Read The Peregrine Spy for Free Online

car away.”
    Two teenagers, eyeing the car from across the street, walked quickly away when they saw Frank coming down the steps. Following Rushmore’s instructions, he backed the car down the steep drive into the basement garage. He closed and padlocked the overhead door, surveyed the empty street, and climbed the stairs to the bullet-pocked entrance to his new home.
    “Grab a candle,” said Gus, “Let’s take a look around.”
    They discovered a spacious, sparsely furnished living room adjacent to the kitchen. Its three front windows were covered with the same heavy metal that lined the inside of the front door.
    “Nice view,” said Frank.
    They found a windowless bedroom behind the living room and behind that a utility room with boiler, hot water heater, washer, dryer, and ironing board. Rectangles where two windows and a back door might have been had been sealed up with concrete. They headed back toward the front of the house, and suddenly the lights came on.
    “I guess that’s a power in-age,” said Gus.
    They held on to their candles and glanced at each other. The lights faded off.
    “Outage,” said Frank.
    Upstairs, cupping flickering candles, they found four open doors off the hallway. The first led to a bathroom with a frosted but unsealed window. The back bedroom had two curtained windows looking out over a narrow alley and the shuttered back windows of another row of houses.
    “With a little help from a rope, that could be our back door,” said Gus.
    They found a middle bedroom without windows, an echo of its companion downstairs. The front bedroom featured a matching cherry dressing table, chest of drawers, four-poster bed, and wardrobe closet. The bed was made, thick with blankets and topped with a patchwork quilt.
    “Nice room,” said Frank. With his coat still on, he’d only begun to notice that the house was without heat.
    “You can have it,” said Gus, nodding over his candle at the three windows that looked out over the street. “I’ll take the cul-de-sac down the hall.”
    The lights came back on, “That may be a sign,” said Frank. He studied the room again, glanced at his candle, waited. He set the candle down on the dresser, waited another moment, then blew it out. The lights stayed on. “That is a sign,” said Frank, “I’ll take the room.”
    He headed downstairs for his luggage. He and Gus shuttled up and down, maneuvering a bag at a time on the narrow stairway.
    “There’s some cans of chicken soup in that kitchen cupboard,” said Gus as he struggled to the top of the stairs.
    *   *   *
    The steaming ceramic bowls and the cold Formica tabletop conspired to form beaded webs of moisture. Frank stirred his soup, letting the steam spiral up to his nostrils. He could detect no smell. He tried a spoonful. Lukewarm and tasteless. Probably good for a cold, he thought.
    “We have to find a better way,” said Gus.
    “To eat?”
    “Please, Lord,” said Gus, raising his pale, watery eyes over the wire rims of his glasses. Frank guessed that under better circumstances those eyes would be hazel.
    “I promise we will,” said Frank. “I’m a good cook.”
    From what he knew of Gus’s past, Frank guessed him to be in his mid-fifties. He peered at Frank over the wire-rimmed glasses balanced on the tip of his nose.
    “How much warning did you have about this?”
    “None,” said Frank. “I got off a plane in Washington, yesterday I think it was, expecting to go to work down that way. Instead, the old buddy who met me at the airport said, ‘Boy, have I got a surprise for you.’”
    “Yesterday?”
    Frank nodded. “I think yesterday,” He told Gus of the hyperkinetic hours he’d spent in and around Washington.
    “Word I got in Rome,” said Gus, “was you’d been briefed at Langley and would fill me in on whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing over here. At least until Archie Bunker got on the scene.”
    “Do people really call him Archie?”
    “Well, not