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Data quality is one of the most important problems in data management,
since dirty data often leads to inaccurate data analytics results and
incorrect business decisions. Poor data across businesses and the U.S.
government are reported to cost trillions of dollars a year. Multiple surveys
show that dirty data is the most common barrier faced by data scientists.
Not surprisingly, developing effective and efficient data cleaning solutions
is challenging and is rife with deep theoretical and engineering problems.
This book is about data cleaning, which is used to refer to all kinds
of tasks and activities to detect and repair errors in the data. Rather than
focus on a particular data cleaning task, we give an overview of the end-
to-end data cleaning process, describing various error detection and repair
methods, and attempt to anchor these proposals with multiple taxonomies
and views. Specifically, we cover four of the most common and important
data cleaning tasks, namely, outlier detection, data transformation,
error repair (including imputing missing values), and data deduplication.
Furthermore, due to the increasing popularity and applicability of machine
learning techniques, we include a chapter that specifically explores how
machine learning techniques are used for data cleaning, and how data
cleaning is used to improve machine learning models.
This book is intended to serve as a useful reference for researchers
and practitioners who are interested in the area of data quality and data
cleaning. It can also be used as a textbook for a graduate course. Although
we aim at covering state-of-the-art algorithms and techniques, we
recognize that data cleaning is still an active field of research and therefore
provide future directions of research whenever appropriate.
Editor in Chief
M. Tamer Özsu, University of Waterloo
ACM Books is a series of high-quality books for the computer science community, published
by ACM and many in collaboration with Morgan & Claypool Publishers. ACM Books
publications are widely distributed in both print and digital formats through booksellers
and to libraries (and library consortia) and individual ACM members via the ACM Digital
Library platform.
Data Cleaning
Ihab F. Ilyas, University of Waterloo
Xu Chu, Georgia Institute of Technology
2019
Ihab F. Ilyas
University of Waterloo
Xu Chu
Georgia Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy,
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permission of the publisher.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trade-
marks or registered trademarks. In all instances in which the Association for Computing
Machinery is aware of a claim, the product names appear in initial capital or all capital
letters. Readers, however, should contact the appropriate companies for more complete
information regarding trademarks and registration.
Data Cleaning
Ihab F. Ilyas
Xu Chu
books.acm.org
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This book was typeset in Arnhem Pro 10/14 and Flama using ZzTEX.
Cover photo: Jason Dorfman MIT / CSAIL
First Edition
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To my family: Francis, Aida, Mirette, Andrew and Marina
Preface xiii
Figure and Table Credits xv
Chapter 1 Introduction 1
1.1 Data Cleaning Workflow 3
1.2 Book Scope 4
References 227
Index 247
Author Biographies 259
Preface
Data quality is one of the most important problems in data management, since
dirty data often leads to inaccurate data analytics results and incorrect business
decisions. Poor data across businesses and the U.S. government are reported to
cost trillions of dollars a year. Multiple surveys show that dirty data is the most
common barrier faced by data scientists. Not surprisingly, developing effective and
efficient data cleaning solutions is challenging and is rife with deep theoretical and
engineering problems.
Data cleaning is used to refer to all kinds of tasks and activities to detect and
repair errors in the data. Rather than focus on a particular data cleaning task, in
this book, we give an overview of the end-to-end data cleaning process, describing
various error detection and repair methods, and attempt to anchor these propos-
als with multiple taxonomies and views. Specifically, we cover four of the most
common and important data cleaning tasks, namely, outlier detection, data trans-
formation, error repair (including imputing missing values), and data deduplica-
tion. Furthermore, due to the increasing popularity and applicability of machine
learning techniques, we include a chapter that specifically explores how machine
learning techniques are used for data cleaning, and how data cleaning is used to
improve machine learning models.
This book is intended to serve as a useful reference for researchers and practi-
tioners who are interested in the area of data quality and data cleaning. It can also
be used as a textbook for a graduate course. Although we aim at covering state-of-
the-art algorithms and techniques, we recognize that data cleaning is still an active
field of research and therefore provide future directions of research whenever ap-
propriate.
