Bagley, Desmond - The Freedom Trap by The Freedom Trap

Author:The Freedom Trap [Trap, The Freedom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Yet sometimes it has to be done and an agent is detailed to do it. Whether this constitutes a licence to kill I wouldn't know; it certainly doesn't grant a general licence to commit unrestricted mayhem. You leave too many unexplained bodies lying around and the secret service stops being secret.

Now, Mackintosh hadn't told me to kill anyone apart from Slade and that meant, generally speaking, no killing. Such unordered deaths are known in the trade as 'accidental' and any agent who is crass enough to cause such an accidental death quickly gets the chop as being unreliable and inept. For an agent to leave a trail of corpses in his wake would cause untold consternation in those little hole-in-the-corner offices in Whitehall which have the innocuous and deceptive names on the doors.

In fact, it came back to the old moral problem -- when is a man justified in killing another man? I resolved it by quoting the phrase -- 'Kill or be killed!' If I were in danger of being killed then I would kill in self-defence -- and not until then. I had killed only one man in my life and that had made me sick to my stomach for two days afterwards.

That settled in my mind, I began planning arson. An inspection of the liquor cabinet showed a bottle and a half of South African brandy, the best part of a bottle of Scotch, ditto gin, and a half-bottle of Drambuie. A few tests showed the brandy and the Drambuie as being most flammable, although not as fiery as I would have wished. I was sorry I hadn't developed a taste for rum -- there's some nice 100 per cent stuff on the market which would have suited me fine -- although God knows what it does to the lining of the stomach.

Then I went to bed and slept the sleep of the morally just.

II There was no breakfast next morning. Instead of Taafe trundling his trolley before him he came in empty-handed and jerked his thumb at the door. I shrugged and walked out. It seemed as though the party was over.

I was taken downstairs and across the hall into the closely curtained room where I had signed the cheque. In the hall I passed an elderly couple, Darby and Joan types, who were sitting nervously on the edges of their chairs as though they thought it was a dentist's waiting room. They looked at me incuriously as I walked past the m into the room where Fat-face was waiting for me.

There was a bleak look on his face. 'You've had a night to think about it,' he said. 'Your story had better be very good, Mr Whoever-you-are.'

I went on the attack. 'Where's that dab-sheet?'

'We don't keep it here,' he said shortly. 'In any case, it isn't necessary.'

'I still don't know what you're talking about,' I said. 'And if you think I've spent all night cooking up a cock-and-bull story just to satisfy you then you're crazy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.