted with a slight smile. “We have great admiration for the Double-C Man.”
“I had trouble getting here,” he told the Russian, because it was true. “They were certain your message was a trap of some sort.”
“And yet you came?” Taz asked, his blue eyes flashing in the room’s dim light. Rand could imagine the man bent over a cryptogram, studying frequency tables or captured code books.
“I came. I told them I could be killed or kidnaped on the streets of London, if that was what you wanted.”
Taz nodded. “You are a wise man—the man I expected you to be. I too had difficulties. There are many in the Kremlin who oppose this meeting.”
“And just what is the reason for it?” Rand asked.
“Our interests lie along parallel lines.”
“In what way?”
“You know of Father Howard, the English missionary priest who was killed last week in Tirana?”
Rand knew. “He was returning to England after twenty years in China. They took him off the plane and murdered him.”
Taz nodded slightly. “Albania is a close ally of China. Someone in Peking ordered his murder after he’d left the country.”
Rand decided he could admit to a little knowledge. “The word is he was carrying an important document.”
The blue eyes flashed again. “He was carrying a report he had prepared on the inner workings of China’s Communist Party hierarchy. It is said to outline the current power struggle and to give an indication of which leaders will probably emerge triumphant. It also contains a great deal on the future course of Sino-Soviet relations, as well as some information of a highly personal nature concerning certain key Chinese leaders.”
Rand ground out his cigarette. “You know a great deal. That report would have made interesting reading.”
“It still could,” Taz said. He picked up a pencil and tapped it nervously against the table. “They removed Father Howard’s luggage from the plane, but they did not find the report. You see, he had a traveling companion aboard that jet—a former news correspondent named Kane Mander.”
Rand nodded. “And Mander landed in Paris with the report intact. We’ve heard rumors that a man of that name has been offering it for sale.”
“Exactly.” Taz cleared his throat. “You would be willing to act with us against the common Chinese enemy?”
“That would be a matter for London to decide.”
“There is no need for a policy decision,” Taz insisted. “We would be willing to share the contents of the report with your government.”
“Why do you need me?” Rand asked. “Why can’t you just contact Mander and buy it from him?”
“The report was dictated to Father Howard by a highly placed government official shortly before his execution on charges of deviation from party policy. The priest wrote it all down—in Latin.”
Rand thought about that for a moment. “Interesting, but I still don’t see why you need me.”
“The report is for sale in Paris, before the week’s end. My government is more than willing to purchase it, but my assignment is to make certain we get the true report and not twenty or thirty pages of Latin prayers.” He sighed a little. “And that is the problem. Latin is not taught in Russian schools. There is no one in my department who can read it.”
“You must have doctors and lawyers in the government who understand the language.”
The Russian shook his head. “Fewer than you’d think, and no one I could trust.” He smiled lightly. “These days it would be difficult to find a priest who could read it. Father Howard’s skill with the language was somewhat remarkable.”
“So you want me to furnish an agent who can read Latin?”
“Exactly.”
“You’d trust the British before your own people?”
“I would trust you, since it would be to your government’s advantage to have a copy of the report.” He paused and began tapping the pencil again. “The question is, do you have an agent you could trust?”
“I think so,” Rand said. He was remembering a young man named Harry Truce. “Yes.”
“Could you have him in Paris the day after tomorrow? Saturday?”
“Yes,” Rand said. At this point he had nothing to lose and possibly a great deal to gain.
Taz smiled and held out his hand. “Then we are partners?”
“Of a sort,” Rand agreed. “For the present.”
He found to his surprise that he liked the man, and he wondered if he could trust him as well.
Harry Truce had been educated at the best universities to enter the diplomatic corps. It was an occupation his father and grandfather had followed before him, and it was an honorable one. He’d been born of an English father and an Irish mother, brought up partly in London and partly in an unlikely area of Ireland called Macgillycuddy’s Reeks.
Rand never learned at what juncture in Truce’s career the diplomatic service had become subordinated to intelligence work, but he did know that young Truce had shown special skills on a number of recent assignments. He was handsome, unmarried, still in his late twenties, with a vigor that Rand secretly admired. And best of all, he could read Latin.
“It would be a privilege to work with Concealed Communications,” he told Rand the following morning back in London.
Rand smiled and offered one of his American cigarettes. “Glad to have you aboard, as they say. We need you to fly to Paris and read some Latin. Can you do it?”
“Is that all?”
Rand stared hard at the curl of smoke from his own cigarette. “We’ll be working with the Russians,” he said quietly. “It may work out and it may not. In any event, we have to be on our toes every minute.” He ran quickly over the information Taz had given him in Berlin.
