"Frank Herbert - Hellstrom's Hive" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

Curious, he had glanced into the file and found a highly touchy report on a translator in a foreign
embassy.

His first reaction to the file's contents had been a kind of sorrowful outrage that governments still
resorted to such forms of espionage. Something about the file told him it represented an intricately
complex operation of his own government.

Janvert had come up through the "campus unrest" period into the study of law. He had seen the law
at first as a possible way out of the world's many dilemmas, but that had proved a will-o'-the-wisp.
The law had led him only into that library with its damnable misplaced file folder. One thing had
led inevitably to another, just as it always did, without a completely defined cause-and-effect
relationship. The immediate thing, however, was that he had been caught reading the file by its
owner.

What followed was curiously low key. There had been a period of pressures, some subtle and some
not quite subtle, designed to recruit him into the Agency that had produced the file. Janvert came
from a good family, they explained. His father was an important businessman (owner-operator of a
small-town hardware store). At first, it had been vaguely amusing.

Then the pay offers (plus expenses) had climbed embarrassingly high and he had begun to wonder.
There had been startling praise for his abilities and aptitudes, which Janvert had suspected the
Agency invented on the spur of the moment because he'd had difficulty seeing himself in their
descriptions.

Finally, the gloves had come off. He'd been told pointedly that he might find other government
employment difficult to obtain. This had almost put his back up, because it was common
knowledge that he'd set his sights on the Justice Department. In the end, he'd said he would try it
for a few years if he could continue his law education. By that time, he'd been dealing with the
Chief's right-hand man, Dzule Peruge, and Peruge had evinced profound delight at this prospect.

"The Agency needs men with legal training," Peruge said. "We need them desperately at times."

Peruge's next words had startled Janvert.

"Has anyone ever told you that you could pass for a teen-ager? That could be very useful,
especially in someone with legal training." This last had come out with all the overtones of an
afterthought.

The facts were that Janvert had always been kept too busy to complete his valuable legal training.
"Maybe next year, Shorty. You can see for yourself how crucial your present case is. Now, I want
you and Clovis --"
That had been how he'd first met Clovis, who also had that useful appearance of youth. Sometimes,
she'd been his sister; other times they'd been runaway lovers whose parents "didn't understand."

The realization had come rather slowly to Janvert that the file he had found and read was more
sensitive than he had imagined and that a probable alternative to his joining the Agency had been a
markerless grave in some southern swamp. He had never participated in a "swamping," as Agency
old-timers put it, but he knew for a fact that they occurred.

That's how it was in the Agency, he learned.