Covert One 6 - The Moscow Vector Read Online Free PDF

interrogated.
    He sighed and trotted off down the corridor. “On my way.”
    Dempsey paused outside the locked outer doors of the DIA section’s office complex. A light on the electronic security station there shone bright red.
    Anyone trying to force their way through would automatically trigger alarms throughout the massive building. With another frown, he dug the shift-issued special police ID card out of his uniform pocket and ran it through the machine. The light shifted to yellow, indicating that he had been granted emergency permission to enter.
    He pushed through the security doors and found himself in another hallway, this one leading deeper into the building. Several soundproofed glass doors opened onto this corridor. Silently now, the policeman moved faster toward the office his sergeant had identified as the source of the abortive 911
    call, trying very hard not to look too closely at anything in the rooms he passed.
    A painted sign on the door he was looking for read DIRECTORATE FOR CURRENT INTELLIGENCE—RUSSIA DIVISION. Dempsey knew enough about the different intelligence outfits to realize that the men and women who worked here were directly responsible for briefing the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs on all significant military and political developments. They were the top analysts charged with pulling together the bits and pieces of information gathered by human agents, from satellite photographs, and from intercepted radio, phone, and computer transmissions.
    “Police!” he called out as he went inside. “Is anyone here? Hello?”
    The corporal looked around carefully. The room was a tangle of desks, chairs, filing cabinets, and computers. The faint voice of the 91I operator still
    trying to get a response guided him toward a desk in the far corner.
    Dozens of file folders and prints of satellite photographs lay strewn across the desk and the carpeted floor around it. Despite his best efforts, the corporal
    could not help reading the tags on some of them: 4TH GUARDS TANK
    DIVISION — NARO-FOMINSK CANTONMENT, SIGNAL INTERCEPTS —45TH SPET-SNAZ BRIGADE, R\IL TRAFFIC ANALYSIS —MOSCOW MILITARY DISTRICT. Red warning stamps marked them all as being classified TOP SECRET or beyond.
    Dempsey winced. Now he was in for it.
    The computer on the desk hummed quietly to itself. A screen saver hid the contents of whatever document its owner had been working on and the police corporal was very careful not to touch anything around the machine. He looked down.
    There, curled up next to an overturned chair, lay an older man. The skin on his face and neck was strangely mottled. He groaned once. His eyes flick-red partly open and then closed as he drifted in and out of consciousness.
    e was still clutching the phone receiver in one hand. Clumps of his thick gray hair were falling out, revealing grotesque bald spots covered in a bright red rash.
    Dempsey dropped to one knee, taking a closer look at the sick man. He felt for a pulse. It fluttered rapidly and irregularly under his fingertips. He swore once and grabbed his radio. “Sergeant, this is Dempsey! I need a medical team up here, pronto!”
    February 16
    Moscow
    The ornate pinnacles and towers of the Kotelnicheskaya apartment block soared high above the city, offering an unsurpassed view west across the Moscow River toward the red brick walls and golden domes and spires of the Kremlin. Dozens of satellite dishes and radio and microwave antennae sprouted from every relatively open space on its elaborate facade. Kotelnicheskaya was one of Stalin’s massive “Seven Sisters”—seven enormous high-rises built around Moscow during the 1950s to close what the increasingly power-mad dictator believed was a humiliating “skyscraper gap” with the United States.
    Once home to Communist Party officials and heavy-industry bosses, the enormous high-rise now mostly housed wealthy foreigners and members of the new Russian governing and business elite—those able to