“You believe what he told you?” Harry Truce asked. “About not having anybody in Russia who could read Latin?”
“Not entirely. But I’ll play along with him, just to see what he’s up to.” Rand stood up. “Let’s go, Harry. We leave for Paris tonight.”
Paris was a sea of glittering April lights as their plane came in for a landing. It was the sort of warm spring night that brought out the lovers along the Champs Elysées, the sort that made Rand forget the dampness of London and Berlin. They had a room at a medium-priced tourist hotel just across the Seine from the Palais de Justice, and it was still a little before ten when they reached it.
Rand phoned the telephone number that Taz had given him, and heard an unfamiliar male voice say, “Kane Mander is staying at number 17, Rue de Varenne. He is expecting you at noon tomorrow.”
“What about the money?” Rand asked. “He’s not likely to give up anything for free.”
“You will be contacted tonight,” the voice said, and hung up. Rand sighed and reached for a cigarette.
“What do you think?” Harry Truce asked.
“I don’t know,” Rand admitted. He began to pace the floor, trying to complete in his mind a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. He was trusting a Russian, doing a job for him, when every instinct cried out against such trust. Surely Taz would have got the report first and then worried about reading it. Surely the translating of it was a minor problem at best. And Father Howard’s companion would have no reason for substituting a fake report. “Harry—”
“What?”
“Take a ride over to 17 Rue de Varenne. It’s not far from here. See if there’s a Kane Mander staying there.”
“Right.”
“But be careful. Don’t make contact with him directly. I’ll be waiting for you here, down in the bar.”
It was just after midnight when Harry Truce returned. Rand had passed the time lingering over two weak drinks served by an indifferent bartender in the dimly lit lounge, and he was just about to go upstairs to bed when Harry walked through the swinging doors. His left arm was around the waist of a smartly dressed young lady with shoulder-length blonde hair. He was smiling like a college boy on a big date.
The girl’s name was Naomi Smith, and she liked to laugh a lot. Rand waited till she went off to the Ladies’ Room before fixing Harry with an icy stare. “Where’d you pick her up?”
“I checked out that address. There’s a Kane Mander staying on the top floor. But he seemed to be out.”
“And the girl?”
Harry Truce smiled slightly. “I didn’t think you’d mind. She got there just ahead of me, and she was asking questions about Mander.”
Rand grunted. It might mean anything. “Did you ask her about it?”
“I was working up to it.”
Naomi Smith came back then, threading her way between tables and sitting down with a bit of a laugh. “Hi! Back again!”
Rand offered a cigarette. “You’re American, aren’t you?”
“Does it show?”
“Just a little. Do you work in Paris?”
“Here and in London. I’m the European representative of Cage Publications in New York. We have a biweekly news magazine and a chain of newspapers through the midwest. I’m about all they can afford in the way of a foreign correspondent. But Paris is still a great place to work—memories of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, all that.”
“It was a long time ago, Miss Smith. There was a war in between.”
“Call me Naomi—everyone does. There are so many Smiths, but not many Naomis outside of the Bible.” She paused to light another cigarette. “I know there was a war, and now there are all sorts of interesting people around. Did you know that Hemingway covered the liberation of Paris in 1944? I think his generation is still here in spirit.”
Rand sipped his drink. There was no point in fencing any longer. “Would one of those interesting people be Kane Mander?”
She looked blank, as if she’d never head the name. “I really don’t know.”
“You were looking for his apartment.”
The big eyes widened further. “Well, I know that, but I haven’t been able to meet him yet.” Another little laugh, as she brushed a vagrant strand of hair from her eyes. “But that’s business and I never talk business this late at night.”
A sleepy bellboy appeared with a message for Rand. There was a phone call for him in the lobby. He excused himself and went to answer it. It was no real surprise to hear the voice of Taz on the other end.
“You have been out of your room, Mr. Rand.”
“Doing a little sightseeing.”
“At night? In the bar with Mr. Truce and a young lady?”
Rand smiled slightly. “You don’t miss much.”
“We have the money for you. For tomorrow.”
“Where is it?”
“There is a white envelope near your left hand at this moment. In it is a quantity of Swiss banknotes, enough to meet Mander’s asking price. Close the deal at noon and return to your hotel room with the report. I will get in touch with you there.”
“All right,” Rand said. He hung up and pocketed the white envelope without opening it. He knew one of Taz’s men must be close at hand, watching.
