Private Moscow (Private 15)

She ignored his grumbling and hung up.

“Well?” Leonid asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Former army captain, former priest, maybe a minor criminal,” Dinara replied.

“Minor, as far as they know,” Leonid observed.

Dinara nodded. The FSB was thorough, but it wasn’t omniscient. There was a thin line between minor and major crime, and the murder of a blogger would definitely buy someone passage across it.

“What now?” Leonid said.

“Asking for guidance? It’s almost as if you finally recognize me as your superior.”

“I was talking to the soup,” he replied, gesturing with his spoon.

“We run surveillance on Erik Utkin and see what he’s really hiding,” she replied, but before she could go any further, her phone rang, and the words “Private New York” flashed on screen.

“Hello,” she said in English.

“Dinara? It’s Jessie Fleming of the New York office.”

Dinara hadn’t had much contact with the head of the New York branch but she recognized the name.

“Sorry to call on a Sunday, but it’s an emergency.”

“No problem. I’m in the office too,” Dinara replied. Her FSB training had made her fluent in four languages, and, next to Russian, English was her favorite. “What’s going on?”

“Check your email,” Jessie said. “Call me if there are any problems.”

“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 o

f 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.