The Red Horseman Read Online Free PDF Page A

or
hammer but no more inherently interesting. Of necessity
he periodically applied himself to making one work, and
when required could even give a fairly
comprehensive technical explanation of what went
on down deep inside. But a computer had no
pizzazz, no romance, no appeal to his inner being.
This Monday morning he leaned idly on the counter and
without a twinge of curiosity watched Harper and his
computer do their thing.
    But he had a restless mind that had to be mulling
something; once again his thoughts went back to Elizabeth
Thorn, alias Judith Farrell. He had loved
her once. One of the mate’s biological
defects, he decided, was his inability
to stop loving a woman. Oh, you can dump her,
avoid her, hate her, love someone else, but
once love has struck it cannot be completely
eradicated. The wound may scar over nicely,
yet some shards of the arrowhead will remain permanently
embedded to remind you where you were hit. If you are a
man.
    Women, Toad well knew, didn’t suffer from
this biological infirmity.
    Once a woman ditches you her libidinal
landscape is wiped clean by Mama Nature,
clean as a sand beach swept by the tide, ready for the
next victim to leave his tracks like Robinson
Crusoe. And like that sucker, he’ll conclude that he
is the very first, the one and only. Amazingly, for her
he will be.
    Biology, you old devil.
    Ah, me.
    Then Toad’s thoughts moved from theoretical
musings to the specific. He poked around the edges
of the emotions that the sight and sound and smell of
Elizabeth Thom created in him and concluded, again,
that it would be unwise to explore further. Yet he
couldn’t leave it. So he circled it and looked from
different angles.
    He felt a chill and shuddered involuntarily.
    “Commander Tarkington?”
    It was Harper. This was the second time he had said
Toad’s name.
    con’allyeah.”
    ‘Just what is it you want to know about these
prints?”
    Harper flexed his fingers like a concert pianist.
    ‘Ah, have they been enhanced? Touched up? Whatever
the phrase is.”
    “Well, the two prints are identical.”
Toad had given Harper two prints, the original
that Elizabeth Thom had handed him Friday night and
one he had made yesterday evening from the negative
at a one-hour photo shop in a suburban mall.
“I ran them through the scanner,” Harper continued, “which
looks at the light levels in little segments called
pixels and assigns a numerical value, which is
how the computer uses the information. The prints are
essentially identical with only minor, statistically
insignificant variations. Possibly caused
by dust on the negative.”
    Toad grunted. “Did anybody doctor it
up?”
    “Not that I can see.” Harper punched
buttons. Columns of numbers appeared on the
screen before him. “What we’re looking for are
lines, sharp variations in light values that shouldn’t be
there. Of course, with a sophisticated enough computer, those
traces could be erased, but then the resultant print
would have to be photographed to get a new
negative, and that would fuzz everything. I just don’t
think so. Maybe one chance in a hundred. Or one
in a thousand.
    “What can you tell me about the picture?”
    Harper’s fingers flew across the keyboard. The
photo appeared on the screen. “It’s a man
sitting at a table reading a newspaper.
Apparently at a sidewalk cafd.”
    “Do you know the man?”
    “No, but if you like I can access the CIA’S
data base and maybe we can match the face.”
    “That won’t be necessary,” Toad Tarkington said.
“Is there anything in the photo that would indicate where
it was taken?”
    The computer wizard stroked the mouse and drew a
box over the newspaper.
    He clicked again on the mouse button and the boxed
area filled the screen. The headline was in English
and quite legible, but the masthead was less so.
    “We’ll enhance it a little,” Harper muttered and
clicked the mouse again.
    After a few seconds he announced, “The
Times.”
    “New York