The Red Horseman by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online Page A

believe it-the only
politically neutral people he had ever met were dead.
    So the items discussed here were really policy
alternatives that had made their long, tortuous
way through the intestines of the Central Intelligence
Agency, perhaps the most monolithic bureaucracy
left on the planet. Like General Brown, Jake
Grafton looked at these nuggets without
enthusiasm. Larded with dubious predictions and
carefully chosen facts, these policy
alternatives were really the choices the upper
echelons of the CIA wanted the policyrnakers
to adopt. The researchers gave their bosses what
they thought the bosses wanted to hear, or so Brown and
Grafton believed.
    Alas, these two uniformed officers well knew
they couldn’t change the system. So they listened and
recorded their objections.
    Schenler sometimes argued. Most of the time he just
took notes. Grafton never saw the notes.
About fifty, with saltand-pepper hair and an ivy
league education, Schenler was an organization man
to his fingertips.
    “I’ll bet the bastard hasn’t farted in
twenty-five years,” General Brown once
grumbled to Jake.
    Jake also took occasional notes at these
soirees, doodled and watched Schenler and his
lieutenants perform the usual rituals.
    Today, when he finally concluded that General Brown
had given up, he went back to doodling. He used
his pencil to doctor up his copy of a reproduction
of a current Russian anti-Semitic poster that
had been handed around before Brown fired his salvo. The
crude drawing depicted two rich Jews-they had
to be Jews: guys with hooked noses wearing
yartnulkes–counting their money while starving women and
children watched. In one corner a man with a red star on
his cap observed the scene. Jake penciled a
swastika on his chest.
    “What is this?” Jake held up a piece of
paper and waved it at Toad Tarkington.
    “Ah, Admiral, if you could give me a little
hint “You put this here, didn’t you?”
    Jake Grafton had been going through his morning
mail pile when he ran across Toad’s
masterpiece, a summary of everything in the computer about
the demise of Nigel Keren. It was short,
only one page, but pithy, full of facts.
    Toad knew the admiral was partial to facts.
    “Oh,” Toad said when Jake held the paper out
so he could see it, “that’s just a little thing I put together
for your information.”
    The admiral stared at him with humor. “I know
everything I want to know about Nigel Keren.”
    Toad had rehearsed this, but looking at Jake
Grafton, his little speech went out the window. “I’m
sorry,” he said contritely.
    “I know how he was killed,” the admiral said.
    Toad gawked.
    The admiral put the paper on the desk in
front of him and toyed with it.
    “A publishing mogul alone on a large yacht,
no one aboard but him and twelve crew members,
all male. The ship is three days out of the
Canaries when he eats dinner alone-the same
food that all the crew was served-and spends the rest
of the evening walking the deck, then goes to his
stateroom. The next morning the crew can’t find
him aboard. Two days later his nude body is
found floating in the sea. A Spanish pathologist
found no evidence of violence, no water in the
lungs, no heart disease, no burst blood
vessels in the brain, no evidence of suffocation.
In short, the man died a natural death and his
corpse somehow went into the sea. None of the crew
members knows anything. All deny that they killed
him.”
    When Jake fell silent Toad added, “Then his
media empire broke up.
    Apparently large sums of money, hundreds of
millions, may have been taken. If anyone knows,
they aren’t saying. Keren’s son says the deceased
father just leveraged deals and the worldwide recesmade too
many sion caught them short.”
    The admiral merely grunted.
    “Perhaps there was a stowaway aboard the yacht,”
Toad suggested. “Or a small vessel
rendezvoused with the yacht and an assassin team came
aboard.”
    “No. The British checked with every ship in the
vicinity and