An Affair of Deceit Read Online Free PDF

my dear. If they wanted to speak with you, they hardly needed to follow you. They must have had some other aim in mind. I suspect that your friend Dr. Riley is flushing the quail to see where it flies.”
    “I’m not flying anywhere.” Abigail ground her teeth in irritation. “And I’ve got nothing to hide, though that only makes one of us. Anyway, I have to go.”
    “As do I. I will call you later, after this doctor from the government visits me. I do not doubt that he will.”

    “She’s talking to her mother.” Ethan Greene’s smoothly modulated voice on the phone was as familiar to Riley as his own. “Our guy outside her mom’s house in Virginia says she does tai chi at dawn every morning and just picked up the phone. He’s listening with a parabolic mic. Also eating his way through a dozen donuts. Says there’s a Boston crème for you if you want to hit him up with a coffee refill on your way in.”
    “Interesting.”
    “Boston crèmes
are
delightful. Me, I’m more of a jelly-fill kind of guy. Raspberry over cherry, though. And leave strawberry for the women.”
    “No, it’s interesting that Abigail is talking to her mother.” The rain had stopped and Riley now paced on the steaming, hissing street in front of the DC courthouse. He’d let Abigail walk into her office alone. “This is the first time they’ve talked in six months.”
    “Right. Not since her mom’s birthday. Not even on Mother’s Day.” Greene whistled. “That girl is stone cold.”
    “It happens. They’re estranged.”
    “What kind of person doesn’t call their mother on Mother’s Day?”
    “Someone from a country where they don’t celebrate Hallmark holidays. It’s a made-up holiday, anyway.”
    “Really? When’s the last time you ignored it, mama’s boy?”
    Riley rolled his eyes. Of course Greene knew he never neglected his mother on a holiday. Hell, Greene had spent mostof the last few holidays with Riley and his mother, including Christmas. Greene’s own mother and father, long divorced, had each been too busy with their own lives to bother speaking much with Greene this year. Or last year.
    “What are they saying?” Riley asked, impatient to keep momentum on the case.
    “Not much. Abigail wants to know why people from the government are looking for her father. Her mother said she has no idea. Then they bitched at each other about their feelings. You know—typical mother/daughter shit. But nothing good. Not yet. I’ll get you a rough transcript in a few minutes.”
    “We’re lucky she took the call outside. Is the NSA still stalling on wiretaps?”
    “They’re not so much stalling as they are refusing to engage,” Greene explained. “They say that since Mason disappeared in France, he isn’t a threat to our national security and is therefore not of their concern. He won’t be a priority until—
if
—he shows up inside the US.”
    “They don’t care that he was last seen in the company of a”—Riley glanced around to be sure that no one was listening, but he still lowered his voice to a gravelly whisper—“a man known to supply heavy weaponry to terrorists, and they had twenty antiaircraft missiles between them?”
    Greene laughed again. “That’s entirely Langley’s problem, man. The NSA threw it back in our laps. They have much more pressing stuff to worry about. A rogue CIA agent, a black-market weapons dealer gone bat-shit crazy, and twenty operational Stinger missiles lost somewhere in the South of France are low on their list of priorities.”
    “And top on ours.”
    “Of course.” Greene was serious now. “Nothing matters to me more than taking Peter Mason down.”
    “You mean securing the missiles, rearresting Kral, and finding out if Mason’s our China mole.”
    “I mean tossing Peter Mason in a federal penitentiary for the rest of his natural life. He’s been a traitor for decades, and he’s screwed America for the last time.”
    “We have no proof that he’s a traitor.