Triple Read Free Page B

beside a thick box hedge which cut
    off a comer of the garden: someone had begun to plant a rnst e and never
    finished the job. A few steps from where they were a gap opened, then the
    hedge turned a right angle and ran along the river bank. The voices came
    clearly from the other side of the foliage.
    The woman spoke again, low and throaty. "Don't damn you, or I'll scream."
    Dickstein and Cortone stepped through the gap.
    Cortone would never forget what he saw there. He stared at the two people
    and then, appalled, he glanced at Dickstein. Dickstein's face was gray
    with shock, and he looked ill; his mouth dropped open as he gazed in
    horror and despair. Cortone looked back at the couple.
    The woman was Eila Ashford. The skirt of her dress VMS around her waist,
    her face was flushed with pleasure2 and she was kissing Yasif Hassan.
    13

One
    The public-address system at Cairo airport made a noise like a doorbell, and
    then the arrival of the Alitalia flight from Milan was announced in Arabic,
    Italian, French and English. Towflk el-Masiri left his table in the buffet
    and made his way out to the observation deck. He put on his sunglasses to
    look over the shimmering concrete apron. The Caravelle was already down and
    taxiing.
    Towfik was there because of a cable. It had come that morning from his
    "uncle" in Rome, and it had been in code. Any business could use a code for
    international telegrams, provided it first lodged the key to the code with
    the post office. Such codes were used more and more to save moneyby
    reducing common phrases to single words-than to keep secrets. Towfiks uncWs
    cable, transcribed according to the registered code book, gave details of
    his late aunt's will. However, Towflk. had another key, and the message he
    read was:
    OBSERVE AND FOLLOW PROFESSOR FRIEDRICH SCHULZ ARRIVING CAIRO FROM MILAN
    WEDNESDAY 28 FEBRUARY 1968 FOR SEVERAL DAYS. AGE 51 HEIGHT 180 CM WEIGHT
    150 POUNDS HAIR WHITE EYES BLUE NATIONAL. ITY AUSTRIAN COMPANIONS WIFE
    ONLY.
    The passengers began to Me out of the aircraft, and Towfik spotted his man
    almost immediately. There was only one tall, lean white-haired man on the
    flight. He was wearing a light blue suit, -a white shirt and a tie, and
    carrying a plastic shopping bag from a duty-free store and a camera. His
    wife was much shorter, and wore a fashionable mini-dress and a blonde wig.
    As they crossed the airfield they looked about them and
    15

Ken Folio"
    sniffed the warm, dry desert air the way most people did the &at time they
    landed in North Africa.
    The passengers disappeared into the arrivals hall. Towfik waited on the
    observation deck until the baggage came off the plane, then he went inside
    and mingled with the small crowd of people waiting just beyond the customs
    barrier.
    He did a lot of waiting. That was something they did not teach you-how to
    wait. You learned to handle guns, memorize maps, break open safes and kill
    people with your bare hands, all in the first six months of the training
    course; but there were no lectures in patience, no exercises for sore feet,
    no seminars on tedium. And it was beginning to seem like There is something
    wrong here beguming to seem Lookout lookout beginning to--
    There was another agent in the crowd.
    Towfik's subconscious bit the fire alarm while he was thinking about
    patience. The people in the little crowd, waitIng for relatives and friends
    and business acquaintances off the Milan plane, were impatient. They
    smoked, shifted their weight from one foot to the other, craned their necks
    and fidgeted. There was a middle-class family with four children, two men
    in the traditional striped cotton galabiya robes, a businessman in a dark
    suit, a young white woman, a chauffeur with a sign saying FORD MOTOR
    COMPANY, and-
    And a patient
    Like Towfik, he had dark skin and abort hair and wore a European-style
    suit. At first glance he seemed to be with the middle-class family-just as
    Towfik would seem, to a casual observer,