“No,” Dinara said.
Maybe this was it. The final visit to thank her for her efforts and shut down the office.
“Don’t look so nervous,” Leonid said, pulling into traffic. “If it was bad news, he would have emailed.”
Dinara smiled as the Lada headed north toward the Garden Ring. A few minutes later, they were crawling along the wide beltway with hundreds of other slow-moving vehicles.
“I checked with an old friend,” Leonid said. “Grom Boxing is paying for police protection.”
“How high up does it go?” Dinara asked.
“My friend doesn’t know.”
“Then it’s high.”
“You’re as smart as you are beautiful,” Leonid quipped.
“And you’re as condescending as you are arrogant,” Dinara replied. “Why would a boxing gym need high-level police protection?”
“We could be finding out, if we weren’t busy taxiing the big American,” Leonid muttered.
“Otherwise known as our boss.”
“If you want to get technical,” Leonid scoffed.
They drove north toward Sheremetyevo International Airport, and passed the time discussing what little they knew about Yana Petrova. Dinara had spent much of the night going through the blogger’s computer, trawling Yana’s extensive background research for each of her published articles for anything that might point them toward a suspect.
“She was unremarkable in school,” Leonid said. He’d dug into Yana’s background. “Her reports say she showed no aptitude for anything, and she took a mundane job with Moesk after graduating with a degree in economics from St. Petersburg Polytechnic. Nothing about her says enemy of the state.”
“Which is why she went undetected for so long,” Dinara observed.
They continued discussing Yana and speculating about her fight-fixing investigation. After forty minutes, they reached the MKAD, the outer beltway, and joined it heading west. The rush-hour traffic had eased up, but the highway was one of the main routes to the airport, and was always busy. The winter storm had only made things worse.
They turned off at junction 79, and drove along a narrow furrow that had been plowed between two cliffs of frozen snow to join the slip road.
Out of nowhere, a truck appeared alongside them, tearing through the snow, spraying it everywhere.
“Hold on,” Leonid said, the instant before the truck side-swiped them.
The Lada spun into the drift to their right and careened wildly out of control before coming to a sudden halt when it crashed into the metal safety barrier. The airbags popped and Dinara’s training kicked in.
Move, she thought, keep moving.
Everything was white, and her head was pounding, but she reached for the handle and pushed the door open. Her senses returned and she saw a gang of men in ski masks emerge from the back of the truck that had hit them. The men ran toward her, and one held a gun, but it wasn’t pointed at Dinara. She turned to see Leonid emerge from the battered driver’s side of the Lada, and realized he was the target. His head was bloody and he took two faltering steps before the masked gunman shot him three times in the chest.
Leonid fell back into the thick snowdrift and Dinara’s world spun as she registered the full horror of what was happening.
Gloved hands grabbed her and she tried to fight them off. As she struggled against the three men who were dragging her away, she caught the cuff of one of their gloves and saw a tattoo she recognized. It was a snake wrapped around a dagger, and she had last seen it on the wrist of one of the fighters who’d been sparring in the ring at Grom Boxing.
“Help! Help me!” Dinara shouted to the onlookers, who’d started to emerge from the line of cars backed up behind the crash.
The gunman brandished his pistol. “Stay back,” he yelled, and no one argued with him.
How had I not noticed the truck? Dinara asked herself as the strong men dragged her toward the waiting vehicle. The gunman jogged behind her, and she stared into his eyes, swearing they would witness her revenge.
CHAPTER 40
DINARA GLANCED OVER her shoulder to see a female driver yelling at other onlookers.
“Stop them! What’s the matter with you? Help her!”
“He’s got a gun,” a nearby motorist shouted back.
No one was going to help her and Dinara couldn’t blame them. There were two masked men waiting by the back of the truck and three hauling her toward them. There was a driver and an accomplice in the cab, and then there was the shooter, the man who’d killed Leonid. This was a formidable, organized group. If she was to escape, she would have to save herself.
