Snare of the Hunter by Helen MacInnes Read Free Book Online Page A

the direction of the sleeping child and the hostess joined her in a bright smile. Then Jo was on her way to the washroom.
    Girl? If she were Women’s Lib and insisted on being addressed as Ms., she’d be annoyed with that description. But, thought David as male chauvinist, she might be a grown woman in her late twenties, and she might be brighter and more intelligent than he was (McCulloch, that careful codger, wouldn’t pick a fly-brained cutie for this job), yet she was still a charmer, and definitely of the purely feminine gender. An oval face with smooth pale skin and good bone structure. (The profile view had been clear and well defined.) Large eyes, dark eyelashes, carefully marked eyebrows, all very pleasing below the gleaming dark hair. He wouldn’t forget that face. Nor the voice: well modulated, nothing hoarse or raucous; middle register, with a hint of something else than purely American. English? Just a slight influence in the vowels, he thought, with Italian (her name pointed to that) in the softness of some syllables. At least, if she started giving him orders, her voice wouldn’t add to his annoyance. Let’s hope she doesn’t, he decided; let’s hope we both keep the level of command at fifty-fifty. He had his doubts. Jo seemed to be a capable woman, all right. The way she had handled herself there was damned neat.
    He returned to his newspaper. McCulloch had taken out some legal-sized sheets from his briefcase, put on his glasses, uncapped a ball-point pen, and was apparently absorbed. David began reading. It didn’t take him long to finish the Reuter’s dispatch—its four columns covered about a quarter of the full-sized page of the newspaper. Its headline had been misleading. “Two More Subversion Trials” meant, in fact, two places—Prague itself and the town of Brno—where a number of trials, each involving groups of the more liberal Communists, had been going on for the last week and were still continuing. The defendants were all educated men and women: doctors, historians, a philosopher, two engineers, a clergyman, lawyers. They had been arrested last November, before the Czech elections, for handing out leaflets which reminded citizens of their constitutional rights in voting. Some, too, had given interviews to Western newsmen. They could get as much as ten years in prison. It was, so the paragraph lightly circled by McCulloch’s pencil told David, an attempt “to eliminate any remaining active political opposition once and for all. That this is evidently declining is indicated by the fact that in the months before the trials began Western correspondents heard less than usual from the underground opposition movement.” And there was another eye-catching detail: the present Communist party leader, now in control of the government, was trying to keep the trials in low profile, not disturb the general calm of the country, and give no opportunity to hard-liners “to step in with tougher measures.”
    There’s a clue there, thought David, to the way our intelligence agencies are acting, and I can’t quite find it. He re-read the dispatch. The due was there, still evading him. But he had learned something. There were four political groupings in Czechoslovakia. First was the minority who now held power; they were middle-of-the-road, trying to show Russia they were all good Communists too—see how we can keep discipline? Secondly, there was a majority, now out of power, as liberal but not quite as daring as Dubcek in the Prague Spring of 1968, who were being disciplined to encourage them to hold their heads down. Thirdly, there was the group in the background, the hard-liners, the new Stalinists, ready “to take tougher measures”—which meant the seizure of power and shock tactics. They’d hold bigger and better trials: staged shows with charges of treason, just like the old days. And fourthly, there were the non-Communists and ex-Communists, possibly the smallest group of all, now