The Ghost War Read Online Free PDF Page A

plan to push. He put the helmet on the night-stand and pulled off his jacket.
    In one quick move she rolled over, grabbed the helmet, and threw it at him. But Wells had played linebacker in college and still had a football player’s reflexes. He caught it easily and put it on her desk.
    “Jenny, I’m sorry. I know I said I wouldn’t, but I really needed it tonight.”
    “Where’d you go?”
    “Up 95, toward Baltimore.”
    “How fast?”
    “I don’t know, Seventy, seventy-five miles an hour. Nothing I can’t handle.”
    “John. Please. Shafer’s had a helicopter on you the last couple weeks.” Ellis Shafer, their boss at the agency.
    “Shafer what?” So that’s who’d been watching him tonight. “Did Duto put him up to it?”
    “Haven’t you figured out yet that Vinny Duto couldn’t care less about you, John? Shafer did it because I asked him to. He said they clocked you at a hundred ten. I wasn’t going to tell you, but that’s why I asked you to stop.”
    “Jenny—” He guessed he wouldn’t be talking to Duto after all. A small consolation.
    “I swear, John, I wish you were out drinking, screwing somebody else.” Her voice broke. “Anything but this. Every time you leave I think you’re not coming back.” He sat beside her on the bed and put his hand on her hip, but she pulled away. “Do you even care if you live or die, John?”
    “Of course.” Wells tried to ignore the fact that he’d asked himself the same question a few minutes before, with a less certain answer.
    “Then why don’t you act like it?” She searched his face with her fierce blue eyes. He looked away first, down to her breasts, their tops striated with tiny white stretch marks. Her milky white thighs. And the scar above the knee where the bullet had hit.
    “Sometimes I forget how beautiful you are,” he said.
    He heard a police siren whistling to the northeast, one of the precincts of Washington that hadn’t gentrified. The siren wasn’t as close as it sounded, he knew. Wells had spent a decade away from America, living undercover as an al Qaeda guerrilla, slowly ingratiating himself with the group. He’d picked up more than a few survival tricks along the way, including the knowledge that gunshots and sirens carried much farther at night than during the day. Just another bit of wisdom that no longer did him much good.
    “Your hand,” she said. He looked down. His left hand was trembling on his jeans. She caressed it in hers until the shaking stopped.
    “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” he said. For a while they were silent. She squeezed his hand and he found his voice again. “You know, I thought when I woke up in the hospital and saw you there that it would all be okay. That I was out on the other side. And now . . .” In the distance a second siren rang out, then a third. Trouble in the night.
    “Even Utah isn’t Utah,” Exley said. He looked at her questioningly. “When I was a kid, I used to love to ski. Before everything went bad with my family.” She slipped a hand around his shoulder. “Nothing scared me. Bumps, steeps, any of it. I didn’t want to hit puberty because I thought having a chest would mess up my balance. And it did.”
    She arched her back, jokingly thrusting out her breasts, and despite his gloom Wells felt himself stir. He imagined her, a narrow boyish body cutting down the mountain, her ponytail tucked away. “They must have been surprised when they saw you were a girl.”
    “Mainly we went to Tahoe. We did it on the cheap, stayed in motels, brought sandwiches to the mountain. The most fun I remember having as a kid. But I always wanted to go to Utah.” She ran a hand down his arm. “My dad didn’t want to. Said we didn’t have the money. But I pestered him and finally, when I was twelve, we flew to Salt Lake City. Me, my brother, my mom and dad. The whole happy family. My mom didn’t ski much, but she always came.”
    “She was afraid to leave him alone,”