Dark Winter Read Online Free PDF Page A

follow you if the bike’s still OK. If not, we’re walking back.’
    She got into the Lite Ace, engaged first gear with blood- and mud-covered gloves, got it back on to the road, and drove down to the junction. I went over to the grounded bike and hauled it upright. The bike’s clutch was twisted down so it faced the tarmac, but it was still in better nick than some of the machines we’d seen around town. The main thing was that it worked.
    I waited at the top of the Buddha junction for Suzy, and as she came back up the hill and threw her leg over the saddle she leant forward. ‘Didn’t we do well? I think we deserve to go jet-skiing tomorrow, don’t you?’
    The right side of my leg was raging so badly from the gravel grazes that I had to grit my teeth.

4
    Washington DC
    Friday 2 May, 07:04 hrs
    It was a miserable day. The weather just couldn’t make up its mind – never quite raining but looking like it wanted to at any moment.
    I walked along D Street just a couple of blocks south of the Library of Congress, on my way to meet George, moving as fast as I could while trying to sip from a lip-burning Starbucks. I’d got the metro from Crystal City, where I now lived in a large grey concrete apartment block that made me feel like a UN delegate. There was a Bosnian concierge in the daytime and a Croatian one at night. All the cleaning women seemed to be Russian and the superintendent was from Pakistan. They all understood English really well, until something needed repairing or cleaning. Especially the superintendent – every time I hassled him about the problem with my washer-dryer he went deaf.
    I tested my Starbucks again. It had cooled down a little so I took a longer sip through the top cover. I’d been thinking that only George would call me into the office for seven in the morning, but apparently he wasn’t alone. The whole of DC seemed to be on an early start; the traffic was heavy already and plenty of people were walking purposefully past me in both directions, almost power walking, cell phones stuck to the sides of their heads so everyone knew they were doing really important stuff. Not that they needed the cells; their voices were loud enough to carry the message right across town.
    I took another swig and checked my traser watch again as I kept moving. I should be on time. The mission in Penang had been simple enough – to kill the target once he’d handed over a box to the source, after prayer that same evening. But just as important, George had stressed, was that Suzy and I both had to see the source physically in control of the box – which must have been why he’d brought it round to the passenger door.
    It was a shame about the target’s pickup. He was one of life’s unfortunates: wrong place, wrong time. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that whatever was in those bottles, it sure wasn’t wine, or even Ribena; I just hoped it had been worth him dying for.
    The big problem facing Suzy and me afterwards was that we still had four days left of our package holiday. We couldn’t just pack up and take a scheduled flight home: everything had to look normal; we had to brass it out. We did a lot of the tourist sights rather than lying by the pool – I needed to keep my gravel-graze out of view and keep as low a profile as possible. It felt like we spent entire days in trishaws going from temple to temple.
    I took the bike back; it cost me $150 for the damage, but I was just dismissed as another incompetent tourist. The killing, even the disappearance of the two waiters, hadn’t made it to the New Straits Times in the remaining four days, which probably meant that no one had come across the Lite Ace or a fly-infested body by the time we left the country. In fact, the main event in the papers was some politician’s wife being accused of khalwat , an offence that involved being in close proximity to a member of the opposite sex who wasn’t a relation. She had been watching television