MadetoBeBroken Read Online Free PDF

blanket of silence
over every tree, every field, every village. Soon, he could return. After the
mess of the other night, there was only one more directive to carry out.
    He watched unseeing as the liquid in the cup turned from
amber to a bitter tobacco color. Funny word for “mess” in Russian, bardak ,
it meant same as bordello, or the kind of pleasure palace he had found her in.
His balls tightened again, thinking of her.
    No. Rule Number Two was show no weakness. He would not let
his desire for her interfere with the mission. Better than most men, Alexi
Maksimov knew the meaning of sacrifice. He would do what he had to do before
leaving for home.
    Kill the girl.
    * * * * *
    “You haven’t gotten our man yet.”
    Rod sounded aggrieved and accusatory over the phone. His
pulling rank like a puffed-up bureaucrat was the last thing she could take right
now. Coco was still pulling herself together after the night she’d had.
    Put it out of your head, she told herself, and do
your job. Things looked better in the light of morning. She could almost
believe that hadn’t been Maksimov in the club at all. It was so dark, and her
mind, to say the least, was elsewhere. She didn’t need an ex-boyfriend scolding
her from thousands of miles away to undo the fragile truce she’d made with her
conscience.
    “I will,” she answered, pushing her feet into sensible
tourist walking shoes. “Look, there’s gotta be a dossier on this Kaminsky. If
I’m going to get close to the assassin, I have to understand his victim.”
    Rod sighed. “Okay, but you’re wasting your time. I can get
you the official file. As far as I can tell, it’s all pretty straightforward.”
    “No sign of an unofficial file?” she asked. “Did you try
your counterpoint in Moscow?”
    “Don’t teach your grandmother how to suck eggs, Coco. I know
my job. And until you get Maksimov to the safe house, we’re just spinning our wheels.”
    This time she would remember her wallet. She stuffed it into
her purse and drew a light scarf out of her holdall. It looked to be another
scorcher.
    “That’s another thing. Those questions you want me to ask
him? I need them now, before we get there. He made me at our first contact, and
I didn’t like that at all.”
    “A ruthless warlord has a lot of enemies. If you got
spotted, I’m sorry to say that was mission error on your part.”
    He didn’t sound sorry at all, the condescending bastard.
    Her voice hardened. “The questions. I want them or I fly
back to DC tonight.”
    The white van was where Rod had said it would be, parked
around the corner from her hotel in front of a fast-food place that seemed to
sell nothing but potatoes. In her four years with OSO, Coco had been in
innumerable exotic places. She’d seen insects served on skewers, fresh snake
blood for sale, sheep’s eyes and whole bird fetuses, complete with downy
feathers, offered as delicacies. It was funny how in places with cultures very
different from her own, she expected the unusual and even, to her Western soul,
distasteful. Here in upright, English-speaking, clean, gray London, the idea of
an all-spud restaurant—or beans stewed in bacon fat for breakfast—seemed more
exotic and more appalling than a bowl full of lightly fried crickets. Which had
actually been pretty yummy, she remembered, thinking fondly of the Bangkok
street stalls.
    The van’s location meant she was expected to knock out
Maksimov right on the street, close to the hotel where she’d already met
someone who could identify her should the kidnapping go south. She hoped Madam
Amanda’s “work” at the Fordham was done for now. She considered changing hotels
or hiring a driver, but neither option would be very useful in the end.
Overall, it was a damn shoddy operation Rod had chosen for her. Once an ass,
always an ass.
    She bought a newspaper and settled into a booth in a dark,
almost empty teashop with a cup of black coffee and a croissant. There was no
more news about