• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1397 0

sickness and in health. But he’d distanced himself from her, both physically and emotionally. She was like a painting, or someone perpetually asleep, dreaming a life he could never understand. Did a radish dream, or a head of cabbage? She never responded in the slightest way to the music he put on during his visits—Al Hibbler singing “After the Lights Go Down Low,” for instance, or the Everly Brothers singing “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” songs they had loved and, in their youth, had danced to. He’d thought of this, a calming consolation, when six months ago he’d taken up one of the spare pillows and prepared to lower it over her face that, in her infirmity, had grown round and shiny as a metal globe. She wouldn’t know what was happening, what he was doing to her, and if she did, he was certain she’d be grateful. What kind of life was this she led? Even cows had it better, but not, perhaps, radishes. He was seconds away from doing it, his fingers gripping the sides of the pillow, his mind already made up, set on its path, when the music came on: Roy Hamilton’s “Don’t Let Go.” It seemed somehow sacrilegious to commit murder—even compassionate murder—while that song was playing (“I’m so happy I got you here/Don’t let go, don’t let go”), and something inside him shifted, everything changed and, turning, he put the pillow back where he’d found it. Then, without a backward glance at his wife or the radish, he left and hadn’t been back since.

He turned back into the hotel room, away from the glare of the headlights, and sat back down at the dingy desk and the endless lines of information scrolling across his laptop’s screen.

Why wouldn’t he forgive Nina, she was all he had.

But Nina was beyond his forgiveness, Jack had shot her through the heart before she’d had a chance to poison everyone at the inauguration with the vial of anthrax given to her by Morgan Herr. This, then, was Dennis Paull’s dilemma as he sat scrolling through the so-far innocuous mountain of electronic data: He was indebted to Jack McClure for saving Edward Carson, but he hated Jack for killing Nina.

RHON FYODOVICH Kirilenko had just enough time to swing by his office and pick up the photos his assistant had pulled off the CCTV cameras at Zhulyany Airport before transferring to a waiting FSB vehicle that took him, at reckless speed, to board his scheduled flight to Simferopol.

While his driver was weaving through the clogged arteries of Kiev he studied each of the three photos. The first was of the three people: Annika Dementieva he could see clearly enough. Behind her, his face partially obscured, was a man who looked vaguely familiar. Kirilenko spent several fruitless minutes trying to place the visible features before moving on. The second photo was of the young girl, who bore no resemblance to anyone in Kirilenko’s memory bank. He studied this photo in a rather abstract manner; for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what she was doing with the two adults. To his knowledge, which was extensive to the point of encyclopedic, Annika Dementieva had no sisters, and the girl was too old to be her daughter. So who on earth was she? Sighing in frustration he turned to the third and last photo, which was a full-face shot of the man. Almost immediately a galvanic shock rode up his spine. He knew this man, he worked for the President of the United States. What the hell was he doing with Annika Dementieva?

Kirilenko stared out the window, seeing nothing but his own muddled thoughts. He knew his duty was to inform his superior of this shocking development, but something—a stubbornness, resentment, a feeling of being at once played and betrayed—stayed his hand. He was tired of being manipulated. Bad enough to be fucked over by the Americans, that kind of treatment was a given, but to be fucked by his own people, who had to know they were throwing him into an international arena filled with land mines, was more than he could tolerate. But there was something else—something deeper—at work in his mind. He was finally in possession of information not available to