Sea of Shadows eBook - Navy Thriller.com

BRITISH EMBASSY
WASHINGTON, DC
MONDAY; 07 MAY
2:14 PM EDT
CHAPTER 5
Sarah Bexley leaned on the sink basin and rested her eyes for a
moment. Here, in the quiet coolness of the ladies’ toilet, her throbbing
headache seemed to recede to something approaching a bearable level. It
had to be the flu—some nasty little American variety of the virus with a
particular taste for fair English flesh. At least it seemed that way, since
everyone in the office appeared to be catching it. A third of the staff had
already gone home ill.
Sarah felt for the handle of the cold-water tap and turned it on, cringing
instantly at the sound of the water cascading into the marble basin. Her
head was killing her. The two Motrin she had taken had done a bit to ease
the body aches, but they weren’t doing much for the pounding symphony
of pain behind her temples. Why couldn’t the Yank pharmacies stock a
decent painkiller, like Nurosen? Oh they said it was all ibuprofen, didn’t
they? But it wasn’t really the same, now was it? A couple of Nurosen
would have had this headache on the run by now, whereas the bloody
Motrin wasn’t doing a thing.
She opened her eyes and looked at her reflection in the mirror. It took
a few seconds to force her eyes to focus. She barely recognized the face
staring back out of the glass; it was flushed, puffy looking, and inhumanly
tired. Her eyes were the worst: red-rimmed and bloodshot. There were
dark circles under them that her makeup couldn’t disguise.
Sarah was twenty-eight, and she prided herself on having inherited
something of her mother’s Anglican beauty. Not that you could see it at
the moment. The face in the mirror might have belonged to a forty-yearold
barfly after a month or two of pub crawling.
She pulled a hand towel from the neat stack next to the wash basin,
moistened a corner of it under the running water, and then folded it and
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