The Specialists Read Online Free

get away from the class division even in civilian life. He had been an officer, a captain, and they were enlisted men, and that in its own way created a gulf at least as great as the other element that separated him from them.
    The first time, in Canada, he had been particularly aware of the distance between himself and Dehn and Giordano and Murdock and Manso. More with Murdock than the others, perhaps, but it was there with all of them. Still, he had to admit that it had never gotten in the way. The five of them worked together on an equal level, planned the operation and carried it through, and when they were all together with the colonel in the big house in Tarrytown, the pie was carved into equal shares, a shade over fifty thousand in cash money for each of them.
    “I want to thank you all,” the colonel had said. “You’ll all go back to your own separate lives now. I don’t suppose we’ll see each other much, if at all. But if any of you ever needs anything, anything at all——”
    Then a sort of embarrassed pause, until Giordano said what all of them had been thinking. “Sir, I’ll say one thing. This past month makes the first time I’ve felt like myself since I took off that uniform, sir.”
    Nods and echoes. And Ben Murdock, elaborately casual, saying, “You know, this kind of thing, we could do it again sometime.”
    The six of them were up all night talking about it. All over the country there were dirty men with dirty money, men the law could never get close to, but once you took their money away, it turned clean. Hard, tough men—but after fun and games in Laos you weren’t so easily impressed by tough men in civvies. As the colonel said, it was all the same jungle, and jungle fighting was what they were trained for.
    The colonel helped plan out their lives for them. They needed covers, he told them. They needed lives that would account for their income, needed ways to bury their money and turn dirty money into clean money.
    For Simmons, the answer was a simple one. All his life, ever since his second-grade teacher gave him some stamps from letters from her mother in Hungary, he had spent spare time working on his stamp collection. It wasn’t much of a collection because he had never earned huge money, but it was perfectly organized and beautifully mounted. And ever since he decided against reenlisting and went back to Detroit and found Esther and married her, ever since then he’d had that one big dream. Sooner or later, damn it, he was going to be a stamp dealer.
    An independent dealer. No shop, no boss, no customers to meet face to face, even. Ads in the magazines and all his business done by mail, and Lord, if he only had the capital, he could do it right. None of the penny-ante stuff, no fooling with new issues and other promotional items. Just buying and selling good solid collectible stamps.
    It was the perfect cover. The fifty thousand from Operation Stockpile was enough to buy the house and the stamp stock and keep the business running a long time. As it turned out, the business went into the black by the fourth month; last year he had netted better than twelve thousand dollars just selling stamps. And the two operations they had carried out since then were gravy. It was a cinch to hide the proceeds, paying cash for expensive stamps for his own collection. His personal collection was quite an improvement on that handful of Hungarian stamps that started him off twenty-seven years ago. He wondered what Esther would say if she knew how much it was worth.
    And later, in bed, after he had successfully convinced her that lovemaking would not constitute an invasion of the baby-to-be’s privacy, he listened to her measured breathing and wished he didn’t have to keep this part of his life secret from her. It was for her own good, he knew. She worried enough if he got on a plane, and if she had the slightest idea what he really did on those business trips, it would tear her up, no question about