Free The Color Of Night by David Lindsey

she said.
    Howard said nothing.
    “Claude Corsier has disappeared,” she said.
    He didn’t have much of a reaction, only a fleeting frown.
    “What do you mean?”
    She looked at him, tense, restless. “Which of those words don’t you understand?”
    “You’ve been keeping in touch with him?”
    “Yes.”
    “Really. And with Strand, too?”
    “No.”
    “Okay,” he said, shifting his shoulders on the sofa, settling in, “go ahead and tell me what’s going on.”
    Ariana nodded and took a long drag on her cigarette for support. She collected herself.
    “After the FIS changed our mission to criminal intelligence, everything changed for us… who worked with Harry. Even before that we knew things were going to be different after the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union disintegrated. The cold war was over. We knew we were living through the end of an era. Harry said the FIS was being forced to… you say, downsize. Even though we had been redirected”—she shrugged—“we saw how easily we could be thrown away when we were no longer useful in a certain way.
    “Harry… well, all of us… the three of us made certain plans to, uh, ‘improve’ our retirement situation. It was late in the day for me,” she continued. “I was approaching middle age, had no money to speak of and no pension waiting for me. No husband and no prospects of getting one—that’s too high a price to pay for security. I decided to look after myself.”
    Howard’s expression changed slightly, taking on the impassive rigidity one often saw in people who suddenly realized they were about to hear news that they expected would shock them. They reflexively prepared themselves with a kind of facial fortification.
    “We developed a strategy to get away with some money, a scheme. It went on for exactly six months, until Harry closed it down nearly six months before he retired.”
    Howard’s face fell. “Jesus… Christ… Wolf Schrade?”
    She nodded. “Of course, everyone scattered after that. We never saw each other again. None of us.”
    Howard had forgotten to smoke his cigarette. It smoldered between his fingers.
    “But Claude and I decided we wanted to stay in touch with each other. We agreed on a secret way to communicate, a way to make sure that each of us knew the other was still alive. A warning system.”
    “He’s missed his turn.”
    “Exactly.” She smoked, her stomach aching from the tension.
    Howard wasn’t interested so much in Claude Corsier’s disappearance. “How much did Schrade lose?” His voice betrayed a forced stoicism.
    She hesitated. “Millions.”
    “How many?”
    “I don’t know. Quite a few.”
    Howard didn’t react.
    “The way it was set up,” Ariana went on, “he didn’t know. It was a very good operation. Very good. Extensive planning.” She paused. “I think he has finally puzzled out what happened. And who did it.”
    “Shit.” Howard remembered his cigarette, which had burned down to the filter and was stinking. He put it in the ashtray.
    “The point is,” she said, “I think this is going to get dirty. This is very complex.”
    “God… damn.” Howard swallowed. “This was Harry’s idea, wasn’t it?”
    Ariana looked at him. “We were all involved…”
    “But it was Harry’s idea.”
    “You’ve got to understand—”
    Howard held up one hand to stop her. His face had grown red. He was furious. She knew the reality here. Bill Howard didn’t give a damn that Ariana was afraid, that she believed she was going to be killed, and that she was desperate for protection. What was coursing through his thoughts like a fever was that his twenty-three-year career in the Foreign Intelligence Service, a carefully shepherded career, was suddenly as unstable as the smoke wisping up from the end of her cigarette.
    She smelled food cooking, a thick odor that she couldn’t identify. It lacked the tangy sharpness she would have smelled in Salonika or Athens, or even Rome. She