Krysalis: Krysalis Read Online Free Page A

dazzling speed, and Kleist flinched. But Barzel held only a photograph. When Kleist looked down at the image, his face turned white.
    “Sit down.”
    Kleist hesitated.
    Barzel shouted,
“Sit down!”
    Kleist obeyed, very slowly. “Please … my housekeeper, you’ll wake her….”
    “To hell with your … your
servant!
You forget, in the Democratic Republic there aren’t many servants.” Barzel poured acid into his voice. “Your sister Ilsa, for example.” He jiggled the photograph. “She does all her own housework. Cooks for the kids. And for Walther, that layabout husband of hers.”
    He saw with satisfaction that Kleist could not take his eyes off the photo, which showed a blonde woman, her face lined and unremarkable, standing beside a man a full head shorter than herself, with her hands restingon the shoulders of a small boy. The man was holding a baby.
    “The hospital has given her a raise.” Barzel flipped the photo over so that he too could look at it. “They are considering taking a bigger apartment. Four rooms instead of three, think of that!” He let his eyes roam around Kleist’s richly furnished living room. “You no longer have a wife, but you have money. This house. Reflect, Gerhard; those are things that can
change.”
    “I’m a naturalized citizen. No one can throw me out of England.”
    “Naturalized, yes … on the strength of Institute 631′s forgeries. A phone call, that’s all it takes.”
    “You wouldn’t risk that. I’ve run too many of your people.”
    Barzel looked into Kleist’s eyes. They belied his confident words. “My orders are to procure Krysalis forthwith,” Barzel said. “For that, I am both authorized and prepared to make
any
sacrifice.”
    “Why can’t you just burgle the house, steal this Krysalis thing, and have done with it?”
    Kleist’s voice had become a bleat and Barzel, hearing it, felt hope stir. “Because we can’t risk leaving the slightest trace, that’s why. When the General Secretary leaves Moscow to go to Vancouver he wants Krysalis in his pocket, but no, repeat
no,
fingerprints on it.”
    “And if Anna has never seen her husband open the safe, so that there’s nothing for me to discover even under hypnosis?”
    “Then you’ll have failed.” Something clawed at Barzel’s guts as he spoke those words. “But at least you’ll have tried.”
    “Suppose I do get the combination out of the wife,which is by no means certain, let me tell you, and the safe turns out to be empty?”
    Barzel sensed that his host’s breathing was slowing, calming. Yes, he was hearing a new note in Kleist’s voice. Interest. Attentiveness. Why? Could it be that Kleist missed Anna Lescombe?
    “Then you’ll have to do it again,” he said. “And again. As often as is necessary until the safe is
not
empty.”
    Kleist lowered his head, but Barzel felt increasingly certain what was going through his mind. The man feared exposure and disgrace, yes; but more than anything he wanted to see Anna again, and here was the opportunity he had secretly been praying for.
    In better times, the thought of that anguished paradox might have moved Barzel to pity. Now, the only emotion he felt was fear and a pain in his gut: Could Kleist handle it?
    “I’ll need time,” Kleist said at last. “It may take months to reestablish that kind of trust, the necessary degree of dependence…. I need at least three months.”
    “I know. And I feel sorry for you.” Barzel studied the photo one last time, flicked it, put it back in his pocket. His heart was beating very fast. At the start of this conversation he had felt it was hopeless, but somehow he’d succeeded in igniting a spark. Don’t weaken, he reminded himself; you could still end up in a Berlin jail…. “Sorry, too, for Ilsa.”
    “Why?”
    “Because instead of three months, you have only a fortnight.”

CHAPTER
3
    “H ow did you do?” Duncan Broadway, Q.C., inquired of Anna Lescombe as she trudged into the