Cold Allies Read Online Free PDF Page A

mass, and there is no sign of that here. Look at him. Just look at him, general,” she ordered. “He’s still a pudgy-cheeked boy. If he were mummified, those cheeks would be sunken and drawn.”
    At the last word, Lauterbach glanced up at her sharply.
    His yellowish hazel eyes were dispassionate, the eyes of a puma, a wolf. “You’re not getting enough sleep.”
    “Neither are you,” she shot back.
    His expression wavered, his gaze became furtive. “I’m flying to Poland tonight. It’s important for me to know. Did the shrapnel kill him?”
    She looked at the wound. In one lightning-from-God instant, the kid had lost half his face. “Given medical attention soon enough, he would have lived.”
    The corners of Lauterbach’s mouth dipped in revulsion.
    She could almost read his thoughts: For what? “Do you suppose he wanted to die?” he asked quietly.
    Rita glanced at the general curiously. His face was so weary that he seemed close to illness. War was a lamprey, a sucker of life. It found its victims in battle where death came easy, and even in bunkers where it did not.
    Lauterbach was a hands-on commander, flitting from one front to the next, exhorting his tired army. Maybe his dearest wish was that his plane would go down. The young white boy on the stainless steel table must have ached for a desperate peace like that.
    “Yes. I’m sure he did,” she told him.
    The general nodded. “Then it was as though he were killed by friendly fire.”
    “Friendly?”
    “Loving fire.” His voice was so soft, it could barely be heard above the sound of the circulated air from the ducts.

    ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

    Linda Parisi trudged home from the city bus stop, suitcase in hand. The gig in Boston had been a killer: too little money, too many strange people. They’d come up to her after the lecture, their eyes wide with hope and desperate invention, to tell her how they, too, had talked to the Eridanians, and how the Eridanians had turned their lives around, blah, blah, blah.
    She limped up the concrete steps of the red-brick apartment house, staggering under the weight of her battered Samsonite.
    Maybe, she thought, some chivalrous or impressionable soul would hear her and come out to help. As loud and slow as she made her progress, however—banging her suitcase pointedly against the walls as she passed—no one hurried to the rescue.
    The hall of the apartment house was dim and littered.
    At her chipped steel door she fought the usual battle with her keys: two for the twin deadbolts, one for the regular lock.
    Inside she found that her poodle had thrown up on the carpet in revenge for her trip. Farther in, she discovered the full extent of the obtuse dog’s retaliation. Lacy had spilled his water and carpeted the kitchen with soaked and crumbling Kibbles and Bits.
    The light on the answering machine was blinking. On her way to the cramped closet for the broom, Mrs. Parisi hit the MESSAGE pad on the phone.
    “Call me,” said the machine.
    She found the broom and dustpan and was toting them to the kitchen by the time the beep sounded and the next message came on.
    “I’m not kidding.” The same voice. “Call me.”
    “Oh, ca-ca,” she replied, unleashing the irritation she’d kept in check the entire weekend. “Oh, ca-ca on you. I hope you find yourself chin-deep in the smelly.”
    Mrs. Parisi knew the voice, of course. Feet aching, she halted in the door of the kitchen and surveyed the chaos. Next to her sat Lacy, tail a-wag, obviously delighted with his handiwork.
    Beep. “Call me at home, call me at work. Just call me.
    Our lives are in danger.”
    Sighing, Mrs. Parisi swept the dog food into a pile and used the dustpan to dump it back into Lacy’s bowl. “Dindin,” she said with a venomous smile.
    Before she called her editor/publisher, Mrs. Parisi took off her sensible pumps. When she was comfortably settled on the sofa, she lifted the receiver, hit the 1 button, and listened to the rapid, tuneless