The Favor by Nicholas Guild Read Free Book Online Page A

pie Guinness had
brought along with him. It was a beautiful thing, in its way—a
handmade, one of a kind, single shot nine millimeter rifle that
looked like just so many aluminum tubes when it was disassembled;
Guinness had smuggled it all the way across Europe in the side
pocket of his suitcase. It had a special five power hooded scope so
it wouldn’t glint in the sunlight, and at anything less than
seventy-five yards you could use it to punctuate a sentence.
    Still, he found it hard to ignore the feeling
that all was not well.
    For one thing, Shevliskin was scared. He kept
studying the reflections in shop windows, as if he could sense he
was being followed. He had been doing it from the first day—from
the first hour. He was a worried man.
    Guinness was reasonably certain that he
hadn’t been spotted, so he didn’t think it was him. But there was
something that played on our boy’s nerves. He was like a man
conscious of being under sentence of death, simply waiting for the
thing to happen. He was waiting—that was it—and with a kind of
unfocused dread.
    And then there were the police. There were
just too many of them. It wasn’t that they stood around in pairs on
every corner; there were plenty of uniforms in evidence, but that
was true everywhere east of Berlin. The guys in the olive drab
coats and the peaked caps were kind of reassuring, in fact—you
could spot them. But there were too many others, too many big men
lounging around under their hat brims.
    Maybe they were the reason Shevliskin wasn’t
feeling very jolly; he seemed to be swimming through an atmosphere
of official surveillance.
    Guinness had wanted just to forget the whole
thing and go back to London, but he had been a lot younger in those
days and a believer that orders were orders. MI-6 wanted this guy’s
ticket canceled, and the job was supposed to come first. Letting
your woman’s intuition get the better of you wasn’t considered very
good form.
    So he had gone ahead with it. On the second
afternoon, while Janik ate his minced pork and pickled cabbage, he
had scouted the building with the “For rent” sign and had found an
empty front office on the second floor, picking the lock almost as
fast as if he had been provided with a key. The window faced
directly across to the spot where, two days in a row now,
Shevliskin had stopped to relight his cigar, and there was a stack
of packing cases in one corner, so there wouldn’t be any problem
about concealing the rifle; he didn’t want to be seen carrying
around any funny looking bundles on the big day.There was an
Alitalia office on the fourth floor, which would provide a suitable
cover story if he should for some reason be called upon to explain
what he was doing in that particular place. After all, he was a
tourist. He walked up the two flights of stairs and asked for a
flight schedule, involving the girl behind the counter in a long
and grotesquely complicated conversation—Guinness only knew about
three hundred words of Italian, most of them inconveniently
Dantesque—about the customs regulations. The idea was to be
remembered as absorbed in his travel plans.
    For the rest there was precious little to do.
While his target was working in the inaccessibility of the State
Security Office, Guinness followed his guidebook around the streets
of Belgrade, trying not to get lost. It wouldn’t have been hard—the
guidebook was in English, German, and French, but most of the
signs, and all the street markers, were in the Cyrillic alphabet,
which he had to figure out by analogy with Greek, with rather
questionable results. Finally he gave up and found he could do
fairly well navigating by triangulation from three or four of the
more obvious public buildings. After all, if worst came to worst,
he could always just strike west and he would have to run into the
Sava River—from there he knew how to find the boarding house where
he had a room.
    On the morning of the fourth day, he waited
until