Spy and the Thief Read Free

American advertising men. He was tall and grayishly handsome, much like the photos Rand had studied for the past two days. He looked like a government official. Or an actor.
    Rand moved out to follow him at a distance of a dozen paces. He didn’t see the other man until that man stepped directly in front of Barton O’Neill, materializing out of the shadows like a ghost. The man wore a dark leather jacket with a cap pulled down over his eyes. He might have spoken a word or two to O’Neill, but Rand couldn’t be certain. Then, without warning, the stranger fired two shots through the pocket of his leather jacket.
    Barton O’Neill half turned, clutching his chest. The man fired a third time and then Rand was on him, toppling him backward to the pavement. Somewhere a woman screamed, and suddenly the street was alive with panic. Rand brought his fist down on the gunman’s jaw and then tore the weapon free from limp fingers.
    Parkinson and a uniformed policeman were already running across the street, fighting their way through the gathering crowd. “What happened?” Parkinson called out.
    Rand, catching his breath, looked over at the actor’s crumpled body. “This man shot O’Neill.”
    The policeman knelt for a moment, carefully avoiding the spreading pool of blood, and then shook his head. Barton O’Neill was dead, and the game was ended—and yet Rand had the gnawing feeling that he had witnessed a carefully planned drama that he didn’t even begin to understand.
    For most of Thursday the head of Double-C tried to ignore it. O’Neill’s murder might only have been the work of some would-be bandit, or even of a wronged husband. There was no reason why it had to be connected with the actor’s attempt to steal the diplomatic code. None at all.
    All morning had been spent inspecting the extremely interesting contents of O’Neill’s attaché case. There was a carefully made duplicate key to the locked door on the second floor of the Foreign Office. There was a man’s black wig, a pair of bushy false eyebrows, two tubes of makeup, and a small metal mirror. There were three large candid photographs of a man identified as James Corbin, an employee of the Foreign Office Message Center.
    And last, there was a book about the size of a desk dictionary, carefully bound in impressive black cloth, and filled with 882 pages of recipes and cooking suggestions.
    “A cook book?” Parkinson asked, somewhat unbelieving.
    Rand nodded. “But a specially bound cook book. The binding is almost identical with that of the diplomatic code books, and the size is the same too. I think we can piece together his plan. During a lull in the filming downstairs, he’d slip up to the second floor, just as he did on Sunday. In the stairwell he’d open his case and make himself up to look like James Corbin, one of the employees on the day shift. Then he’d simply unlock the door, walk past the inner guard with a mumble, go to Corbin’s desk, and switch this cook book for one of the real code books. It would go into the attaché case, and he’d be out of there in a couple of minutes. Anyone on duty in the room would probably be too busy to give him more than a glance.”
    Parkinson shook his head. “He couldn’t have gotten away with it.”
    “That’s something we’ll never know. He obviously thought he could. Check on this Corbin fellow right away, will you?”
    Parkinson returned in an hour with the news that James Corbin—the real James Corbin—was vacationing in the south of France for two weeks.
    “But,” Parkinson argued, “the inside guard would have asked him why he wasn’t away on his holiday. He’d have had to say something—and how do we know he could imitate Corbin’s voice well enough?”
    “He was a character actor as well as a secret agent. We’ll have to assume he thought he could bring it off. He was in the building and he had a key, and that would have automatically canceled out a lot of suspicion. He must