Saying soothing things, Finkie lifted, earned her to the couch in the now deserted outer office where, being so experienced and really understanding in such situations, was making love to her when Julius crept back inside the room as shoeless as Joe Jackson so he shouldn’t squeak. Scalpel ready, his face whiter than Moscow’s January snow, he slashed at Finkie’s jugular vein.
“Jesus!” said Finkie, rolling off of Rosala and squirting blood everywhere. “Just like Cain and Abel, now who would have thought?”
Rosala had only time to wonder if in time to save her honor her knight had arrived before the bloody scalpel just below the sternum slid in and up between her teats. Gasping for breath, her eyes as round as honeydew melons, Lilith! poor tsedraite Rosala cried out. Lilith! who sucks out from the soul what she shouldn’t, how otherwise explain Julius’s bloody monstrous face as he extracts the blood-soaked instrument and plunges it into his heart?
“Julius?” Mrs. Finkelstein said when Isaac the policeman told her how many more sweaters she could buy now that Finkie was dead. “He never had it in him.
“ ’ead all about itl ’et yuh Journal, Whirl, Tele...”
Spy for Sale
Edward D. Hoch
Edward D. Hoch is a past president of Mystery Writers of America and author of more than seven hundred short stories. He also has twenty-eight books to his credit, including his annual series. Year’s Best Mystery & Suspense Stories, which he edits for Walker. About “Spy for Sale,” Mr. Hoch comments: “This story doesn’t introduce a new character but is intended more as a nonseries tale focusing upon the increasingly important world of what might be called civilian intelligence gathering. The idea came to me after reading an article about such activity in the New York Times. I enjoy researching this type of story, and I hope readers might gain some knowledge along the way.”
Method was already at his desk pouring over the latest satellite photos of the Oregon forestland when Frazer arrived. He was late, as usual, and was aware of Method’s critical gaze on his back as he hung up his raincoat and took his seat.
“I’ve started work on the forestry management report for you,” Method said. “It has to be completed today, you know.”
“I know,” Frazer replied. “Do you have the photos?”
“Right here.”
He leaned over the balding man’s shoulder and inspected the familiar satellite views of tree-covered mountainsides seen from four hundred miles up. “Those fires did more damage than we thought. See this area along the ridge?”
Felix Method grunted. “It’s nature’s way. It’ll fill in again through natural growth.”
Frazer had been a photo analyst for Sky-Eye since the first of the year. Though he didn’t particularly like Felix Method, he had to admit the man had laid the foundation for what might well become a hugely profitable business in a few years’ time. Method and his backers had purchased Sky-Eye from the American government when it turned over three aging satellites to commercial companies. The two Landsats had gone to the Earth Observation Satellite Company, while Sky-Eye had gone to the newly formed Sky-Eye International Corporation.
The satellite, circling the earth in a regular orbit, was the equal of the highly touted French SPOT, capable of photographing any point on earth twice each week with a peripheral-vision camera and transmitting the picture to a ground station via electronic signals. Powered by solar panels, Sky-Eye had decades of life ahead of it. “It’s not as good as the military satellites, of course,” Felix Method had explained when Frazer joined the firm. “It can’t read the numbers on a license plate from one hundred fifty miles up, like the American and Soviet governments can. The Defense Department set specific limitations on how good the Sky-Eye can be. Still, it can distinguish objects a quarter the size of a football field, which is good enough for our clients.”
“Just who are your clients?” Frazer had asked, wondering what he was getting into.
“Our photos can be used for mineral exploration, city planning, crop forecasting, forestry management — just about anything where an overview of a large area is required. Clients merely furnish the latitude and longitude of the spot they need, and Sky-Eye takes the picture. The cost can be anywhere from under a hundred dollars to two thousand dollars, depending upon various factors. If they need it at once, it costs more. If they’re willing to wait a few months until the data can be routinely transmitted back to earth and the pictures processed as a group, the cost goes way down.”
Frazer’s job was photo analysis, for those clients who required it. Mostly this involved a knowledge of geology and land management, but his years with Air Force intelligence helped, too. They’d taught him a great deal about shadows — how they could help or hinder photo analysis. As Felix Method liked to point out, “There are always shadows on our pictures. If the sun can’t get through the clouds, our camera can’t get through, either.”
This morning in April, with a misty rain falling outside, Method and Frazer and Miss Raymond were the only ones in the office. Miss Raymond was Cynthia Raymond, who handled much of the office routine and billing, taking time out occasionally to try a bit of photo analysis on her own. She was especially captivated by satellite views of the Nevada desert, showing the site of underground testing of nuclear bombs at Yucca Flat.
“What are all these things?” she asked Frazer, coming over to his desk with the latest Yucca Flat photo. “They look like the craters of the moon.”
“You’re not far wrong.” He liked the feel of her alongside him, her long legs brushing against him ever so slightly as she leaned over the desk. “The underground explosions, if they’re powerful enough, cause the earth to collapse over the point of the blast, leaving craters several hundred feet wide. Such tests are easily detected by satellite cameras, so there’s no way of hiding them from the Russians. That’s why our government announces them, although since 1982 they haven’t announced the smaller ones.”
“Someone could count these craters and know exactly how many underground tests we’ve conducted.”
“It’s not quite as easy as that. As I said, some are much smaller and don’t leave craters. And tests of equipment are often done in a different manner, in horizontal tunnels drilled into the side of the mesa. But this is a good record of the larger underground ones.”
“Can we tell as much about the Russian tests as they can about ours?”
“Pretty much.” He flipped through one of the photo files and took out an eleven- by fourteen-inch enlargement. “This is a Soviet missile launching site. I could make you a detailed drawing of it from the information on this photo. And here’s a space-shuttle runway being built.”
“You’re good at this business, aren’t you?”
“Fairly good,” he admitted with a grin. “Everyone’s good at something.”
Felix Method came in from his desk to interrupt them. “Less chatter and more work would be appreciated. How are those forestry-management reports coming along, Frazer?”
“I’ll have it after lunch.”
“I hope so.” He turned his attention to Cynthia. “Caught up on your work, Miss Raymond?”
“No, sir.” She blushed prettily and retreated to her own desk.
Frazer waited until he was going out to lunch and then managed to pause by her desk. “Maybe we could continue our conversation over a drink tonight,” he suggested.
She brightened up at once. “I’d like that.”
Frazer was unattached at the moment, and he’d had his eye on Cynthia Raymond since she joined Sky-Eye two months earlier. Her high cheekbones and dusky eyes gave her an appearance that was almost oriental, the sort he found especially attractive in a woman. Better yet, she’d demonstrated the sort of intelligence on the job that he found refreshing. She wasn’t afraid to ask questions, and the answers seemed to go into her memory like programs into a computer.