The Saint straightened up.
It had been a good evening; and he had no regrets. The game was worth playing for its own sake, to him: the prizes came welcomely, but they weren’t everything. And no one knew better than he that you couldn’t win all the time. There were chances that couldn’t be reckoned with in advance; and the duplicity of Mr. Watkins was one of those. But for that, he would have played his hand faultlessly, out-bluffed and out-manoeuvred the Carney-Runce combination in a fair field, and made as clean a job of it as anything else he had done. But that single unexpected factor had turned the scale just enough to bring the bluff to a show-down, as unexpected factors always would. And yet Peter Quentin saw that the Saint was smiling.
“I think that’s a good idea,” said the Saint.
Between Philip Carney and George Runce flashed one blank glance; but their mouths remained closed.
“Perhaps there’s another room we could go to,” said the sergeant, almost genially; and Mrs. Dempster-Craven I inclined her head like a queen dismissing a distasteful odour.
“Watkins will show you to the library.”
Simon turned on his heel and led the way towards the door, with Mr. Watkins still gripping his arm; but as his path brought him level with Kate Allfield he stopped and smiled down at her.
“I think you’re a swell kid,” he said.
His voice sounded a trifle strange. And then, before two hundred shocked and startled eyes, including those of Lord and Lady Bredon, the Honourable Celia Mallard, three baronets, and the aspiring Mrs. Dempster-Craven herself, he laid his hands gently on her shoulders and kissed her outrageously on the mouth; and in the silence of appalled aristocracy which followed that performance made his stately exit.
“How the devil did you get away with it?” asked Peter Quentin weakly, as they drove away in a taxi an hour later. “I was fairly sweating blood all the time you were being stripped.”
The Saint’s face showed up in the dull glow as he drew at his cigarette.
“It was in my mouth,” he said.
“But they made you open your mouth—”
“It was there when I kissed Kate, anyway,” said the Saint, and sang to himself all the rest of the way home.
Send a Man from Intrex
by Michael Avallone
Illusions die hard. We like to insist that “it can’t happen here” — and, of course, most of the time it doesn’t. But just as much as death and violence, including mob violence, have become aspects of our times, so have these skirmishes in the shadows — to which we ourselves may at times be unwitting witnesses — which often determine what happens next in the Cold War. And, if you doubt this, remember Gordon Lonsdale — or Colonel Abel.
When two agents meet, the sparks don’t necessarily fly upward. They can shoot down, around and out. Particularly when both agents are trained killers and each share the mutual love and respect of an organization known as the International Trade Experts. Code name, alphabetic shorthand, INTREX.[1]
Where these two agents met and why they are important is of little consequence. It should be sufficient to say that their names are David Seven and Miles Running Bear Farmer.
David Seven is deceptively lean, quiet-voiced and quiet-faced. The world knows him as one of the finest young legal minds available for outlandish fees.
Miles Running Bear Farmer is that rarity among statistics: a full-blooded Cherokee Indian who went to college, graduated with honors and leaped to the forefront as an outstanding exponent of the new approach in his particular sphere of his field — public buildings, municipal centers, auditoriums.
These then are our heroes.
Under the separate covers of Law and Architecture, they work for INTREX. As field agents, scientific assassins and underground tools for the organization which masks its workings and endeavors as a philanthropic, benevolent society, founded by anonymous millionaires, who would gladly pick up the tab for all the deserving poor of the world.
Were you to look INTREX up as a matter of curiosity or business interest, you would find that their Dunn & Bradstreet rating is Triple A; that their offices are located in an immense warehouse complex on the lower East Side of Manhattan, with a rear development that meets the waterfront of the East River. Many of the members of INTREX are prominently listed in all the Who’s Who extant on the professions and sciences. In truth, all of this corporation’s members are outstanding professional men in the fields of electronics, medicine, engineering, chemistry, archeology, geology, palaeontology, atomic research, law, logistics, biology, botany, etc. There is no field of human endeavor and knowledge in which the International Trade Experts do not have a leading representative.
David Seven and Miles Running Bear Farmer were meeting at the corner of Forty Second Street and Fifth Avenue, because INTREX always sends a man, sometimes two, when a problem or a difficulty crops up that may threaten the security of the world.
On the morning of July 13th, the old world seemed to be in hot water again.
Seven and Farmer arranged their rendezvous under the guise of a chance meeting.
“Hey, Dave!”
“Miles—”
“You old sonofagun, what are you doing here?”
“I’m out buying. Cathy needs a new handbag—”
“Got time for a cup of coffee?”
“Sure thing, Miles. Wait’ll I tell Cathy I ran into you like this—”
Forty Second and Fifth is a Times Square in microcosm. All sorts of people rushing back and forth, heavy traffic; the crowds are eternally on the go. The only aspect of the Square that is missing are the garish movie houses, the book stores and the loitering drifters. Thus, two old friends can meet and the world will hardly pause to take a second look.
Cathy Darrow was David Seven’s official secretary down at INTREX. But just as the world was fooled, so was she. She never would have believed that her dreamboat boss, with his quiet ways and kindly smile, was a cold-blooded executioner type spy just like the ones she saw in the movies. The same sort of bad guessing would apply to Miles Running Bear Farmer.
The Mayflower Coffee Shop was half-filled. The time was not yet noon and the crowds hurrying in for lunch were still an hour away.
They found a square, cozy brown table just off from the nook of a bar. Just above them, the spaced floorboard of a staircase rose to the next level.
David Seven ordered coffee for them both. The waitress, not so prim or trim, smiled blankly and moved on her errand. Miles Running Bear Farmer took out a pack of cigarettes and placed it on the table near his right hand.
“Thought you gave up smoking,” Seven said.
“Swore off there for awhile. I don’t know. I need one now and then. I have cut down. Twelve a day.”
“That’s something,” Seven agreed, his cold blue eyes quiet as always. In reality, the cigarette pack was a tape recorder device which would magnetize all that they said or might overhear. Its range was contained within the perimeter of their seats.
“Shall we talk about The Saint?” Farmer said suddenly, his tone low and unbantering.
“Let’s.”
Farmer nodded, eyes peeled on the bar a few feet away, where a solitary citizen, not too young, was brooding into a glass of amber beer. The bartender, beefy in the typical clichè way, was running some tap water, rinsing glasses.
“I followed Baroda up from the Chanin Building. He turned at the corner of Forty Second and Fifth. I closed in on him, ready to make the pinch. We were right outside 489 — I was sure he had the microfilm on him. But when I grabbed him and took him to Headquarters, he was clean and bare as a new kid whistle.”
1
Yet...
That underground army of agents that has become the most highly feared arm of espionage in the world.
Espionage in the name of