Last Snow Read Online Free PDF Page B

for a fact.”
    “I hear things, Annika, same as you.” She shook her head. “You’re so naïve sometimes.”
    Jack had had about enough Halloween stories for one evening. He had zero interest in seeing Ivan Gurov again, but he didn’t have any expectation that he would, especially since by tomorrow morning he’d be in the air, on his way to Ukraine.
    He finished his drink and stood up. “Ladies, it’s been interesting, but all things considered it’s time for me to leave.”
    “You see what you did, Jelena,” Annika pouted, “you’ve driven away another man.” She rose and threw some money on the bar. “I promised to make sure you got to your room.”
    “That’s right,” Jelena said with a sardonic edge. “That disgusting pig of yours might be hiding in the elevator.”
    Jack held up his hands. “Ladies, I like women fighting over me as much as the next guy, but, really, I can find my way upstairs by myself.”
     
    A LONE IN the elevator, he still felt Annika’s cat’s eyes following him, and he wondered whether she or Jelena had been seriously coming on to him. Maybe that was just male ego talking. Then again, it could be that both of them had been flirting with him, which had long been a fantasy of his, one he shared with about a billion other men. One thing was for certain, his brain and theirs had been vibrating on two distinct frequencies. Between the assignment in Ukraine, secret from even the president’s staff, and the escalating friction with Sharon, his mind had no room for flirtatious Russian women, especially when one had a mobster for a boyfriend, ex- or otherwise.
    He got off at the top floor, nodded to the Secret Service personnel on duty, and entered his room. Something about his talk with Carson in the stairwell bothered him. Why had he dismissed his bodyguards before he brought up the subject of Jack’s assignment? When Jack had queried him, the president had said: “
I trust you, Jack. That’s the beginning and the end of it
.”
    Did Dennis Paull suspect a mole inside Edward’s staff—in the president’s own Secret Service detail? If true, it would be a devastating blow to Edward’s work guiding the administration. What if his political enemies—who, as he said, were still powerful—knew his every move before he made it? Carson hadn’t spoken their names, but Paull had: Miles Benson, the former director of the CIA, a hardheaded,take-no-prisoners war veteran; and Morgan Thomson, the former national security advisor, the last of the credible neocons, bellicose, nervy, with recently revealed ties to several companies manufacturing war materiel. Between them, the two men had almost sixty years of service and networking inside the Beltway, formidable opponents indeed. They could not only stymie the president’s agenda, but also undermine his standing in the country. These days, polls were everything. The appearance of failure was all that was needed to send Carson’s popularity skidding.
    He thought about calling Sharon, but he needed something to calm him. Maybe a hot shower. As he stripped off his clothes and padded into the bathroom, he made a mental note to follow up on his line of reasoning, either with or without Carson’s approval.
    He turned on the shower, and had to wait for the hot water to come up, but a man’s voice arrived before the heat did.
    “Toss the entire fucking room.”
    Jack, listening closely, turned off the water and put his head near the pipe.
    “I want to find her secrets, something I can use against her.”
    Ivan was speaking in Russian, a language Jack had learned while at the ATF because of his work with terrorists. He’d used Rosetta Stone to learn Russian, Arabic, and Farsi, all within an eight-month period. He already had been fluent in Spanish. As long as the foreign language was delivered aurally, his dyslexia allowed him to be an astonishingly quick learner. He was able to see the words, phrases, tenses, and colloquialisms in three