Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax Read Free Page A

Webster?” He jumped to his feet and said hastily, “I must excuse myself, I’m sorry, Mrs. Politick.”
    “Pollifax,” she reminded him forgivingly, and leaned back in her chair to wait for his return.

CHAPTER 2
    Carstairs was lean, tall, with a crew-cut head of gray hair and a tanned, weather-beaten face. He looked an outdoor man although his secretary, Bishop, had no idea how he managed to maintain such a façade. He spent long hours in his office, which was a very special room equipped to bring him into contact with any part of the world in only a few seconds time. He often worked until midnight, and when something unusual was going on he would stay the night. Bishop didn’t envy him his job. He knew that Carstairs was OSS-trained, and that presumably his nerves had long ago been hammered into steel, but it was inhuman the way he kept his calm—Bishop was apt to hit the ceiling if his pencil point broke.
    “Anything from Tirpak?” asked Carstairs right away, as Bishop handed him reports that had been filtering in since midnight.
    “Nothing from him since Nicaragua.”
    “That was two days ago. No word from Costa Rica, either?”
    Bishop shook his head.
    “Damn.” Carstairs leaned back in his chair and thought about it, not liking it very much. “Well, business as usual,” he told Bishop. “It’s time I made arrangements for Tirpak at the Mexico City end. One must be optimistic. I’ll be in Higgins’ office.”
    “Right.”
    “And keep the wires open for any news from Tirpak; he’s overdue and if there’s any word I want to hear immediately.”
    Carstairs opened and closed the door of his soundproof office and joined the life of the humming building. Higgins was in charge of what Carstairs—humorously but never aloud—called “Personnel”: those thousands of paper faces locked up in top-secret steel files and presided over by Higgins of the cherubic face and fantastic memory. “Good morning,” said Carstairs, peering into Higgins’ room.
    “Actually it’s cloudy outside,” Higgins said mildly. “That’s the trouble with this modern architecture. But come in anyway, Bill. Coffee?”
    “You’re saving my life.”
    Higgins looked doubtful. “You’d better taste the swill before you say that, and you’ll have to manage your own carton, I’ve already lost a fingernail prying open the lid of mine. What can I do for you?”
    “I need a tourist.”
    “Well, name your type,” Higgins said dolefully, and lifting his coffee high murmured,
“Skoal.”
    “I want,” said Carstairs, “a very particular type of tourist.”
    Higgins put down his coffee and sighed. “I was afraid of that. Tourists I can supply by the droves, but a particular type—well, go ahead, I’m free for half an hour.”
    “He or she will have to come from your inactive list. This tourist must be someone absolutely unknown, Higgins, and that’s vital.”
    “Go on. For what type of job, by the way?”
    Carstairs hesitated. He always hated divulging information, a feeling bred into him during the war years, but Higgins was not likely to meet with torture during the next twenty-four hours. “There’s a package coming into Mexico City. This particular tourist is to be nothing but a tourist for several weeks but on a certain date stop in at a specified place and pick up the package—rendered innocuous for customs, of course—and bring it into the United States.”
    Higgins lifted an eyebrow. “A regular courier won’t do?”
    “Couriers are pretty well known to them,” pointed out Carstairs gently.
    “And to mail it…?”
    “Far, far too risky.”
    Higgins’ gaze grew speculative. “I see. I gather, then, thatthis package of yours is dynamite—not literally, of course, but figuratively—and that you are therefore reduced to being terribly ingenious and circumspect, but that the job is not dangerous so long as said tourist is utterly unknown to
them
.”
    “Bless you for saving us both precious