The Old Boys Read Online Free PDF

codgers with the faces of men who had been my senior officers when they were in their prime. Owing to my long vacation in Pennsylvania, and also because that’s just the way things are, I had not seen most of these people for years. I liked them all in the way you go on liking the members of your collegefraternity, for the boys they used to be no matter how much they change. But few had been the stars they’d hoped to be.
    Out of a crowd of sixty, I invited four white-haired old cutthroats to join David Wong and me for lunch that day. Taken as a group, they could be regarded as the all-time backfield of the old Outfit. Besides David, who had escorted the ashes from Beijing, they were Jack Philindros, who had been director of the Outfit during difficult times and before that a nerveless operative in Europe and elsewhere; Ben Childress, who knew Arabs and Arabia in the way a baseball fanatic knows batting averages; Harley Waters, who during the Cold War had recruited more Russians and other Soviet bloc types than there were snowflakes in Siberia; and Charley Hornblower, who knew a lot about codes and arcane languages and the mind of man.
    In movies, master spies meet by dark of night in spooky abandoned factories or under elevated highways in a dangerous part of town. In real life they are far more likely to hold clandestine meetings in crowded restaurants. This is true not only of decadent Americans but also of everybody else, including the Russians and the Chinese and even terrorists, though the latter usually choose places run by their cousins, who are also terrorists. Desirable tables in fashionable restaurants are routinely bugged by counterespionage people in every country in the world, but even knowing this, operatives otherwise famed for their cunning are flattered to be escorted to the same high-visibility table every time they dine.
    The Old Boys and I went to a very expensive steak house on K Street. As the rules of tradecraft dictated, I made the reservation in a false name and we arrived one by one as if we were honest citizens. The maître d’ recognized us for the nonentities we were and seated us at a table near the kitchen that no one had ever bugged. After martinis and oysters and rib steak on the bone and several bottles of pricey but mediocre wine, I told them all I knew about Paul’s disappearance and the reasons behind it. They soaked it all up like the blotters they were. Jack Philindros in particular was attentive. He had a personal interest in the matter. It was Jack whohad passed me the presidential order to kill Ibn Awad, Jack who had taken the political fall when the operation came to light. He was the consummate bureaucrat and it must be said that he had good reason to think that I was a loose cannon. Everybody else at the table was a loose cannon too except him, and even Jack had his moments. One of the reasons I had chosen them was that each had a burning reason to resent hypocrisy? Philindros had been kicked out of the directorship for his sins and all the rest had been busted or humiliated over operations for which they should have been decorated or promoted. All these fellows had too much imagination to stay out of trouble, and in the bad old days when men were men and spies were spies, they had all been disciplined for it. In Helsinki, Harley Waters had run a profitable call-girl ring, mostly Scandinavian blondes specializing in visiting Soviet luminaries. The girls were inventive, and more than one Soviet bigwig became cooperative when he saw the talkies of their encounters. Long before it was popular, David Wong had given the Chinese and the Russians fits by organizing a self-financing secret network of Muslim zealots along the Sino-Soviet frontier. The others had been similarly off the wall, with comparably embarrassing results.
    Jack is the only person I have ever known who has a softer voice than Paul Christopher. On this day somebody else had had to order his lunch for him because the