Ihab Ilyas
Xu Chu
March 2019
Figure and Table Credits
Figures
Figure 2.3 Based On: Patrick Wessa. Free statistics software, office for research development
and education, version 1.1. 23-r7. http://www.wessa.net, 2012
Figure 2.4 Markus M. Breunig, Hans-Peter Kriegel, Raymond T. Ng, and Jörg Sander. 2000.
LOF: identifying density-based local outliers. SIGMOD Rec. 29, 2 (May 2000), 93–104. DOI:
10.1145/335191.335388.
Figure 2.5 Varun Chandola, Arindam Banerjee, and Vipin Kumar. 2009. Anomaly detection: A
survey. ACM Comput. Surv. 41, 3, Article 15 (July 2009), 58 pages. DOI: 10.1145/1541880.1541882.
Figure 2.6 Charu C. Aggarwal. Outlier Analysis. Springer, 2013.
Figure 2.7 Xiuyao Song, Mingxi Wu, Christopher Jermaine, and Sanjay Ranka. Conditional
anomaly detection. IEEE Trans. Knowl. and Data Eng., 19(5), 2007.
Figure 3.3 Based On: Jiannan Wang, Guoliang Li, and Jianhua Feng. 2012. Can we beat the
prefix filtering?: an adaptive framework for similarity join and search. In Proceedings of the
2012 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD ’12). ACM, New
York, NY, USA, 85–96. DOI: 10.1145/2213836.2213847.
Figure 3.6 Jens Bleiholder and Felix Naumann. 2009. Data fusion. ACM Comput. Surv. 41, 1,
Article 1 (January 2009), 41 pages. DOI: 10.1145/1456650.1456651.
Figure 3.7 Based On: George Beskales, Mohamed A. Soliman, Ihab F. Ilyas, and Shai Ben-
David. Modeling and querying possible repairs in duplicate detection. Proc. VLDB Endowment,
2(1): 598–609, (August 2009), 598–609. DOI: 10.14778/1687627.1687695.
Figure 3.8 Based On: George Beskales, Mohamed A. Soliman, Ihab F. Ilyas, and Shai Ben-
David. Modeling and querying possible repairs in duplicate detection. Proc. VLDB Endowment,
2(1): 598–609, (August 2009), 598–609. DOI: 10.14778/1687627.1687695.
Figure 3.11 Jiannan Wang, Tim Kraska, Michael J. Franklin, and Jianhua Feng. Crowder:
Crowdsourcing entity resolution. Proc. VLDB Endowment, 5(11): 1483–1494, DOI: 10.14778/
2350229.2350263.
Figure 3.12 Jiannan Wang, Tim Kraska, Michael J. Franklin, and Jianhua Feng. Crowder:
Crowdsourcing entity resolution. Proc. VLDB Endowment, 5(11): 1483–1494, DOI: 10.14778/
2350229.2350263.
xvi Figure and Table Credits
Figure 3.13 Chaitanya Gokhale, Sanjib Das, AnHai Doan, Jeffrey F. Naughton, Narasimhan
Rampalli, Jude Shavlik, and Xiaojin Zhu. 2014. Corleone: hands-off crowdsourcing for entity
matching. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of
Data (SIGMOD ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 601–612. DOI: 10.1145/2588555.2588576.
Figure 3.14 Pradap Konda, Sanjib Das, Paul Suganthan GC, AnHai Doan, Adel Ardalan, Jeffrey
R. Ballard, Han Li, Fatemah Panahi, Haojun Zhang, Jeff Naughton, et al. Magellan: Toward
building entity matching management systems. Proc. VLDB Endowment, 9(12): 1197–1208,
2016.
