First Blood Read Online Free Page A

back, lost in her memories. They were unpleasant. They pulled at her like hooks.
    She shook her head.
    “I had, uh, surgery. It was before we met.”
    “The life you don’t want to tell me about.”
    “The life you shouldn’t know about.”
    She held out her empty glass, and he filled it.
    “And the injuries just reappeared?”
    “How perceptive of you.”
    Jonathan shook his head.
    “Don’t be that way with me, Madeleine. This is serious. In fact, this is impossible. A surgical incision cannot reopen in that way after so many years. It does not happen.”
    Madeleine smiled, revealing even more of the bone and muscle. Jonathan turned away.
    “You’re right. It’s never happened before. The operation was a particularly innovative one. The doctors said that the wounds were too deep to cover up.”
    She took a deep breath, a distant look in her eyes.
    “The blade that did this to me cut too deeply into my flesh. Yes. Yet I managed to make them disappear, didn’t I? Nobody even knew, not even you.”
    Jonathan nodded. He had kissed his wife’s cheeks all these years. He had caressed them without ever detecting the slightest scar, much less any surgery.
    “So, what happened?”
    Madeleine continued to look into the distance, at the grounds and the pathways that led to the gates, where wisps of blue fog sprawled close to the ground.
    “I don’t know, Jonathan.”
    She was lying to him. He knew it. She knew that he knew it, and she did not care.
    “Maybe I made a mistake,” she murmured.
    “What mistake?”
    “I got in touch with someone, an old friend.”
    “Do I know him?”
    Madeleine smiled. “No, you don’t know him. His name is Ismael. He’s a friend from before.”
    “From your former life,” Jonathan said with a sigh.
    “Yes, my former life.”
    “Why did you call this guy, this Ismael?”
    “I wanted to know if he was having dreams too.”
    “And?”
    “He wouldn’t tell me.”
    For the first time, Jonathan Reich recognized something in his wife’s voice that he had thought he would never hear in his lifetime.
    He heard fear.
    A deep, untamed fear.

5
    Les Ruisseaux
    11 p.m.
    The housing project was on just the other side of the beltway. Its tall columns of buildings blistered with satellite dishes, overturned garbage cans, walls covered in graffiti, and teenagers driving scooters with no lights reminded Eva of Dante’s famous phrase, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
    She swallowed hard.
    The unmarked Renault crept along from one traffic circle to the next.
    Leroy stopped to let a hairless dog cross the street.
    There was nothing official about this assignment. They had to remember that they were not supposed to be here. If things turned bad, they could count only on themselves.
    Eva found the idea exhilarating.
    She swallowed hard again. Daydreaming again. Like usual, these days. She balled her fists in her jacket pockets and lowered her chin ever so slightly so a curtain of white hair would fall over her face.
    Behind the wheel, Leroy had put his hat back on and looked serious. He did not find the situation exhilarating at all. But he had sworn to bring Constantin down, and he would do it. He still believed in justice. He was ready to fight the entire world for it. Eva hoped he would not lose his illusions too soon. Like the others.
    “We’re almost there,” he said.
    They drove along a deserted road with broken streetlamps. A wispy fog hovered above the ground. Beneath it, frost crystals glittered in the lights of the car.
    At an intersection, they passed a burned-out car that had been ignited during their raid two weeks earlier.
    “Did you see that? The mayor tried to remove it, but the city workers were pelted with stones. I imagine it will stay there for some time.”
    Eva nodded. It was no secret. No cops or city workers ventured into these neighborhoods anymore; they were systematically insulted and attacked. Most of the youths who grew up here would never leave the