The Agent (An Isabella Rose Thriller Book 3)

by Mark Dawson

  She was prepared to be patient, but she didn’t have long to wait.

  ‘I’m just going to the little boys’ room,’ he said. ‘You keep an eye on my drink, okay? I’ll be right back.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, mirroring his smile.

  She watched as he disappeared across the room and then she looked around: one of the bartenders was staring at the Redskins game on the TV above the bar and the other was serving a customer. There was no one else near her, and she had deliberately taken a seat out of sight of the single CCTV camera next to the TV. She opened her purse and took out the vial of powder that had been left for her at the dead drop. She palmed it, removed the stopper and, checking again that she was unobserved and that the senator was still in the bathroom, she tipped it into his drink.

  Maia heard the rap of Coogan’s footsteps as he made his way back across the room.

  ‘There’s an empty booth out back,’ he said, pointing. ‘You want to grab it? We could get a bite to eat.’

  ‘Why not,’ she said. She stood and smoothed down her dress. She took his glass and handed it to him, quickly glancing into it as she did so. The powder contained flunitrazepam, an intermediate-acting benzodiazepine that was often used to treat severe insomnia. It was colourless and odourless, and it had already dissolved into the vodka.

  She collected her clutch, dropped the empty vial inside and followed Coogan to the rear of the room.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The senator leaned over to kiss her again almost as soon as the driver had set off. Maia let him. His breath was freighted with the smell of the alcohol that he had been drinking and the rough bristles of his cheeks and chin scraped against her skin.

  They had ordered dinner, but they had not stayed for it. The flunitrazepam in Coogan’s vodka had started to have an effect within thirty minutes. He had started to slur his speech and had enthusiastically reciprocated when she had leaned over to kiss him. She had suggested that they go somewhere else and he had agreed. He booked an Uber, laid down a fifty to pay for their uneaten food and led her outside.

  The snow was falling heavily, the wipers pushing it to the side of the windshield. Coogan put an arm around her and drew her closer to him; she let him do that, too, taking the opportunity to assess him, feeling the muscles in his arms and, as she reached around with her arm, the muscles across his back.

  ‘You’re gorgeous,’ Coogan slurred.

  She pulled away as he started to paw at her dress, his fingers sliding into the gaps between the buttons.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Not here,’ she said with a grin that suggested her reticence would only be temporary.

  Maia knew that the senator had a big house on the northwest side of the city. The driver already had the address that Coogan wanted him to deliver them to, so there was no need for Coogan to tell him and no chance for Maia to confirm it. She was not surprised as they headed west on R Street, took Sixteenth Street past Meridian Hill Park and then turned on to Piney Branch Parkway. The dossier had included plenty of detail on the area: Mount Pleasant was to the south and Crestwood to the north, exclusive neighbourhoods to which the commuters who worked in the Capitol returned every night.

  They passed through quiet streets, the sounds muffled by the thick snow that was falling all around. The cars parked at the side of the road had lost their shapes, the snow smoothing their lines and anonymising the expensive engineering that lay beneath.

  ‘Just over there,’ the senator said, pointing to the magnificent colonial that stood alone behind a set of striking iron gates.

  It was a big house. The realty agent’s details that had been obtained when Coogan purchased the property six years ago revealed that it had been listed at just under two million dollars. Maia had been able to study the plans. It had four bedrooms, three bathrooms, three entertaining spaces and a large garden to the rear.

  ‘Here, sir?’ the driver said.

  Coogan looked out through the windows and squinted. ‘I . . .’ he started to say.

  ‘Thank you,’ Maia finished for him. ‘Here’s fine.’

  She opened the door and got out, her heels sinking into the snow. Coogan slid over and she reached down to help him. He was unsteady on his feet and almost tripped as he reached back to slam the door shut.

  ‘How much did I have to drink?’ he said, the words tripping over one another.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you inside.’

  The senator collapsed on the sofa as soon as they were inside the house. Maia searched the house quickly and efficiently until she found an insulin pen in the bathroom. She took it and returned to him.

  Their research into Coogan had been thorough. They knew that he was a diabetic, and the operational plan took that into account. His file had also included reference to depressive episodes, together with a drink problem that had never been adequately controlled. It would be a simple enough deduction from the available evidence that the senator had returned home and – either accidentally or deliberately – administered an overdose.

  She loaded a three-millilitre cartridge of insulin and shook the pen very gently. She screwed on a needle and primed the pen to clear the air. Finally, she dialled in the dose that she wanted to administer: the maximum two hundred and seventy units. She pulled his shirt out of his pants and examined his stomach; she saw the telltale signs of previous injections, small purple contusions around tiny red pinpricks. She removed the cap from the needle and pushed it into a fold of fat just above his belt line.

  She pushed down on the plunger. She replaced the empty cartridge with a second, fresh one and injected him again. She did it a third time. She stood and put the pen on the kitchen counter.

  She fell back on routine.

  She opened the cupboard under the sink, took out a bottle of detergent and a cloth and then made her way through the kitchen and the bedroom and wiped clean all of the surfaces that she might have touched.

