Altamont cast a quick, routine, glance at the instrument panels and then looked down through the transparent nose of the helicopter at the yellow-brown river five hundred feet below. Next he scraped the last morsel from his plate and ate it. "What did you make this out of, Jim?" he asked. "I hope you kept notes, while you were concocting it. It's good." "The two smoked pork chops left over from yesterday evening," Loudons said, "and that bowl... more...

Charles Marquis had a fraction of a minute in which to die. He dropped through the tubular beams of alloydem steel and hung there, five thousand feet above the tiers and walkways below. At either end of the walkway crossing between the two power-hung buildings, he saw the plainclothes security officers running in toward him. He grinned and started to release his grip. He would think about them on the way down. His fingers wouldn't work. He... more...

etty looked up from her magazine. She said mildly, "You're late." "Don't yell at me, I feel awful," Simon told her. He sat down at his desk, passed his tongue over his teeth in distaste, groaned, fumbled in a drawer for the aspirin bottle. He looked over at Betty and said, almost as though reciting, "What I need is a vacation." "What," Betty said, "are you going to use for money?" "Providence," Simon told her whilst fiddling with the aspirin... more...

There is no lie so totally convincing as something the other fellow already knows-for-sure is the truth. And no cover-story so convincing… The building itself was unprepossessive enough. It was an old-fashioned, six-floor, brick structure that had, over the years, served first as a private home, then as an apartment building, and finally as the headquarters for the organization it presently housed. It stood among others of its kind in a... more...