One more quick drink and they were seeing Naomi Smith into a taxi. But Harry was in no mood for sleep when they returned to the room. “She’s quite a girl, isn’t she? Think she could be a Chinese agent?”
Rand shook his head. “Her eyes don’t slant.”
“No, really! Why else would she be looking for Mander?”
“She’s heard about the report and wants to buy it for her magazine.”
Rand was busy counting the Swiss banknotes. They came to almost £35,000—about $100,000. It was a great deal of money for Taz to entrust to him.
Saturday was sunny, and warmer than the previous day. When they reached the address on the Rue de Varenne, the place seemed quiet and respectable, with only a few children playing a sidewalk game in front. The time was exactly noon when they walked through the doorway of Kane Mander’s apartment.
He was a strange-looking man, with a completely bald head and tiny eyes barely visible beneath layers of fat. His English was poor, and he suggested at the outset that they converse in French. “Whom do you represent?” he asked.
Rand patted the thick envelope of banknotes. “A combine of interested buyers.”
“I will not sell to the Russians. The Communists were responsible for Father Howard’s death.”
“We’re sorry about Father Howard,” Rand told the bald man. “It must have been hard on you.”
“I watched them take him off the plane. I think I knew they were after the report, and he must have, too. It was like a silent movie, because our propellers were still running and I couldn’t even hear the sound of the shots. I just saw him topple, and then they carried him away.”
Rand gestured toward Harry Truce. “This man will inspect the report. He reads Latin.”
“You haven’t yet told me whom you represent.”
Rand handed over some routine credentials. “British Intelligence. To be exact, the Department of Concealed Communications.”
He was beginning to understand at least a part of Taz’s scheming. The man would not have dealt with a Russian. Still, he felt he was being loyal to Father Howard’s memory. The report would be delivered where it would do the most good.
“All right,” Kane Mander decided. “And the money?”
Rand handed it over. “You didn’t mention an amount.”
“I told them on the telephone—is it all here?”
“You can count it while my friend reads the report.”
Mander nodded his bald head and disappeared into the bathroom. He returned almost at once with a sheaf of handwritten pages. Rand guessed there must be 25 or 30 in all, and he could see only that the unfamiliar words had been written in a strong, priestly hand.
“There’s a lot to it,” Harry said with a frown.
“Just skim through it. Make sure of what we’re getting.”
Mander finished his moneycounting first. “The amount is correct,” he announced, slapping down the last of the banknotes.
“You’ll be leaving Paris now?”
“After I get some sleep. In a day or so.”
Harry Truce finished skimming the last of the sheets. “It’s hard to tell, but it looks all right to me. They’re certainly not Latin prayers.”
“Let’s go,” Rand decided. There was nothing more to be accomplished here. “It was a pleasure dealing with you, Mr. Mander.”
“My pleasure, certainly. And Father Howard would have been pleased.”
“You going to use the money for a fancy gravestone?” Rand asked.
Mander reddened slightly. “He was my friend. He would have wanted it this way.”
“Sure. Of course.”
In another moment they were back on the quiet street.
“That was easy,” Harry said.
“Easy,” Rand agreed.
Back at the hotel they waited for the Russian’s call. It came in less than an hour. “You have it, Mr. Rand?”
“I have it.”
“Authentic?”
“Authentic. Verified.”
“I assume you will copy it before delivering the original to me.”
Rand glanced over at the desk where Harry had set up a miniature camera and was already photographing the pages. “Naturally. When do I deliver the original?”
“I cannot come there myself in daylight. A Chinese agent arrived in Paris two days ago, and he may be watching your hotel.” Taz hesitated and then said, “Tonight, just after dark. Be at the Eiffel Tower when they turn on the lights. Then begin walking due south until I stop you.”
“All right,” Rand said, and hung up. He hoped the phone was safe.
“We all set?” Harry asked.
“I am. How about you?” Rand walked over to the table and glanced down at the sheet of paper positioned under the camera. The Latin script covered the page from top to bottom, with the number 23 at the top right corner in a slightly darker ink. “How many more pages?”
“There are twenty-seven pages altogether. I’m almost finished.”
“Good. We’ll send the film to London by courier. Give it to me when you finish.” He walked over to the window and stared down at the river. It was muddy and winding, like the Thames. Like all rivers.
“When do we go back?” Harry asked.
“Tonight, on the late flight. But I don’t want to take a chance carrying this film around. I’ll pass it to our man at the Embassy and then give the original to Taz. You get us some plane tickets and meet me at the airport.”
Harry Truce grunted. “There’s something I want to do first.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s just an idea I have. I’d like to check it out.”
