Read Online Spy Who Read Latin: And Other Stories by Edward D. Hoch - Free Book Online Page B

he had hardly thought of the old war injury. It gave him no trouble, and he walked without a noticeable limp. It was only now, in retirement to a collective farm an hour’s drive from Moscow, that the ache and the limp had reoccurred. It was the life, his sturdy wife Lara insisted. His legs were made for walking on paved sidewalks, not trudging across newly plowed fields.
    As he neared the farmhouse, he was surprised to see a black government staff car pulled in off the road. In this collective, made up entirely of former government employees, one rarely was visited by the bureaucracy. He entered the kitchen door with just a bit of apprehension, to find Lara conversing with two men in overcoats who gave the impression of having just arrived.
    Taz knew one of them—Colonel Tunic, a grizzled old man who’d been his immediate superior during the Cold War days. The other, a younger official who carried himself with an air of newly acquired authority, was a stranger to him.
    “Comrade Taz!” Tunic greeted him, throwing out both arms in an affectionate bear hug. “You look well. Retirement must agree with you.”
    “Lara says farm work is bad on my legs. How are things back in Moscow?”
    “Good, good.” He gave a rueful smile, “Détente, you know.” Remembering the other man, he turned to introduce him. “Comrade Taz, this is Stepan Vronsky, a specialist in international matters.”
    The two men shook hands, and Taz wondered what Vronsky’s true function was. He wondered especially what had brought these men out here to see him. “You look cold,” he told them. “Take off your coats and have some vodka.”
    “I could never live in the country,” Stepan Vronsky said. “The wind is so cold!”
    Taz smiled. “One becomes used to it. Lara, bring us some glasses, will you?”
    When they were seated around the rough oak kitchen table, which Lara had thoughtfully covered with a piece of flowered oilcloth, Colonel Tunic said, “We miss you in Moscow. You retired too soon.”
    Taz merely shrugged. “Cipher experts of my sort have been replaced by machines. Diplomats and machines.”
    “Sometimes there is still need for one,” Vronsky said. Taz turned to study his face and saw only the pale reflection of the Russian winter with its sunless days.
    “We miss you,” Colonel Tunic repeated. “And now we need you. The government wishes you to come out of retirement for one final assignment to the west.”
    The words fell like thunder on Taz’s ears. He’d been expecting it, certainly, ever since he saw the long black car pulled up before his house. But to hear it now was still a shock. “What sort of assignment?” he asked quietly.
    “Some material must be taken to Switzerland. It’s in your line—microdots.”
    Taz snorted. “A diplomatic courier could get it through for you, as you well know.”
    “That’s only part of it. There’s something else.” Tunic shifted in his chair. “An old friend of yours is involved.”
    “Who would that be?”
    “Remember Jeffery Rand, the head of Britain’s Double-C?”
    “Of course.”
    Vronsky spoke again. “You should welcome an opportunity to confront an old enemy one more time.”
    “Rand is not my enemy,” Taz replied. “We were two professional men doing our jobs.”
    “Nevertheless, he is on the other side.”
    “Yes,” Taz admitted. “Just what do you have in mind?”
    “You are familiar with the Nobel Prize recipient, Kolia Komarov?”
    “Certainly.” Despite nominal press censorship, almost everyone in the Soviet Union must have been aware of the Komarov case. A powerful novelist in the tradition of Turgenev, his choice as the Nobel laureate last fall had stirred up all the old fires in Russian literary circles. Though Komarov had written harshly of past Soviet governments, the men in the Kremlin did not want another Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn case on their hands. They had allowed Komarov to leave Moscow to accept the award in Stockholm. In his