Critical Mass Read Online Free Page A

care of here first,” he said. “And I think it’ll be better all the way around if you pave the way.”
    She looked into his eyes and smiled. “You’re probably right. And then?”
    They’d avoided that subject for the week she’d been with him in Paris. And then what, he asked himself. He was quitting Europe, and returning to his ex-wife Kathleen in Washington, D.C. Or at least he and she were going to give it a try.
    Tall and husky, McGarvey was a good-looking man with wide, honest eyes that sometimes were green and other times gray. He was in his mid-forties and had lived in Europe for a number of years, including a time in Lausanne where he’d run a small bookshop as a cover. He’d been in hiding then, as he supposed he still was. Once a spy, always a spy.
    He’d been a loner for the most part, though in Switzerland he and Marta had lived together. Ex-CIA assassins made the Swiss nervous, and Marta, who worked for the Swiss Federal
Bureau of Police, had been assigned to watch him. “Watch you, not fall in love with you,” she told him once. “That I did all on my own.”
    She was looking at the passing scenery, and he studied her profile. A blood vessel was throbbing in the side of her long, delicate neck. She’d come as a complete surprise, showing up on his doorstep last week.
    â€œI heard you were in Paris. Thought I’d drop by to say hello while I was in town.”
    She’d moved in with him, of course. They’d had no discussion about that, because she was still in love with him.
    But she had brought, besides her presence, a flood of memories for him. Some of them good, or at least tolerable, but most of them difficult. What spy looks back on his past with any joy? Or what soldier, for that matter, looks back at past battles with any fondness? They had been at war. And he had killed in the fight. Not a day went by without some thought for the people whose lives he’d ended. Sometimes he’d been close enough to see the expressions on their faces when they realized they were dying. Pain and fear, of course, but most often their last emotion had been surprise.
    He especially remembered the face of the general he’d been sent to kill in Santiago, Chile. The man had been responsible for thousands of deaths, and the only solution was his elimination. But McGarvey’s orders had been changed in midstream without him knowing about it. He returned to Langley not a hero but a pariah, and the CIA had released him from his contract.
    Switzerland had come next, and then Paris when the Agency had called him out of retirement for a “job of work” as his old friend John Lyman Trotter, Jr. , had once called an assignment.
    More death, more destruction, more pain and heartache. He’d lost a kidney in the war. He’d nearly lost his life. He’d lost his wife, and the loneliness, that at times was nearly crushing, rode on his shoulder like the world on Atlas’s. He figured he could write the book on the subject.

    â€œGood thoughts or bad,” Marta asked, breaking him out of his morose thoughts.
    He focused on her. She was studying his face, a bemused expression on hers.
    â€œI think I’ll miss Paris.”
    â€œYou’re leaving for good, aren’t you,” she said. “And somehow I don’t think you’ll be resettling in Lausanne.”
    â€œI haven’t decided yet,” he lied, and he managed a smile. “Besides, I don’t think your boss would be very happy having me on his turf again.”
    â€œSomething could be arranged.”
    â€œMaybe I’d get called up.”
    She shook her head in irritation. “You’re getting too old for war games, Kirk. And you must have noticed by now that the Russians have gone home. The Wall is down, the Warsaw Pact has been dismantled—they’re holding free elections in Poland, for God’s sake—all the bad guys