Figure 3.15 Based on: Michael Stonebraker, Daniel Bruckner, Ihab F. Ilyas, George Beskales,
Mitch Cherniack, Stanley B. Zdonik, Alexander Pagan, and Shan Xu. Data curation at scale:
The data tamer system. In Proc. 6th Biennial Conf. on Innovative Data Systems Research, 2013.
http://cidrdb.org/
Figure 4.3 Vijayshankar Raman and Joseph M. Hellerstein. 2001. Potter’s Wheel: An
Interactive Data Cleaning System. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on
Very Large Data Bases (VLDB ’01), Peter M. G. Apers, Paolo Atzeni, Stefano Ceri, Stefano
Paraboschi, Kotagiri Ramamohanarao, and Richard Thomas Snodgrass (Eds.). Morgan
Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA, 381–390.
Figure 4.4 Philip J. Guo, Sean Kandel, Joseph M. Hellerstein, and Jeffrey Heer. 2011.
Proactive wrangling: mixed-initiative end-user programming of data transformation scripts.
In Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST
’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 65–74. DOI: 10.1145/2047196.2047205. and Jeffrey Heer, Joseph
Hellerstein, and Sean Kandel. Predictive interaction for data transformation. In Proc. 7th
Biennial Conf. on Innovative Data Systems Research, 2015. and Sean Kandel, Andreas Paepcke,
Joseph Hellerstein, and Jeffrey Heer. 2011. Wrangler: interactive visual specification of data
transformation scripts. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems (CHI ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3363–3372. DOI: 10.1145/1978942.1979444.
Figure 4.5 Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. http://fsf.org/, (http://fsf.org/)
Figure 4.6 Sumit Gulwani. 2011. Automating string processing in spreadsheets using
input-output examples. In Proceedings of the 38th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium
on Principles of programming languages (POPL ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 317–330.
DOI: 10.1145/1926385.1926423.
Figure 4.7 Philip J. Guo, Sean Kandel, Joseph M. Hellerstein, and Jeffrey Heer. 2011.
Proactive wrangling: mixed-initiative end-user programming of data transformation scripts.
In Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST
’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 65–74. DOI: 10.1145/2047196.2047205.
Figure 4.8 Z. Abedjan, J. Morcos, I. F. Ilyas, M. Ouzzani, P. Papotti and M. Stonebraker,
DataXFormer: A robust transformation discovery system, 2016 IEEE 32nd International
Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Helsinki, 2016, pp. 1134–1145. DOI: 10.1109/ICDE
.2016.7498319.
Figure 4.9 Based On: Z. Abedjan, J. Morcos, I. F. Ilyas, M. Ouzzani, P. Papotti and
M. Stonebraker, DataXFormer: A robust transformation discovery system, 2016 IEEE
32nd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), Helsinki, 2016, pp. 1134–1145.
DOI: 10.1109/ICDE.2016.7498319.
Figure and Table Credits xvii
Figure 6.7 Based On: Anup Chalamalla, Ihab F. Ilyas, Mourad Ouzzani, and Paolo Papotti.
Descriptive and prescriptive data cleaning. In Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of
Data, pages 445–456, 2014. DOI: 10.1145/2588555.2610520.
Figure 6.9 Floris Geerts, Giansalvatore Mecca, Paolo Papotti, and Donatello Santoro. That’s
all folks! LLUNATIC goes open source. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Vol. 7, No. 13.
Copyright 2014 VLDB Endowment 2150-8097/14/08:1565–1568.
Figure 6.12 Maksims Volkovs, Fei Chiang, Jaroslaw Szlichta, and Rene’e J. Miller. Continuous
data cleaning. In Proc. 30th Int. Conf. on Data Engineering, pages 244–255, 2014.
Figure 6.14 George Beskales, Ihab F. Ilyas, and Lukasz Golab. Sampling the repairs of
functional dependency violations under hard constraints. Proc. VLDB Endowment, 3(1–2):
197–207, DOI: 10.14778/1920841.1920870.
