Read Online Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 by Q Clearance (v2.0) - Free Book Online Page A

Geiger counter closing on a uranium pile. He had been
cultivating this woman for months, and now, he felt certain, she was about to
bear fruit.
                   "Ivy!" he said. "How good to
hear from you!"
                   "Yes, sir. I'm sorry to be bothering you
at work."
                   "Never a bother to hear from you, my
dear."
                   "I wonder if I could stop by and see you
for a minute tonight after work."
                   Before he said, "Of course, my
dear," Pym paused long enough to convey the impression that he was
consulting his crowded schedule. "Nothing wrong, I hope."
                   "Matter of fact ..."
                   "Jerome's all right?"
                   "For now. That's what I want to talk to
you about."
                   "Always glad to help."
                   "I know," Ivy said, "and I
appreciate it, too. And don't think I don't know I already owe you one big
favor, and I'm not a person lets her debts go unpaid."
                   "Helping is reward enough. What time will
you be by?"
                   "I get off work at six."
                   "Say six-thirty. See you then."
                   Pym hung up the phone and, clucking smugly,
leaned back in his chair to contemplate the possibilities. Perhaps it's true,
he thought: All good things do come to him who waits.
                   That credo had been one of his favorites for
the almost forty years he had served—quietly, diligently, assiduously
self-interestedly—as a Soviet spy in the United States.
                   Fyodor Michaelovitch Pinsky had been one of
the first chosen, first recruited, first trained and first sent. He didn't know
why. If he had been forced at gunpoint to guess, he would have guessed that one
of his primary-school teachers had detected an ear for languages in the child.
Nor did he care why he had been selected. He was, simply, pleased that while
scores of millions of his compatriots were being turned into dog food by Stalin
or Hitler—if one didn't get you, the other was bound to—he was learning how to
be an American in a big old dacha in Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea, where the
closest he came to armed combat was reading propaganda posters about the vile
and vicious Hun nailed to the wall of the cafe where he spent every one of his
few unsupervised moments.
                   Commerce didn't boom in the Soviet Union during the war: Nobody had any money, and
if someone came upon some money, he found there was nothing to buy with it. The
law of the marketplace was barter. Pinsky had one prized commodity, his
increasingly fluent English. With it he could read English-language newspapers
smuggled by a sturgeon fisherman across the Caspian from Bobol, in Iran , and this tool, according to the proprietor
of the cafe, could be used "to shove the light of truth up the dark
asshole of Mother Russia." The proprietor (not owner; nobody owned
anything) had opened the cafe under the pretense of serving the people of Astrakhan their midday meals, but his true ambition was to use it
as a conduit for acquiring foods other than potatoes and fish. So he kept a
flock of ducks, which he tended with loving care and cooked with Gallic panache
and shared with
                   Pinsky in return for Pinsky reading aloud to
him translations of the English-language newspapers.
                   From the proprietor Pinsky learned to
appreciate food, which, though he couldn't know it at the time, would become
his life's work. His superiors didn't discourage him, for they knew that
whatever employment he engaged in would be but the cover for his real life's
work.
                   When his trainers deemed him to be
sufficiently American to pass as an American (which turned out to be not quite
the case—some Americans accepted him as