A Hostile State by Adrian Magson (reading eggs books txt) 📗

THIRTY-FOUR

‘Dalkin’s definitely got something going on here,’ said Andrews on arrival in Callahan’s office. He was carrying a tablet and waved it in the air. It was early in his digging assignment into Dalkin’s background and he was looking energized by what he’d turned up. ‘I’ve saved it on here to send you. You want to read this or should I summarize it?’

‘Go ahead and summarize.’ Callahan sat back to listen. He’d become accustomed to knowing when an agent or asset had something interesting to say rather than re-hashing old news, and recognized by Andrews’ tone and nervy stance that it would be best to let him have his head.

‘OK. As we know, not long after Benson’s death Dalkin lost his job. Until recently he’s had little money, no long-term work and existing on whatever stand-in, short-term contract contracts he can find. But even that’s drying up.’

‘Why?’

‘A self-inflicted wound. I’ve spoken to a couple of co-workers who said he’d made himself such a royal pain in the ass skulking around in Benson’s shadow, nobody’s in a rush to trust him again.’

‘Skulking? Is that a current word?’

‘Apparently, he did it a lot according to my informants. You know – like the weedy pal of the playground bully? His wife must have felt the same because she left him and took a bunch of cash for a no-contest divorce. The way things look on paper, his credit’s maxed out and his prospects of staying in Rockville don’t look great. And get this.’ He grinned. ‘An old lady neighbour in his apartment building referred to him as a stuck-up little prick.’

‘Good for her. Is there a “but” lurking around somewhere?’

‘There is. I put a historic trace on his phone records and GPS and it shows he made a prior visit to the Pines View club three months ago. Until then he’d rarely left the city other than a couple of brief visits to Michigan where he has a sister, although they don’t get on much. The visit to Pines View could be when he and Desayeva first met-and-matched. Unfortunately the Pines doesn’t keep CCTV records back that far.’

‘So far so what?’ Callahan wasn’t being picky, merely impatient. He knew there had to be more.

‘Just recently he transferred in three separate sums of nine thousand dollars each to his checking account and two similar sums to a business account. There could be more but they haven’t found it yet. There’s no record the FBI can find immediately of where that came from, but they’re working on it. Dalkin also bought a new car, a Chevy Suburban. Before that he drove a crappy Honda Accord that he’d have had trouble giving away.’ He looked up and added, ‘For a guy who’s only five-seven, a Chevy’s a big chunk of vehicle.’

‘It’s a big chunk of money, too.’ Callahan’s interest had grown. There were plenty of short guys driving big cars around DC and elsewhere; it went with the territory. Fronting up beyond your normal capacity was a local pastime, especially if you wanted to climb the greasy pole of political ambition. More interesting was where did the fifty-plus grand it would have cost Dalkin to buy the car have come from, seeing as he had no proper job?

‘Warner ran a check of his phone calls and emails,’ Andrews continued. ‘Aside from job hunting Dalkin made a handful of calls over the past few weeks to a number assigned to a cellphone from a few years back. It hasn’t been used much recently, although the account is still open.’

‘Do we have a name for the account?’

‘Valentina Desayeva.’

‘That’s more like it.’ Callahan’s interest went hot. It was more than just a chance meeting.

‘There’s no indication why she kept the old phone going, but it could be she bought a new one and simply tossed the old one in a drawer like lots of people.’

Callahan shook his head. ‘She wouldn’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Tradecraft. She’d have been trained to destroy it rather than leave it in a drawer and forgetting it. That’s how sleepers get caught: they don’t think about what’s lying around in the ether and on phone and computer records. Anyway, the battery would have died eventually so she must have kept it charged for a reason. Did anything else show up on the phone records?’

‘Not that we could find. But the earliest call Dalkin made was to her landline in D.C.’

Callahan nodded knowingly. ‘That would have been the first contact. After that she’d have told him to use her old cell number instead. Simple and effective. Like I said, tradecraft.’ He slapped a hand on the desk in disgust. ‘Clean, my ass.’ Then he smiled. ‘Until now, anyway, which is when she slipped up.’

‘How?’

‘Her old phone. She should have ditched it or got a new Pay-as-you-go Sim card. That would have given her a new, clean number. She probably figured nobody else would have a record of it after all this time.’

‘Does this mean we’ve got her?’

Callahan brought him down to earth. ‘Not yet we don’t. We’re closer than we were, but no home run just yet. One question: has Dalkin put his apartment up for sale?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Because if he had it might be one explanation of where his sudden input of cash came from. And it isn’t. What else?’

‘That’s it for now. But Warner and Cahill are digging deep. They seem pretty excited.’

‘They would be; they’re hunters and can smell a rat.’ He nodded. ‘Keep working on it.’

Callahan watched Andrews walk away and smiled. The young man was in the wrong agency, although he wasn’t going to tell him that – at least not yet. He’d got the instincts of a hunter, just like the two Special Agents, but he didn’t realize it. Give him the right tools and some FBI training at their Quantico Academy and he’d be downright dangerous to anyone on the wrong side of the law.

THIRTY-FIVE

Exiting a hot contact area is not always as easy as it might seem; it