Agent in Place by Helen MacInnes

identification on him?”
    Oleg felt a jump of hope. Better than he had expected. He looked crestfallen. “There is nothing to identify him? Then how do I know whether he is my friend? And I’m the only one who knows he’s missing. We were to meet this evening at six o’clock. I waited for over an hour. Then I kept phoning and—”
    “You telephoned his family?”
    Smart girl, he thought, in spite of her expressionless manner. “No. He lives alone. His wife lives on Long Island. In Patchogue. They are separated. I’ll call her when I find out what has happened.” Oleg raised his hands helplessly, let his voice trail off. “If I could see this man—” He paused, waiting for the right response. And he got it.
    “Just a moment,” the girl said, and went over to another section of desk, one that faced a broad interior corridor. She spoke to a nurse on duty there, who telephoned to some other part of the hospital. There was a brief explanation: we have a man down here who is inquiring... The rest was lost in the sudden flurry of activity as the ambulance returned. But the nurse had received an answer and the girl came hurrying back to Oleg.
    “Yes,” the girl said, “they want you to identify him. But you’ll have to wait. Take a seat in there.” She nodded towards the room opposite. Behind her the office had turned into a whirlpool of action.
    “But why wait?”
    “He isn’t available right now.”
    “Why?”
    “He is not available.” That was all she had been told, seemingly.
    “But I can’t wait.” He backed a couple of steps. “I must know. If this man is not my friend, I shall have to do a lot of searching tonight. I can’t waste any time—they might keep me waiting for an hour. Even more.” He half-turned and said angrily, “I’ll come back tomorrow.”
    “Just one moment,” she said again—a much-used phrase, obviously. This time, after a glance at the hustle and bustle around her, she did the telephoning. “You can go up,” she told Oleg. “You can’t see him as yet. But you can give the police some particulars.”
    Police? He looked at her.
    She didn’t explain. She pointed to the closed door that led into the hospital. “Through there straight ahead. One flight up. The elevator is on the right. Near the end of the corridor.”
    “Police—is anything wrong?”
    This amused her. “They always stay until identification has been made.” Then her telephone rang and she was busy with some other inquiry.
    Straight ahead, she had told him. Beyond the door he ignored the busy nurses’ desk, the harshly-lit operating-room facing it, the large room on his right with several emergency beds separated by yellow curtains. It was all clean and bright and modern, with expertly-controlled pandemonium near the ambulance area far to his left. His pace quickened as he reached the end of the broad corridor, further progress barred by a door that must lead on to other stretches of this bewildering place. That might be useful, he thought, but he did not risk exploring it. Not at this moment. One flight up: that was where he was expected now. Police? He wondered again as he entered the elevator. And why was Mischa not kept downstairs in that room with the yellow curtains? In one way Oleg was pleased by this: privacy was better for his purposes. But in another way he found it somehow disquieting.
    Yet, as he stepped off at the second floor and came down a corridor to reach the desk (it was all similar in set-up, he noted, to the first-floor area, except that here there seemed to be private rooms), his alarm about police vanished. There was only one officer in sight, and he was young. Inexperienced, Oleg thought with relief. So there were no suspicions brooding around Mischa. This was just standard procedure, as the girl downstairs had said.
    As for the two nurses at the desk, one was middle-aged and pleasant-faced; the other young and pretty—at least the police officer seemed to think so. It was a