Commander-In-Chief Read Online Free PDF

beard and mustache.
    The men drank coffee and checked their watches from time to time; the older of the two perused an English-language newspaper and the younger kept his phone in his hand, but he mostly just sat with his legs crossed, his bored eyes drifting around the station. The appearance of the two was indistinguishable from twenty-five other pairs of businessmen in the central hall, and not markedly different from any of the three hundred or so standing or sitting here at the station.
    When the men spoke, they did so in English, but even that wasn’t unusual at all in a cosmopolitan city such as Warsaw.
    An announcement of the impending departure of the 9:55 Warszawa–Berlin express came over the PA in Polish, German, then English, and the men stood, hoisted shoulder bags and briefcases, and headed for the stairs down to the platforms.
    As they walked through the middle of the crowded hall the younger man spoke softly. His business associate would not have been able to hear him if not for the earpiece transmitter the size of a hearing aid hidden in each man’s ear.
    “If he’s a no-show, do we still board the train?”
    The older man responded: “No sense sitting around Warsaw if we don’t have intel on his location. This is all we’ve got. We’ll take the train and check it out, maybe he boarded and we just missed him in the station.”
    Dominic Caruso nodded without speaking, but the truth was he would have preferred to stick around Poland a little longer. They’d only just arrived the evening before, but already he could tell this was his kind of town; the history of the city was fascinating, the beer and the food were good and cheap, and the few people he’d encountered seemed laid-back and nice. He’d also noticed that the women were stunning, though this was nothing to keep him here. He was in a relationship at the moment, so he told himself it was probably just as well that he was about to climb on the next train out of town.
    On the platform the two men took a moment to look around before boarding. A large crowd of travelers were moving in all directions, too many for either of the Americans to positively identify their target in the sea of faces. Still, they took their time, keeping an eye out for any countersurveillance operatives watching the platform to check the scene for the target.
    Neither Domingo Chavez nor Dominic Caruso saw anything that concerned them, so they found their first-class carriage at theback of the EuroCity express train to Berlin. Here they sat in a cabin with six seats and a sliding glass door to the narrow hallway, and they both positioned themselves near the window so they could continue to monitor the platform.
    Chavez said, “Lots more cops than I’d expect to see.”
    Caruso nodded as he scanned all the way to the stairs at the far side of the platform. “It’s that thing up north in Lithuania. A new terror actor over here with the skills to pull that off has all the European governments on edge.”
    “Yeah, but for how long?”
    “It’s hard to keep an edge,” Caruso acknowledged, and he also wondered if the increased police presence here in Europe, due to a completely unrelated situation, would have the unintended consequence of screwing with his surveillance mission.
    He pushed away the doubt and kept scanning.
    Their target here in Poland was named Yegor Morozov. He was thought to be a senior officer in the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, Russian intelligence. He was in his late forties, and to make the two Americans’ job over here more difficult, he was just about as plain-looking as most of the men in his chosen profession.
    Chavez and Caruso worked for an American private intelligence outfit that called itself The Campus; through the research and analysis shops of their organization they had managed to uncover a Cyprus-based shell corporation associated with the Kremlin and Russian intelligence. The CIA had already ID’d Morozov as a spook, but