Before he'd gone to bed the night before, Larry Woolford had ordered a seat on the shuttle jet for Jacksonville and a hover-cab there to take him to Astor, on the St. Johns River. And he'd requested to be wakened in ample time to get to the shuttleport.
But it wasn't the saccharine pleasant face of the Personal Service operator which confronted him when he grumpily answered the phone in the morning. In fact, the screen remained blank.
Larry decided that sweet long drinks were fine, but that anyone who took several of them in a row needed to be candied. He grumbled into the phone, “All right, who is it?”
A Teutonic voice chuckled and said, “You're going to have to decide whether or not you're on vacation, my friend. At this time of day, why aren't you at work?”
Larry Woolford was waking up. He said, “What can I do for you, Distelmayer?” The German merchant-of-espionage wasn't the type to make personal calls.
“Have you forgotten so soon, my friend?” the other chuckled. “It was I who was going to do you a favor.” He hesitated momentarily, before adding, “In possible return for future—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Larry said. He was fully awake now.
The German said slowly, “You asked if any of your friends from, ah, abroad were newly in the country. Frol Eivazov has recently appeared on the scene.”
Eivazov! In various respects, Larry Woolford's counterpart. Hatchetman for the Chrezvychainaya Komissiya. Woolford had met him on occasion when they'd both been present at international summit meetings, busily working at counter-espionage for their respective superiors. Blandly [pg 026] shaking hands with each other, blandly drinking toasts to peace and international co-existence, blandly sizing each other up and wondering if it'd ever come to the point where one would blandly treat the other to a hole in the head, possibly in some dark alley in Havana or Singapore, Leopoldville or Saigon.
Larry said sharply, “Where is he? How'd he get in the country?”