Read Online Diplomatic Immunity by Grant Sutherland - Free Book Online

English skin wrinkles tightly around her mouth. As we move toward the door, she expresses a desire that this conversation should remain a private matter, a suggestion to which I diplomatically concur.
    Out in the Delegates’ Lounge the French and Chinese ambassadors are both hovering and Lady Nicola moves toward them, presumably to report the bad news that she has failed to tap a purer source of information than Patrick O’Conner. When word of Toshio’s death gets out, when the storm breaks, the perm five will be navigating their way through the tempest with a compass they do not completely trust. Their problem, I think. Right now I have more than enough problems of my own.
    Weaving my way swiftly through the posse of journalists outside the Delegates’ Lounge, I cross to the escalator. I am already halfway down, when I become aware of some woman behind me, saying my name.
    “Mr. Windrush,” she says again.
    When I turn, my heart sinks. A journalist’s microphone. Then I raise my eyes to the woman, a vaguely familiar face, probably a regular on the UN beat.
    “No comment,” I say, nodding to the mike, trying to make it sound like a joke. But my heart is in my shoes. I am first deputy in Legal Affairs; about three times a year I am wheeled out to give the press a background briefing on some incomprehensible piece of legalese that might or might not have implications for some forgotten war in a distant quarter of the world. On these occasions the journalists tend to help themselves to the press release and skip my recondite lecture. Even after my fifteen minutes of fame as the poor son of a bitch whose wife was taken hostage and murdered by crazies in Afghanistan, there wouldn’t be one in ten of the UN-accredited journalists who knows me by sight. Not one in twenty who knows me by name. But this woman riding down the escalator behind me has apparently made it her business to find out. Half the world’s political big hitters upstairs, and here she is, trailing after me. Toshio? I wonder. Already?
    “Aren’t you headed the wrong way?” I ask her.
    “It is possible.” A French accent. She looks up over her shoulder, then back to me.
“Alors,”
she says.
    I turn just in time to stumble awkwardly off the escalator.
    Stepping off behind me, she says quietly, “Most dangerous.”
    I take a breath and compose myself. “Is there some question that you wanted to ask me?”
    “You were with the ambassador. Monsieur Froissart?”
    Relief. She is fishing for a story on the French ambassador. I was with Lady Nicola Edgeworth, I tell her, not Froissart. She has made a mistake.
    “A long meeting?” she asks.
    “It wasn’t a meeting.”
    “No?”
    I turn and walk, but she stays at my side.
    “Three of the perm five ambassadors left the Assembly Hall during the opening speeches,” she says. “That is strange, no?”
    My glance skitters down to the mike she is holding low by her side. She follows my gaze down. Then she unplugs the thin black wire and crams it with the mike into her purse.
    “Ambassador Edgeworth did not tell you why she left the Hall?”
    No, I say.
    “But she needed to see you?”
    “We had a few words on a private matter. End of story.”
    “I interviewed Monsieur Froissart. He seemed anxious. He did not say to you why?”
    “To me?” I point a thumb at my chest, but the act is overdone. Her look turns skeptical.
    “You do not remember me, do you?”
    I glance at her as we walk. An attractive woman, early thirties, dark hair, her skin faintly freckled on either side of her slender nose. And familiar too, but she sees that I still can’t place her.
    “Journalists and the Secretariat?” she prompts.
    Journalists and the Secretariat. A series of seminars I conducted last year, part of a PR campaign cooked up by Patrick to get the Secretariat some decent press coverage. About a dozen journalists showed up at the first seminar, half that number at the second; by week three there were just me