“Will do,” Dinara said, before hanging up.
“What was that? Leonid asked.
Dinara woke her laptop and logged into the company’s encrypted email server. “We weren’t on a secure line, so she couldn’t tell me what it was about.” After entering her personal decryption key, she read the message Jessie had sent her, and leaned back in her chair. “He’s coming to Moscow,” she said.
“Who?” Leonid asked.
“Jack Morgan.”
Chapter 38
The woman across the aisle was dreaming. Her eyelids flickered and she muttered something in her sleep. Her face was in shadow, which gave her a ghostly appearance, and her body was tucked beneath one of the blankets I’d refused. I was too busy reviewing the case file Sci had prepared to even consider resting. I was also waiting for a call on the satellite phone Mo-bot had given me.
We were investigating three deaths. Robert Carlyle, a Washington fixer and financier who’d been killed in a car crash, Karl Parker, shot in the New York Stock Exchange, and Elizabeth Connor, who it seemed had been poisoned by a man posing as a hotel waiter. There was no apparent link between the three victims, other than their wealth, which made the Ninety-nine’s claims of responsibility plausible. Except they hadn’t taken credit for Robert Carlyle, and the only thing connecting him to Karl Parker and Elizabeth Connor were the clues left on Karl’s secret laptop. As far as we could tell, they’d never met, nor had they ever done business together.
Sci was going to Washington, D.C., to review the evidence from the scene of Carlyle’s crash. Justine had driven me to the airport to catch that day’s last commercial flight to Moscow. For a moment my attention drifted from the investigation to the memory of her reaction at the hotel. Her relief, the tenderness of her embrace and the tears in her eyes all told me she still felt something beyond friendship. She’d wanted to come to Moscow, but I needed her in New York, working with Jessie and Mo-bot to identify the dead getaway driver and chase down links between the three dead victims.
My satellite phone vibrated and I answered the call. At altitude, the signal was clear and didn’t suffer with the interference issues often caused by trees and buildings.
“Mr. Morgan, this is Master Gunnery Sergeant Marlon West. I got a message to call you.”
West was the commander of the Marine Corps security detachment at the US embassy in Moscow. I’d reached out to him via Lieutenant Colonel Edward Frost, an old buddy, who was now stationed in Frankfurt and ran the Marine Corps Embassy Security Group for Eastern Europe.
“Master Sergeant West, I’m calling to make sure you got the intelligence regarding a possible attempt on the ambassador’s life,” I said quietly.
When Mo-bot had revealed the location of the next target, I’d called Detective Tana and shared the information on the understanding he alerted the State Department. We were working on the assumption the next target was Ambassador Thomas Dussler, the President’s high-profile billionaire appointment to Moscow.
The woman opposite me shifted in her sleep, but none of the other passengers in the first-class cabin gave any sign the call was disturbing them.
“We received a flash alert, yes,” West replied. “And we’re taking steps.”
“Good,” I replied, relieved the message had got through. Tana seemed honest, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
“Is that everything, Mr. Morgan?” West asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “Sorry to have troubled you.”
“No problem,” West said. “Lieutenant Colonel Frost speaks very highly of you, and I appreciate the vigilance.”
He hung up and I returned to the case file Sci had prepared. As I studied the notes, I prayed the ambassador would be alive when I reached Moscow. Right now, he was my only link to the man who’d killed my friend.
Chapter 39
When Dinara left her apartment building, she found Leonid using the EMF detector to sweep his car for bugs. A steady flow of morning traffic rolled though the gray snow and swerved round Leonid’s Lada, which had two wheels propped on the pavement.
“Anything?” Dinara asked as she approached.
Leonid shook his head. “And no eyes on us either,” he said, glancing round the frozen square in front of Dinara’s building.
“At least none you can see,” Dinara remarked playfully as she climbed in the passenger seat.
Leonid put the EMF detector in the boot and got behind the wheel.
“Any word on what brings Jack Morgan to Moscow?” he asked as he started the engine.
“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.