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

she was worth. Ken toppled backward with a satisfying thud, her hand still dragging at his plastic windpipe. It was unfortunate, she thought, that she had been forced to silence the only other person she’d seen in days.
    Inverlaggan House was empty of life except for themselves. This was technically impossible, of course— someone prepared Stefani’s meals and tidied her room. But except for a distant figure she once glimpsed raking leaves, the Highlands landscape was stripped of casualacquaintance. Either Oliver preferred to live in the illusion that he was self-sufficient, or his staff was under strict orders to give her a wide berth. Was this for her safety—or theirs?
    Like everything to do with Oliver Krane, the atmosphere of Inverlaggan House—part James Bond, part Bertie Wooster—intrigued and amused her in a way that nothing had for months.
    Every evening she curled up in her massive four-poster bed with a daunting collection of facts about Max Roderick: one hundred forty-three pages of names, dates and events in a very public life. It was, she thought, like studying an issue of
People
magazine devoted entirely to one person. The researchers at Krane’s had included photographs and video stills: Max as a boy of ten, dressed in a blue blazer that looked two years too small for him, standing with bowed head by his mother’s open grave. There were few other mourners: but Joe DiGuardia, the eternal ski coach, had his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Max as a gawky teenager, his smile forced and his right knee in a massive brace. And finally, a much older version, the features of the face sharpened and intensified by years of discipline: Max looking vaguely hostile as he stared down the camera lens.
    She glanced at the caption: 1999. The waning days of his World Cup career, after the failure to qualify for the Nagano Olympics. He was strolling through Gstaad, arm in arm with a spectacular blonde in a silver fox coat. Suzanne Muldoon.
    Stefani flipped through the dossier and found the woman’s entry.
Muldoon, Suzanne—the
only real love in Max Roderick’s life. A downhill skier ten years his junior. She had shared his sport, his passion, his bed, for three years—and self-destructed in a bruising fall during a World Cup final at Innsbruck. Knee ligaments detachedin four places. She had been flown directly to the Steadman-Hawkins Clinic in Vail, where surgical miracles were routinely performed; and then—disappeared.
    Muldoon parted from Roderick in an acrimonious and public battle over culpability for her injuries,
the Krane dossier noted.
She sued for damages, citing deliberate and reckless endangerment due to relentless pressure to train beyond her physical capabilities. The suit was settled out of court. Muldoon never skied competitively again.
    Stefani reached for a pad of paper and pen she kept on her bedside table, and wrote in jarring red ink:
What else does S. Muldoon know about Max? Will she talk? Why has he been alone ever since?
    The piercing gaze of a hawk haunted her dreams.
    Krane had suggested, back in New York, that Stefani’s Scottish interlude would be a sporting one, and despite the wealth of information he managed to impart, they spent most of each day outdoors, in the bracing chill of a Highlands March. The shooting box, as he called it, sat in the southern end of the Great Glen, a flooded rift valley that split the Central Highlands from northeast to southwest. The high lonely reaches above Loch Lochy were sparsely populated, barring the occasional hiker toiling through the glen. The place was as different from Manhattan as a place could be. Half of Oliver’s purpose in bringing her to Scotland, Stefani guessed, was disorientation.
    Inverlaggan had been built on a rise above the loch, some five hundred feet from the shoreline, with a clipped green terrace and a field of boulders strewn in between. It was a pre-Elizabethan edifice that resembled a castle more than a house, with crenellated