ONE-SHOT

On the day that the Polish freighter _Ludmilla_ laid an egg in New York
harbor, Abner Longmans ("One-Shot") Braun was in the city going about
his normal business, which was making another million dollars. As we
found out later, almost nothing else was normal about that particular
week end for Braun. For one thing, he had brought his family with him--a
complete departure from routine--reflecting the unprecedentedly
legitimate nature of the deals he was trying to make. From every point
of view it was a bad week end for the CIA to mix into his affairs, but
nobody had explained that to the master of the _Ludmilla_.

I had better add here that we knew nothing about this until afterward;
from the point of view of the storyteller, an organization like Civilian
Intelligence Associates gets to all its facts backwards, entering the
tale at the pay-off, working back to the hook, and winding up with a
sheaf of background facts to feed into the computer for Next Time. It's
rough on the various people who've tried to fictionalize what we
do--particularly for the lazy examples of the breed, who come to us
expecting that their plotting has already been done for them--but it's
inherent in the way we operate, and there it is.

Certainly nobody at CIA so much as thought of Braun when the news first
came through. Harry Anderton, the Harbor Defense chief, called us at
0830 Friday to take on the job of identifying the egg; this was when our
records show us officially entering the affair, but, of course, Anderton
had been keeping the wires to Washington steaming for an hour before
that, getting authorization to spend some of his money on us (our
clearance status was then and is now C&R--clean and routine).

I was in the central office when the call came through, and had some
difficulty in making out precisely what Anderton wanted of us. "Slow
down, Colonel Anderton, please," I begged him. "Two or three seconds
won't make that much difference. How did you find out about this egg in
the first place?"