Rasputin's Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

Zombanakis, also from the 114th. The three of them looked put out, which was likely, given that they’d probably been told to wait there for us and hand over what they no doubt considered to be their investigation. They also looked annoyed, like Aparo and I had somehow intruded on their little get-together. That was even more understandable and likely due to the lady they were conversing with, who looked out of place until she introduced herself as Larisa Tchoumitcheva, there on behalf of the Russian consulate.
    She was gorgeous. Almost my height in three-inch heels, slim but with rolling curves that challenged the tailored navy blue skirt suit and white shirt she was in, and the wickedest combo of lips and blue eyes I’d ever seen, the lot topped by perfectly coiffed light auburn hair that fittingly veered more toward fiery red than stately brown. I flicked a glance at my newly single partner and could just visualize the wet ’n’ wild clips that were unspooling in his lecherous mind. In this instance, it was hard to blame him. Any man would have had a hard time keeping them in check.
    Ever the perfect gentleman, I told her, “I’m sorry for your loss. Did you know him?”
    “Not really,” she replied. “I met him briefly at some official functions, but our duties didn’t really intersect.”
    She spoke with the barest hint of a Slavic accent. And as if she needed it, her voice only made her more attractive.
    Focus.
    “Who was he?”
    “Fyodor Yakovlev. He was Third Secretary for Maritime Affairs at the consulate here.”
    Maritime Affairs. I hadn’t come across that one yet.
    I asked her, “And you? You said your duties didn’t intersect.”
    She fished a card out from an inside pocket of her jacket and handed it to me. I read the small letters under her name out loud. “‘Counselor for Public Affairs.’”
    Well, at least it didn’t say “attaché.”
    I left the words hanging there and looked up from the card. Our eyes met and I just gave her a small, knowing grin. She obviously read me and my suspicions, but didn’t seem fazed by it at all. It was a dance I’d danced before with, among others, Chinese, French, and Israeli “diplomats.” But most of all, it was the Russians who never stopped hogging that particular ballroom.
    The one for spies.

4

    E venwith the Berlin Wall down and the Evil Empire a relic of the past, we were still playing the same old games.
    Russia was no longer the USSR, the head honchos of the KGB and their organized-crime kingpin partners now owned the country outright instead of just controlling its people, and Communism was lying in some shallow grave while a wildly perverted version of capitalism was dancing the
kalinka
on it. But that didn’t mean we were friends. Even though we no longer had any ideological differences, we still pretty much hated each other’s guts, and we both spent a lot of time and resources snooping on each other.
    We had spies over there; they had spies over here. Mostly, the ones the Russians shipped our way were pretty much of the classic kind: some would be here under “official cover,” meaning they’d have some mundane job at their embassy or consulate, typically an attaché, secretary, or counselor; others, the more adventurous ones, would be here under “non-official cover”—the ones we call “NOCs”—meaning they didn’t have a government job as a cover and, as such, they didn’t enjoy the associated diplomatic immunity if they were caught. And given the stiff penalties sometimes handed out on espionage charges—execution, for one—being an NOC was by far the more hazardous of the two.
    Then there was the new breed of “penetration agents,” like Anna Chapman and her bumbling crew of social butterflies who we nabbed and expelled a few years ago. The media had giggled at the notion of a glamorous redhead and her Facebook-addicted posse posing any kind of threat to our great nation. The truth was, a Russian spy in our midst