Assignment — Angelina Read Online Free Page B

have refused, of course. But then McFee would have had to let you go. McFee said you wouldn't like this, because your speciality has been working on overseas assignments. Our outfit has somewhat different problems. K Section deals primarily with espionage and counter-efforts concerned with defeating your opposite numbers abroad. Our viewpoint is much wider. Our problems, necessarily, are not as clear-cut as those you have been accustomed to consider. You might call us troubleshooters on a general scale, Mr. Durell."
    "Odd balls," said the bald man. "Relax, Durell."
    There was an air of command in these two men that was immediately felt. Durell sat down. He lit a cigarette and waited. The white-haired man smiled. I'm Daniel Kincaid. This is John Wittington."
    Neither man offered to shake hands.
    Kincaid said: "Just to brief you a bit, you've been elected to a rather exclusive club. You may refer to us as the Special Bureau. Our staff is small and select. We are responsible to only two men, whom I shall not name. Mr. Wittington is second in command. You will probably never know our immediate superior, or the two men he reports to, but I can tell you we are associated with the National Planning Board and several other commissions that are not publicized. If you make any guesses about us, don't make them aloud, please."
    Wittington cleared his throat, rubbed his bald head, and grunted. "I told you, odd balls. We get the strange ones. We use the FBI, the Treasury men, your own people from State, and G-2. A kind of clearing house for off-beat problems affecting our national security. From inside as well as out. The Reds are our biggest problem, but not our only headache. We do anything, like spotting a town where gambling elements or crooked unions tend to undermine our democratic way of life if their illegal powers reach up too far." The bald man looked annoyed. 'Am I making a speech? I never can tell this without sounding like an orator on the Fourth of July."
    "I think I understand," Durell said.
    "We can collapse from weakness within as well as from enemy pressure on the outside. You people take care of the overt threats. We look into the others. Most of them do not constitute clear problems. We take a hint here and there and try to extrapolate what it may mean in terms of next year, or five or twenty years from now. Then we try to guide the matter the way it should go to insure our national safety. The first law of nature is to survive, but there is also the question of the conditions under which we survive. Are you still with me?"
    Durell nodded. "Yes."
    "You look troubled."
    "I never heard of you people before."
    "And you will forget us the moment this is over," Wittington snapped. "
If
you get the job. That depends. As I said, we sit on top of the other police agencies; we use their files and occasionally their men. For example, five years ago we correlated certain Foreign Service data and made some guesses and ran them through our machines." Wittington rubbed his bald head and grimaced. "I hate those mechanical monsters. Calculators, just gadgets without souls. We feed data to our beast, Lucy, and Lucy comes up with a prediction of what may happen. Five years ago, Lucy predicted atomic war in ten months, unless we did something about it. So we did it. And there was no war. Perhaps it proves nothing but the sound and fury in which we live today. I mean, Lucy might not have had proper data for an accurate prediction in the first place. But we took steps based on her forecast, and it worked out. She gave us another forecast recently that doesn't make much sense to those who have seen it. We're not sure what steps to take, if any. It's been decided we need more information to make a proper prediction; and you are the man to get that information for us. It depends, in part, upon your memory, Durell."
    "My memory?"
    "About Metzdorf."
    "I was there in 1945," Durell said. "I was a captain in G-2 then, working with Amgot and the War