The Foreign Hand Tie Read online

certain place in the city?"

  Lenny closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. "Rafe says he can goany place that the average citizen would be allowed to go."

  "Excellent," said the President. He gave Lenny an address--an intersectionof two streets not far from Red Square. "Can he get there within fifteenminutes?"

  "Make it twenty," said Lenny.

  "Very well. Twenty minutes. When he gets there, I'll ask you to relayfurther instructions."

  Lenny Poe closed his eyes, folded his arms, and relaxed in his chair. Theother three men waited silently.

  Nineteen minutes later, Lenny opened his eyes and said: "O.K. He's there.Now what?"

  "There is a lamppost on that corner, I believe," said the President. "Canyour brother see it?"

  Lenny closed his eyes again. "Sure. There's a guy leaning against it."

  The President's eyes brightened. "Describe him!"

  Lenny, eyes still closed, said: "Five feet ten, heavy set, gray hair,dark-rimmed glasses, brown suit, flashy necktie. By the cut of hisclothes, I'd say he was either British or American, probably American.Fifty-five or fifty-six years old."

  It was obvious to the Secretary of Defense and to Colonel Spaulding thatthe President was suppressing some inward excitement.

  "Very good, Mr. Poe!" he said. "Now, you will find a box of coloredpencils and a sketch pad in that desk over there. Can you draw me a fairlyaccurate sketch of that man?"

  "Yeah, sure." Lenny opened his eyes, moved over to the desk, took out thepencils and sketch pad, and went to work. He had to close his eyesoccasionally, but his work was incredibly rapid and, at the same time,almost photographically accurate.

  As the picture took form, the President's inward excitement increasedperceptibly. When it was finally finished, Lenny handed the sketch to thePresident without a word.

  The President took it eagerly and his face broke out in his famous grin."Excellent! Perfect!" He looked at Lenny. "Your brother hasn't attractedthe man's attention in any way, has he?"

  "Nope," said Lenny.

  "Fine. The experiment is over. Relay my thanks to your brother. He can goahead with whatever he was doing now."

  "I don't quite understand," said the Secretary of State.

  "I felt it necessary to make one final experiment of my own devising," thePresident said. "I wanted Raphael Poe to go to a particular place at aparticular time, with no advance warning, to transmit a picture ofsomething he had never seen before. I arranged this test myself, and I ampositive that there could be no trickery."

  "Never seen before?" the Secretary repeated bewilderedly. He gestured atthe sketch. "Why, that's obviously Bill Donovan, of the Moscow delegation.Poe could have seen a photograph of him somewhere before."

  "Even so," the President pointed out, "there would be no way of knowingthat he would be at that spot. But that's beside the point. Look at thatnecktie!"

  "I had noticed it," the Defense Secretary admitted.

  It was certainly an outstanding piece of neckwear. As drawn by LeonardPoe, it was a piece of brilliant chartreuse silk, fully three and a halfinches wide at its broadest. Against that background, rose-pink nude girlswere cavorting with pale mauve satyrs.

  "That tie," said the President, "was sent to me fifteen years ago by on ofmy constituents, when I was in Congress. I never wore it, of course, butit would have been criminal to have thrown away such a magnificentlyobscene example of bad taste as that.

  "I sent it to Donovan in a sealed diplomatic pouch by special courier,with instructions to wear it at this time. He, of course, has no idea whyhe is standing there. He is merely obeying orders.

  "Gentlemen, this is completely convincing to me. Absolutely no one butmyself knew what I had in mind. It would have required telepathy even tocheat.

  "Thank you very much, Mr. Poe. Colonel Spaulding, you may proceed withOperation Mapcase as planned."

  * * * * *

  "Dr. Malekrinova, will you initial these requisition forms, please."

  Dr. Sonya Malekrinova, a dowdy-looking, middle-aged woman with unpluckedeyebrows and a mole on her chin, adjusted her steel-rimmed glasses, tookthe proffered papers from the clerk, ran her eyes over them, and then puther initials on the bottom of each page.

