THE POLITICS OF PLEASURE Read Online Free PDF Page A

his palm, as if weighing up what the bygone counterculture publication implied about Goldman's character. He then looked along the passageway.
    Goldman glanced over his shoulder. A handful of personnel waited patiently behind him. Farther back, General Kaplan's robust frame dominated the passageway. From under a prominent brow, his dark eyes studied the makeshift checkpoint.
    Goldman cursed inwardly and turned back to Reid. 'Look ... I've got a Wing Chun Do class to catch in less than an hour,' he lied. 'So, um, I should get going.'
    Again Reid looked over Goldman's shoulder, but this time nodded as if in acknowledgment of a passed-on instruction. He returned the book to the bag and handed the bag back to Goldman. 'Sorry for the inconvenience, sir, but I'm afraid it's a necessary evil we all must endure in these troubled times.'
    'Yes, apparently. Good night.'
    Reid nodded a reply and beckoned for a raven-haired servicewoman to step up to the table.
    Warming the engine of his Saab 900 sedan, Goldman found a new FM station on the radio: “... thanks Lisa, and now a seven-piece band from Australia who've made a big name for themselves over here: Little River Band with Curiosity Killed the Cat”.
    Goldman reversed from his space, clicked in his seatbelt and accelerated toward the main gate. He engaged the last speed bump and waved to the sentry in the gatehouse who'd raised the boom gate. The chemist drove out of Silverwood Area and into the north sector of Aberdeen Proving Ground, soon passing the Chemical Agent Storage Yard where more than a thousand one-ton containers of Mustard Agent were stockpiled.
    The late-afternoon sky was a pleasing study of light and cloud as Goldman made his way along State Highway 24, all the while humming to a Mowtown song on the radio. He glanced at an attractive young woman in a convertible red sports car, her platinum hair streaming wildly in the wind as she kept alongside him. She smiled at the chemist and then sped away in a brazen display of her car's superior horsepower. Yes, Goldman never had any misgivings about leaving his workplace. A weight always lifted from his shoulders whenever he left Aberdeen Proving Ground proper, which only made the end of his working day that much better.
    This afternoon he was particularly buoyed. He counted his blessings to have passed through Reid's surprise checkpoint unhindered. He recalled the juridical look on Reid's face when the guard flicked through Goldman's book. What a uniformed jerk. Goldman turned off the highway and headed for Interstate 95. Now he was back in the real world, the whole affair at the front doors seemed farcical. He could only chuckle aloud. Television comedies about the US army – which he'd viewed as a boy in Australia – popped into his head. The screwball antics of a particular comedy ( Sergeant Bilko no less) played vividly in his mind as he engaged the Interstate's sea of speeding vehicles.
    A bronze Dodge van with airbrushed murals of fire-breathing dragons and scantily clad maidens along its sides braked hard to accommodate Goldman's unwary intrusion on to the busy outer lane. The van's long-haired driver engaged a set of air-horns and flipped his finger while overtaking Goldman's sedan. The chemist fared better when passed in turn by an elderly woman in a Honda Civic who merely frowned at his improper employment of the lane.
    He drove on without incident, relaxing his grip on the wheel and keeping a watchful eye on the many vehicles about him. The backwash of passing traffic swished through his lowered window as he reviewed his unlawful doings at his workplace. He'd smuggled out the last of his MPA and he hadn't clocked up too much illegal time on the centre's new computer, skimming through several directories before printing out two files of interest. He'd smuggled out twenty-odd pages of what he hoped would make good late-night reading: a classified report outlining the CIA's MK-ULTRA programmes during the fifties