The Red Horseman Read Online Free PDF

Times?”
    “The Times. The real one. London.”
    “What day?”
    “Can’t tell. The date is just too small. But
look at this.”
    The whole photograph was brought back to the
screen and the cursor repositioned over a white
splotch on the cafd window. Now the splotch
appeared. Toad came around the counter and stared over
Harper’s shoulder. “It’s a notice of the hours the
cafe is open. You can’t read the language in this
blowup-the picture is too fuzzy-but if the
computer uses an enhancement program to fill in the
gaps it should become legible.”
    His fingers danced. After a minute or two he
said, “It’s not English.
    It’s Portuguese.”
    “So the photo was taken in Portugal.”
    “Or in front of a Portuguese cafd in
London, Berlin, Zurich, Rome, Madrid,
New York, Washing-
    “How about the front page of the paper? Can you
give me a printout of that?”
    “Sure.” Richard Harper clicked the mouse on
the print menu and in a moment the laser began to hum.
Toad waited until the page came out of the
printer, then examined it carefully. There was a
portion of a photo centered under the paper’s big
headline, which contained the words “Common Market
ministers.- He folded the page and put it back
into his pocket.
    “Well,” he said, “I guess that’s everything.
Give me back the prints and erase everything from the
memory of your idiot box and I’ll get out of your
hair.”
    Harper shrugged. He put the prints in the
envelope that had originally contained them and passed it
to Toad, who slipped the envelope into an inside
pocket. Then Harper clicked away on the mouse.
After a few seconds of activity he sat back
and said, “It’s gone.”
    “I don’t want to insult you,” Toad said, “but
I should emphasize this little matter is a tippy
top secret, eyes only.
    Loose lips sink ships.”
    was Everything I do is classified,
Commander,” Harper said tartly. He reached for the
folder on the top of the pile in his in basket.
    “No offense,” Toad muttered. “By the way,
what were those lines you were saying about ‘visions and
revisions”?”
    Now Harper colored slightly and made a
vague gesture.
    “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock.”
    An hour later in the media reading room in the
Madison Building of the Library of Congress
Toad found the page of the London Times that had
been captured in the photo Several weeks’
editions of the newspaper were on each roll of
microfilm. He selected the roll that included the
date Nigel Keren died, placed it on a Bell
and Howell viewing console and began to scroll through the
pages. The headline he wanted was on page
twenty-three of the scroll, the edition of November
1, 1991.
    Rear Admiral Jake Grafton spent the
morning in a briefing. As usual, the subject was
nuclear weapons in the Commonwealth of Independent
States, which was the old Soviet Union. This
matter was boiling on the front burner.
    The locations of the strategic nuclear
missiles-ICBM’SEA.WERE known and the political
control apparatus was more or less public knowledge. But
the Allied intelligence community had lost sight of the
tactical nuclear weapons-weapons that were
by definition mobile. They were hidden behind the pall of
smoke rising from the rubble of the Soviet Union.
    Listening to experts discuss nuclear weapons as
if they were missing vases from a seedy art gallery,
Grafton’s attention wandered. He had first sat through
classified lectures on the ins and outs of
nuclear weapons technology as a very junior
A-6 pilot, before he went to Vietnam for the first
time. In those days attack plane crews were each
assigned targets under the Single Integrated
Operational Plan-SIOP. The lectures were like
something from Dr. Strangeiove’s horror
cabinet-thermal pulses, blast effects, radiation
and kill zones and the like. When the course was over he
even got a certificate suitable for framing that
proclaimed he was a qualified Nuclear
Weapons Delivery Pilot.
    But the whole experience was just