Shadow of the Condor by James Grady Read Free Book Online Page A

get tough?"
    "Well," continued the old man, "that will be difficult. It's a rural area. We can't move in too many strangers or the natives will know something is wrong and his cover will be blown. Some agency men will be staying at the air base eighty miles away from the town Condor will use as an operations center, but I don't think we can get anyone closer than that. You should have backtracked Parkins to that area in a week or ten days. Then the opposition will concentrate on you, and you can take care of yourself."
    "Do you really think Malcolm can handle it, even if nothing goes wrong? Parkins' death makes this a little more than routine."
    The old man smiled. Well, in any event, it will be interesting. Very interesting."
    Kevin blinked his eyes after he relived that memory. He looked across the plane aisle to where Malcolm sat nodding. Malcolm's hour-long explanation that afternoon must have exhausted him, thought Kevin. For sixty minutes Malcolm had talked, sometimes slowly, sometimes shrilly. He shifted from dispassionate analysis of his "debt" to almost hysterical ramblings when he recounted his memories and fantasies. In the end he had looked at Kevin and said, "It really doesn1 make any difference, does it? I'm going because I have to go, I have to know, and the only way I'll know is by going."
    "What do you want to know?" Kevin had asked.
    "I don't know," Malcolm replied, "I don't know."
    Early risers were just beginning to make their way through Moscow streets when Malcolm and Kevin were approaching Washington . One of the few Russians who walked briskly through the early morning was Nicholaus Ryzhov, a physical prototype for the bearlike Russian peasant. His proletariat ancestry showed in his lumbering workingman's walk and on his heavy muscled frame, which even at age sixty-three was hard and tough. But Ryzhov's clothes were cut more expensively than most of his fellow Russians', and he was no longer a peasant. He was a very important division commander in the committee for State Security of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union , the Komitet Gosudarstvennoye Bezopastnosti, better known as the KGB. Although the KGB is a civilian organization, its officers often hold military rank. When he took over his duties as a division commander, smooth-faced, tight-skinned, gray-haired Ryzhov chose to be a colonel. He could have been a general if he wished. Ryzhov strode on oblivious to the chilly morning. His bodyguards, who followed, flanked and preceded him at discreet distances, shivered, very, very silently cursing their chief's love of long, early morning walks.
    The KGB is one of two major government branches in 'the Soviet Union concerned with espionage, the other branch being the KGB's smaller rival, the GRU, military intelligence. The KGB traces its roots as far back as 1881 and the Okhrana, the Department of State Protection, used by the czars as a secret police and intelligence agency. Less than two years after its inception the czarist espionage unit sent agents to the United States to keep track of Vladimir Legaev, an Okhrana defector who fled Mother Russia and became an American college professor. The czarist Okhrana also kept track of potential troublemaking Russians who stayed at home. For example, an Okhrana file card, dated May 1, 1904, notes that the second and third toes of one Joseph Stalin's left foot were grown together, producing a webbed-foot effect.
    The secret police and intelligence system which in post-revolutionary days replaced the Okhrana operated in basically the same fashion as its czarist predecessor, but under a variety of changing names and initials, including the Cheka (Chrezvychainaya, Komissiya po Borbe s Kontr revolutisiei i Sabotazhem, ie., the Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage), born December 20, 1917. Some Russians still refer to KGB agents as Chekists. In 1938, one Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria took the reins of the then NKVD, a position he