Any Minute Now by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online Page B

King would drop her if she stopped feeding him intel on NSA policy as it pertained to Universal Security. The thought of spending nights alone was more than she could bear. Even these embers were better than an empty hearth.
    Though she could feel him against her, his gaze was far away. A dull ache started up around her heart. She placed his hand on her breast, but it might have been a plastic cast for all the life and warmth it provided.
    *   *   *
    â€œI have not gotten better,” Charlie said. “I’ve gotten wiser.”
    â€œSo that’s what’s different about you,” Whitman replied.
    She was curled up on her living room sofa, bare feet tucked under the Japanese robe she had changed into as soon as they had gotten home. Fierce-looking green and gold embroidered dragons chased one another over a frothy sea of blue silk. She held a glass of Pappy in one hand, the other lay flat against her thigh. She watched him out of the corners of her eyes, which, so far as Whitman was concerned, was a step in the right direction.
    â€œI wonder,” she said in a voice scarcely above a murmur, “whether you’ve changed.”
    â€œEveryone changes,” he said.
    â€œNot everyone,” she said with a razor’s edge to her voice.
    â€œYou promised to tell me,” he said, to take his mind off her mercurial shift in tone, “how you beat Milt.”
    She stared down into her glass like the bar flies at The Right Cue. “You shouldn’t have come back, Whit.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    She glanced at him. “Because I’m not going to give you what you want.”
    â€œYou don’t even know what it is.”
    â€œPayback for the shot in the ribs I gave you when I kicked you out.”
    He was astonished by her answer, and more than a little saddened. She still had the ability to break his heart, it seemed, even more than it was already broken. He decided to move on. “I’ll settle for you telling me the secret of your pool win.”
    â€œIt’s all in the pool cue,” she said matter-of-factly. He supposed that now she had plunged the knife in she felt free to speak openly. “I hand-turned it myself from African ebony and Hawaiian koa. This makes it beautiful and perfectly balanced, but that isn’t the half of it. The core is made of a thin rod of tantalum.” She took another sip of her drink. “Do you know anything about tantalum, Whit?”
    â€œWhy would I?”
    â€œRight, why would you. It’s an exotic metal with some very interesting properties. The one relevant to this discussion is how readily and rapidly it conducts heat and an electric charge.”
    Whitman considered the implications for a moment, before he said, “Where is it?”
    As if watching a flower unfurl in slow motion, he saw her left hand open to reveal the tiny circular object stuck to the center of her palm.
    â€œWhen it curls around the butt of my cue it comes in contact with a plate hidden just beneath the skin of wood.”
    â€œThe charge launches the ball.”
    â€œAnd more. It guides the ball into the pocket.”
    â€œNow that’s just impossible.”
    She smiled, as if to herself. “Pool balls are made of phenolic resin. There is something in the tantalum—a certain pentoxide, so I’m told by a chemist friend—that reacts with the resin.” She raised her left hand. “ Et voilà!”
    â€œWhy do you insist on inserting French phrases?”
    â€œOne of these days you should learn French,” she said in a perfectly neutral tone.
    â€œOne of these days you should learn to drink añejo .”
    â€œFrench comes in handy in Southeast Asia,” she said, as if she had not heard him.
    â€œIt’s arrogant and pretentious,” he said, “and it makes me feel…”
    She sat up so abruptly the last of her whiskey almost slopped over the rim of her glass.