Conspiracy in Kiev Read Online Free PDF

retirees.
    She waited at the elevator. It was stopped on the fifth floor. It seemed to be permanently stopped, as if someone was saying a longwinded good-bye.
    She grew impatient. The elevator began to descend slowly.
    Five , four , three …
    She knew everyone on her floor, at least by sight. Who was making her day longer than it had to be?
    Two , one …
    The twin doors of the elevator opened. Out stepped a young woman who could hardly have been older than her early twenties, very pretty in a heavy parka and tight jeans. A student at one of Washington’s numerous colleges, Alex figured.
    Students, along with career-beginners, were the Calvert Arms’ bread and butter. They coexisted with the old women in their seventies, eighties, or even nineties who had moved into the place when it opened forty years ago. At that time they had been middle-aged empty-nesters. Time had passed. They were still empty-nesters, just twice as old. Their ex- or late husbands had been pushing up daisies for decades.
    The younger girl hurried to the front door. Alex stepped into the elevator and rode to the fifth floor.
    Her neighbor across the hall had started out as a friendly nodding acquaintance and ended up becoming a good friend in a fatherly kind of way. He was a scholarly sixty-year-old who had worked for the State Department for twenty-eight years. Now he was a retired diplomat who played catchy pop music from Latin America each morning as she was on her way to work. The Calvert Arms was pretty well insulated, but you could hear music in the hallway through the doors.
    Alex had on occasion met him going into or coming out of his apartment and had struck up a conversation in the laundry room, commenting on his choices. She too liked Lucero and the late Rocío Dúrcal. One day she couldn’t help asking, “Do you only listen to women singers?”
    “Absolutely,” he replied. “My virtual harem.”
    That conversation and similar exchanges had let to a curious kind of friendship with a man who could be friendly but was self-contained, seemingly content with his virtual harem. He had few visitors. They spoke only Spanish with each other and his was easily a match for hers. She called him Don Tomás, though he was no Latin. He had invited her and Robert in for brunch one Sunday. They had been fascinated by his collection of art deco prints from the 1920s and 1930s, notably some beautifully preserved works of the French artist Tamara de Lempicka. They were all stylized pictures of beautiful women.
    “Another part of your virtual harem?” she had asked.
    Don Tomás had replied in the most relaxed manner imaginable, “Absolutely.”
    This evening no sound from the vocal part of the virtual harem was coming through the door as she passed. She hoped nothing had happened to him.
    She glanced at her mail and dumped it on the dining table. Then she stood perfectly still. Was everything exactly as she had left it? Was there something that she sensed, but could not quite put a finger on? Alex was unsure. Coupled with the appearance of the man at the bar in the Athenian, the evening had taken on a strange spin. Or was she just overanxious about a Ukraine trip that she didn’t want to make?
    She sighed. She dismissed it. She placed the flowers in a vase.
    She was in bed by midnight. She set the alarm for 6:00 a.m. Then, as she settled in to sleep, her eyes shot open. A realization hit her.
    The man she had seen at the bar in the Athenian?
    He was Fred, one of the two newcomers at the gym. Away from the gym, in a Burberry raincoat instead of basketball togs, she hadn’t recognized him. Chances were that he couldn’t figure out why he thought he knew her. Well, now she could relax. At least she knew why she recognized him and from where.
    She closed her eyes. Minutes after her head hit the pillow, she was sleeping soundly.

SEVEN
     
    T he next morning at 7:54 a.m., Alexandra walked through the entrance to Room 6776 B at the main building of the