The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth Read Free Book Online Page A

staff will confirm you spoke to nobody, contacted nobody. You paused at nobody’s table, nor anyone at yours. You have the package in an inside pocket, and you finish your drink and go back to the embassy. The Opposition will, hopefully, report that you contacted nobody throughout the entire stroll.
    “That is the brush-pass ... and that is the lunch bell. All right, we’ll scrub it for now.”
    By midafternoon, Adam Munro was closeted in the secure library beneath the Firm’s headquarters, beginning to bore through a pile of buff folders. He had just five days to master and commit to memory enough background material to enable him to take over from Harold Lessing at the Firm’s “legal resident” in Moscow.
    On May 31 he flew from London to Moscow to take up his new appointment.

    Munro spent the first week settling in. To all the embassy staff but an informed few he was just a professional diplomat and the hurried replacement for Harold Lessing. The Ambassador, head of Chancery, chief cipher clerk, and commercial counselor knew what his real job was. The fact of his relatively advanced age at forty-six years to be only a First Secretary in the Commercial Section was explained by his late entrance into the diplomatic corps.
    The commercial counselor ensured that the commercial files placed before him were as unburdensome as possible. He had a brief and formal reception by the Ambassador in the latter’s private office, and a more informal drink with the head of Chancery. He met most of the staff and was taken to a round of diplomatic parties to meet many of the other diplomats from Western embassies. He also had a face-to-face and more businesslike conference with his opposite number
    at the American Embassy. “Business,” as the CIA man confirmed to him, was quiet.
    Though it would have made any staffer at the British Embassy in Moscow stand out like a sore thumb to speak no Russian, Munro kept his use of the language to a formal and accented version both in front of his colleagues and when talking to official Russians during the introduction process. At one party, two Soviet Foreign Ministry personnel had had a brief exchange in rapid, colloquial Russian a few feet away. He had understood it completely, and as it was mildly inter- esting, he had filed it to London.
    On his tenth day, he sat alone on a park bench in the sprawling Soviet Exhibition of Economic Achievements, in the extreme northern outskirts of the Russian capital. He was waiting to make first contact with the agent from the Red Army whom he had taken over from Lessing.
    Munro had been born in 1936, the son of an Edinburgh doctor, and his boyhood through the war years had been conventional, middle-class, untroubled, and happy. He had attended a local school up to the age of thirteen years and then spent five at Fettes College, one of Scotland’s best schools. It was during his period here that his senior languages master had detected in the lad an unusually acute ear for foreign languages.
    In 1954, with National Service then obligatory, he had gone into the Army and after basic training secured a posting to his father’s old regiment, the First Gordon Highlanders. Transferred to Cyprus, he had been on operations against EOKA partisans in the Troodos Mountains that late summer.
    Sitting in a park in Moscow, he could see the farmhouse still, in his mind’s eye. They had spent half the night crawling through the heather to surround the place, following a tip-off from an informant. When dawn came, Munro was posted alone at the bottom of a steep escarpment behind the hilltop house. The main body of his platoon stormed the front of the farm just as dawn broke, coming up the shallower slope with the sun behind them.
    From above him, on the other side of the hill, he could hear the chattering of the Stens in the quiet dawn. By the first rays of the sun he could see the two figures that came tumbling out of the rear windows, in shadow until their headlong