The Eiger Sanction Read Free

Jonathan, who resented being touched by these people. All of them, the Negro worker, the cleaning woman, the businessman, were CII guards; and the toolbox, the mop handle, and the briefcase all contained weapons.
    Jonathan stood with his legs apart, his hands against the wall, embarrassed and annoyed with himself for being embarrassed, while the businessman's professional hands frisked part of his body and clothing.
    “This is new,” the businessman said, taking a pen from Jonathan's pocket. “You usually carry one of French make—dark green and gold.”
    “I lost it.”
    “I see. Does this have ink in it?”
    “It's a pen.”
    “I'm sorry. I'll either have to keep it for you until you come out, or I can check it out. If I check it out, you'll lose the ink.”
    “Why don't you just keep it for me.”
    The businessman stepped aside and allowed Jonathan to enter the office.
    “You are eighteen minutes late, Hemlock,” Mrs. Cerberus accused as soon as he had closed the door behind him.
    “Thereabouts.” Jonathan was assailed by the overwhelming hospital smell of the glistening outer office. Mrs. Cerberus was squat and muscular in her starched white nurse's uniform, her coarse gray hair cropped short, her cold eyes pinched into slits by pouches of fat, her sandpaper skin appearing to have been scrubbed daily with sal soda and a currycomb, her thin upper lip aggressively mustachioed.
    “You're looking inviting today, Mrs. Cerberus.”
    “Mr. Dragon does not like to be kept waiting,” she snarled.
    “Who among us really does?”
    “Are you healthy?” she asked without solicitude.
    “Reasonably.”
    “No cold? No known contact with infection?”
    “Just the usual lot: pellagra, syphilis, elephantiasis.”
    She glared at him. “All right, go in.” She pressed a button that unlocked the door behind her, then returned to the papers on her desk, not dealing with Jonathan further.
    He stepped into the interlock chamber; the door clanged shut behind him; and he stood in the dim red light Mr. Dragon provided as a mezzo-phase from the glittering white of the outer office to the total dark of his own. Jonathan knew he would adapt to the dark more quickly if he closed his eyes. At the same time, he slipped out of his suit coat. The temperature in the interlock and in Mr. Dragon's office was maintained at a constant 87°. The slightest chill, the briefest contact with cold or flu virus would incapacitate Mr. Dragon for months. He had almost no natural resistance to disease.
    The door to Mr. Dragon's office clicked and swung open automatically when the cooler air Jonathan had introduced into the interlock had been heated to 87°.
    “Come in, Hemlock,” Mr. Dragon's metallic voice invited from the darkness beyond.
    Jonathan put out his hands and felt his way forward toward a large leather chair he knew to be opposite Mr. Dragon's desk.
    “A little to the left, Hemlock.”
    As he sat, he could dimly make out the sleeve of his white shirt. His eyes were slowly becoming accustomed to the dark.
    “Now then. How have you been these past months?”
    “Rhetorical.”
    Dragon laughed his three dry, precise ha's. “True enough. We have been keeping a protective eye on you. I am informed that there is a painting on the black market that has taken your fancy.”
    “Yes. A Pissarro.”
    “And so you need money. Ten thousand dollars, if I am not misinformed. A bit dear for personal titillation.”
    “The painting is priceless.”
    “Nothing is priceless, Hemlock. The price of this painting will be the life of a man in Montreal. I have never understood your fascination with canvas and crusted pigment. You must instruct me one day.”
    “It's not a thing you can learn.”
    “Either you have it or you haven't, eh?”
    “You either got it or you ain't.”
    Dragon sighed. “I guess one has to be born to the idiom.” No accent, only a certain exactitude of diction betrayed Dragon's foreign birth. “Still, I must not deride