Dinara lashed out, kicking the man immediately to her left. She caught him in the shin and he let go of her. She swung her fist at the man to her right, but he dodged it, and she heard rapid footsteps crunching in the snow, and felt the muzzle of a gun pressed against her temple.
“Be good,” the gunman said.
The man she’d kicked slapped her, and took hold of her arm. She looked at him defiantly, memorizing another set of eyes that would one day look upon her revenge.
The gunman took the muzzle away, and the men continued pulling her toward the truck. She wanted to scream with grief and anger, but she refused to give her assailants the satisfaction of seeing how much they’d hurt her, so she stayed grimly silent.
The gunshot shocked Dinara and startled the men holding her. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing when the gunman went down with a bullet wound in his leg. Then she looked round to see Leonid standing there, seemingly back from the dead, with gun drawn. Dinara was astonished, but this grim-faced Lazarus seemed unaffected by his journey to the other side, and carried on with his dirty work.
Leonid shot the man to Dinara’s left, and the bullet hit him in the leg, almost exactly where she’d kicked him. He fell away, moaning and clutching the wound. Another shot hit the man to her right in his left arm, and Dinara pulled free of him as he cried out in pain.
The gunman was hauling himself up, and Dinara lunged for him and wrestled him for his weapon. As they struggled, Leonid rushed over and delivered a heavy pistol blow to the head, knocking the gunman out cold.
Leonid grabbed Dinara. “Come on!”
They started running as one of the masked men retrieved the pistol from the unconscious gunman and opened fire. The bullets hit the wreckage of Leonid’s Lada as he and Dinara dashed behind it.
“Keep going,” Leonid said, dragging Dinara on toward the safety barrier.
They jumped the metal rail, sailed through the air and hit a steep snow-covered bank. Dinara couldn’t stop herself; she tumbled forward and rolled down the steep slope. She was dimly aware of a mass of arms and legs falling beside her.
Dizzy and disorientated, she finally came to a halt near a copse of trees and helped Leonid to his feet. They ran for cover as bullets chewed the trunks of the surrounding trees. They ducked behind a large elm and peered up at the slip road.
A couple of the masked men were eying the tree line.
“We have to go after them,” Dinara heard one of them say.
“Are you crazy?” the other replied. “The cops are almost here. Help get the guys into the truck.”
The speaker withdrew from sight, and a moment later, so did his gun-toting companion.
Dinara took the opportunity to catch her breath.
“How?” she asked between lungfuls of freezing air.
Leonid opened his jacket and pulled his shirt apart to reveal a concealed layer of body armor.
“Some call it paranoia,” he said. “I call it common sense.”
Dinara stared at him in awe.
“Come on,” he said. “We’d better get moving, or we’ll be late.”
He ran into the trees, and a moment later a bemused but jubilant Dinara followed.
CHAPTER 41
IN THE END, I managed a couple of hours’ sleep on the plane, but by the time I arrived, my eyes were gritty and my body ached with the ground-in fati
gue that was commonplace after transatlantic flights. But no matter how rough I felt, I knew I didn’t look as bad as my two employees. I’d hired Dinara Orlova because she was highly experienced and extremely intelligent. Every time I’d met her she’d been exceptionally composed and immaculately presented. But right now her long dark hair was lank and matted, and her normally flawless skin was scratched and marked by dirt. Her trousers and coat were soaked with ugly stains. Her companion, Leonid Boykov, a grizzled former cop who oozed roguish charm, looked even worse.
I crossed the Sheremetyevo arrivals hall, which was busy with the early-morning crowds associated with the arrival of a flurry of transatlantic red-eye flights. As Dinara and Leonid came to meet me, I noticed the former Moscow cop was scanning the terminal nervously.
“Thanks for coming,” I said, shaking Dinara’s hand.
“Good to see you, Mr. Morgan,” she replied in English. “I’m sorry for our condition. We just escaped an abduction attempt.”
“Abduction for you,” Leonid said. “Murder for me.”