“They don’t pay us to be heroes,” Rand reminded him. “Just to do a job. Pick up the tickets and meet me at the airport.”
After Harry left, Rand checked his suitcase and removed the flat automatic pistol which he always carried in an inner compartment. He didn’t particularly like the weight of it under his arm, but the meeting with Taz presented too many unanswered questions.
The Russian had wanted someone who could read Latin. He’d obviously wanted the deal handled by the British rather than the Russians. Did he want something else, too? Rand was inclined to trust him, but he took the gun anyway.
Back in the sunshine, walking across the nearly deserted Rue de la Cité, where the rear view of Notre Dame Cathedral was almost as spectacular as the front, he decided to deliver the film to the courier before he did anything else. It took him only ten minutes to complete that mission, and as he left the drop point near the Embassy, he heard someone call his name. “Mr. Rand!”
He turned and saw a breathless Naomi Smith running down the sidewalk toward him. “Miss Smith. How are you today?”
“Not very good,” she admitted. “What are you and Harry trying to pull with Kane Mander?”
“Do we have to be pulling anything?”
“My boss talked to Mander by trans-Atlantic phone three days ago. He agreed to see me and listen to my offer before doing anything with the report. I just reached him and he told me he’d sold it to you.”
Rand smiled slightly. “We weren’t completely honest with each other last evening, were we?”
“Mr. Rand, we’re willing to go as high as fifty thousand dollars for first publication rights to Father Howard’s report.”
“It’s not mine to sell, Miss Smith.”
“Could we talk to your superiors?”
“I’m sorry. It would do no good.”
She seemed almost ready to stamp her foot in frustration. “This could cost me my job!”
“There’s nothing I can do,” he said, and left her standing alone on the sidewalk.
He’d walked another few blocks when he saw the crowd in the street. It was the direction Naomi Smith had come from—back toward the apartment on the Rue de Varenne. Rand would have passed by without a second thought except that something drew him to the spot.
He pushed through the crowd, past the little ambulance with its flashing light, and saw the body on the pavement. It was Harry Truce.
“What happened?” he asked a bystander.
“Accident—hit and run.”
“Is he dead?”
The Frenchman nodded. “He’s dead. These Englishmen never look the right way when they’re crossing.”
“I saw the whole thing,” a woman said. She was fat and sweating. “He ran right at the car and it hit him.”
Rand’s mouth was very dry. “Was there a woman driving?”
The fat woman bumped against him. “What does that mean? You think only women run down pedestrians in the street? You Englishmen are all alike, all—”
He walked away, pushing back through the crowd, avoiding the uniformed policeman who was taking statements. There was nothing he could do for Harry Truce. Perhaps he had done too much already.
It was a dirty business at best, and the Paris assignment with Taz was no different from all the rest of it. The Russian had somehow double-crossed him, in a manner he still did not understand, and now Harry Truce was dead. But the original of Father Howard’s report was still in his breast pocket. They hadn’t got it from Harry, if that was what they’d been after.
He took a taxi to the Palais de Chaillot, across the river from the Eiffel Tower, and found a public restroom. He locked himself in the little cubicle and examined the original report once more. If there was any secret communication in it, the Latin words effectively screened it. He looked through the 27 pages one at a time, finding nothing. And yet there was something that bothered him, something not quite right.
In a few hours the report would be in Taz’s hands. Would he have killed Harry just to get it a little bit sooner? Or had Harry died because of some discovery he’d made about the whole affair and Taz’s part in it?
He wondered what Harry would have done with the report if the choice had been his. Give it to Taz as promised? More likely, he’d have let Naomi Smith use it for her magazine. Sometimes wars really were lost by a general’s hangover, or won by the smile of a pretty girl.
Rand barely glanced at the Eiffel Tower as he crossed the bridge and walked among the strollers and lovers and tourists with their cameras. Already it was dusk, and soon the lights would come on. Taz would be waiting—to kill him too?
Rand felt the gun heavy beneath his arm. No one could live on trust forever, not Rand or the world. He would have to shoot first, if Taz made the slightest suspicious move.
Presently he saw the man, sitting on one of the benches in a shabby workingman’s costume. The Russian pretended not to notice him as Rand walked on past, waiting for the spotlights to strike out at the Tower when darkness fell. Finally the lights came on. Rand turned to retrace his steps, and saw the Russian rise to greet him.
He was twenty feet away when Taz’s hand emerged from his pocket, holding a small pistol that was almost invisible in the gloom. Rand dropped to the pavement, clawing at his own weapon. But then in an instant he saw the third figure behind him. It was Kane Mander, and he too had a gun.
