The Peregrine Spy Read Free Page A

beard,” said Frank.
    “When you retire from the air force, you can grow a beard.”
    “How long before I get to retire from the air force?”
    Dan shrugged. “Don’t ask me. After the war, I guess.”
    Their footsteps echoed down the Pentagon’s endless, rubber-tiled corridors as they left the cover unit. Frank studied his documents. “True name,” he said.
    “What did you expect? We don’t have time for all that other mumbo-jumbo.”
    “We never do.”
    “What’s the diff? You’ve never been blown.”
    Their whirlwind day included an hour at Langley with two Near East Division types he’d never met before and a quick pass at the polygraph, including what Frank by now considered a routine rehash of his years of contacts in many countries with Vassily Lermontov.
    “Flying colors,” said the technician, who looked painfully young to Frank.
    It was Frank’s first time in the headquarters building. All his previous contact had been filtered through the agency proprietary World Wide Communications, the firm that recruited him. The awesome structure, with its multiple rings of security, intrigued him. When he thought of all the odd, messy threads dangling from the edges of his life, he wondered why he had ever been recruited or how he had gotten through the security checks. But he admitted to himself that he’d been surprised by the sophistication of an intelligence agency that had a place for characters like himself—or even Dan Nitzke.
    “Will there be contact with the Shah?” he asked the Near East team.
    “Absolutely not,” said one old Near East hand, who’d identified himself as Joe. They sat on hard-backed chairs around a bare metal table with a top of highly polished fake wood.
    Frank shrugged. “I asked because I spent some time with him when he was on a state visit in Ethiopia in the sixties.”
    “Details,” said Joe.
    “I was writing speeches for Haile Selassie in those days,” said Frank. “At some reception, he introduced me to the Shah. We got along. No big deal. We talked about jazz, weight lifting. When the Emperor came back from that twenty-fifth-hundred anniversary bash at Persepolis, he told me the Shah asked about me, said I should have come along. I wished I had. I heard it was quite a party.”
    “Keep talking,” said Joe. He had close-cropped hair, a ruddy face, thick wrists, and slender hands. “But forget the party you didn’t go to. I want to hear about the Shah in Ethiopia.”
    “He asked me to draft his farewell remarks. It pissed some of his people off, but he used what I wrote. We worked out together a couple of times. He was in pretty good shape in those days.”
    “He’s a dead man now,” said Joe. “Absolutely no contact. You’ll be useless to us if the people you’re working with get the idea you have a pipeline to the Shah. How much you know about what’s goin’ on over there?”
    “I read the papers,” said Frank.
    “Well, not a lot gets in the papers,” said Joe. “Shame you haven’t got time to do some reading in on the intel. What we’ve got over there is a situation.”
    “We and the Brits have been propping this Shah up on his Peacock Throne ever since 1941,” said Jack, another of the Near Easternites. “World War II. His father was pro-Hitler, and you have to remember that besides all that oil Iran has a long border with the Soviets.”
    “And back then,” said Joe, “God help us, the Sovs were our allies.”
    “So we and the Brits kicked the father out and put the son on the throne.”
    “And we had to do it all over again in 1953,” said Joe, “when the Shah’s lefty prime minister, guy named Mosaddeq, tried to nationalize the oil industry. The Shah hit the panic button, ran off to Rome, ready to abdicate. The agency managed to stir up enough trouble to get rid of Mosaddeq and bring the Shah back.”
    “And we’ve propped him up ever since,” said Jack. “Till now.”
    “Now we’ve come full circle,” said Joe. “This