Guess Who’s Coming to Kill You

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Wilkinson’s most valuable asset was that he looked like a tired businessman pushing fifty. He was in fact tired and pushing fifty, but he was not a tired businessman pushing fifty. He was a tired spy pushing fifty.

He had seen it all before and he had been through it all before. That was the trouble, as he was to find out shortly. There is a deadly hypnosis about repeated experience that lowers the guard; or, if the guard-up is automatic, like a reflex, the muscle response is not. He was to find that out shortly, too.

Wilkinson leaned against the wall in the alley behind The Golden Obi watching tradesmen and porters going and coming through the rear door. He was well in the shadows. He was thinking: what am I doing here?

That was bad; a bad sign. Holloway would have been distressed, if a spider can be credited with emotion. Worse, or perhaps better, he would have seen to it that Wilkinson was cashiered on the spot. But Holloway was in his web in Washington, D.C., an ocean and a continent away, and that was Fred Wilkinson’s misfortune.

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