Taz shouted something in Russian as Mander fired two wild shots. Then Rand rolled over, prayed he was making the right choice, and shot Kane Mander through the forehead.
They held their final meeting in a private room at Orly Airport, just before midnight that evening. It was very different from the hour they’d spent in Berlin together. Taz and his party were departing for East Berlin, while Rand was on his way back to London. The report of Father Howard had already changed hands.
“Perhaps you saved my life,” Taz said.
“He was blinded by the lights,” Rand pointed out. “It gave me a split second to decide.”
“But how did you know it was Kane Mander who killed your friend, and not me?”
Rand leaned back in his chair, tired of it all, wondering what awaited him back in London. There’d be formalities with the Paris police, reports to be completed. “It wasn’t Kane Mander, that’s the point. It was the Red Chinese agent who arrived a few days ago. The real Mander is probably at the bottom of the Seine.”
“But how did you know?”
“The same way Harry Truce knew, except that I was a bit slower catching on. When we met the supposed Kane Mander, he described the killing of Father Howard and mentioned the noise of the plane’s propellers. But the plane was a jet, and a jet has no propellers—which he certainly would have known if he’d made the trip with Father Howard. If he didn’t make the trip, then he wasn’t the real Kane Mander—simple as that.
“The girl Naomi Smith gave me a bit of verification when she said her publisher had phoned Mander, that he’d agreed to see her and listen to her offer before closing a deal with anyone else. Again this appeared to be the action of an impersonator, a false Kane Mander.”
“But why sell you the report if he was a Chinese agent?” Taz argued.
“Two reasons—for the money, mainly, but also to have a try at killing us both. He must have had someone on my tail all day, waiting for me to make contact with you. If we could both be killed, and it could look as if we had shot each other—”
“He knew we were working together?”
“He knew, or guessed. Don’t they always suspect you Russians of such things with the West?”
“But the report was truly valuable—” Taz was still puzzled.
“Not in the form he supplied it to me today. We received Father Howard’s fifteen-page introduction and twelve-page conclusion. The meat of the report, running to thirty-five more pages, was removed by the false Mander before he delivered it. Harry Truce only skimmed through it, and failed to realize that such a large chunk was missing. But there was a clue to it—the clue that must have sent Harry to his death.”
“What clue?”
“The page numbers were in a darker ink, indicating they were written at a different time from the text, and they were in Arabic numerals—I remember seeing the number 23 while Harry was photographing the pages. Would Father Howard have numbered a Latin manuscript in Arabic numerals, in other than Roman numerals? Possible, but unlikely. Either the original manuscript was unnumbered, or else the Chinese agent merely cut off the tops of the pages and renumbered them. If the manuscript pages were renumbered, the implication was that something had been removed. Harry must have thought of that, along with Mander’s mistake about the plane’s propellers, and gone back to confront him—or to search for the missing pages.”
“And was killed.”
Rand nodded. “And was killed. He saw the man who called himself Mander leaving in a car and tried to stop him. He was run down for his trouble. I knew the accident took place near the apartment, but I didn’t connect Mander with it till I saw him at the Tower tonight.”
“Surely our people in Moscow and London would have discovered the missing pages of manuscript.”
“Yes, and accused each other of stealing them. Neither of us would have been alive to say differently.”
Taz’s voice was barely a whisper. Overhead they could hear the roar of an incoming jet. “It is my turn to play detective. How did you know there were thirty-five missing pages?”
“I went back to Mander’s apartment tonight and found them hidden under the rug.”
“I must have them,” said Taz.
Rand took a thick envelope from his pocket. “They’re yours. I’ve already photographed them.”
The Russian smiled slightly. “Thank you.” Then, “Did you really think I would have killed you tonight?”
“For a moment I wasn’t sure,” Rand admitted. “You surely wanted more than just a spy who could read Latin. You must have people in Moscow—”
“I wanted more.”
“Me?”
Taz eyed him for a moment. “But not dead. Alive—as a defector. I was to offer you a great deal of money.”
“You didn’t mention it earlier.”
“No. I realized from the moment I saw you that you were a different sort of man.”
“Aren’t we both?” Rand got to his feet. “I have a plane to catch.”
Taz nodded. “What about the girl?”
“I’ll give her a story—something with lots of cloaks and daggers.”
“But not the truth?”
“There are so many truths.” Rand said. “We can share one of them with her—the one about a brave and foolish young man named Harry Truce.”
Rand walked with Taz to the door, shook hands quickly, and hurried toward his plane. He did not look back.