The former cop had been Dinara’s hire and I didn’t know him well enough to be certain he wasn’t joking. I glanced at Dinara, who confirmed the statement with an emphatic nod.
“What the hell happened?” I asked. “Where’s the car?”
“About seven kilometers that way,” Leonid replied. “Blocking a major exit on the highway.”
Dinara frowned at him. “We need to take a taxi.”
She ushered me toward one of the doors, and I glanced at Leonid, who was looking from wall to wall, like a bird of prey. As I studied him, I finally registered the holes in his jacket.
“Are those—”
“Yes,” he cut me off. “Bullets. Three of them.”
“We were lucky,” Dinara said.
“A bulletproof vest is not luck,” Leonid responded. “It is the correct preparation.”
Struggling to get my head around the news, I steered them away from the doors to a quiet part of the arrivals hall where we wouldn’t be overheard.
“You’d better tell me what’s going on,” I said.
With the occasional interjection from Leonid, Dinara briefed me on the death of Yana Petrova, their meeting with the Kremlin-connected oligarch Maxim Yenen, and the discovery of Yana’s second life as the conspiracy blogger Otkrov. Then they told me about Grom Boxing and Dinara’s belief that one of their assailants was a boxer she’d seen at the gym the previous night. After months in the wilderness, it sounded as though Private Moscow had finally scored a truly challenging case.
“And why are you here?” Leonid asked when Dinara had finished.
I didn’t know either of my Russian employees well enough to trust them with full disclosure, but saying nothing would have been counterproductive.
“I’m investigating the murder of Karl Parker,” I replied. “He was a friend.”
“I’m sorry,” Dinara offered.
“I appreciate it,” I replied. “We’d better go. It sounds like you’ve got to clear up this morning’s mess.”
“Not a problem,” Leonid said. “The police in Moscow are experts at making things vanish. My old friends on the force will know how to handle this. As long as I can get my car insurance to pay up. I’m not sure it covers hijacking and gun fights.”
“If it doesn’t, I’ll make sure you don’t lose out,” I said.
“Thank you, Mr. Morgan,” Leonid replied. “That means a lot.”
“Not a problem. And please, both of you, call me Jack.”
I followed Dinara and Leonid through the terminal and we were soon outside with the ice and snow. I couldn’t say whether Moscow or New York was colder. Both had been hit by vicious snowstorms and were still in the grip of a big freeze.
The cab driver took my suitcase and put it in the trunk of his Volkswagen Passat while Dinara and I climbed in the back, and Leonid took the front passenger seat.
The driver jumped behind the wheel and slammed the door. He removed his gloves and blew on his hands, before saying something in Russian.
“Where to?” Dinara translated.
“The American embassy,” I replied.
CHAPTER 42
TWO HOURS LATER, I was finally shown into the office of the US Ambassador to Moscow, Thomas Dussler. He was from old Wall Street money and it showed in the traditional furniture and dark bookcases that lined the walls of the room. The décor was out of keeping with the rest of the contemporary nine-story building, which lay in a heavily fortified compound a few miles west of the Kremlin. There was the obligatory photograph of Dussler with the President, and framed artwork that dated from shortly after the Revolutionary War. The antique furniture was designed to impress, as was the view, which took in a few snow-capped high-rise hotels and the Moscow River, but I wasn’t much interested in the trappings of power: it was Dussler’s life that concerned me.
Master Gunnery Sergeant Marlon West had taken the threat very seriously, but hadn’t been able to convince the ambassador to change his schedule in light of the intelligence, and I got the impression I was West’s last hope at convincing Dussler to recognize the danger.
“Ambassador,” I said.
“Mr. Morgan,” he replied, rising from behind his large desk. “I know your firm by reputation. You have quite a record.”
“Thank you,” I responded. “This is Dinara Orlova, the head of Private Moscow, and one of our investigators, Leonid Boykov.”
