The Kobalt Dossier by Eric Van Lustbader

Author:Eric Van Lustbader [Lustbader, Eric Van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

29

ODESSA, UKRAINE

The opalescent dawn contrasted harmoniously with the dull gray of the buildings. As usual, their hotel stood out—a peacock in a land of pigeons. As soon as they stepped inside, the night manager, about to go off duty, handed Kobalt a slip of folded paper, bid her good morning and stepped outside, disappearing into the tender light. She opened the paper, read the handwritten note. Her head snapped up. She ordered Zherov to take the weaponry back up to their suite.

“Where will you be?”

She gestured to the bar. “I need to do this alone.”

He hesitated a moment.

“It’s okay,” she reassured him. “I’ll be fine.”

He nodded, then walked away.

She waited until he stepped into the elevator and the doors closed before she made her way to the bar. Only in Odessa would a hotel bar be open at the crack of dawn. Possibly it never closed.

For a long moment, she stood on the threshold, taking the temperature of the room. It was nearly deserted, just the bartender, a disconsolate businessman in a disgracefully rumpled suit, taking vodka shots one after the other without so much as a pause to take a breath, and the woman at a semicircular banquette off to the right. She was seated so that she had a full view of the entrance, so she must have seen Kobalt, and yet she made no sign of recognition. Her ice-blue eyes passed over Kobalt’s face as if she were a part of the bar’s décor. Her blond hair was pulled back from her sharp-featured face. Her nose was too long, her mouth too wide, her chin too prominent, and yet when taken all together, through some mysterious alchemical means, she was gorgeous in a manner most women only dreamed about as they leafed through Vogue or Vanity Fair.

Since ignoring people seemed the order of the morning, Kobalt crossed to the bar. The businessman smelled of metal and canned air and sweat, the way you do after a twenty-four-hour flight. The bartender, a barrel-chested man who might have been police or military in his former life, studied every inch of her from the top of her head to the toes of her boots, after which he greeted her in a surprisingly soft voice.

She looked over the bartop. “What are you mixing there?”

He had a shaved head and a face like an extremely intelligent bear. “I’m trying out a new type of Negroni.” A toss of his head indicated the businessman. He winked. “For all the sophisticates.”

“Too early for a Negroni.”

“Why, yes, it is.” He put a filled shot glass on the bar along with an ice-cold bottle of Mamont Siberian vodka. The bottle was shaped like the curved tusk of a Yukagir mammoth. He indicated with his chin. “Courtesy of Madame.”

Kobalt sat at the bar, two stools away from the wrecked businessman, but soon moved farther away. The bartender tasted the Negroni, found it wanting, and threw it out. He drifted closer to her just as she threw the shot he’d poured for her down her throat.

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