  She went to Coogan, knelt down, slid her arms beneath his legs and shoulders and then heaved him up. He was much heavier than she was, and although the effort sent a blast of pain through her shoulder, she was able to stagger through into the bedroom and set him down on the bed. She took off his shoes and loosened his tie. His breathing was fast and shallow and his skin felt clammy. The excess of insulin in his bloodstream would cause his body to absorb glucose from his blood. His liver would produce less glucose. These two conditions would work together to create dangerously low glucose levels in his blood. He would slip into a hypoglycaemic coma from which he would never awaken.

  Maia left him on the bed and looked around the room. There was a computer on the bureau. She was drawn to it – by force of habit, perhaps – and, with a tissue covering her finger, she tapped the keyboard and woke the screen. Several windows opened: Coogan’s email client – one particular email that he had maximised – and several Word documents.

  She read the email first.

  LINUS GOSLING

  To: Jack Coogan

  Senator,

  The doctor will arrive at Washington Dulles at 11 a.m. She is ready to speak at the hearing. Please provide secure pickup. Her safety is your responsibility.

  She covered the mouse with the tissue and navigated over to the client’s ‘Sent’ folder. She clicked to open it and saw that the last email Coogan had sent earlier that evening was in reply to the message:

  JACK COOGAN

  To: Linus Gosling

  I understand, but the hearing is two weeks away. What am I supposed to do with her until then?

  Maia felt a prickle of dread. She brought the first Word document to the front of the screen and read.

  Aleksandra Litivenko was born on April 26, 1980, in Moscow. Her father is the famous Soviet and Russian biophysicist Trofim Litivenko. In the 1990s, her family moved to Ussuriysk, where she attended middle school. From 1998 to 2003, Litivenko studied in the College of Genetics of the Biology Department of the Moscow State Univers
ity–Lomonosov. In 2004, she received her PhD in biology from the Moscow State University and, in 2005, she took up a position as Associate Visiting Scientist in the Department of Genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She resigned her position in 2006 upon the offer of employment with Daedalus Genetics, Inc., a Delaware-registered corporation developing genetic therapies to fight disease.

  Maia stared at the screen. She was confused. Nothing was explicit, but the implication was clear: the doctor referred to in the first email must have been Aleksandra. Why else would Coogan have been studying her biography? The senator was involved with her disappearance in some form or another. What was the hearing that was referred to? Whatever it was, Coogan’s involvement with Aleksandra must have been the reason why Maia had been sent to eliminate him. There could be no other reason.

  But why had she not been told?

  That would have to wait.

  She printed the documents and put them in her bag, then covered the handle of the front door with a cloth from the kitchen, opened it and went outside. The snow was falling in a blizzard now and the cold wrapped around her like it was grasping her in an icy fist. The tracks from when they had stumbled out of the taxi had already been filled in. The same would happen to the tracks she left now.

  She walked away from the house.

  She had an appointment to keep.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Maia hailed a cab and told the driver to take her to the Mall. The man, a dour Arab who hadn’t shaved for days and who smelled strongly of hashish, drove them south on Sixteenth Street in silence. Maia recognised the familiar edifices and monuments to power and loss as the city grew taller around them. She saw the Museum of Natural History, leaned forward and told the driver to stop. She paid him and got out.

  The car had been warm, and the frigid weather quickly wrapped around her again. She clasped her coat tightly, crossed the empty Madison Drive and moved on to the open expanse of the Mall.

  She walked quickly until she reached the carousel in front of the Arts and Industries Building, the blue and yellow canopy above the riderless horses weighed down with snow.

  There was a man leaning against the railings. She slowed her pace. The man pushed himself away from the railings and walked across to her. He was wearing a charcoal pea coat, with the top of a navy wool turtleneck visible between the lapels and a woollen beanie. He had a bland and unmemorable face.

  It was Curry.

  Why was he here?

  They continued on, making for the five-hundred-foot obelisk of the Washington Monument.

  Curry spoke first. ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s done.’

  ‘Without issues?’

  ‘I picked him up in the bar and he took me to his place. There was no one there.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Insulin.’

  ‘What about the camera outside?’

  ‘I destroyed the drive.’

  ‘Well done. Did he say anything?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Anything that might be of interest.’

  ‘No,’ she said, omitting the documents that she had found. ‘Nothing.’

  They continued on, past the monument and along the north side of the reflecting pool of the Lincoln Memorial. The water was black and glassy and still, the nearby lights refracted across it.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she asked him.

  ‘Our work isn’t done.’

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘Why do you need to be here? Is there another target?’

  ‘That’s classified. You know better than to ask me that.’

  ‘Whatever’s happening, I want to be involved. I don’t like leaving a job unfinished.’

  ‘It is finished,’ he said firmly. ‘You are to return to the safe house tonight and prepare to exfiltrate. You’ll take the Northeast Regional train to Richmond. You’re booked on a flight to Boston, then to Istanbul, then back to Skopje for the debrief. Here.’

