Femme Fatale Read Online Free PDF Page B

faint smatter of freckles and give her that fresh-faced morning tourist look, and she was ready to venture into the waterfront proper, an area with such intensity of charming character that it almost hurt. Shopping opportunities, African crafts and handmade items—all imported, since Cape Town itself had no booming cultural arts community—food for the hungry, quaint benches with a perfect view of Table Mountain and its end caps of Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head— 3563 feet high, she recited to herself—boat rentals, an IMAX theater and, out by the road to Cape Town proper, an aquarium.
    Caffeine, Beth decided. Caffeine was the way to start this day, and by then the Victoria Wharf Shopping Center would be open. If she could find a tourist-oriented bookstore or even a computer store with demo systems hooked up to the Internet, she might be able to make something of Blue Crane, at least as it related to South Africa. With luck, under the table would make more sense in the context of that information. Or Barbara would be able to help, and contacting her from a computer store was not likely to gather any attention at all. Testing a toy, that’s all.
    She found a coffee shop and ordered herself something with foamy chocolate, choosing a powdered sugar doughnut. She considered contacting Barbara here and now, but it was too quiet here. Too obvious. She pulled the PDA from her sling pack, but powered it up only to consider Lyeta Denisov and her former lover, Kapoch Egorov.
    There was Lyeta, a stunning digital image that couldwell have been used as a cover photo for any upscale women’s magazine—if it hadn’t been for the cold, cold stare of her light blue eyes. Not a warm, inviting presence…very much a beware of me lady. In person, Beth had only seen her in blue Phantom night light or in the gloom of predawn; the photo jumped with the vivid color of Lyeta’s long red hair, the gentle waves of which did nothing to soften the sternness of her classic beauty. The photo proclaimed what she was: a woman of power, with intensity of life and ultimate self-confidence.
    Beth found herself scowling and pressed her lips together, a fleeting self-admonishment. She took a deliberate sip of her cooling coffee. Lyeta was dead, and she’d chosen the path that ended her own life so prematurely. Now it was up to Beth to make sure Lyeta’s death—and her life—counted for something.
    Beth returned to the PDA menu and picked the photo of Egorov. Another time, another world, he would have been called a crime kingpin. Now he was just a rich man of influence to most people, a charismatic man in his fifties with piercing blue eyes and a rakish scar on his cheek. But behind the scenes, Egorov played cultures against one another with terrorism as his tool and money and power as his reward. Now he was discovering what most people knew…that all the power in the world couldn’t cure what mankind had not learned to cure.
    So he would die, and if Beth had her way, before he went he would know that his CIA mole had failed to kill Lyeta in time to protect his legacy.
    Although the mole still had the chance to stop Beth. And the mole had far too many advantages for comfort—unlike Beth, he was not on the run. Mr. B.S., for Bad Sniper, although it amused her that the initials were multipurpose. And unlike Beth, Mr. B.S. likely had a localteam behind him, legitimately on the hunt for Lyeta and now the woman who’d supposedly killed her. Whereas Beth could not hunt for the mole, but simply do her best to evade him—and MI6—while she tried to understand Lyeta’s nonsensical death whispers.
    Not undoable. But it would take some concentration…and just the right moves.
    Not to mention doing without sleep for a while. She closed Egorov’s photo and did some quick surfing on the PDA, blessing its many enhancements as she hunted for anything “Blue Crane.”
    The little screen quickly filled with results, and she nibbled the doughnut, pondering