The Hamlet Warning Read Online Free Page A

talents. 
    With his left hand he moved the magnifying glass experimentally, altering the image slightly. With his right hand he rolled his cigar, thinking, searching for the elusive truths he felt the eyes contained.
    Here was a man who kept much locked up within himself, he concluded. A man who could wait as well as act. Who felt things deeply, yet who maintained a certain you-be-damned, go-to-hell attitude toward the world. And clearly, here was a man used to having his own way. Robertson didn’t know how he knew these things. He simply knew them. Life had sculptured those features, and Robertson read their meaning.
    He also sensed in Loomis something else he couldn’t quite define.
    The crow’s feet definitely were not laugh lines. They seemed to stem from a narrowing, a guarded wariness. Robertson searched for a word. Distrust? Suspicion? Disillusionment?
    Cynicism, he decided. The mark of a man burned by experience. Loomis would not be a man to commit his emotions lightly.
    Yet, Robertson somehow would have to gain Loomis’s confidence.
    He rolled his cigar thoughtfully for a moment, closed the folder, and pressed a button on his desk. He asked his appointments secretary to escort the men from Langley into the Oval Office. Gathering all the material and his notes, Robertson left the hideaway office and was halfway down the corridor before he remembered his retinue. He waited impatiently for the Secret Service men and the guy with the satchel. Properly flanked, Robertson walked rapidly across the drive and into the White House.
    As he entered the Oval Office, he nodded a greeting to the two men from Langley, and dismissed his appointments secretary. “We’ll be more than an hour,” he said. “Hold all calls. Stack appointments. I don’t want to be disturbed.” 
    He escorted the visitors to the conference couch, again taking their measure.
    The Director, Delbert Wallaby, was tall, well built, even athletic. The thick, graying hair, fashionably long over the collar, lent him an air of distinction. A Harvard man, an eminent attorney, Wallaby was politically oriented and motivated. His appointment had been forced on the Administration, but Robertson had not objected strenuously. Wallaby was intelligent and experienced. Robertson knew that Wallaby often foresaw the shifting tides in the world’s storms long before the so-called experts at State.
    His Deputy, Cyrus Ogden, was another matter. Short and heavyset, even chubby, with high forehead and thinning hair, the pipe-smoking Deputy could have been mistaken for a professor of philosophy at some small, remote college. In a city fascinated by power, the Deputy remained virtually unknown. But Robertson was in a position to know that this quiet, outwardly affable little civil servant was one of the most powerful men in the world. Directors came and went at the whims of politics or presidential fortunes. But the Deputy, as chief of the agency’s Clandestine Services throughout the world, toppled budding empires, murdered potential Hitlers, and made the world safe for American investments. There was a reticence, a smugness about the little bastard that Robertson didn’t like.
    Robertson motioned them to the couch, walked to his facing chair, and carefully placed the report on the small table within easy reach.
    “This is the goddamnedest thing I’ve ever read,” he said.
    Neither man smiled.
    “Why in hell wasn’t I told about this earlier?” Robertson asked.
    Wallaby was not fazed. “First, we had so little information that we hardly put credence to it,” he said. 
    “Then, when more became known, and the facts established, we thought we had the matter solved. Naturally, when the affair got out of hand, we made you aware immediately.”
    “Are you certain of your information?”
    “Absolutely,” Wallaby said.
    Robertson tapped the report with a forefinger. “The nuclear capabilities they claim. Is such a thing possible?”
    Wallaby nodded