Worst Case Scenario Read Online Free Page A

the twenty-first might be just that much worse than the nineteenth. The choice was stark and simple: sweat now or bleed later.
    Questions? No, no one had any questions. (If they asked questions, he might answer them.) The crowd gave him a respectable hand, then bolted for the door.
    â€œHe believes what he says,” Wendy heard someone say on the way out of the room.
    â€œYeah,” the stone-face who’d introduced him answered. “Thank God he’s not in charge of anything important.”

Chapter Three
    The Piaget watch the woman was wearing said 6:10, which meant that Scott Pilkington had fifteen minutes to get moving. The watch was the only thing the woman was wearing, though, and Pilkington knew he was in for a moral struggle. Concupiscence versus duty. He sighed at the prospect.
    Carmen highlights wafted valiantly from the tiny speakers on the boom box/CD player Pilkington had brought with him. The woman—Katy? Sally? Kalli, that was it, Kalli Stern—was flipping through the other dozen or so CDs in Pilkington’s attaché case.
    â€œI never met anyone before who takes his own sound system along on trips,” she said. “Once most of us get twenty miles outside Washington, it’s tube all the way. CNN or C-Span, take your pick. I’m the same way.”
    â€œIf you don’t know it before it’s on CNN,” Pilkington murmured, “you might as well be a lawyer in Milwaukee.”
    Eyes closed for just a moment, he savored the mot , which he thought rather good. He decided to use it again sometime. Then he allowed himself another undisciplined glance at Kalli. Concupiscence was going to win.
    â€œYou got any Andrew Lloyd Webber?” she asked. “Sondheim, maybe?”
    Jesus. Had we really turned the country over to people who found Bizet inaccessible?
    â€œI think Madama Butterfly ’s in there somewhere.”
    â€œThat Sondheim?”
    â€œYes. Just before he changed his name from Puccini.”
    Rolling up to sit on the side of the bed, Pilkington began searching for his clothes. An upset victory for duty.
    Kalli snapped her head toward him, her expression questioning and surprised.
    â€œSorry,” he said as he pulled on a sock. “I have to see a woman.”
    â€œWhat am I, chopped liver?”
    â€œNo, darling, if you were chopped liver, you’d have better taste.”
    â€œAsshole,” she snapped.
    â€œYou say that as if it were a negative thing.”
    Snatching at panties and bra, Ms. Kalli Stern stomped toward the bathroom, demonstrating in the process the singular aptness of her name. Pilkington sighed again. And found his other sock.
    ***
    For a surreally exhilarating moment, on the strength of no particular evidence, Michaelson thought that the approaching woman wanted to seduce him. As she introduced herself, he realized with a mixture of relief and letdown that she only wanted to use him.
    The relief didn’t surprise him, but the letdown did. He wondered how he’d have dealt with an attempted pickup if one had been in prospect. Sorry, I have an understanding with a lady in Washington ? As if he and Marjorie had worked out a fishing rights treaty with an odd codicil addressing this situation. He supposed so. He smiled at himself, reflecting briefly on the perils of being decades out of practice.
    â€œI’m Sharon Bedford,” the woman said, extending her hand.
    Laying an open volume of Emily Dickinson’s poetry face-down beside him on the weathered wooden bench, Michaelson rose and shook hands as he spoke his own name. With a gesture he invited her to sit next to him. They were on a quiet patio on the west side of the hotel, where strategically placed foliage and unobtrusive architecture provided the illusion of a tranquil rural view.
    â€œI know who you are, actually,” Bedford said. She tugged awkwardly at the hem of her skirt as she sat down. “I was on the NSC staff the first