Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) Read Online Free PDF Page A

stood in white dinner jackets and black tie on an esplanade. These men, who had once looked old to his eyes, now looked half a generation younger than him. The finca’s “staff,” all of them stunning girls in their early twenties, stood behind and to each side of the fishermen. Their smiles were open to interpretation.
    One thing was for sure, he thought: It had been a better world, easier, more fun. Maybe Luke was right after all, to go where impulse and testosterone led him.
    Billy looked in the mirror as he washed his hands. By God, he was showing his age! His hair, which had begun to gray at thirty-nine, he and his barber had at once done something about. His skin was another matter. There were crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. His brow had creased and the folds above his lip sunk, extending toward his chin. The skin itself appeared older, thinner, here and there traced with blue, almost translucent. The sharpness of his features, which had made him such a confident young man, had been all but erased beneath the deposit of years. So what? He detested complainers and had no intention of turning into one.
    Drying his hands, he glanced again at the finca—in particular into his father’s eyes. Billy missed his father. Even as he prized the freedom he had inherited along with his father’s shares and other worldly goods, he wished the old man had stayed around longer. The company he’d founded had grown thirtyfold over his son’s tenure as chief executive. The perks of such a position had also become more polished. If not the Continental Flying Spur, which Adolph Claussen would have found too flashy, Billy would like to have shown his father the fleet of company jets in their own hangar at KCI. The hangar was meticulously kept, and the planes saved thousands of hours of employee time traveling to and from Claussen sites across the world.
    Before sitting down to his desk, he looked out from the window behind it at the long, formal garden Maggie had planted. Terraced into the hillside, it was fallow now, but he had no difficulty imagining it in bloom. It was from just above the far tree line—although, seen from the other direction, the house he’d been born in—that a tornado had swept in when he was nine years old. He had never been more frightened; his heart had never beaten more rapidly. But even as he’d sprinted all those yards for shelter, a part of him had savored the idea of havoc, as if whatever was destroyed might be put back together again, improved.
    On shelves on the opposite wall, his parents’ collection of Hehe Boys, Chinese figurines, were arranged exactly as they had been in the gallery of the old house. He was not fond of them as works of art, never had been. Yet as evocations of another time—an era with its comfortable certitudes in place—they possessed for Billy a value beyond price. For a delicious moment, he looked around his library, a room none of his wives, no one but he, had ever touched. It was perfect, a chrysalis of his past.
    There was not much in the day’s mail to warrant his attention: a monthly newsletter from his New York club, a statement from one of the three personal checking accounts with which he paid for periodic indiscretions and which for that reason he always balanced himself. In the last month, sadly, there had been no such indiscretions, so he placed the red-and-white envelope in a drawer.
    As he closed the drawer, the carillon of the hall clock chimed the quarter hour, eight smoothly ascending and then descending notes to which he’d been so accustomed since childhood that they now hardly registered. But it was the sound that came next and was at once followed by an absence of sound that alarmed him: a sharp creaking of the floor above, then quick skidding that ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Billy drew his breath and stood, attuned to the silence of his house. Moving toward the library door, he