The Vatican Conspiracy: A completely gripping action thriller (A Marco Venetti Thriller Book 1) by Hogenkamp Peter

The Vatican Conspiracy: A completely gripping action thriller (A Marco Venetti Thriller Book 1) by Hogenkamp Peter

Author:Hogenkamp, Peter [Hogenkamp, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838888428
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2020-10-19T16:00:00+00:00


Twenty-Six

The soft, almost intimate knock came at 8 p.m., exactly when he had been told it would come. Marco pushed himself off the sofa and shuffled across the dingy hotel room to let her in. He peered through the spyhole before he opened the door—more out of curiosity than anything else—and saw her standing there in the drab third-floor hallway of the Hotel EuroStar. Her image was distorted by the layers of grime caked on the glass, but he could still see it was the woman whose photograph Lucci had shown him.

He opened the door, and she walked in, toting brown paper shopping bags in both hands and pecking him on the cheek as she brushed past. He shut the door and followed her across the worn burgundy carpet. She set her shopping bags down on the chest of drawers and stuck out her hand. He shook it automatically, without taking his eyes off her face. She had large green eyes, high rounded cheekbones, and a wide mouth bordered by full lips painted the color of a cardinal’s sash.

“Hello. My name is Sarah.”

Her accent reminded him of Magdalena, the American woman he’d dated during his time in the navy. Her cream-colored sundress did as well, although Magdalena hadn’t had the same deep bronze skin or the lean, muscular arms that swung in step with her shapely legs.

“I’m Marco.”

She moved over to the small table—Marco watched her walk and forgot about Elena for a moment—and sat down on a plastic chair. “Come, sit.”

He grabbed a couple of Peronis from the refrigerator and joined her. They made small talk for a little while as the TV blared in the corner, unwatched. Marco got up to turn it off—the Azzurri were losing anyway—but Sarah asked him to leave it on.

“Are you a football fan?”

She laughed easily, denying it. “I just like the noise. It makes it hard to eavesdrop.”

And then Marco remembered who she was and why she was there. It had all been pushed out of his head by the flash of her teeth as she smiled and the scent of jasmine that followed her wherever she went. But it came tumbling back with this realization, never to leave again. She was an American sniper. He was traveling with her to Austria to observe the assassination of a Saudi prince before he could acquire two nuclear warheads.

“You don’t look like an assassin.”

“The good ones never do.”

Her laugh made him want to say more clever things. “More like a lawyer or a doctor.”

She excused herself into the washroom, and he phoned for room service. They ate spaghetti bolognese at the small table, washing it down with a bottle of red wine. They conversed easily as they ate, speaking in English.

“You sound like an American,” she said.

“I dated a girl from Maryland.”

“What happened to her?”

“We broke up years ago … lost touch. I got a Christmas card from her a few years ago. She was living in Boston … some sort of biotech engineer.”

“What



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.