Assignment — Angelina Read Online Free

phone call from London. She goes to Paris tomorrow. Covering fashions, of all things." Durell tried to keep his voice empty of his irritation. "She won't be back for another month."
    "Well, you come have dinner with the twins, hear?"
    "I don't know where I'll be," Durell said. "Ill make it if I can, of course. And thanks."
    He left his office and walked down the quiet corridor to the elevator. No. 20 Annapolis Street was a graystone building in a residential section of Washington, with nothing about it to indicate it was headquarters for K Section of the Central Intelligence Agency of the State Department. Downstairs were the front offices of a commercial concern that actually procured small-part supplies — nuts, bolts, machine-screws and small optical instruments — for the armed forces. The elevator was the only approach through the steel doors to the upper floors. The place had become home to Durell in the last three years, and he knew this attitude was a mistake. An espionage agent has no home, he reminded himself, and no life he can call his own. That was the basic problem between Deirdre and himself. Scowling, he lit a cigarette in the elevator on his way up to Dickinson McFee's office.
    Durell was a tall man in his thirties, with thick black hair, a small, trim mustache and dark blue eyes that reflected the quickness of his Cajun temper. He was powerfully built under his conservative gray summer suit, and he moved with deceptive ease and grace. His fingers were long and slender, adept with a gun, knife, or a hand in a poker game. He had been brought up by his Grandfather Jonathan, one of the last of the old Mississippi gamblers. The old man had worked the side-wheelers from St. Louis to New Orleans, and Durell's boyhood had been spent in the hot, green silences of the bayous around Peche Rouge in the delta country. His accent no longer betrayed him, thanks to his years at Yale and the war and his tours with G-2, the old OSS, and more recently, the CIA. His work was dangerous, and he was a dangerous man. Caution was as much a part of him as breathing. He was objective, even about Deirdre, since the difference between the living and the dead in his business was often the difference between a cool objectivity and a moment's emotional carelessness.
    He could conceive of no other future for himself than doing the work he had been trained to do and wanted to do. But the orders in his pocket removed him, without warning or thanks, from the silent war he had been fighting. An ugly war, without bugles, fought in the dark alleys of all the corners of the world. Fought relentlessly, without mercy, where death came with a knife or a sniper's bullet, or the strangling agony of a swift garotte.
* * *
    Sam Durell walked past the communications room and heard the regular clacking of the teletypes and the murmur of high-frequency radios; then the analysis and synthesis rooms, where electronic computers winked and hummed and glowed. Finally he entered an outer office with walls lined with charts and filing cabinets and from there he went into General Dickinson McFee's office.
    There were no windows. An air conditioner worked quietly; the venting grate was high in the wall. The small, trim gray man sat behind his desk, waiting for him.
    "Sit down, Sam, and let's not be formal. And we won't say good-by, either. Your orders are strictly for temporary duty."
    "Where am I going?" Durell asked.
    "You know better than to ask. Sit down, will you? You may keep smoking, if you like." The little general hated cigarettes, and it was an indication that he, too, was perturbed by Durell's sudden assignment away from K Section. "You can read your orders any time now."
    "I haven't opened them yet."
    "Read them here and then burn them."
    It was an order. Durell nodded and slit the envelope and looked at the typewritten lines. He felt puzzled.
    McFee said: "You'report to the Waggonner Building."
    "You knew that much, sir?"
    "And that's all I know,