Spider Shepherd 10 - True Colours Read Online Free PDF

explanation,’ said Button. ‘They’re just racist haters, with no rhyme or reason.’
    ‘People aren’t born hating,’ said Shepherd. ‘Kids of all races and colours play happily together when they’re toddlers. They have to be taught how to hate.’ He looked at his tattooed knuckles and grimaced. ‘I can’t wait to get these off,’ he said.
    ‘One laser treatment will do it,’ said Button. ‘Two at the most.’
    ‘I’ve never liked tattoos,’ said Shepherd. He turned his hands over and examined the reddened palms. They were greasy and he realised that the paramedics must have rubbed some ointment over the burns. Button was right, the damage was only superficial.
    ‘They were camouflage, and they worked,’ said Button.
    ‘I want them off tomorrow, first thing,’ said Shepherd.
    ‘No problem. Go home. Have that shower. I’ll call you first thing and I’ll have a laser clinic fixed up. And take a few days off, you’ve earned it.’
    Yuri Buryakov stifled a cavernous yawn and glanced down at his watch, a Patek Philippe Tourbillon that had cost him over a million dollars. The conference had been going on for over eight hours now, with only a one-hour recess for lunch providing any relief. He had sat through a succession of speakers, listening to the simultaneous translation in his earpiece, but all he had heard was one piece of bluster or special pleading after another, one more reason why Russia should let the West have its gas, coal and oil for nothing.
    He allowed his gaze to wander for what seemed like the thousandth time that day. He knew, because his German hosts had told him so over and over again until he could almost have recited it in his sleep, that the Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam was a rococo masterpiece built by Frederick the Great and rivalling Versailles for its opulence and extravagance, if not its size, but all that ornate plasterwork, marble, silver and gold was like too much rich food to him and left him feeling just as queasy. There was a certain irony that this pleasure palace, created by Frederick as a place to escape the burdens of state – its very name, Sanssouci, meant ‘without care’ – should now be playing host to a collection of politicians, officials, functionaries and flunkies, who could not have been less carefree, nor more dull and dour, if they’d tried.
    The German Chancellor was the host of this international conference, called to discuss the future security of power supplies for the West. The US Secretary of State, the female head of the CIA, the British Foreign Secretary and the head of MI6, and the leaders or foreign secretaries and spy chiefs of all the EC and NATO countries, had been wrangling all day with the delegation from the major oil, gas, coal and electricity producers of Russia and half a dozen other states of the old Soviet bloc. Buryakov had no interest in spending any more time listening to the turgid speeches and debates, nor in gazing at the lavishly gilded interiors and the immaculate terraced gardens, ornamental fountains and sweeping vistas outside. Culture of all kinds – even the Bolshoi – left him cold. It had been a long day and he just wanted to get back to his hotel on Kurfurstendamm – the Knightsbridge of Berlin – and find some more congenial company than politicians, diplomats and bureaucrats. He would eat some oysters and caviar, drink some ice-cold schnapps or vodka, and then, if the mood was on him, have his bodyguards bring a whore to his suite.
    He left the selection to his bodyguards; they knew his taste in women – stick thin, very young and almost androgynous blondes – and he took his pleasures with them the way he took his business opportunities, with a single-minded, ruthless self-interest, indifferent to who he might hurt in the process. If the whores were sometimes a little bruised or bloody after their encounters with him, then a tip of a couple of hundred dollars more would usually stifle their complaints, and