Figure 6.15 Solmaz Kolahi and Laks V. S. Lakshmanan. 2009. On approximating optimum
repairs for functional dependency violations. In Proceedings of the 12th International Con-
ference on Database Theory (ICDT ’09), Ronald Fagin (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 53–62.
DOI: 10.1145/1514894.1514901.
Figure 6.16 Mohamed Yakout, Ahmed K. Elmagarmid, Jennifer Neville, Mourad Ouzzani,
and Ihab F. Ilyas. Guided data repair. Proc. VLDB Endowment, 4(5): 279–289, DOI: 10.14778/
1952376.1952378.
Figure 6.17 Mohamed Yakout, Ahmed K. Elmagarmid, Jennifer Neville, Mourad Ouzzani,
and Ihab F. Ilyas. Guided data repair. Proc. VLDB Endowment, 4(5): 279–289, DOI: 10.14778/
1952376.1952378.
Figure 6.18 Wenfei Fan and Floris Geerts. Foundations of Data Quality Management. Synthesis
Lectures on Data Management. 2012. © Morgan & Claypool.
Figure 6.19 Xu Chu, John Morcos, Ihab F. Ilyas, Mourad Ouzzani, Paolo Papotti, Nan
Tang, and Yin Ye. 2015. KATARA: A Data Cleaning System Powered by Knowledge Bases
and Crowdsourcing. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on
Management of Data (SIGMOD ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1247–1261. DOI: 10.1145/
2723372.2749431.
Figure 6.20 Xu Chu, John Morcos, Ihab F. Ilyas, Mourad Ouzzani, Paolo Papotti, Nan
Tang, and Yin Ye. 2015. KATARA: A Data Cleaning System Powered by Knowledge Bases
and Crowdsourcing. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on
Management of Data (SIGMOD ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1247–1261. DOI: 10.1145/
2723372.2749431.
Figure 6.23 George Beskales, Ihab F. Ilyas, and Lukasz Golab. Sampling the repairs of
functional dependency violations under hard constraints. Proc. VLDB Endowment, 3(1–2):
197–207, DOI: 10.14778/1920841.1920870.
Figure 7.1 Sunita Sarawagi and Anuradha Bhamidipaty. 2002. Interactive deduplication using
active learning. In Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge
discovery and data mining (KDD ’02). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 269–278. DOI: 10.1145/775047
.775087.
Figure 7.2 Sidharth Mudgal, Han Li, Theodoros Rekatsinas, AnHai Doan, Youngchoon Park,
Ganesh Krishnan, Rohit Deep, Esteban Arcaute, and Vijay Raghavendra. 2018. Deep learning for
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Figure and Table Credits xix
entity matching: A design space exploration. In Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference
on Management of Data (SIGMOD ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19–34. DOI: 10.1145/3183713
.3196926.
Figure 7.3 Sidharth Mudgal, Han Li, Theodoros Rekatsinas, AnHai Doan, Youngchoon Park,
Ganesh Krishnan, Rohit Deep, Esteban Arcaute, and Vijay Raghavendra. 2018. Deep learning for
entity matching: A design space exploration. In Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference
on Management of Data (SIGMOD ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19–34. DOI: 10.1145/3183713
.3196926.
Figure 7.8 Jiannan Wang, Sanjay Krishnan, Michael J. Franklin, Ken Goldberg, Tim Kraska,
and Tova Milo. A sample-and-clean framework for fast and accurate query processing on
dirty data. In Proc. ACM SIGMOD Int. Conf. on Management of Data, pages 469–480, 2014. DOI:
10.1145/2588555.2610505.
Figure 7.9 Sanjay Krishnan, Jiannan Wang, Eugene Wu, Michael J. Franklin, and Ken Gold-
berg. Activeclean: Interactive data cleaning for statistical modeling. Proc. VLDB Endowment,
9(12, August 2016): 948–959. DOI: 10.14778/2994509.2994514.
