The Council of Shadows Read Online Free

And the voice slithered into his ears:
    â€œWho’s been a naughty boy, then?”
    He began to sink into the dry dusty earth, and it flowed into mouth and nose and eyes, the dust of ages and of empires.
    â€œNaughty!”
    â€œChrist!”
    He lay panting in the darkness, smelling his own sweat and waiting to be sure he was awake—sometimes he dreamed he was, and then the whole thing started cycling through his head again. It was blurring away already, details fracturing like sunlight through a drop of water. His hand groped for the cigarettes on the bedside, and then remembered he’d stopped.
    â€œGo back to sleep,” he told himself. “Dreaming’s no worse than remembering, anyway.”
    Christ.
    â€œI wonder where Tarnowski is?”
    He didn’t really want to know; kidnap victims usually didn’t end up anywhere good.

CHAPTER TWO
    W hen Ellen came out in a too-large white cotton robe with a towel wrapped around her hair he had the breakfast table set, in the big airy room that led out onto the balcony. The pensione was perched high on the slope above Amalfi’s little cove, and the Tyrrhenian Sea sparkled an impossible blue to the west; white buildings tumbled down the hillside to meet it, down to the Duomo and the half-Romanesque-Byzantine, half-Saracen cathedral.
    She felt much better now; the hot water had driven the last of the grue out of her mind and the stiffness out of her muscles, and she found herself eager for the day, sniffing the scent of the coffee. When she tossed the towel aside the mild warm breeze tumbled through her curly blond hair.
    â€œGood morning, Mrs. Brézé,” Adrian said.
    â€œ Salut , Monsieur Brézé,” she replied.
    â€œAnd buongiorno ,” they added in unison; this was Amalfi, after all.
    â€œYou look enchanting. And dressed like that, you also look about twelve.”
    â€œNot really,” she said.
    Ellen struck a pose with one hand behind her head and a leg showing through the slit. Adrian’s gaze lingered on it. She was twenty-four; she was also five-foot-six and thirty-six/twenty-seven/thirty-six, taut from tennis and cross-country running, with a face close enough to a certain fifties actress that it had been embarrassing in NYU’s art history classes when they came to study Warhol’s famous portrait.
    â€œNo, on second thought, of a perfectly legal age,” he said, after clearing his throat.
    She sat, and began to eat. The breakfast was more or less Italian, except for the chilled mango, ripe figs, crisp crumbly frese , slightly sweet and flavored with anise, torta di nocciole e limoni di Amalfi , rich with hazelnuts and tart with lemon, rolls, jam.
    â€œWell, that’s certainly blatant,” Adrian said after a moment, a slight prickle of danger in his smooth voice.
    â€œWhat is?” Ellen replied.
    â€œThis.”
    He showed her his tablet across the remains of their breakfast. She took the reader and held the thin sheet between her hands. This was an announcement in the Corriere della Sera that the . . .
    â€œ Ikhwan al-Fajr al-Aswad is to meet in Tbilisi, Georgia,” she murmured, yawning. “Next year, about this time.”
    It was late morning, which was a compromise between their preferred hours; Adrian might be a Good Guy, but his genes gave him a thoroughly Shadowspawn preference for waking up around noon and not becoming really active until sunset. By no coincidence whatsoever, that was a preference shared by many eccentric artists and mad dictators. She’d always been an early-to-bed, morning-type person. Marriage required a lot of meeting in the middle; going to bed late sometimes left her tired despite eight hours’ sleep, even when it hadn’t been interrupted the way it had last night.
    Nobody at the inn objected to their schedule, even though it must have played havoc with their housekeeping. They had long experience with eccentric foreigners,