Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow Read Online Free PDF Page A

security was to ferret out the movements of the enemies of the Soviet Union, ticket them and label them and, should they cross the boundaries of Holy Mother Russia, see to it that steps were taken to render them harmless.
    The clipping near the bottom of the pile which now commended itself to his study was the same one from the British newspaper which several weeks ago Mrs Butterfield had called to the attention of Mrs Harris, the one that dealt with the change of post of the Marquis Hypolite de Chassagne, France’s Ambassador to the United States, to a senior adviser upon foreign affairs at the Quai d’Orsay.
    Comrade Vornov read through the item, then pushed a button and commanded a junior officer to produce the file on the Marquis who was too big a fish to be buried merely in the innards of a computer. There would be a thorough dossier upon him in the section listing
Enemies of the Soviet Union
.
    The file produced, he read through it carefully and from the very beginning to follow the history of the Marquis, birth, education, politics, friends and acquaintances, his rise to diplomatic eminence and a long list of his actions inimical to the welfare of the Soviet Union and its hierarchy.
    The dossier was as thorough a compendium of ahostile subject as could only be amassed by the far-flung tentacles of the KGB and contained a list of names of practically anyone and everyone with whom the Marquis had ever come into contact.
    Now that the Marquis was again to become a power in the direction of French foreign policy it was certain that his voice would be raised once more in potent resistance to the swallowing of the Soviet master plan of a phoney
détente
designed to lull the West into a false sense of security. He read through the names carefully. Many of them were familiar to the Comrade Inspector, others far down the list he had never heard of and their position indicated that they were not considered of major importance but, in casting his eyes over them, they fell upon that of one Ada Harris of 5, Willis Gardens, Battersea, London, sw 11. There were no details as to the who, what, why or wherefore of her connection with the Marquis and so the Inspector read on making a note of the more familiar associates who from that time on were to be more closely watched.
    â€˜Whoever has heard of Ada ’Arris in Moscow?’ Mrs Harris had asked. Comrade Inspector Vaslav Vornov of the KGB had. And one reason that Vornov had attained his position in the organization was that he possessed a memory such as might be encompassed by a whole herd of elephants, but of this Ada was blissfully ignorant. Not that at this stage itwould particularly have worried her. She was too busy planning her counter-attack to weaken the defences of Mrs Butterfield.
    Mrs Harris’s opening skirmish in her campaign was to stop in at the Intourist Office in Upper Regent Street. Here she picked up a dozen or more highly coloured, handsomely and expensively printed brochures got out by the Soviet’s monolithic travel bureau extolling and reproducing the grandeurs of the cities and the landscapes of Russia as offered by a choice of package tours behind the Iron Curtain.
    When Mrs Butterfield produced drab, close-set paragraphs in smudgy type of newsprint detailing the variety of horrors and repressions suffered by the citizens of the USSR as well as anyone caught messing into their business, Ada spread her antidote out on to the tea table.
    Here were pictures of neat white boats upon the blue Moscow River and palaces of glorious proportions. The red brick of the fascinating Kremlin dominated almost every scene, the skyscraping University of Moscow, monuments and fabulous buildings arose out of the greenery of parks. Buildings were modern, the monument to space conquerers soared into the sky. There were photographs galore of museums and exhibitions. These vied with multicolour reproductions of ballerinas, folk dancers, circus performers,