The Peregrine Spy Read Free

interest in Africa wanted for a two-year contract. Good salary and many benefits.” He and Jackie had been married less than a year. They discussed it and decided Frank should give it a try.
    Frank soon received a call from Patricia Rhoden, president of World Wide Communications. It was only years later that he discovered that someone else—Gus Simpson—got the job they originally had considered him for. Over a year later, World Wide called Frank again about another job, the job that took him to Ethiopia. It was another year before it finally happened. By then, at Pat Rhoden’s suggestion, he had become active in the Washington branch of the American Friends of Ethiopia, and at one of their functions he met Dan Nitzke. Dan had introduced himself as a State Department foreign service officer who had just spent two years in Ethiopia. He was friendly, outgoing, brimming over with knowledge and advice about Ethiopia, unfazed when Ethiopians politely corrected him, and, by the end of a long evening, usually quite drunk.
    Frank began getting calls, from the accountant in New York who did his taxes, from his former bosses at various newspapers, from his mother, from the literary agent who’d been trying without much success to sell his short stories. FBI agents had been around asking questions about him.
    “Are you in some kind of trouble?” his mother asked.
    Pat Rhoden called to ask him how quickly he could wrap up his work at the AFL-CIO and leave for Ethiopia.
    “Well, I’ll have to talk to Mr. Meany.’’
    “He’s wired. No problem,” said Pat in her brisk way.
    Frank held the phone away from his ear and stared at the receiver. Who are these people? he wondered. He heard Pat’s voice. “Are you there?”
    “Right here,” he said into the mouthpiece.
    “You’ll need about ten days’ briefing here at our office in New York. We have you booked out on the twenty-first. You know about the airline strike. Pan Am’s the only American carrier into Europe, but Juan’s a good friend of ours.”
    Juan? Who the hell is Juan? wondered Frank.
    Pat must have read his mind. “Juan Trippe, you know, the president of Pan Am, so that’s been worked out. Then it will be Ethiopian Airlines into Addis.” She hammered out details and schedules, the car that would pick up Frank and Jackie at the airport, the apartment that would be waiting for them in New York. “Oh, you and your wife, Jackie, should both resign your jobs as soon as possible. Decide what belongings you’ll want shipped over, what you want put in storage. We’ll take care of all the arrangements.”
    It all moved rapidly, according to plan.
    On his second day in WWC’s headquarters overlooking the library lions on Fifth Avenue, Frank went into Pat Rhoden’s office and was startled to see Dan Nitzke bounding up out of an overstuffed easy chair to greet him. “Hi, I bet you’re surprised to see me. And boy, have I got a surprise for you.”
    *   *   *
    “This is Fairfield coming up now,” said Dan. “We’ll be at Motor Vehicle in five minutes.”
    “I feel like I’ve been shanghaied,” said Frank. “Again.”
    “That day in New York?”
    “That day in New York.”
    “You should have seen the look on your face when I told you I didn’t really work for the State Department.”
    “I can imagine.”
    “Boy, were you surprised.”
    “Yeah,” said Frank. “You surprised me, all right.” And I surprised myself, he thought.
    They raced through the day, pretty much the way Dan had outlined it. There had been a wild, improvisational quality to it all that Frank enjoyed. The professionalism of the Pentagon cover unit impressed him. They were in and out in fifteen minutes with air force documents, including airline tickets and travel papers that identified him as Major Francis J. Sullivan. The photo on his ID card looked just like his unfamiliar, clean-shaven self.
    “Without that beard, you look like a leprechaun,” said Dan.
    “I want my