The Secret Agent by Francine Mathews Read Free Book Online Page A

entirely the next day, because time was short and Oliver had a great deal to teach. There were the obvious things, like Krane & Associates’ operations worldwide, which Oliver summarized between brisk gallops through the fields of Inverlaggan House that first misty, exhilarating morning. He sat his mount with the incalculable air of having been born to a life of privilege that Stefani admired and deeply suspected was chicanery. He talked incessantly but to the purpose—imparting so much information, in fact, that she was glad she had tucked a voice-activated tape recorder in the pocket of her field jacket. She made no mention of the device and had almost forgot it when, at the end of nearly two hours’ ramble amid the rowan-berries and the spear thistle, Oliver told her gently, “I’ll have that tape now, old thing, if you don’t mind. What you can’t remember don’t matter a fig; and homeworknever was your style.” He tossed the tape, recorder and all, far out into the lake and led her back to the house for breakfast.
    By lunch, she was swimming in detail. There were all the subtleties of forensic accounting and of hard-drive analysis and file retrieval—which she gathered were pet topics of Oliver’s and far too complex to master in a matter of hours. He threw them at her while they hunted for trout, adjusting the angle of her pole and advising her alternately on coarse fishing and sheltering assets.
    “If you’re in debt to the world and the world wants payment,” he advised, “have your best friend sue for a shocking amount. Better yet, have your ex-husband throw the book at you. Fail to answer the suit, and he’ll get a healthy default judgment. Then you file bankruptcy and the bulk of your liquidated estate goes to your detested former spouse. A few weeks later he’ll hand it all back as per your previous arrangement—minus a bagatelle of a handling fee. You shelter the remainder offshore. Brilliant little game, because it’s simple and goes almost unnoticed—except by those of us who think like the crooks do.”
    In between riding and fishing lay all the small matters Oliver was determined to teach her: how to search a room for bugs, a car for explosives or the exterior of a building for video surveillance. How to fire a handgun, which Stefani had never done in her life and hardly expected to enjoy so much; how to shoot a camera disguised as a cellular phone while poring over suspect documents. How to detect infrared barriers and circumvent the more predictable forms of electronic security systems. Over a smoky single malt in the fire-lit library one rainy afternoon, Oliver showed her how a hostile handshake could steal her identity across the Internetwaves, and how to prevent it from happening in the future. He gave her phone numbers, security numbers and names in code: mental keys to a whole series of Krane’s rooms she might never unlock, with no notion of what lay behind their doors.
    He even taught her, during a stint in his cavernous subterranean gym, how to fall into the arms of a would-be attacker and flip him onto his back with a force that drove the breath from his body.
    “We’ll have to leave switchblades for another time,” Oliver said regretfully as he picked himself off the mat with a lithe spring. “I’ve no one whose neck I can put to the knife at the moment. You’ll have to rely on the C-clamp.”
    The C-clamp, she learned, was a rigid cupping of the fingers in the shape of the letter C. When jammed, hard, against an assailant’s Adam’s apple and shoved upward, it was capable of killing a man in three seconds. Oliver declined the experiment, however.
    “Use the mannequin,” he instructed with an airy wave at a life-sized Ken doll dressed in the requisite black. The mannequin emitted a high-pitched, mind-grating signal akin to a triggered smoke detector, setting nerves on edge and adrenaline pumping. Just to shut the thing up, Stefani lunged, grappled and shoved for all