A Korean Tiger Read Online Free Page A

It was the ultimate act of desperation and a tip-off to his mental state. Nick repressed his faint grin.
    Hawk pointed the cigar at Nick like a pistol. "Then it happens. It begins. One of the Laurel cops smells something. Literally. And it stinks."
    Despite his vow, Nick could not resist. "The wife? Dead?"
    Hawk's grin stretched his wizened face into a death's head for a moment. "Go to the head of the class, son. But not stuffed into a closet or buried in the basement. Nothing as mundane as that. There was a
secret room
in Bennett's basement. The FBI found it, after the Laurel people called them in. I guess they had a hell of a time finding it, and if it hadn't been for the smell they might never have found it, but they did. Back of what used to be a coal bin. The neighbors say that Bennett was quite a do-it-yourself man. He did a good job on his wife, that's for sure. He used a hatchet."
    Hawk took some 8 X 10 glossy photos from his desk and scaled them at Nick. As the AXE agent caught them he murmured, "Secret room, eh? Now that's something you don't often find these days in this profession. I thought they were rather passe. Except in castles on the Rhine."
    Hawk, half snarling, came up with a reprimand from his own generation. "It ain't funny, McGee! If this thing turns out the way I think it's going to turn out — we're in trouble up to our ass. Just remember that Bennett was working for us, for AXE, at the last. We're going to be left holding the baby."
    Nick was studying the photo of the dead woman. She was fat and lay in a congealed web of black blood. The hatchet, which still lay beside her, had done nothing to improve her features. He doubted they had been much to begin with. But then neither had Raymond Lee Bennett, as Nick remembered him. He strove to visualize the man now and found it hard. Yet he must have seen Bennett a thousand times. Lurking in halls, working over a desk, at a water cooler, in the elevators. Under normal circumstances you just didn't notice the Bennetts of this world. Balding, skinny, a long horsey face ravaged by a terrible case of juvenile acne. Dull eyed. Shambling walk. The image of the man was coming back to Nick now. And a more unlikely candidate for spy, for Commie agent, for traitor, he could not imagine. As he remembered now, forcing his mind back, Bennett hadn't even appeared very bright. Certainly he had never advanced, never gotten anywhere in government service. Why would the Kremlin employ a man like that? Especially, why would they employ him and then never contact him? Never use him?
    Nick frowned at the dead fat woman and then looked at Hawk. "It doesn't make a goddamn bit of sense, sir. Something, or somebody, is way out of line. The more I remember about this Bennett the more impossible it is. I..."
    His boss was smiling at him. An odd smile. "There's one other thing I didn't tell you," Hawk said. "It slipped my mind."
    Nick knew it was a lie. It hadn't slipped Hawk's mind at all. He had been saving it for the last, this little tidbit, whatever it was. Hawk had a rather distorted sense of the dramatic at times.
    "Raymond Lee Bennett was something of a freak," Hawk said. "He wasn't very bright in school. He got lousy marks. He dropped out. And he never got anyplace here in Washington. But the FBI found an old retired professor, who used to teach Gestalt psychology at Columbia. He's almost ninety now, but he remembers Bennett from one of his classes. Bennett
was
a freak — he had total recall. A camera mind. And a recorder ear. Once he read, or heard, a thing he never forgot it! So every document he's seen, every damned word he's heard in Washington in the last thirty years is filed away in his freak brain like books. Thousands of books. All the Commies have to do is open the books and read!"
    Nick was still pondering that when Hawk said, "Come on. Get your hat. We're driving out to Laurel. I want you to see this secret room for yourself. What you learn may help you catch