Palace of Treason Read Online Free PDF Page A

surveillance in Austria and France to determine his patterns, and then meticulously concocted a classic
polovaya zapadnya,
honey trap, using a primal, leggy Slav as a nectar bribe to lure the goateed physicist into the snap trap of a chintz-upholstered Viennese love nest that kept his
khuy
in a perpetual state of leaky anticipation.
Invaginirovatsya.
Jamshidi had been turned
inside out
. And tonight she had stage-managed the Paris pitch—playing the hooker, naturally. Zyuganov calculated: Egorova was returning to Moscow from Paris tomorrow. His crawly mind raced as he searched through papers on his desk to find the name of her hotel—Paris can be a dangerous city. A very dangerous city. Zyuganov picked up the phone.
    The cats had deserted her. Three thirty in the morning and a bird was trilling in a tree along Rue de Turenne as Dominika turned into the dimly lit Rue de Jarente. There was a single lamp burning over the door of the Jeanne d’Arc; she’d have to buzz the night porter to get in. She was nearly to the entrance when she heard footsteps coming from across the narrow street, from behind the parked cars on the right curb. Dominika turned toward the sound while leaning on the night-bell button with her shoulder blade.
    A man was approaching—a large man with black, shoulder-length Fabio hair and a leather coat. From her left, a second man rounded the corner of a side street and walked toward her. He was shorter but thicker, balding, and wore a padded vest over a work shirt. She saw a wiggly leather sap in his right hand. They both looked at Dominika with dull, wet-lipped relish.
Not professionals,
she thought,
not from any intel service. These were gonzo bullyboys high on absinthe and blunts.
Dominika leaned on the bell again, but there was no response from inside the hotel, no lights, nothing stirring, and she backed smoothly away from the entrance, hugging the wall, her red-soled Louboutins rasping on the pavement. She kept facing the two men, who had now converged and were walking shoulder to shoulder. She backed into another side street, Rue Caron, which opened onto tiny Place Sainte-Catherine—cobblestoned, tree-lined, stacked café tables darkly sleeping.
Two fights in one night: You’re pushing your luck,
she thought.
    With the extra room, the men rushed her, hands out to grab her arms, and as the sap came up Dominika touched off the lipstick gun in her bag, the metallic
click
of the electric primer muffled by the disintegrating satin clutch. Close range, point and shoot. There was a puff of goose down as the bullet hit the vest just above the shorter man’s right nipple and its metal dust core expanded inside his chest cavity at three times the rate of a copper slug, vaporizing the vena cava, right ventricle, right lung, and the upper lobe of his liver. He collapsed as if spined, and his chin made a
tok
as it hit the
pavès
of the square. The black sap on the cobbles looked like a dog turd.
    A
two-shot
lipstick gun,
she thought. Fabio was on her now, a headtaller. A streetlamp lit up his red-rimmed eyes, and the air around his head was swimming yellow. As he reached to grab her, a not unpleasant scent of leather came off him. She gave him a wrist, which he took, and she trapped his hand and quickly stepped into him, leaning him back on his heels. Dominika hooked her calf slightly behind his leg and pushed with her shoulder, applying torque to his knee. He should have gone down and given her time to put the heel of her shoe into his eye socket, but he grabbed the plunging front of her dress and pulled her down with him, tearing the material and exposing the lacy cups of her bra. They hit hard together, and Fabio rolled Dominika over onto her back, the Louboutins flying off, and he was on top of her—she smelled his leather jacket and the stale-cake bloom of week-old shirt—and she was using her hands to try to reach something, eyes, temples, soft tissues, but there was a singing bang and her head