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.I’m fine as is.”“Sure? I’m thinking of a breakfast burrito.Sausage and egg.Maybe a soda.Didn’t teach you to eat like that at Eton, did they?”“Stone the crows, no.A burrito would probably send me to the heavens.” Llewellyn-Davies coughed once, violently.“Pardon,” he said, raising a hankie to his mouth.“You okay, Tony?” Gavallan asked, concerned.“I’m alive, Jett.That’s good enough for me.”“If you need anything.”“Yes, I know.Ask.” Llewellyn-Davies knitted his brow inquisitively.“Not looking for another ticket to the ball tonight, are you? Hoping I might opt out?”“No,” said Gavallan abashedly.“No, no, no.”“Good, because I have every intention of attending.I can’t wait to see you mount the dais and make a bloody fool of yourself.You have to pay good money for that kind of entertainment.”“You bastard!” said Gavallan, laughing in earnest for the first time that morning and clapping his friend and colleague on the back.Sometimes it was hard to hide his admiration for Llewellyn-Davies.It had to be damned tough living your life on a leash, he thought, relying on ten different combinations of six different pills—“cocktails,” they were called—to be taken six times a day.He remembered the frail, sallow man who’d showed up for the interview seven years earlier, the thousand-yard stare, the unflinching honesty.“I’m sick,” Llewellyn-Davies had said.“You can see that.But I can work.Have to, actually.Can’t go out leaving debts behind me.What would my dad say? An accountant, don’t you know?”His resume read like gold.Oxford, Harvard, a year at a bulge bracket firm before being fired for excessive absences.Gavallan had made some calls beforehand.Smart as a whip, came the unanimous response.Polite.Great sense of humor.Clients love him.But, come on, the coughing, the sweating, all those doctor’s appointments.How long’s he got, anyway? Six months? A year? Who wants to sit next to a fuckin’ cadaver all day long? Besides, you never know.Shit may be contagious that way, too.“The job’s for a trader on our Swiss franc book,” Gavallan had said.“Pays fifty thousand a year plus a fifteen percent bonus if you don’t lose us too much money.If you have to miss work, get someone to cover for you.If you can’t find someone to cover for you, call me.Understood?”Llewellyn-Davies had nodded, his jaw clenched, eyes welling.“Monday is it, then?” he’d asked, wiping his cheek with the back of his hand.“You kidding?” Gavallan had exclaimed, standing and walking to the door.“You’re starting now.Take off that necktie and come with me.”Gavallan looked at Llewellyn-Davies now, wondering if maybe he was remembering the same moment.Seven years later, Tony wasn’t simply alive but a vital component of Black Jet Securities and one of Gavallan’s most trusted lieutenants.For a few more seconds, neither man spoke, and the silence that invaded the room was soft and comforting.“Jett, do you think it might be true?” Llewellyn-Davies asked finally, in his mildest brogue.“You think Kirov’s having us on, then?”“Is it true?” For once, Gavallan didn’t have an answer.Shrugging, he was unable even to mouth the requisite denials.The answers, he knew, lay elsewhere.In the past.In his judgment.In his greed.And instead of looking at the delicate features of Antony Llewellyn-Davies, he was meeting the brooding, religious gaze of Konstantin Romanovich Kirov the night they had first met six months before.8You are Mr.Gavallan, I think.”“Mr.Kirov.It’s an honor.”The two were standing in a plush reception hall on the campus of Stanford University.Kirov had been invited to deliver the annual Grousbeck lecture on foreign affairs.As his subject, he had chosen the current state of the Russian legal system, and his performance had been impressive, an impassioned sixty-minute discourse hitting all the buzzwords a liberal California audience was dying to hear.The need for an independent judiciary, ratification of the nation’s highest judges by a legislative authority, freedom of the press, the right to free speech.It was the Federalist Papers dressed up in an Italian blazer, Cartier links, and Lobb shoes, and topped off with an irresistibly cosmopolitan Russian accent.Kirov was still glowing from the standing ovation he’d received
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Tematy
IndexChristine Amsden [Cassie Scot Cassie Scot ParaNormal Detecti
Christie Craig [Divorced, Des Divorced, Desperate
Moore Christopher Ssij, mała, ssij (II)
Stasheff, Christopher Wizard in Rhyme 6 Haunted Wizard
Christine Feehan Mroczna Seri Mroczny Demon
Cidney Swanson [Saving Mars Saving Mars (epub)
Stasheff, Christopher Rogue Wizard 04 A Wizard in Peace
Feehan Christine Mroczna Seria 01 Mroczny Ksišże
Stasheff, Christopher Warlock 01 The Warlock in Spite of Himself
Christine Feehan Mroczna Seria 13 Mroczne Przeznaczenie