  Curry reached into his pocket and took out a paper folder embossed with the logo of Turkish Airlines.

  ‘What aren’t you telling me?’ she said, even though she was sure that she knew what that was.

  ‘Go to the safe house. Your flight leaves at ten. Make sure you’re on it.’

  Curry turned, following the path to the north towards Constitution Gardens.

  Maia stayed where she was, lit by the glow of an overhead lamp, snow gathering on her shoulders. She felt a prickle of discomfort, a feeling in her stomach that she didn’t recognise and couldn’t diagnose. Anxiety? She didn’t suffer from uncertainty; her life was constrained so that there was no scope for choice, and so no room for doubt.

  She watched Curry as he disappeared, absorbed by the curtain of falling snow, and turned to the south.

  PART TWELVE:

  The Pacific

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Pope woke after an unsatisfactory two-hour snooze. They were flying United Business so that they could sleep, but the seat was hard and uncomfortable and he had been wakened several times by various aches and pains.

  He listened to the drone of the 777’s engines and allowed his mind to drift.

  It had been a very long three days.

  They had continued north from Ussuriysk until they reached Mikhaylovka. Pope had found a quiet parking lot and had taken the opportunity to change the G-Class for a Lada Samara. The damaged FSB car would have betrayed them eventually, and he had decided that the risk of stealing a second vehicle was less than the risk of proceeding in the same car.

  The drive to Vanino had taken thirty-one hours. They only stopped three times: once at a Gazprom Neft filling station in Novostroyka, once at a second station in Dada and then finally at a roadside cafe as they slogged east across Khabarovsk Krai.

  It was there that Pope had finally made contact with Atari. The man reported that he had been refused entry to the country because of inconsistencies in his paperwork and had been sent back to China again. Pope explained what he was proposing and, after a moment of disapproval that Pope suspected was because the agenda had tipped away from him, Atari had conceded that it was the best that could be done under the circumstances. He said that he would make the arrangements for their arrival in the United States and that he would be in touch again when it was done.

  They had taken the car ferry from Vanino to Kholmsk, on the Russian island of Sakhalin. That voyage had taken nineteen hours, and Pope had managed to sleep a little in the cramped and basic cabin that he had shared with Isabella and Litivenko. There had then followed a two-hour transit across the island to Korsakov and then a five-hour voyage to Hokkaido, Japan’s most northerly island. They had taken an internal flight to Tokyo and then transferred to United for the trans-Pacific hop.

  He turned over and opened the blind. The view from the porthole window was uniform: a bland carpet of grey and white, breakers rolling over the ocean for as far as he could see. There was no sign of land, and the line where the water met the horizon was blurred and indistinct.

  He looked at his watch. It was six. They were due to land in five hours.

  Pope had spent the first few hundred miles of their long drive through Russia persuading Litivenko that she should come with them to Washington. She was adamant that the data on the stick was lost to them without it being unencrypted, and Pope believed her when she said that she didn’t know how to do it. The data was important, but it would have been second-hand. If Atari and the people he worked with wanted to make an impact at the hearing, then oral testimony from someone deeply involved with Daedalus would be far more powerful and persuasive.

  She had dismissed the idea out of hand when he first suggested it, telling him that it was the most foolish thing she had ever heard. He did not give up. She laid out her concerns and then he addressed each of them one after the other. Uppermost in her mind, and with good reason, was her safety. He gave her his word that he would protect her. ‘Like my husband?’ she had retorted, but Pope had explain
ed, as delicately as he could, that Wheaton’s fate had been his own doing. He had chosen the location for the rendezvous because he thought he would be safe in a public place; he had not accounted for the possibility of a sniper and the wide range of firing spots that Chen Yi Square accommodated around its periphery.

  She said that the American government would find a reason to detain her as soon as she had given her testimony. Pope agreed that this was a possibility and proposed that they negotiate an agreement whereby that risk was taken off the table. The fact that her evidence would be given in public would be in her favour, too. Until she was ready to spend her money to effect a disappearance, she would be too high profile to detain.

  Her final objection was that she had no idea how to disappear. Pope said that he would help with that, too. He explained a little of his experience with Group Fifteen and that he had worked with professional ‘disappearers’ who would be able to make her vanish and then surface her somewhere else with a new identity and no ties to her past. He knew a man by the name of Ed who worked as a violin salesman in New York. Ed had previously worked as a Mossad sayan, an agent recruited from within the Jewish diaspora to assist with operations outside Israel. He supplemented his income by putting his old skills to good use. He could provide transportation, new documents, a whole new life. The price for all of that was steep, but Litivenko would be rich. Money would not be a problem for her.

  Eventually, she had acceded. Pope was not surprised. The objections were obvious and almost by rote, made until she had accepted the truth of her situation. She had no other options. If she stayed in Russia, the secret service would find her and she would be detained. If she tried to run on her own, her previous employers would find her and kill her. He could offer a third way; it was not a guarantee, and it was certainly dangerous, but it was all that she had.