Spy and the Thief Read Online Free Page A

for it between his duties at the little village hospital and his weekly sermons at the chapel in town. But each Monday morning he walked down to the cable office near the docks and sent in his weekly coded report. It was in the form of an innocuous requisition for more supplies—a listing of Bibles and hymnbooks, medicines and foodstuffs to be shipped to his mission—and if the local authorities ever wondered why most of the requested supplies never arrived, they refrained from questioning him about it.
    But the political situation on Buhadi remained far from settled, even after the government fell. Down from the tropic hills in the island’s center came two opposing rebel armies, one backing the Anglo-Indian Rama Blade, and the other following the bearded giant Xavier Starkada. Each army claimed to represent the people, and each leader claimed the other was a spy and traitor in the pay of Peking.
    Oddly enough, British Intelligence agents in Asia had quickly confirmed that one of the two men was indeed a spy in the pay of the Communists, and thus Cecil Montgomery received his last and most important assignment from London.
    Though he’d had little training in the intricacies of modern espionage, Cecil Montgomery did have the advantage of being on the scene. Working day and night among the poor peasants of Buhadi, he heard things and saw things. Soon he came to know both Blade and Starkada well, and made friends with their trusted aides during lulls in the sporadic fighting. And so it was that on a certain Monday morning in January he sent a coded cablegram to the cover address in London that read: CONFIRMING IDENTITY OF SPY THIS WEEK. WILL CABLE NAME NEXT MONDAY.
    The next Saturday night, by flickering candlelight in a shabby village shack, Cecil Montgomery read the documents that told him what London wanted to know. Somewhere during the middle of his regular Sunday morning service he had a passing doubt about this undercover work he was doing, knowing in an abstract way that the message he would send the following morning would sooner or later cause the death of a man. But then he remembered the bodies of his wife and child, killed by a bomb with Red Chinese markings on it, and he knew what he had to do. If the spy died as a result of his message, then at least this land of Buhadi—in a sense, his land—could begin to live in peace.
    He carried the message in his breast pocket that Monday morning, written in pencil on a standard cablegram form. It was a sunny morning, with a warm wind blowing in off the ocean—the kind of day his wife had always liked. Not until he was across the street from the cable office did Montgomery see the two men who waited there for him.
    Something had gone wrong, something had gone terribly wrong. They knew.
    Then he was running wildly, and they were after him, through the narrow twisting lanes of the old town, seeking a shelter where he knew there was none. In all this town, among all these people whom he’d helped so much, he knew there would be no hiding place.
    Finally, winded from his run, he paused against a rough stone wall in a dead-end alley facing the white marble church that was a town landmark. He took a piece of notepaper from his pocket, and a ballpoint pen, and slowly but deliberately began to write a message. It took him two minutes to write the few words, and when he’d finished he folded the paper twice and scrawled two initials on the outside. Then he stuffed the folded paper deep into his pocket.
    By that time the two men were standing at the end of the alley, their dark outlines stark against the whiteness of the church beyond. They walked slowly toward him, knowing there was no way out for Cecil Montgomery. The doctor-missionary waited calmly now, his lips moving in a silent prayer.
    The taller of the two assassins had a pistol with a silencer on it. The other carried a dagger with a curved blade that caught the morning sunlight.
    The man with the dagger struck