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

Street in the Khoroshyovsky Administrative District of Moscow. Two women and four men got out, each dressed in plain overalls, rubber gloves and carrying boxes of equipment. The woman in the lead ripped away a No Entry sticker across the lock and used a key to unlock the door, standing to one side while the others filed inside.

The last man in carried a stepladder and a plastic folding barrier. He stopped to place the barrier across the doorway to deter visitors, and as an additional measure strung a police tape across the door.

Inside, the team moved across the foyer, deactivating the security system and working their way quickly through the floors, checking for signs of use. Most of the rooms were empty and showed a thin layer of undisturbed dust and the kind of chilled feel denoting a lack of any human presence. Only on the fourth floor was there any furniture, this confined to two of the offices and a meeting room – the so-called ‘dead room’.

The team sprayed and thoroughly cleaned down every item, every desktop and drawer inside and out. They removed the telephones, three computer terminals and towers, including leads and drives. The first woman in directed a man to check all the door frames and windows and give the glass and sills a careful wipe, and instructed the man with the stepladder to remove a set of recording equipment and a camera from inside the air vent panel in the ceiling of the meeting room. Another man was directed to the washroom at the end of the corridor where he sprayed every surface and wiped them down with strong bleach.

Job done, they retreated, closing the doors and wiping down the outer frames. One woman went down in the lift, cleaning the call buttons and every surface that might have been touched, while her colleagues saw to the handrails down the stairwell.

Reaching the ground floor they removed the police tape and plastic barrier before locking the door and climbing back in their vehicles and driving away.

When they were gone, so was every trace of the group that had been operating from Building No 3.

FORTY-EIGHT

I was in Paris. At least, I thought I was – I was feeling a little hazy, dragged from a deep sleep by my phone ringing and unsure of my surroundings. I snatched up the phone and checked the screen. No caller ID.

‘What kind of trouble have you started over there?’ Callahan demanded with no lead-in. He didn’t sound pissed, just loud, like his blood was on fire.

‘Wait one,’ I croaked, and swung my legs off the bed. I’d called Lindsay on my way in from Beauvais to let her know I was safe and would check in with her later after crashing out. The rest I couldn’t recall, but that’s what the aftermath of combat can do to you.

‘What do you mean?’ I played dumb while I woke up fully and drank some water. Dehydration had set in and I hadn’t drunk enough to ward it off completely.

‘We’re getting reports of criminal gangs waging war on each other on the outskirts of Paris. Tell me that’s not your doing?’

I gave him the facts, stripping away any emotion because that was all he needed. He didn’t interrupt me but I could hear him humming at various points, although whether it was acknowledgement or approval wasn’t clear.

When I ran dry he said, ‘I’ll get someone to take a look at local police and coroners’ reports. How’s Lindsay?’

‘She’s fine. Enjoying the sights of Paris on Langley’s dollar as far as I know.’

‘Good to hear.’ He hesitated. ‘Is she holding up after the fireworks?’

‘She is. But you might want to get a friendly psych to have a talk with her when she gets back.’

‘Will do. How close to it did she get?’

‘Close enough.’ I wasn’t about to tell him that she’d actually shot a man dead because Lindsay didn’t know and wouldn’t want to have that on her record in Langley. Some things are best not publicized if they don’t need to be.

‘OK. Listen, we’ve got the leaker.’ He gave a long pause.

I got the sense that the pause was deliberate. It certainly caught my attention and I felt a tingle up the back of my neck. ‘Are you going to tell me?’

‘It began with a former chief of staff in DC for someone you knew. Remember Senator Howard J. Benson?’

Benson. I’d heard of the man but never met him, which was probably a good thing. From what little Callahan had told me before, he’d been a CIA hater who’d latched onto me as a specific target while I was on a contract assignment in Ukraine for Callahan. It didn’t matter now because Benson was dead, killed by a sniper at his lakeside home outside Washington. The sniper called himself Two-One, and he’d phoned to warn me off going after Benson because he was already taking care of it. He’d been employed by Benson to dispose of at least two people Benson had seen as a threat to his plans, prosperity and future. In the end Two-One had figured he was likely to be next on the list and had chosen to take care of the senator for good and get out.

‘I remember,’ I told Callahan.

‘The staffer, named Dalkin, had gotten himself into some serious debt, and decided to get creative by contacting a woman here in DC named Valentina Desayeva, and giving her your details. I won’t bother you with the rest but the FBI have had a low-level watch on her for some time, and one of their random surveillance teams picked up a photo of her and Dalkin in a meeting at a hideaway a couple of hours out of Washington.’ He gave a dry chuckle. ‘Sometimes we get lucky.’

‘You said three. If Dalkin and Desayeva were on the outside, that means number three must have been feeding my locators to them from inside.’

‘Yeah. Something like that. Just when we think we’ve