“Sure,” Spiro replied. “My office.”
He gestured for them to follow, and led Dinara and Jack past his administrative assistant into the large room that lay beyond.
“This is quite some place,” Dinara said, trading a conspiratorial glance with Jack. “You must be doing well.”
“Can I get you a drink?” Spiro asked, going to a console that took up an entire wall. He opened a cabinet to reveal an extensive liquor collection.
“I’ll have a martini,” Dinara said, closing the office door.
Spiro turned around to fix her drink. “And your friend?” he asked. “Sorry, I didn’t catch his—”
When Spiro had turned to the liquor cabinet, Jack had crossed the room silently, and Dinara watched him wrap his arms around Spiro’s neck, cutting him off mid-sentence. Spiro dropped the cocktail shaker onto the thick carpet, and made a rapid succession of choking sounds as he struggled against Jack’s relentless grasp. Finally, the fight left him, and he fell to the floor.
Jack checked his pulse. “He’s down, but not dead. Come on, we don’t have long.”
CHAPTER 94
WE WALKED OUT of the SVR executive’s office as though it was just any normal day. Dinara said something in Russian before she shut the door behind us, and the man’s assistant glanced up from her work and gave a knowing smile.
I was shocked when Dinara lashed out at the woman, knocking her unconscious with a couple of quick punches.
“Help me get her inside,” she said.
I glanced around nervously. Cubicle dividers prevented the other executive assistants from seeing, but if anyone walked along the corridor …
I grabbed the woman’s shoulders and Dinara took her feet, and we carried her inside her boss’s office, and laid her on the floor beside him.
“I told her he was having an afternoon nap, but the first thing she would have done when we set the alarm off would have been to try to wake him up,” Dinara explained as we left the room.
“Good work,” I whispered as we hurried along the corridor toward the fire stairs Erin had told us were located near Salko’s office.
We found the fire escape where we’d expected, and went into the stairwell.
“Ready?” I asked, and Dinara nodded.
I smashed a tiny glass panel, and activated the fire alarm. A klaxon sounded almost immediately, and we ran up two flights of stairs to the upper service level before the first people began streaming through the fire doors below us. We concealed ourselves behind an air-conditioning unit, and the stairwell filled with people chatting as they shuffled downstairs.
When the last of them had left, we hurried down to the twenty-first floor, quickly slipped through the fire door, and sprinted to Salko’s office.
“Connect us,” I said.
“Connecting,” Anna replied via my in-ear transceiver.
Salko’s room was locked, but Dinara and I grabbed his assistant’s desk, turned it to face the door, and pushed as hard as we could. The heavy desk surged forward and smashed the door open, and we clambered into Salko’s grand corner office.
“Go ahead, Jack,” Mo-bot said.
“We’re in the target’s office,” I told her as I raced to his huge desk.
“Plug the USB into his computer,” Mo-bot replied.
I pulled a tiny plastic USB drive from inside my shoe. Dinara had downloaded Mo-bot’s program onto the tiny device. After a brief search, I found Salko’s computer in one of the cabinets built into his desk.
“Come on, Jack,” Dinara said, watching the doorway nervously.
No amount of fast talking would explain away the wreckage. I thrust the USB drive into one of the ports, and when the computer woke, I was greeted by a password screen.
“I’ll take it from here,” Mo-bot said, and I saw a series of DOS windows open. “Shouldn’t take too long,” she remarked, and the password screen vanished and was replaced by a desktop home page full of file icons.