1967 - Have This One on Me Read Online Free Page B

vaguely around. ‘Where do you keep your tea things?’
    Mala gripped the arms of her chair.
    ‘Will you please go! I don’t want you here! I won’t help you! Please go!’
    ‘Now, don’t be silly,’ Worthington said. He removed his spectacles and carefully put them in his breast pocket. ‘If they catch me, they will catch you. Let’s have some tea.’
    He went into the kitchenette and Mala heard him put on the kettle. She looked desperately around the room as if for a means of escape. She wanted to run out of the apartment, but where could she run to? She now bitterly regretted listening to Dorey’s agent, with his smooth talk of patriotism, her duty and the money she would make. Up to this moment, she hadn’t realised to what she had committed herself. Now, all the ghastly stories she had heard of what happened to spies when they were caught, crowded into her mind. Suppose she called the police? Would they be lenient with her for betraying Worthington? She knew they wouldn’t be. She imagined their hot, cruel hands on her body. She thought of the outrageous things they would do to make her talk. Even if she told them everything she knew - and it wasn’t much - they would still go on and on, sure she was holding something back.
    Worthington came out of the kitchenette, carrying a pot of tea.
    ‘When I have bleached my hair,’ he said, setting the teapot down on the table, ‘I want you to take photographs of me. I have a camera with me. I need a photo for my passport.’ He went back to the kitchenette and returned with cups and saucers. ‘Then I will ask you to go to an address I will give you.’ He began setting out the cups and saucers. ‘The man there will put the photo on my passport. He is an expert. Once all that is done, then I can go. They don’t know I still have a British passport. With my changed appearance, I should be able to get out as a tourist.’ He lifted the lid of the teapot and stared at the tea. ‘I do miss China tea,’ he said and sighed. He replaced the lid, ‘Do you take milk?’
    Mala stared at him, shrinking back in her chair. She had to bite her knuckles to stop herself screaming.
     
    * * *
     
    Mike O’Brien arrived in Prague by car at nine o’clock p.m.
    He had flown by air taxi to Bumberg, picked up a car and had driven fast to Prague.
    O’Brien, young, sandy haired, flat faced with freckles and with ice-grey eyes was O’Halloran’s hatchet man. During the three years he had worked for O’Halloran, he had been called upon to execute four agents who were on the point of defecting.
    These executions were now routine to him. He had no compunction about taking human life. Even his first killing had left him unmoved. To him. it was merely a job to be done: a ring on the door bell, the silenced gun, the squeeze of the trigger. He had decided from the start that a head shot was safest. With a .45 slug, a man’s brain would be immediately shattered.
    He had studied a street map of the City. He had no trouble in finding Worthington’s apartment. He parked his car, slid out, slammed the door shut and walked briskly into the apartment block. As he ascended the stairs, he touched the gun hidden, in his pocket. With any luck, he told himself, he would be back in Nuremberg by midnight. He would spend the night there, then fly back to Paris.
    He reached Worthington’s floor and before he rang the bell, he snicked back the safety catch on his gun. He made sure that it would slide out of his pocket, then he dug his thumb into the bell push.
    There was a brief pause, then he heard footsteps and the door swung open.
    A giant of a man confronted him. This man had silver-coloured hair, cut close, a square shaped face, high cheek bones and flat green eyes.
    O’Brien felt a shock run through him as he recognised Malik. He hadn’t met him before, but he had seen his unmistakable photograph in the dossier the C.I.A. had of him.
    O’Brien looked beyond Malik. Three men, two of them