To Kill a Grey Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

which he changed weekly.   This spat out another 27 numbers which he
sifted through changing some into letters and ended up with today’s password.   It was as close as he could come to a one
time pad and made sure that each day’s password was unbreakable.   The fact it was 27 characters long was no
coincidence.   He hoped that anyone
discovering it would feel it was part of the new encryption protocol then in
vogue.

 
    The mental workout was something he prided himself on.   Over the past thirty years he had studied how
to develop the memory, reading countless books and working on retentive
techniques similar to the memory turns that used to work in the theatre.   Certainly he could duplicate any old act and
had progressed further than anyone he had heard of.   At will he could remember almost any single
fact he had read or been told in his long life.   Any piece of detailed information he could,
with a little work, bring to mind, and was almost always word perfect.   This incredible memory along with a highly
analytical brain allowed him to piece together, when needed, the most obscure
of clues which made him the greatest intelligence officer of his generation.

 
    He got up, washed and cooked a small breakfast before logging on and
changing the password.   Then he reported
in to The Firm.   He picked up his mail
and the normal routine messages then sent out the electronic sniffers to look
at the integrity of the system, finally going through all The Firm’s requests
and orders that had come in from the customers.   Part of his job was to ensure that no member
was overstepping the mark, dipping into pools they should not be dipping into, or
setting up operations outside the agreed charter.   Any government departments that were, would
get a stiff rebuke and held up in front of the monthly meetings for all the
other partners to see.   Any smaller customers
would get a visit from a representative of The Firm and formally dismissed from
The Firm, quite often violently.

 
    Most of his working life was taken up overseeing the colossus that
was now ‘The Firm’ and he was the only man alive that knew everything.   He constantly moved from safe house to safe house
as he knew many people would kill for the information in his head and he had
only been in this current place for a few weeks.   As always it was carefully located under an
alias and the house and grounds specially modified to his needs and wants.   Being a careful man and constantly hunted,
the house was extensively equipped with security equipment.   Once he felt it was time to move on the
equipment would be destroyed and new equipment installed wherever he went next.

 
    He handled all this through a company that had no other dealings
with The Firm or the intelligence world.   In fact they had no idea where he was or where he had been either, often
equipping four or five houses at a time across Europe, most of which he would
never live in.   Once he left this place
he would be meticulous in removing any trace that he had ever been there.   The company just received a message to junk a
certain house and then find him another.   It cost a lot of money to live like this but
he had amassed a huge fortune over the years and he hardly thought about it.

 
    Now in his mid-sixties he worried about his health.   Recently he had been getting terrible
headaches and eye strain, sometimes having to lie down and cover his eyes with
a cloth.   He had also noticed that
sometimes in the afternoon the edges of his sight would close in and he had a kind
of tunnel vision.   For a person in his
position, losing the peripheral vision was a disaster.   He had reported it at his last medical and so
far no feedback so he assumed it was nothing to worry about, just old age
coupled with a hard work load, but he wondered how much longer he could go on
balancing the powers and who he should hand over to.

 
    He knew Sir Thomas Robertson, his nominal