Agent in Place Read Online Free PDF Page B

up in his office, lay beside him with the NATO folder disguised inside it by this morning’s Times . He had opened the briefcase for the obligatory halt at Shandon’s gates, but the guard had contented himself with his usual cursory glance through the car’s opened window. After four years of being checked in and out, inspection of Kelso had become routine. Routine made everything simple.
    All too damned simple, Kelso thought now, turning the anger he felt for himself against Shandon’s security. I should never have got away with it. But I did.
    He had no sense of triumph. He was still incredulous. The moment had been presented to him, and he had taken it. From then on there had been no turning back. How could he have done it? he wondered again, anger turning to disgust. All those lies in word and action, the kind of behaviour he had always condemned. And yet it had all come so naturally to him. That was what really scared him.
    No turning back? He slowed up, drew the car to the side of the narrow road, sat there staring at his briefcase. Now was the time, if ever. He could say he had forgotten something in his office: he could slip downstairs to the filing-room—Maclehose would have left by now. He had the combination of the key drawer—127 forward, back 35—and the rest would be simple. Simple: that damned word again.
    And yet, he thought, I had to do it. There was an obligation, a need. I’ve felt it for the last three weeks, ever since I worked over the first section of the Memorandum along with Farkus and Thibault. Yes, we all agreed that the first section should have been published for everyone to read. Now. Not in ten, twenty, even fifty years, lost in the Highly Classified files until some bureaucrat got round to releasing it.
    The other two sections—or parts—of the NATO Memorandum were in a different category. From what he had heard they were top secret. Definitely unpublishable. Unhappily, he glanced again at the briefcase. He wished to God they were back again in the Pending drawer. But he had had only a few moments, less than a full minute, not time enough to separate them from Part I of the Memorandum and leave them in safety. All or nothing: that had been the choice. So he had taken the complete Memorandum. The public had the need to know—wasn’t that the current phrase, highly acceptable after the secrecies of Watergate? Yes, he agreed. There was a need to know, there was a moral obligation to publish and jolt the American people into the realities of today.
    He drove on, still fretting about means and ends. His conduct had been wrong, his purpose right. If he weren’t so sure about that...but he was. After three miserable weeks of debating and arguing with himself, he was sure about that. He was sure.
    * * *
    He was late. First, there was a delay on the New Jersey Turnpike, dusk turning to night as he waited in a line of cars. A truck had jack-knifed earlier that afternoon, spilling its oranges across the road, and it was slow going, bumper to bumper, over the mess of marmalade. Next, there was a bottle-neck in Saturday traffic on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—huge caterpillars, two cranes, bulldozers, debris trucks, even a powerhouse, were all left edging a new giant excavation until Monday morning. If there was a depression just around the turn, these hard-hats didn’t know it. And then, last nuisance of all, with night already here, he found all the parking spaces on his own street tightly occupied. He had to leave his car three blocks away and walk to Sixty-sixth Street, gripping his briefcase as though it contained the treasure of Sierra Madre. Yes, he was late. Rick had probably called him at five exactly; Rick seemed to have a clock planted like a pacemaker in his chest. It was now ten minutes of six.
    “One hell of a day,” he said aloud to his empty apartment. Switching on some lights, he placed the briefcase on his desk near the window and looked for any messages that Mattie,