"Дон Пендлтон. Renegade Agent ("Палач" #47) " - читать интересную книгу автора

book, a white pen in a white holder, a white telephone with three rows of
pushbuttons and nothing else. Set to one side on a lower table with two
drawers was a computer terminal with a video display tube. There was a file
cabinet against one white wall, a white sofa with two matching chairs, and a
couple of coffee tables on which magazines were arranged in neat overlapping
rows. The only real color came gloomily from a couple of abstract framed
paintings that looked like microcomputer schematic. Gadgets was already
checking out the door set into the wall behind the desk. The intelligence
reports that had gotten them this far had the room beyond as the private
office of Frederick Donald Charon ( president of DonCo, theoretical
scientist with a PhD in cybernetics, mathematics, and computer applications,
and holder of an NSC Priority-One clearance.
Charon was an extraordinary man, for sure, with, perhaps, merely a
single flaw.
The guy was guilty of treason.
Back up a bit. As was common knowledge, over half the staff of the
Soviet embassy in Washington were intelligence agents under direct control
of the KGB. One of these agents, a medium-ranker named Tuholske who worked
in the legal counsel's office, had secretly defected years earlier.
Though hardly privy to everything that went through the embassy, he was
occasionally able to answer on some interesting tidbits for the U.S. Not
twelve hours earlier, Tuholske had reported to his control that he had
encoded a message to the Kremlin reporting one Frederick Donald Charon
offering to sell some unspecified but highly classified defense information
for a great deal of-money. Was Moscow interested? Probably. Washington sure
as hell was.
The fact that the intelligence was, in fact, three weeks old was
unfortunate but unavoidable.
Tuholske was under strict orders to make contact only on a rigidly
randomized monthly schedule, as a precaution against his being discovered.
What made things more difficult, more urgent, was that Charon's present
whereabouts were unknown, and inquiries through normal channels had been
uniformly stonewalled by DonCo personnel.
This softprobe, therefore, had two purposes.
One was to secure hard evidence of Charon's evident treason. The other
was to discover his whereabouts, hopefully in time for a regular field agent
to interdict the scientist before he could carry through on his offer to the
Russians. And the key to both goals was behind that locked door.
A quick little shimmer tingled the Bolan spine. He stood relaxed in the
dark zone, but alert, legs apart in his skintight combat blacks and soft
black shoes. He watched in the darkness now, taking position in the very
background of the gloom as the wizard played his own penlight over a panel
set into the wall next to the entrance to Charon's office.
The panel held a keyboard, and above it an LED display.
"Automatic access-control system," Gadgets said. He punched a digit at
random.
It appeared in the display. Gadgets hesitated, punched another, then a
third, fourth, and fifth.
Next to the five figures the display began to flash "ERROR," like an
accusation. Gadgets hit the "clear" button and the display returned to