The Hidden Target Read Online Free PDF

stop-press item. Three more Essen terrorists belonging to Direct Action, residing at Töpferstrasse, had been identified in Duisburg. Arrests were imminent.
    Fools, thought Kiley, making their way to join Section Two in Duisburg, endangering its members and sympathisers. What was Theo’s idea? Keep the police concentrating on that area? Keep them from tracing Marco to Hamburg, or me to Rotterdam? It could be. He could find no mention of either Marco or Erik—and Amalie had known these two names. No mention at all. Somehow, that worried him.
    He was in a grim mood when the taxi deposited him at the sedate entrance to the Russell Arms. Carefully, he counted out the strange money—but he would soon get used to Britain’s present system, changed from the £.s.d. he had once known— and calculated a ten per cent tip. The driver gave him a hard look, refrained from saying what he thought, but his face spoke adequately. Kiley added three more pence, coldly received, but he couldn’t stand here adding coins to an outstretched palm like some yokel from a hick town. He strode into the hotel, grim mood replaced by annoyance. In Rotterdam he had studied guide-books, maps, but not one item on tipping. Small things can trip you up, he warned himself; that cabbie is going to remember your face and where you are staying. And then, as he looked at the panelled lobby and saw the mixture of ordinary tourists and small business-men, annoyance with his own stupidity changed to a strange uncertainty.
    It was a long time since he had walked into a reputable hotel and openly claimed his reservation; or crossed a lobby without pausing behind that large flower vase, for instance, just to note if anyone seemed interested. A long long time since he had shared a lift to his floor without getting out at the one above and walking down to his room by the back stairs; or entered a room such as this, where he’d come and go for two weeks (three weeks, if things moved slowly), curtains wide open and only to be closed when the lights were turned on, a window at the front of the hotel and not facing a blank wall in a back alley. Yes, it had been years since he had lived as an ordinary civilian. He had forgotten how this kind of life felt. Disturbing, somehow.
    He tipped the boy who had insisted on carrying his bag and opening the room door, on showing him closet space and bathroom and the bedside radio. This time he must have calculated correctly, perhaps even too generously. But that was more in keeping with his American clothes and voice. The boy left, a happy grin added to his thanks, blissfully unaware of Kiley’s opinion of him: a human being debased by gratuities, living on perpetual handouts; a typical example of the serfdom that capitalism had imposed. When the people had established a true social order, there would be no need for tips that lowered the worth of a man, turned him into a leech sucking other men’s blood.
    Kiley looked around his room, at an untapped telephone, at walls that hid no microphones or concealed cameras. Pure luxury, he thought, and began unpacking his bag: three weeks ahead of him, three weeks of leading the ordinary life of an ordinary man. For a moment, he felt a surge of elation. And then crushed it down, replaced it with a touch of guilt for that brief, inexplicable betrayal. The ordinary man, he reminded himself, was enslaved by a system that was long overdue for destruction.
    As he stripped and showered in bourgeois comfort, he was quoting Anarchist Bakunin to a steam-fogged mirror: “There will be a qualitative transformation, a new living life-giving revelation, a new heaven and a new earth, a young and mighty world in which all our present dissonances will be resolved into a harmonious whole.” Yes, you had to destroy to build. Bakunin had said that, too: “The passion for destruction is also a creative passion.”
    If he felt any exhilaration now, as he dressed and left for the concert, it was only from the