Jack's Widow Read Online Free PDF Page A

be bugged, he laughingly commented that for once he would have just a two-minute bath as he was longing for a scotch, and wouldn’t it be great if they could be the first ones down for cocktails.
    Standing at the bar in the ballroom, Jackie and Jack appeared to be doing nothing more than enjoying their drinks. The moment that Jackie touched his hand to signal that one of the women she had seen that afternoon had come through the door on the arm of a Russian physicist, Jack gently wheeled them both around the room to join the most senior nuclear expert on the American team. She smiled at the pair while her husband pretended to be whispering a slightly off-color joke to him. As Jack was dispensing Jackie’s information, carefully indicating the woman and her spouse, the change of expression on the nuclear expert’s face confirmed she had not wasted her time. Seconds later she glimpsed the American scientist sidling out through the large mirrored doors of the hotel ballroom. As they sat down for dinner, some twenty minutes later, he reappeared and slid into his seat on the right of the British Foreign Secretary’s wife.
    As soon as the meal was over, but before coffee and digestifs were served, Jackie was surprised when the tall blond press attaché from the American embassy whom they had met on their first evening came over and reintroduced himself as Guy Steavenson. Within moments he had asked if the senator would object if, even though the night was very cold, he could escort his wife out onto the balcony to show her the view of the Charles Bridge.
    Without waiting for her to exclaim about the Gothic towers of stone at each end, Guy explained, in a low voice, that he handled more than press at the American embassy.
    “Not wanting to be melodramatic, I wonder if it would be too boring for you if you told me absolutely everything you heard this afternoon?”
    She looked up at him. He had a kind but strong face, twinkling eyes divided between white and cerulean blue, lips that seemed more comfortable curved in an upward direction rather than the reverse, and both his pale blond hair and dinner jacket stood out—they had been expertly cut.
    Swathed in her mink stole, she recounted everything while pretending to look at the stars.
    When she finished he thanked her and asked if she would be prepared to help again.
    Still simulating entrancement with what she was seeing, rather than what she was hearing, she nodded.
    Staring deeply at her, he said, “If I were to rig things so that you could spend tomorrow together with them, could you cope? I’ve looked at the schedule, it’s a shoe factory in the morning and a children’s drama school in the afternoon.”
    “Try and stop me,” she said, laughing.
    His eyes are quite hypnotic, she thought.
    She did spend the next day as close as possible to the two women. This time they divulged nothing.
    That evening, fearing her enthusiasm for the day’s work barely masked her exhaustion, the senator, over cocktails, quietly told Guy Steavenson that Jackie was pregnant.
    “We’ve lost two babies. I know that this is important but you have got to let her off the hook now. Tomorrow she needs to rest.”
    After dinner that night Guy lied impeccably when she playfully accosted him and whispered that she was standing by for her orders.
    “Mrs. Kennedy, you have been wonderful. You really don’t need to follow these women any longer. We know everything we need to know. What you have done has been above and beyond what we could have expected.”
    “I’ve done nothing really.”
    “Well, you’ve proved how we linguists will rule the world eventually.” He smiled.
    “Don’t you want to know how many of them are going?”
    “The truth is,” he lied, “we have discovered that they have called off going on tomorrow’s trip. So I am afraid that we have no way of putting you together with them.”
    She looked at him, the question in her eyes doing all the talking.
    Shrugging his