Tables
Table 3.2 Jens Bleiholder and Felix Naumann. 2009. Data fusion. ACM Comput. Surv. 41, 1,
Article 1 (January 2009), 41 pages. DOI: 10.1145/1456650.1456651 and Xin Luna Dong and Felix
Naumann. Data fusion: resolving data conflicts for integration. Proc. VLDB Endowment, 2(2):
1654–1655, 2009.
Table 4.1 Based On: Sean Kandel, Andreas Paepcke, Joseph Hellerstein, and Jeffrey Heer.
2011. Wrangler: interactive visual specification of data transformation scripts. In Proceedings
of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’11). ACM, New York, NY,
USA, 3363–3372. DOI: 10.1145/1978942.1979444.
Table 5.2 Lukasz Golab, Howard Karloff, Flip Korn, Divesh Srivastava, and Bei Yu. On
generating near-optimal tableaux for conditional functional dependencies. Proc. VLDB
Endowment, 1(1): 376–390, DOI: 10.14778/1453856.1453900.
Table 6.1 Based On: Xu Chu, Ihab F. Ilyas, and Paolo Papotti. Holistic data cleaning: Putting
violations into context. In Proc. 29th Int. Conf. on Data Engineering, pages 458–469, 2013b.
Table 6.3 Wenfei Fan, Jianzhong Li, Shuai Ma, Nan Tang, and Wenyuan Yu. 2011. Interaction
between record matching and data repairing. In Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGMOD
International Conference on Management of data (SIGMOD ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 469–
480. DOI: 10.1145/1989323.1989373.
Table 7.1 Theodoros Rekatsinas, Xu Chu, Ihab F. Ilyas, and Christopher Ré. 2017. HoloClean:
holistic data repairs with probabilistic inference. Proc. VLDB Endow. 10, 11 (August 2017),
1190–1201. DOI: 10.14778/3137628.3137631.
1
Introduction
Enterprises have been acquiring large amounts of data from a variety of sources in
order to build large data repositories that power their applications, with the goal of
enabling richer and more informed analytics. Data collection and acquisition often
introduce errors in data, e.g., missing values, typos, mixed formats, replicated en-
tries for the same real-world entity, and violations of business and data integrity
rules. A survey about the state of data science and machine learning (ML) reveals
that dirty data is the most common barrier faced by workers dealing with data.1
With the popularity of data science, it has become increasingly evident that data
curation, unification, preparation, and cleaning are key enablers in unleashing the
value of data.2 According to another survey of about 80 data scientists conducted
by CrowdFlower and published in Forbes,3 data scientists spend more than 60% of
their time in cleaning and organizing data, and 57% of data scientists regard clean-
ing and organizing data as the least enjoyable part of their work. Not surprisingly,
developing effective and efficient data cleaning solutions is challenging and is rife
with deep theoretical and engineering problems.
Regardless of the type of data errors to be fixed, data cleaning activities usually
consist of two phases: (1) error detection, where various errors and violations are
identified and possibly validated by experts; and (2) error repair, where updates to
the database are applied (or suggested to human experts) to bring the data to a
cleaner state suitable for downstream applications and analytics. Error detection
techniques can be either quantitative or qualitative. Specifically, quantitative error
detection techniques often involve statistical methods to identify abnormal behav-
iors and errors [Hellerstein 2008] (e.g., “a salary that is three standard deviations
1. https://www.kaggle.com/surveys/2017
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/technology/for-big-data-scientists-hurdle-to-insights-is-
janitor-work.html
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2016/03/23/data-preparation-most-time-consuming-
least-enjoyable-data-science-task-survey-says/
2 Chapter 1 Introduction
away from the mean salary is an error”), and hence have been mostly studied in the
context of outlier detection [Aggarwal 2013]. On the other hand, qualitative error de-
tection techniques rely on descriptive approaches to specify patterns or constraints
of a consistent data instance, and for that reason these techniques identify those
data that violate such patterns or constraints as errors. For example, in a descrip-
tive statement about a company HR database, “for two employees working at the same
branch of the company, the senior employee cannot earn less salary than the junior em-
ployee,” if we find two employees with a violation of the rule, it is likely that there
is an error in at least one of them.
