The Once and Future Spy Read Online Free PDF

wasn’t at all sure what he was seeing.
    Nate felt an icy hand caress his spine. He raised his eyes to the pewter sky, to the pewter God, then obliged himself to look
     back at the hanged man. Still hiccuping, he was jerking at the end of the rope, which was slowly strangling him. The Virginian
     on his white mare made an impatient gesture with his hand. General Knox signaled to the shirtmen with a crisp nod of his head.
     One of them strolled over to Hickey. He wrapped his arms around the jerking knees of the executed man and pulled himself up
     until his weight was hanging from Hickey’s body.
    The hiccuping stopped. Then the jerking.
    Nate saw the shadows of birds racing across the ground and looked up, but there were no birds, there was just Hickey dangling
     from the bitter end of the rope, and the shirtman dangling from him in an erotic embrace.
    Nate and Stephen caught their horses, which were grazing in afenced-in field behind Cape’s Tavern, and saddled them and started them walking up the Broad Way in the direction of the old
     Dutch village of Haarlem. They passed a fat woman rooting in garbage. They passed a company of John Haslet’s Delaware Continentals,
     whom everyone called the Blue Hen Chickens, heading on foot for Kipp’s farmhouse and the cove under it; some carried muskets,
     some carried pitchforks. The Chickens were handing around a transparent green jug and taking healthy swigs from it as they
     marched. Nate and Stephen passed a deserted farmhouse that had gotten a “Hillsborough treat”—thinking Tories lived in the
     house, rebels had smeared it with excrement.
    The day grew heavier. A pall of dust kicked up by horses ahead of them on the Broad Way hung in the air, obliging Nate and
     Stephen to mask their noses and mouths with bandannas. For a long time neither man said anything. The silence turned awkward.
     Eventually Stephen broke it. “That was a god-awful thing we saw today.”
    Nate fingered the hair mole on his neck. When he was a boy his friends had teased him about it, telling him it meant he would
     one day be hanged. “A long life has a lingering death,” Nate replied through his bandanna, quoting the English version of
     a Latin maxim he had memorized at Yale.
    As near as I can figure, all this took place three weeks before Nate got involved in whipping the cat.

6

    T he first working session had gotten off to a relatively sluggish start. “The desk clerk offered me a room with a queen-size
     bed,” the Admiral was explaining. “I naturally inquired about the view. ‘If you are into brick the view is terrific,’ he told
     me. I am not inventing. ‘Into brick’ were his precise words. I let him know I was into park. He consulted one of those television
     screens attached to a typewriter. ‘I can give you park,’ he said, ‘but no queen-size bed.’ ‘What is it with you and queen-size
     beds?’ I asked him. He gave me as thorough a once-over as I have ever had. ‘Just playing a hunch,’ he said.”
    “Into brick,” repeated the middle-aged woman whose face was masked by a veil. She clucked her tongue appreciatively.
    “I am afraid park will cost you slightly more a day than brick,” Toothacher informed Wanamaker. “I trust you will feel the
     additional money was well spent.”
    “Brick, park, it’s all the same to me,” Wanamaker said impatiently. He noticed that the Admiral’s eyes were rimmed with red.
     He’s been off carousing with Huxstep, he thought, but what he does with his free time is his business as long as he plugs
     my leak. Wanamaker pushed a batch of dossiers across the felt to the Admiral. “For starters, here are the service records
     of the twelve staffers assigned to Operations Subgroup Charlie. Mildred here is
my
man Friday. She was raised in Tehran, speaks Persian, Pashto, Avestanand Kurdish fluently, can pronounce the Ayatollah’s name without an accent. Only ask her. She will get you whatever else you
     feel you