Palace of Treason Read Online Free PDF

rocked, and maybe she could take one, two of those punches, but not many more.
    The weight was off and Fabio was standing over her; she covered up but he kicked her ribs once and was measuring the distance for a big-booted neck stomp when a blessed street cleaner holding a power nozzle connected to a little bug-nosed water truck with a merry revolving orange light entered the other end of the square and started hosing down the cobbles. Fabio kicked Dominika again in the ribs, a glancing blow, and ran. She lay on the ground for a second, feeling her ribs for damage, watching the sweeper truck wetting down the far end of the square. She turned her head and saw the body of the man she had shot, lying small and facedown in a pool of black blood.
The sweepers would have some extra spraying to do,
she thought.
Now get out of here
. Stifling a groan, Dominika rolled to her feet, gingerly retrieved her shoes and glasses, and limped around the corner to her hotel, holding the scraps of her dress together with her other hand. She was quite a sight: She’d tell the night porter she was through working conventions—the hell with fertilizer salesmen from Nantes.
    She left the room lights off and went into the bathroom, peeled off her torn dress, and examined the bruises in the mirror—red now, the eggplant purple would come tomorrow. Her cheek ached. She put a cold cloth on her eye, then eased herself with a groan into a hot tub, thinking about the towering coincidence of being mugged in Paris, about the pitch to Jamshidi.
    And about Zyuganov.
Yadovityi,
poisonous. One of only two men she had ever known who showed not color but black foils of evil. She guessed that he betrayed without conscience, and would in turn expect and watch for betrayal. She knew he would consider Putin’s heavy-lidded attention to her a serious threat, as if she were stalking him with a knife. And an operational triumph—such as recruiting Jamshidi—would be equally threatening to his standing. So if she failed, or if she was injured—say
, mugged on the street
—Zyuganov could take over management of the operation and personally carry the sensational intelligence reports to the fourth floor of Yasenevo and to the Kremlin.
    It was the familiar, acid taste of double cross, the usual knife-across-the-throat treachery, and Dominika weighed her grim determination to fight them, to burn down the Service, to damage their lives. She considered reactivating contact with the CIA and Nate now, this very evening. Her assignment to Line KR and the Jamshidi case would potentially provide magnificent access, stupendous intelligence. They would marvel at her accomplishment in so short a time. She sank up to her neck in the hot water. She had six hours before her flight to Moscow.
    It wasn’t her mother this time. Marte had been a classmate at Sparrow School—corn-silk blond hair, blue eyes, and delicate lips—who, driven mad by the salacious requirements of the school, had hanged herself in her dormitory room. Dominika had been very sorry at the time, then furious: Another soul consumed by the Kremlin furnace. Marte sat on the rim of the tub and trailed her fingertips in the bathwater. There’s time enough later for the Americans, said Marte; you have to go back now and put the noose around the neck of the Devil.

    Dominika returned to Moscow on the morning Aeroflot flight from Paris sore and stiff, one raccoon eye throbbing. A car brought her to Yasenevo directly, and before she could report to Zyuganov, a waiting aide whisked her into the elevator and up to the executive fourth floor, past the portrait gallery of former directors, bushy-browed and wearing their medals on the lapels of their Savile Row suits, their rheumy eyes following the familiar figure of Dominika Egorova along the cream-carpeted hallway.
Hello! Youagain. Have they caught you yet?
the directors asked her as she passed.
Take care,
malyutka,
be careful little one.
    Pushing through the door of the