Various surveys and books detail specific aspects of data quality and data clean-
ing. For example, Rahm and Do [2000] classify different types of errors occurring in
an Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) process, and survey the tools available for clean-
ing data in an ETL process. Some work focuses on the effect of incompleteness data
on query answering [Grahne 1991] and the use of a Chase procedure [Maier et al.
1979] for dealing with incomplete data [Greco et al. 2012]. Hellerstein [2008] fo-
cuses on cleaning quantitative numerical data using mainly statistical techniques.
Bertossi [2011] provides complexity results for repairing inconsistent data and per-
forming consistent query answering on inconsistent data. Fan and Geerts [2012]
discuss the use of data quality rules in data consistency, data currency, and data
completeness, and their interactions. Dasu and Johnson [2003] summarize how
techniques in exploratory data mining can be integrated with data quality manage-
ment. Ganti and Sarma [2013] focus on an operator-centric approach for developing
a data cleaning solution, involving the development of customizable operators that
can be used as building blocks for developing common solutions. Ilyas and Chu
[2015] provide taxonomies and example algorithms for qualitative error detection
and repairing techniques. Multiple surveys and tutorials have been published to
summarize different definitions of outliers and the algorithms for detecting them
[Hodge and Austin 2004, Chandola et al. 2009, Aggarwal 2013]. Data deduplica-
tion, a long-standing problem that has been studied for decades [Fellegi and Sunter
1969], has also been extensively surveyed [Koudas et al. 2006, Elmagarmid et al.
2007, Herzog et al. 2007, Dong and Naumann 2009, Naumann and Herschel 2010,
Getoor and Machanavajjhala 2012].
This book, however, focuses on the end-to-end data cleaning process, describing
various error detection and repair methods, and attempts to anchor these proposals
with multiple taxonomies and views. Our goals are (1) to allow researchers and
general readers to understand the scope of current techniques and highlight gaps
and possible new directions of research; and (2) to give practitioners and system
implementers a variety of choices and solutions for their data cleaning activities.
1.1 Data Cleaning Workflow 3
External sources
Knowledge
bases
PDFs, rules,
patterns, etc.
Error Error
Discovery detection Errors repair
Data
Figure 1.1 A typical data cleaning workflow with an optional discovery step, error detection step, and
error repair step.
In what follows, we give a brief overview of the book’s scope as well as a chapter
outline.
Example 1.1 Consider Table 1.1 containing employee records for a U.S. company. Every tuple
specifies a person in a company with her id (GID), name (FN, LN), level (LVL),
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"Fantastic!" said the Secretary of Defense.
"Will it work with anybody?" the President asked.
Dr. Wolstadt shook his head. "No. This is a most unusual case. Mr.
Merriwether, according to the FBI reports, had a terrible memory
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but he always forgot things, and that made him look stupid.
"But, fortunately, it meant that his memory was almost a total blank.
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"It's like recording something on an L-P disc. If it already has music
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"Then if it had hit anyone but me—" Phil began.
"—it would probably have driven them insane," said Dr. Wolstadt.
"That still leaves us the problem of what to do with Mr. Merriwether,"
said the President.
"I think I have an idea," Phil said. "Want to hear it?"
Some months later, two men arrived by air in the city of Moscow.
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"That can be arranged. But where is your companion? I understood
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"He is, shall we say, taking a stroll around Moscow."
"But he can't do that!" the Ambassador said. "The President said he
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"That is the chance we have to take. Now if you'll show me to that
room, I'll go about my business."
Some distance away, on the opposite side of the Kremlin from the
American Embassy, Philip Merriwether, the most valuable spy that
ever existed, waited patiently for the ray that would be generated
inside the Embassy to strike his head. In a few seconds, he would
know even more than he already did.
He smiled happily. This was the life!
THE END
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