We’d stopped at the Private Moscow office en route from the airport, so both of them could shower and change. Dinara was in a dark trouser suit, and Leonid wore chinos and a tweed jacket.
“Pleased to meet you,” Dussler said, shaking our hands. “Have a seat.”
He ushered us toward a long conference table.
“This is my security adviser, Carrie Underwood.” He introduced us to a somber woman in a formal navy blue dress. “And you know Master Gunnery Sergeant West.”
I nodded at the Marine as Dinara, Leonid and I took seats at the table. West had a hopeful look in his eyes.
“Master Gunnery Sergeant West tells me you’re the source of the intelligence report indicating there might be a threat on my life,” Dussler remarked with a smile.
“That’s right, sir,” I replied. “I got the information from a device we found on a man who was involved in the assassination of Elizabeth Connor.”
“Tragic,” Dussler observed.
“We believe Miss Connor’s death is also linked to the shooting of Karl Parker,” I said.
“Ah yes, the Ninety-nine,” Dussler remarked.
“No, sir,” I replied. “I don’t think so. The man I apprehended, well, he was Russian.”
“And you found my name on this device?”
I hesitated, imagining how this conversation had played out with West. “No, sir,” I replied at last.
“Then you don’t know I’m the target,” Dussler countered.
“You fit the profile, sir,” I said.
“Thomas, for the last time, we need to revise some of your engagements.” Carrie Underwood’s concern was palpable. Another person taking the threat very seriously.
Dussler smiled like a parent indulging a child. He had the superior air of someone who didn’t think the world’s mundane concerns should trouble him. “And should we jump every time a ghost goes bump in the night?”
“If that ghost is leaving a trail of bodies,” I replied.
“What was on this device?” Dussler asked.
“Coordinates,” I said. “The coordinates for this embassy.”
Dussler sat back and his indulgent smiled widened.
“Hundreds of people work here. Even if this information is reliable, the target could be any one of them.”
“Mr. Parker, Miss Connor, these were powerful, well-protected people. They were hard targets, just like you, sir,” I protested.
Dussler wavered and the confident smile fell for a moment before returning with a fresh shine. “I don’t have the lu
xury of being a private citizen,” he said. “I have duties, Mr. Morgan. America is counting on me. I’m sorry, I can’t change my schedule because you found the embassy’s address on a bad guy’s Nintendo.” He grinned at his own joke. “Besides, I have my Secret Service detail and Master Gunnery Sergeant West to keep me safe.”
“Sir,” West began, “there’s only so much—”
Dussler interrupted him. “Only so much you can do to protect me. Don’t worry, Master Gunnery Sergeant, I won’t hold you responsible.”
West shook his head with resignation.
“Listen, Mr. Morgan,” Dussler said as he stood. “You share what you’ve got with my chief of staff, Ernie Fisher, and if he recommends changes, I’ll listen.”
“OK,” I said, exchanging a look of defeat with West and Underwood. Dussler was giving us the brush-off.
“Where is Ernie?” the ambassador asked. “He should be in on this.”
Dussler crossed the room and opened his office door.
“Where’s Mr. Fisher?” he asked the nearest of his three assistants.
“He said he had to go home, sir,” the assistant replied. “Mr. Fisher said he’d forgotten something important.”
“When was this?” I asked, my hackles rising.
“About an hour ago,” the assistant replied. “He should have been back by now.”
I turned to West. “Where does Fisher live?”
“About ten minutes away,” he replied. “Near Russian Federation House.”
“What’s going on?” Dussler asked.
“Conspirators fearing exposure often run,” I told him.
“Are you serious? Ernie Fisher a conspirator?”
“Or a target,” I conceded. “Either way, we’ve got to check anything out of the ordinary. Can you take me there?” I asked West.
He nodded.
“I’m going to put you in lockdown, sir,” Underwood said. “Until we know what’s going on.”
“Leonid, alert the Moscow police. Send them to Fisher’s home,” I told the former cop as I got to my feet. “Dinara, you’re coming with us.”
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