To Free a Spy Read Online Free PDF Page A

started if she called, but if not he’d see her afterwards and spend the night in her suite upstairs, as usual when he was in Atlantic City.
    The phone rang as he was about to hit the shower. He couldn’t deny his thin smile as she breathed how she had managed to get free for the evening. “All for you, Jag.” Did she think he fell for her obvious manipulations, he wondered, but it didn’t matter. The party downstairs did matter. He was a politician and seeing and being seen by the right people was life blood. But as he showered, his thoughts were on Karly—her scent, her smoothness, the silky hair, her voice rasping her where-the-hell’ve-you-been- I’ve-needed-you fodder, her sculpted calves and thighs that would wrap him in a prison of soft yarn…and those green eyes. He knew the thinness of her adoration and figured she knew that he knew. Just part of the charade they would continue this weekend.
    He checked the time again. Less than two hours until he was downstairs among the Who’s Who of Washington, and here he was thinking of Karly. He had sworn off of her once but didn’t remember why just now. It sure wasn’t because of the marriage vows he’d taken. He doubted now if he loved his wife even years ago when maybe he thought he had. Now their marriage, beyond hostile, worn-out, wasted away like property values in a D.C. ghetto.
    But there was no way out of the marital union. His father-in-law was a retired United States Senator from Jag’s own state who liked Jag from the beginning and catapulted him into politics. Now, more than twenty years later, the old man, a national icon, still wielded enormous power: An advisor to presidents and a favorite of television news types who went to him and others like Henry Kissinger for a weighty utterance on the international crisis du jour. If Jag feared any man, it was his father-in-law. He could doom his son-in-law’s political future, including his fertile hopes for the White House that lived in the back of Jag’s mind, with no more effort than required to pick up the phone. And it looked like the old Washington warrior was going to live forever.
    But Jag didn’t worry much about his wife stirring things up for him. She had her own reasons for hanging onto their marriage. She never seemed to mind being seen with him at high-profile Washington balls or finding her picture on the society pages. He wondered for a moment whether she was involved with someone, but rolled his eyes at the thought: That would involve sex.
    He’d fantasized about a future without his wife but knew Karly Amarson would have no place in it. There’d be no need for the secrecy she offered. And even if she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, the most uninhibited lover, she was still who she was, simply a high-priced whore. But she was convenient now. He could fly her to meet him in New York for plays and museums and shopping at Saks and Tiffany’s and dinner at Fiorio’s on West Fifty-Second where he wouldn’t be recognized and the music was seductive and they could dance and then go to their hotel suite and make love and sleep it all off, and he’d go back to Washington and she’d return to the Golden Touch Casino & Hotel and a life he never allowed himself to think about.
    But today he was in Atlantic City and he’d see Karly for the first time in two weeks, or was it three, and distancing himself from her was not in his immediate plans. She was an elevator ride away, his ambivalence was banished, and for the weekend Karly Amarson was everything he wanted.
    * * *
    Karly finished dressing, poured herself another drink and leaned back in a leather chair in the living room, taking a minute to survey her place. It hadn’t been that hard to swing, actually. She had proposed the deal to a reluctant Frank Gallardi one morning after he’d had a blockbuster month in the casino. “Frank, I can bring my clients to the Golden Touch or I can take ’em somewhere else. They don’t