The Summer Soldier by Nicholas Guild Read Free Book Online

he had drunk it. But as he sat at the window and watched
the rain he drank less and less. After all, what’s a little
discomfort in the old GI tract compared to a good case of
pneumonia?
    He sat there—weighing one evil against
another and thinking how in a few hours he would have to turn
himself over to the embassy for shipment home—for perhaps three
quarters of an hour. The tea had long since ceased to make him
anything except faintly nauseous when MI-6, in the soon to be
familiar person of Mr. Byron J. Down, made its move.
    Guinness always liked ol’ Byron J. He was,
indeed, a likable man, not the sort at all you would expect to be
running a stable of assassins. He looked exactly like what in fact
he had been before the war had given him the opportunity to
discover where his real genius lay—a professor of linguistics, in
fact a specialist in deep structure syntax with three degrees from
Cambridge University.
    He must have been in his early fifties when
Guinness first met him. A heavyset man with a placid, rather dreamy
face set off by a pair of heavy, black rimmed glasses. His hair was
brownish and thinning, and he never wore a hat, no matter what the
weather, on the theory that the hatband would cut off the
circulation in his scalp and hasten the balding process. He had a
nice smile, ol’ Byron did, and he smiled it as he sat down at
Guinness’s table and offered him a nice thick wedge of apple pie.
He slid the plate across the table with the tips of his thumb and
first finger, as if it weighed nothing.
    “Here you go, young man,” he said in a
caressing voice. “You have a bit of that. You look done in.”
    Guinness glanced up at him suspiciously as he
picked up the fork and started eating. His first thought was that
the guy was probably a fairy on the hustle, but what the hell. He
was starving and a slice of pie doesn’t bind you to anything. It
hardly seemed an occasion in which to display one’s outraged
manhood. That could wait on events.
    Down must have divined his thoughts—he had
that knack—because the smile died.
    Neither one of them said anything for perhaps
as long as five minutes. Guinness was being careful, famished
though he was, not to rush through his pie. He tried to make each
piece about the size of his thumbnail, and he chewed carefully. It
was ice cold and lovely, even with that hideous lardy crust the
British favor, but he didn’t want to appear to be enjoying it too
much. Regardless of what Chubby had in mind, he didn’t care to
appear too terribly hard up. It was bad psychology—people always
want to kick you when you’re down.
    “There now,” Down began at last. “That’s
better. You don’t look the sort of lad to go to the dogs from long
standing habit.” The pleasant smile reappeared slowly, and Guinness
thought he noticed the faintest trace of an Edinburgh burr stealing
in behind the words. “And you don’t look the type to turn down an
honest offer of employment—how would you like to make a round
thousand quid all in one lump, hum? That would tide you over for a
while, now wouldn’t it?”
    A little quick mental arithmetic made that
out at about twenty-five hundred dollars. You could live a long
time on that kind of money. Seven, maybe eight months if you were
careful. Yes, Guinness would have to agree. Twenty¬ five hundred
dollars would solve all of life’s immediate problems quite
nicely.
    “Who do I have to kill?”
    For the next six years, until Down fell over
dead from a heart attack in the billiard room of his club—it was a
real heart attack; Guinness checked and Byron’s arteries were hard
enough to pound through a tree—they always laughed about that
unintentionally appropriate question.
    “Who do I have to kill?” It became a kind of
in house joke.
    Poor ol’ Byron, dead and buried lo these many
years.
    Very much alive for the moment, Down smiled
even more broadly, made a little sound that came out about halfway
between a cough and a chuckle,