A Clear and Present Danger Read Online Free PDF

And he rubbed the back of his head. A trickle of blood appeared on his dirty neck.
    “Man, I had to sleep outside! I had to walk here, in the middle of the night, and… ”
    “All right, all right,” the guard said. “We’ll see to everything. Come on in. I guess it will be all right.”
    The guard opened the door wider and admitted the young man, whose fingers were now covered with blood from the nasty cut on
     his head.
    “I’ll just get you situated with someone,” the guard said, “someone who might be in early. But you’ll probably have to wait
     until the big cheeses start coming around. Maybe till 10 o’clock or so.”
    The young man nodded. “Thanks, man. Really, thanks a lot.”
    “Yeah, kid. Sure thing.”
    The young man followed the guard down a long corridor to a carpeted reception area. The massive reception desk was held down
     by a heavyset woman busy pulverizing a typewriter with her lightning quick, hammerlike fingers. She looked up from her work
     at the bedraggled young man and the guard at his side.
    “What’d you drag in here, huh, Henry?” she said.
    “Another Little Boy Blue who’s lost his horn is all,” the guard answered.
    The receptionist nodded. She had heard this story a couple of thousand times since she took the job at the Embassy. And she
     had taken care of matters in every case. No need to bother the brass.
    “Sit down.” She waved a fleshy finger toward a government-issue brown imitation leather chair at the side of her desk. Then
     she removed the paper she had been pounding at in the typewriter and replaced it with a government-issue form.
    “Okay,” she said. “Name. Home town. Father’s name.”
    “Edward Folger. Yonkers, New York. Thomas Folger.”
    “Lost your passport, I suppose?”
    “Yeah. I mean, yes, ma’am.”
    She typed these bits of information onto the form.
    “Oh boy,” she said matter-of-factly. Then she stopped typing and sat back in her chair. “Tell me how it happened, Edward.”
    “Well, I was walking around the City… you know, the East End?”
    “I know, dearie. That’s where it always happens. Go on.”
    “… and anyway, I’m just minding my own business, looking around and all. It’s still daylight, and there’s lots of people around.
     Out of the corner of my eye, I see a group of maybe eight or ten little girls. Oh, ten or twelve years old, I guess. They’re
     all freckle-faced and in school uniforms. I didn’t pay any attention to them.
    “Then right when I’m passing them on the sidewalk, they jump out in front of me. Four or five of them are in front, one or
     two at a side, and the rest in back of me. They’ve got me completely surrounded in a tight circle. And they’re all mumbling
     something.
    “It’s confusing as all hell, you know?”
    The receptionist nodded.
    “And they’re raising their hands at me, but I can’t see them because they’re covered with sweaters. They’re all around me,
     real close in and mumbling, and I can see those hands moving under the sweaters.
    “And then, all of a sudden, just as quick as they mobbed me, they step aside. Then in a flash I realize they must be pickpockets!
     Damn, I never felt a thing!”
    The receptionist said, “They’re called ‘dippers’ here, honey.”
    The young man rubbed his head and winced. His fingers were now caked with dry blood.
    “How’d you get that, Edward?” the secretary asked. She was pointing at his head.
    “Well, when I realized they must be—‘dippers’—I felt in my pocket, in back, and my billfold was gone. I looked and they were
     running up a side street and then into an alley.”
    “And you chased them?”
    “Sure. My billfold had everything in it. Cash, passport, American Express… ”
    “Never leave home without it.”
    “Yeah. Well, so I chased them. I mean, I had to get back my cards and passport anyway, you know?”
    “Sure.”
    “And somewhere in that alley, someone hit me over the head. I never did find the