Whirlwind Read Online Free PDF Page B

other player, the one who was still in the game, although where in the game was the question, wasn’t it?
    He flipped the folder open. His first thought: pretty girl. No, make that a gorgeous girl. And add an exclamation point! Quite obviously, the Agency’s photographers agreed. They’d taken countless pictures of her. Here she was in a slightly dowdy gown at an embassy function, there she was in flattering light but unflattering dress leaning against a bar talking to someone with his back to the camera …. Close-ups that were nearly portraits. Medium shots. Full-length photos. Yup, boys will be boys, and boys do love taking pictures of pretty… hmpf!.. . women.
    Blonde hair over her shoulders most of the time, but occasionally up in a tight French twist. Big blue eyes, and you know the kind I mean. Wide forehead, elegant eyebrows arched like a seagull’s wings. A lower lip so full and ripe that even a man of my advanced and decrepit years wonders how it would taste. Perfect cheekbones, not the switchblade Slavic sharpness of your typical Russian lass, but high and smooth and wholly bewitching. Yeah, I could look at Irina Kolodenkova for a real long time, and not think I’d looked long enough.
    “A major babe,” Sam opined.
    “Understatement. Beauties like this… and more credit to her for turning down the job… are the kind of gals they try to pressure into becoming swallows.”
    “Becoming what?”
    Charlie glowered. A careerist and nothing but, Sam cared so little about the art of intelligence that he didn’t even bother to learn the lingo. “Swallows. Agents who use sex to gather intelligence.”
    Sam laughed coarsely. “She could swallow me any time.”
    Charlie frowned him into silence. Shuffling the photographs to the side, he turned his attention to the dossier’s paperwork.
    Okay, what do we have here? Third child of a naval officer, a light cruiser commander, and at his age that’s as far as his career will go. Two older brothers, and both of them commissioned in the Russian navy, just like dad. A military family, through and through. But Irina doesn’t join the regular forces, instead she signs up for intelligence work. Makes sense. The Russian navy is not an equal opportunity employer. Women run desks, not ships, and their career progression correlates directly with the number of senior officers they sleep with. Which this girl who most definitely did not become a swallow was bound to know.
    Sam, although he did not know it, was in an empty room. Charlie wasn’t there anymore. He’d floated off to a space outside of space. Alone and un-reachable, his mind roamed free, toying with scanty, scattered puzzle pieces. Extrapolate, extrapolate. Pieces of a puzzle their shape and texture and color have a message and a meaning. I can’t see the entire picture, because there aren’t enough pieces. But I can imagine. I can hypothesize. I can infer.
    And nine times out often he’d be right because he was one smart cookie, although when he was wrong good men died, and he wished he’d never been born.
    He almost stopped. Stopped right there. Was ready to quit on the spot. Give Sam back his files, and to hell with it, because as good as he was, he made mistakes, and he wasn’t sure he could live with himself if he made another.
    Instead he thoughtlessly flipped a page in Irina Kolodenkova’s dossier. And his eyes lit up.
    Oh, lookee, lookee. She made the Russian Olympic fencing team. She even brought home the gold! We’ve got a talented girl here. But more than that, a smart one. Fencing is the most intellectual of sports, three-dimensional chess and you play it in real time. In any other game, a great athlete beats a good one every time. Not in fencing. Physical fitness is only half the fight The rest is brainpower. And young Irina appears to have a surfeit of that.
    She’d be a challenge. He couldn’t resist a challenge.
    He closed his eyes. The puzzle is truth. Each piece is a fragment of truth.