The Whole Truth by David Baldacci Read Free Book Online Page A

name.
    “Shaw.”
    “Scottish?”
    “No.” The truth was Shaw didn’t really know his origins. For him, one past was often as good as another, when you needed it to be.
    “Well, damn, that explains it,” one of them had said in his brogue, with soft, truncated vowels and rock-hard consonants as he rubbed his smashed jaw. “You’re bloody Irish!”
    After tossing his bags in his hotel room and changing clothes, Shaw pounded along the 709 hectares of Phoenix Park, a green paradise over twice the size of Central Park. Along his run he passed the residences of the U.S. ambassador and the Irish president and failed to salute at either one, though at various times he’d worked for both as a freelancer. He covered five miles in half an hour. Not his personal best, but a good pace. He could run it faster and he knew the time would come when he would have to.
    He returned to his hotel, took two showers, put on lotion and extra swipes of deodorant, and still swore he could smell the stink of the Amsterdam canal oozing from his every pore. He checked his watch. He still had some time to kill so he took a stroll, finally reaching the spot on the river Liffey where as recently as 1916 the Brits had sent a gunboat up and commenced lobbing shells into Dublin proper to quell the “Uprising.” It was no wonder, Shaw thought, that the Irish were still a bit prickly with respect to their neighbors to the east.
    Wars. They were the easiest things to start and hardest things to end. Shaw knew this, unfortunately, from experience.
    He checked his watch again. It was time to go see Anna.
    Anna Fischer. Born in Stuttgart, university-educated in England and France, she was now currently living in London, except when she was giving a speech, which she was doing in Dublin. Hence Shaw was here too. He and Anna often hooked up around the world, yet this time was different. And the nerveless Shaw suddenly felt his heart rate quicken and his breathing grow more shallow. It really was time.

CHAPTER 12
    T HE WALK TO TRINITY COLLEGE took only about ten minutes with Shaw’s long-gaited pace and pent-up anticipation. Her lecture nearly over, he waited for his lady across from a side entrance to the college close to Maggie’s Bookshop, a favorite of theirs. He spent a few minutes chatting with the woman who ran the shop.
    On one shelf he found a copy of a book that Anna had written on the subject of the origins of fascist governments entitled A Historical Examination of Police States. The love of his life was fun-loving in many ways, emotional and romantic, but she also possessed an IQ far to the north of genius level and the issues that dominated her professional life were serious ones indeed. Was there ever a more potent combination to win someone’s heart than brains and beauty?
    When Anna came out, the hug lingered. She pressed her long fingers directly into the small of his back, kneading as she moved up the spine. She could always sense pain in him and he was a man who hid such things extremely well.
    “Tense?” she asked, her German accent virtually nonexistent. Anna Fischer could speak fifteen languages at last count and all of them like a native. After six years at Oxford writing brilliant research papers and books, she had joined the UN as a simultaneous translator. After that stint, she’d accepted a position at a think tank in London and did work on international policies and global issues of unfathomable complexity with not an easy answer in sight. She was certainly far smarter than Shaw, yet never made him feel it.
    “A little.”
    “Bad flight from Holland?”
    “Ride was great. Just an old rugby injury.” Actually it was the free fall into the canal cesspool, but she didn’t need to know that.
    “Boys and their games,” she said in a mock scolding tone. “Is that how you got that?” She pointed to the bruise on his face courtesy of the Iranian who would never see freedom again.
    “Luggage came out of the plane bin