Exile Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page B

to know they’re in
town.”
    “Patricia Kendall?
Here in Beirut?” Linder asked, his voice rising.
    “Apparently they
arrived from the Continent, which is why surveillance didn’t pick
them up earlier. Why does it matter? Do you think she might recognize
you? You two haven’t crossed paths before, have you?” Denniston
searched his colleague’s face closely.
    Linder shook his head
and looked away.
    “No, it just
complicates things, that’s all. I don’t like it when targets have
their families around during a meeting. You can never be sure where
things will lead with wives and kids.”
    “Don’t worry, pal.
They won’t be at the flat. Eaton’s not that stupid,” Denniston
said, approaching Linder so that he was cornered between nightstand
and bed. “But, come to think of it, you were posted to London
around the time that Eaton and the Kendalls arrived, weren’t you?
Are you sure you didn’t cross paths?”
    “We overlapped for a
while but I never ran into them,” Linder answered, stepping around
Denniston to straighten his tie in the wall mirror.
    “And not before then,
in Cleveland, maybe? Didn’t you grow up in the same part of town as
the Eatons? Over on the East Side, by Shaker Heights and the
University, where all the rich people used to live?” Denniston now
stood directly behind him so that the two men looked at each other in
the mirror.
    “Not exactly, Neil,”
Linder retorted. “Our house was in Lyndhurst and the Eaton estate
was in Gates Mills. They’re only about five miles apart, but Gates
Mills was a different world.” Evading the Branch Chief, Linder
checked his watch as if to point out that it was time for him to be
on his way. But Denniston would not be put off.
    “Okay, but if you
lived in different worlds, how do you explain this?” he asked,
pulling a folded clump of papers from his pocket and handing it to
Linder. To Linder’s astonishment, the first page was a photocopy of
a newspaper article about the Cotillion Ball and the Cleveland
debutantes presented to society that year, including Patricia Eaton.
The following page included a photocopy of an annotated guest list
showing Linder’s name with a check mark next to it, and a
photograph showing a wide-eyed Warren Linder dancing with a less than
enthusiastic Patricia Eaton.
    “Granted, it’s
going back pretty far, but it’s not the kind of thing a guy would
easily forget—not when the party is for someone as rich and
good-looking as Patricia Eaton. What do you say, does this refresh
your memory?”
    Denniston took a seat
on the bed and waited in silence while Linder inspected the papers.
    Linder’s heart sank.
The newspaper article was in the public domain, but the DSS could
have obtained the guest list only by means of an informant in the
Eaton household. If they had this kind of material, what else might
they have on him?
    Linder took a long look
at the photograph before raising his head to offer Denniston a
sheepish grin.
    “It wasn’t one of
my happier nights, which is probably why I buried the memory,”
Linder explained truthfully. “As I recall, the only reason I would
have been invited was because Patricia and I had been in ballroom
dance class together in seventh grade. We had just run into each
other at a dance in Boston while away at boarding school and I expect
the party planners needed some extra boys from the right schools to
provide gender balance. They must have reached pretty far down the
list to get to me.”
    Denniston nodded and
stuffed the papers back into his jacket pocket before responding.
    Linder sensed from this
that Denniston had noticed his embarrassment and believed his story
to be true. If so, Denniston might be willing to deep-six the
documents and thereby prevent some paranoid counterintelligence
analyst from launching an investigation. He shuddered to think of
what could happen if Bob Bednarski had found the documents. But, with
Denniston, a favor always came at a price and, until it