Private Moscow (Private 15)

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.