Spy and the Thief Read Online Free

could only work his plan when he was already inside the lobby with the television crew. Since he had to have time to make the duplicate key, he couldn’t try for a code book until Wednesday night.”
    “Without identification, how could he have gotten by the second guard, at the Message Center door?”
    “You know how those things are, Parkinson. The first guard would have been a lot more careful than a guard checking on only a half dozen people he sees every day. Once through that locked door, O’Neill was apparently sure he could bring off the rest of it by using his makeup and his acting abilities.”
    “So what have we got, sir?”
    Rand closed his eyes. “We have an agent with a better-than-ever chance of stealing one of our diplomatic code books and getting away with it. Although it would be tremendously important to the Russians to get their hands on it, they have the man killed just before his mission is accomplished. Why?”
    Why? The question remained, even after Parkinson had left the office. Rand sat brooding about it in silence, knowing that he could never drop the case until he knew the answer. He thought of talking to the girl at the Foreign Office again, but somehow he knew the answer didn’t rest there.
    He went to the window and pressed his forehead against the cold glass, staring out at the muddy Thames, trying to put himself in the place of a man in Moscow whom he’d never met.
    Why did they kill him? Because he knew too much? No.
    Because he knew too little?
    Rand’s head came away from the window and he snatched up the telephone. “This is an emergency! Get me the Foreign Secretary!”
    “Too little?” Hastings repeated later, not sure he understood.
    Rand nodded from behind a cloud of relaxed cigarette smoke. “O’Neill was killed because he knew too little, not too much. I knew the code book had to be involved somehow, and then I remembered an incident in World War II. A team of American and British cryptanalysts broke the code used by Japanese military attaches. But the OSS wasn’t informed of this, and they managed to steal a copy of the code book in Lisbon. Of course the Japanese immediately stopped using the stolen code— and the cryptanalysts had to start all over again!”
    “You mean the Reds …?”
    Rand nodded and poured some brandy. “I’m sure of it. Remember, we’ve been using that same diplomatic code for five years. Sometime in those five years Taz’s people broke it. Now, what would you do, Hastings, if you were sitting in Moscow with our secret diplomatic code broken, reading our messages every week, and some freelance agent you couldn’t control said he was going to steal that very code for you?”
    Hastings nodded, seeing it all clearly. “Even if he got away with it, we’d have discovered the theft in a couple of hours or days and promptly changed the code. And they couldn’t just order him not to steal the book, because he’d have done it anyway and sold it to another government. All they could do is what they did—kill him before he stole it.”
    “A dirty business,” Rand said, staring out at the lights of the London night. “Dirty.”
    “What will you do now?”
    Rand took a sip of brandy. “I’ve already done it. Our embassies switched to an emergency code book this afternoon. Taz is in for a surprise when he tries to decode the next message.”

THE SPY WHO HAD FAITH IN DOUBLE-C
    C ECIL MONTGOMERY WAS A young British medical missionary who had come to the island republic of Buhadi filled with noble plans for curing men’s ills and saving their souls. He’d been there just one month when the year-old government toppled during a long night of gunfire and bloodshed, and a bomb hurled at random by a rebel terrorist killed his wife and only child.
    Sometime after that, during a brief visit back to London, Cecil Montgomery decided to return to Buhadi and work for British Intelligence. His assignment was not a glamorous one, and he barely found time