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Page 64
Moscow tidbits Marina always brought whenever she parked the Porsche and came striding up the walk to meet him.
He had accepted a key to the townhouse without a second thought. Marina might nominally be GKNT, bright bitch that she was, but it was obvious the bills for the car and the house were being paid for by the Intelligence Directorate office in the compound. The cold war was over, but some things did not change.
The only cloud on Joe Ryerson's horizon was the chance that the inside-the-Beltway gossip machine might report that Neanderthals of the Russian Intelligence Directorate owned a Washington newsman. No one was ever going to hang a rap like that on Joe Ryerson.
But this morning a session with Marina failed to improve his humor. The humiliating episode with Kellner's man John Morgan Still gnawed at him. It had been a mistake to go snooping around the Leesburg house, but he'd needed to know what Vincent Kellner and Charlotte Conroy were up to, and how they intended to deal with Anna Neville and Pierre Grau. There was a story there, a big one; Ryerson could smell it, taste it. A story big enough, he thought, to turn the ombudsman's report around and get himself rehired by the Post. But that goddamned Marine had run him off before he could learn anything.
He could hear Marina moving about in the kitchenette. She might have a sheaf of Russian scientific degrees, and she might work for the Intelligence Directorate or the GRU, but she knew how to serve a meal, brew a glass of tea, and chill a bottle of vodka. She was expert in pleasing a man and knew how and when to play the whore. That was an uncommon talent today, with Washington swarming with surly feminists.
Ryerson regarded his mirrored image with regret. His hair was thinning on topmaybe it was time for a hairpiece. He self-consciously pulled the covers up to his waist. He had seldom been that successful with women, and never before with a woman like Marina Suslova. She had an incredible body,

 
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