Commander-In-Chief Read Online Free PDF Page B

The Campus tracked him here in Warsaw after he’d used a credit card linked to the Cyprus shell that was under one of his known aliases. By the time the two Americans made it to Poland, Morozov had checked out of his hotel, but his card had been used to book a pair of first-class tickets on this morning’s Warszawa–Berlin express.
    The men had a picture of their target from his Polish visa application, but they didn’t know who he’d be traveling with, why he was going to Berlin, or any intel at all about what he was doing here in the West.
    Still, they were here; their focus for the past few months had been on Russian money networks, after all, and Morozov was a name with a face tied to one company in one of the networks. He wasn’t much of a lead, but he was all they had, so they’d been sent to tail him.
    And now it looked like he was going to be a no-show.
    Dom Caruso said, “This could turn out to be a boring day.”
    “Yeah, well, this whole investigation is more analysis than footwork. Jack Junior and the other analysts are the brains; you and I are just the feet and the eyeballs, so we pulled this thrilling gig.”
    Caruso nodded while he scanned, then he blinked hard in surprise, as if doubting the image in front of him. “I’ll be damned. I got him.”
    He saw the target on the other side of the window, walking along the platform in a leather bomber jacket and jeans, and holding a large leather duffel bag in his hand. There was a female pulling a rolling duffel a few feet away from him, and they walked in step with each other. She was much younger than he was, with dark hair and fair skin. To Dom she didn’t look Polish, nor did she look Russian, but he told himself he had not been checking out the females over here all that much, so he wouldn’t admit to being an expert.
    But Chavez was thinking the same thing. “I’d say the unsub is North African. Morocco. Algeria. Maybe Spanish, possibly Portuguese.”
    Caruso nodded. Ding Chavez had been at this a lot longer than he had, and the older man was usually right with his first assumptions.
    Caruso added, “She could do a lot better than a guy like Morozov.”
    “Frankenstein’s bride could do a lot better than a guy like Morozov.”
    The Russian and his fellow traveler climbed into the same car as Chavez and Caruso, which was not pure luck. Of the six carriages in the train, only one was first class.
    Dom climbed out of his seat and moved to the sliding glass door to the hall, glanced down and saw the woman following Morozov into a compartment two down from the American operatives.
    Moments later the conductor stepped onto the platform just ahead of where Caruso and Chavez were sitting and blew his whistle, then he climbed back aboard and the massive Siemens electric locomotive began pulling the six carriages out of the station.
    Once they had been on the way for a few minutes, Chavez and Caruso decided they’d recon the entire train to look for any countersurveillance before they decided how to get a closer look at their target and the young woman with him. They left their compartment and passed Morozov’s compartment without glancing in, then they moved through the vestibule to the dining car. On the other side of the dining car, the vestibule was open to the first second-class carriage. Here a group of a dozen or so men, all in black tracksuits with red piping, sat together. Chavez and Caruso had seen them in the station a short while before boarding, and they assumed the men to be members of a soccer team. Most of them wore earbuds, but a few of them chatted. A couple of their number looked like they could be the team’s coaches, but the rest were the right general age and build of athletes.
    Chavez and Caruso continued on to the next car, where they saw no one but tourists, a couple of men and women in business attire, and several senior citizens.
    In the second-to-last car, both Americans took note of a trio of men in their thirties. Two