  "Thank you, Comrade Doctor," said the clerk when she handed back the sheafof papers.

  "Certainly, Comrade."

  And the two of them went about their business.

  Not far away, in the Cathedral of St. Basil, Vladimir Turenski, aliasRaphael Poe, was also apparently going about his business. The cathedralhad not seen nor heard the Liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church or anyother church, for a good many decades. The Bolsheviks, in their zeal toprotect the citizens of the Soviet Unions from the pernicious influence ofreligion, had converted it into a museum as soon as possible.

  It was the function of _Tovarishch_ Turenski to push a broom around thefloors of the museum, and this he did with great determination andefficiency. He also cleaned windows and polished metalwork when theoccasion demanded. He was only one of a large crew of similarly employedmen, but he was a favorite with the Head Custodian, who not only feltsorry for the simple-minded deaf-mute, but appreciated the hard work hedid. If, on occasion, Comrade Turenski would lean on his broom and fallinto a short reverie, it was excusable because he still managed to get allhis work done.

  Behind Comrade Turenski, a guide was explaining a display to a group oftourists, but Turenski ignored the distraction and kept his mind focusedon the thoughts of Dr. Sonya Malekrinova.

  After nearly ten months of patient work, Raphael Poe had hit uponsomething that was, to his way of thinking, more important than all theinformation he had transmitted to Washington thus far.

  Picking brains telepathically was not, even for him, an easy job. He hadthe knack and the training but, in addition, there was the necessity ofestablishing a rapport with the other mind. Since he was a physicist andnot a politician, it was much easier to get information from the mind ofSonya Malekrinova than to get it from the Premier. The only person withwhom he could keep in contact over any great distance was his brother, andthat only because the two of them had grown up together.

  He could pick up the strongest thoughts of any nearby person very easily.He did not need to hear the actual words, for instance, of a nearbyconversation in order to follow it perfectly, because the words of verbalcommunication were strong in a person's mind.

  But getting deeper than that required an increasing amount ofunderstanding of the functioning of the other person's mind.

  His ability to eavesdrop on conversations had been of immense benefit toWashington so far, but is was difficult for him to get close enough to thehigher-ups in the Soviet government to get all the data that the Presidentof the United States wanted.

  But now that he had established a firm mental linkage with one of thegreatest physicists in the Soviet Union, he could begin to sendinformation that would be of tremendous value to the United States.

  He brushed up a pile of trash, pushed it into a dust pan, and carried itoff toward the disposal chute that led to the trash cans. In the roomwhere the brooms were kept, he paused and closed his eyes.

  _Lenny! Are picking this up?_

  _Sure, Rafe. I'm ready with the drawing board anytime you are._

  As Dr. Sonya Malekrinova stood in her laboratory looking over theapparatus she was perfecting for the glory of the Soviet State, she had nonotion that someone halfway around the world was also looking at it overher shoulder--or rather, through her own eyes.

  * * * * *

  Lenny started with the fives first, and worked his way up to the largerdenominations.

  "Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty--forty, fifty, sixty...."he muttered happily to himself. "Two fifty, three, three-fifty, four,four-fifty."

  It was all there, so he smiled benevolently at the man in the pay window."Thank you muchly." Then he stepped aside to let another lucky man cash aw
inning ticket.

  His horse had come in at fifteen, six-ten, four-fifty for Straight, Place,and Show, and sixty bucks on the nose had paid off very nicely.

  Lenny Poe took out his copy of the _Daily Racing Form_ and checked overthe listing for the next race.

  _Hm-m-m, ha. Purse, $7500. Four-year-olds and up: handicap. Sevenfurlongs. Turf course. Hm-m-m, ha._

  Lenny Poe had a passion for throwing his money away on any unpredictableevent that would offer him odds. He had, deep down, an artistic soul, buthe didn't let that interfere with his desire to lay a bet at the drop ofan old fedora.

  He had already decided, several hours before, that Ducksoup, in the nextrace, would win handily and would pay off at something like twenty ortwenty-five to one. But he felt it his duty to look one last time at