Free The Coil by Gayle Lynds

a tailored skirt and suit jacket, she looked completely professional even at this early hour. There were two other straight-backed chairs in the room, plus a wire cage in the corner, no doubt for unruly prisoners too bad or too opinionated for the potential camaraderie of a tank cell.
    But what he focused on was a second door, which, from the wall it was in, looked as if it opened onto the outside world. He inhaled with relief. The guards’ taking him and the two Germans from the cell had been a ruse. His cover would remain intact.
    He had almost been fooled, too. “You took your sweet time.” He headed for the door.
    She followed. “You’re in one hell of a lot of trouble.”
    â€œWith you or with Whitehall?”
    She was also the local MI6 station chief. She unlocked the door. The thick night air rushed in, and they stepped out of the jail.
    â€œWith all of us, Simon. Get in the damn car.”
    Â 
    With Ada Jackson driving, the nondescript embassy sedan headed through the old city’s narrow streets, past medieval houses and Baroque churches, in the general direction of the Danube. Bathed in silver moonlight, the peaked roofs and soaring towers of centuries-old Bratislava were iridescent. Once a favorite of Magyar kings and Habsburg emperors, the charming city seemed asleep—innocent and untouched. Simon Childs envied it.
    Aware he had again crossed some imaginary line with his higher-ups, he settled alertly into the front passenger seat, glad for the blast of the air conditioner. With a tight grip on his composure, he described the demonstration and Viera’s awful death. He listed the protesters he recognized, repeated conversations, analyzed the overall organization, and hid his guilt.
    As she drove, Ada queried every detail. He considered her profile, the glasses perched on her short nose, and the unchanging severity of her face. From her cap of smooth black hair to her pragmatic pumps, there was precision in her movements, the same sort of precision she brought to her thinking. Sometimes too precise and therefore inflexible.
    He studied her hands on the steering wheel as she drove. She wore no rings. If she had ever had a romantic assignation or even an ordinary date, he had never heard. She was in her late thirties, very pretty, but she gave off that stay-away scent of a woman taken. In her case, he figured it was not a man on her mind, but her “career.”
    â€œYou should never have left the embassy when you did,” she told him, her voice severe. “It was the middle of the party, for God’s sakes. Blast it, Simon, you had an assignment, and you didn’t do it. Whatever possessed you?”
    He had been walking a fine line; she was right about that. He was MI6’s expert on antiglobalization groups in Central Europe, more successful at penetrating them than the Americans, Germans, or French. With so many terrorist fears, apparently no one had blinked when the World Bank chief, freshly anointed, requested a personal briefing from Whitehall with its mysterious antiglobalization source—him.
    After all, the bank lent billions of dollars to governments in the region, and one of the major complaints across the protest movement was that the money went to destroying countries, not building them. So the plan was to disguise him in a tuxedo and slip him into the U.S. Embassy, where he would wait in a back room until Stanford Weaver could make time for him.
    Simon pretended indignation. “I went outside for a few minutes to get a toss of fresh air. And I shouldn’t think I was the only one. Those parties are numbing. ‘Dull’ is an enthusiastic description. I was bored, and that takes off the sharp edge.”
    â€œâ€˜A few minutes’ was all you needed to get yourself into trouble,” she reminded him. “No one enjoys command-performance parties, but we take them in stride. What are you now, thirty?” That made him look at