The Last Ring-bearer - Kirill Yeskov [101]
It was God's honest truth. They parted numerous times, sometimes for a long time, but then always started from the same place. She greeted him differently on his return: sometimes one look of hers chilled the room with an inch of hoarfrost; sometimes it seemed that Arda split to its very hidden core and an blazing protuberance of the Eternal Fire sprang forth; sometimes she simply stroked his cheek with a sigh: "Come in. You look thin; want to eat something?" – a model housewife meeting her husband after a routine business trip. Both of them understood with absolute clarity that each of them carried a lethal dose of poison in their veins, and only the other had an antidote, a temporary one at that.
Chapter 38
Of course, Tangorn's life in Umbar was not limited to travails of love. It should be noted that the baron's professional responsibilities left a certain imprint on his relationship with Alviss. Since she let him know that she was aware of the true nature of his business, at first the baron thought that his girlfriend was somehow connected to the Umbarian secret service. He learned otherwise in a fairly aggravating manner, when twice he planted on her some information meant for his 'colleagues,' and twice it got nowhere; the second time the mix-up almost cost him a well-designed operation.
"Aly, why do you think that your secret service has so little interest in me that they haven't even asked you to look after me?"
"Of course they asked me, right after you came back. And left empty-handed."
"You must have had trouble…"
"Nothing serious, Tan, forget about it, please!"
"Maybe you should've agreed, at least for show."
"No. I don't want to do it, not even for show. You see, to inform on a loved one, one has to be a highly moral individual with an ingrained sense of civic duty. But I'm just a whore who knows nothing of those things… Let's not talk about this anymore, all right?"
This discovery gave the baron the idea to use Alviss' boundless connections for his own data gathering – not of the secret kind (God forbid!), but public information. He and Grager were most interested not in the new generation of warships being built at the Republic's shipyards or the recipe of the 'Umbarian fire' (a mysterious flammable liquid used to great effect during sieges and sea battles), but rather in such mundane matters as caravan trade volumes and price fluctuations on the food markets of Umbar and Barad-Dur. Another keen interest of the baron's were the technological advances that more and more defined the civilization of Mordor, which he had always sincerely admired. Amazingly, it was Faramir's semi-amateurish team (whose members, it should be mentioned, were not in state service and received not a dime from the Gondorian treasury during all these years) that had intuitively arrived at the style that intelligence services have only widely adopted in our days. It is well known that these days it is not the swashbuckling secret agents toting microcameras and noise-suppressed pistols who obtain the most valuable intelligence information, but rather analysts diligently combing newspapers, stock market news, and other openly available sources.
While Tangorn, on Alviss' advice, perused the activities of Umbarian financiers (the magic of the White Council was a child's game in comparison), Grager became Algoran, merchant of the second guild, and founded a company in Khand to export olive oil to Mordor in exchange for products of high technology. The trading house Algoran & Co. prospered; with its hand always on the pulse of the local agricultural markets, the firm kept increasing its export share and even managed to corner the import of dates for a time. The head of the company avoided visiting his Barad-Dur branch (having no reasons to believe that Mordor's counterintelligence service was staffed with incompetent fools), but his position did not require that: