A Hostile State

by Adrian Magson

  ‘Hold on tight,’ I shouted, and stamped on the brakes. I hauled on the wheel, taking a sideways drift into a ninety-degree turn. The rental protested, a vicious banging sound coming from underneath as the wheels bounced, but it held firm and didn’t give out on us.

  By now we were on a single-track route leading away through the trees with vegetation close in on both sides and a hammering of twigs and stones beneath the chassis. A couple of pull-ins flashed by, but they were only big enough for a couple of cars at most and proved to be dead ends, great for dog walkers and hikers but not for defending yourself against armed assault from a bunch of assassins.

  I checked the rear-view mirror. For a moment after the sudden turn the Evoque was gone from my sight. It was all the opportunity I was going to get. I hit the brakes again, this time much harder and bringing us to a stop. Lindsay yelped in surprise as she was thrown against the back of my seat. I grabbed the Sig and jumped out of the car.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she shouted, untangling herself from the car.

  ‘Get into the trees and stay down,’ I shouted and started running back towards the turning. I could hear the Evoque coming up fast, its engine sounding brutally stressed as the driver fought to catch us. Then I heard the engine note drop sharply and the tyres protesting as he braked hard to follow us into the turn.

  By the time the busted grill and headlight came into view round the corner I was standing just fifty feet away in the centre of the track. I had my feet planted and both hands held out front holding the pistol steady, waiting and breathing easy. It threw my mind back to an exercise a million years ago, just one of many battle scenarios we had to train for that were unlikely ever to happen yet still had to be practised, testing the nerves and the will.

  The look of shock on the driver’s face as he clocked me in the centre of the track was almost funny. Pity I didn’t have time to enjoy it.

  Just for a second I thought he was going to stop out of instinct. Then he hit the gas and the engine fought to gain forward traction on the soft surface, suddenly growing larger as it roared towards me.

  I fired twice at the driver and twice more at a man on the passenger side who’d been waving the machine pistol. Then I stepped off the track and watched as the big car gave a frantic wobble before the front wheels turned and took it off into the trees.

  There was a ripping sound of devastated vegetation as bushes and saplings were torn down by the big car, ending with a bang as it buried itself into something solid and unyielding. A long hiss of steam and the engine stalled and went dead. In the silence that followed, someone screamed once, then stopped.

  I checked behind me to make sure Lindsay was out of the way, then crossed the track. The car was still upright but only just. It was tilted over towards the passenger side, and I could see an arm hanging down limply out of the remains of the window. I moved up carefully alongside the rear door and saw a body crumpled in the rear foot-well. There was a lot of blood and he’d got a visible head-wound, his neck at a crooked and impossible angle.

  I placed the Sig’s barrel against the front passenger’s head as a precaution, but he was no threat. A thick branch had entered the front window space and pinned him to the seat. The machine pistol was lying on the floor at his feet.

  The driver was still alive but only just. He was breathing with difficulty and I could see why: he hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt and the air bag had only partially inflated. The air around him was a haze of white corn-starch used to keep the bag pliable while stored, and the steering wheel had done major damage to his face.

  I reached in to his inside pockets and found a cellphone. The screen opened and there was my photo again. I debated going through the other men’s pockets because they were sure to be carrying the same image, but we didn’t have time. I had to face it that sooner or later this was going to get out if it hadn’t already and I would become the mystery man everyone wanted to speak with.

  I trekked back to the car and met Lindsay as she stepped out from the trees.

  ‘Are they still alive?’ she asked, as we climbed in. She dropped the Beretta in my bag almost with a gesture of relief and sat back, her face frozen.

  ‘Mostly,’ I lied, because she didn’t need to know that she had killed at least one of them, the guy in the back. ‘But they’re pretty busted up.’

  She nodded while I turned the car round and got us back on the road. She didn’t look at the Evoque as we passed and I didn’t blame her.

  A little while later she said, ‘How do you deal with this each time?’

  ‘I push it down,’ I replied. ‘It’s the only way.’ As explanations went it wasn’t deep or clever and a psych would laugh at it. But it was as near to the truth as I was ever likely to get.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘You did brilliantly back there.’

  ‘Thank you. It didn’t feel like it.’ She took a deep breath and said, ‘Is this ever going to end?’

  ‘It has to,’ I said with as much optimism as I could manage. It had to end sometime; the only thing I couldn’t figure out was how. Or when.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The lobby of Bradley Dalkin’s Rockville, Washington apartment building was neat, clean and devoid of character, a unit by appearance more suited for worker ants to live in but apparently not to socialize. Modern living for the mid-level governmentally employed. To David Andrews it had all the excitement of an office block and he half expected to have a uniformed guard pop out from a cubbyhole and ask to see some ID.

  In fact getting inside had been simple; no lock-picks or forced entry, not even waiting for one of the residents to come along and provide a simple open door for them to slip through. The door opened at the first push by Agent Cahill and they were in and staring at a bank of mail lockers against one wall. Discreet LED lights in the ceiling tiles gave off a cold light reflecting from the metal boxes, lending the scene a slightly clinical air.

  Warner tapped on the locker assigned to Dalkin. It didn’t spring open but gave off the hollow boom of an empty space. He turned and headed for the stairs with Cahill and David Andrews close behind. They arrived on the second floor without encountering anyone and stopped at Dalkin’s door. Warner motioned Andrews to stand to one side, then knocked, his big fist surprisingly gentle.

  No response. Warner knocked again. Silence. Then a door to an adjacent apartment opened and an elderly lady appeared. She was tall, stick-thin and neatly dressed, with a shopping bag in one hand and purse on a long strap over one shoulder. She locked her door carefully behind her and turned to stare at the three visitors with a look of mild surprise.

  ‘Can I help you, gentlemen? You look a little lost.’ Her voice carried a hint of a snap as if they’d been caught out misbehaving by a teacher.

  Cahill stepped forward and gave her his most innocent boyish smile. ‘We’re not lost, ma’am. We’re here visiting Mr Dalkin—’

  She cut him off. ‘I know who and what you are, young man, so stow the ersatz charm. I was with the Bureau before you were born so I recognize the suits and the look.’ She turned her eye on Andrews, adding dryly, ‘Although maybe some standards have been slipping lately.’ She allowed a smile to touch her lips. ‘Darn, if you could see the look on your faces. Dalkin, you say?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Do you know when he’ll be in?’

  ‘No, I don’t, Special Agent—?’

  ‘Cahill, ma’am.’ He indicated his colleagues and said, ‘Special Agent Warner and … Mr Andrews.’

  The elderly eyes were sharp as they flicked between the two other men, resting briefly on Andrews. ‘Huh. A Mister riding around with the Feds? The world has changed. If you’re not Bureau, what are you?’

  ‘He’s on attachment,’ Warner explained smoothly before Andrews could speak. ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘Well, good for him.’ The old lady walked past them saying, ‘Sorry, I don’t know when Mr Dalkin will be in and nor do I care. He’s never given me so much as a nod all the time he’s live
d here. He’s one of those stuck-up little Washington staff pricks who doesn’t look kindly on us lower orders. I hope you get him, whatever it is he’s done, and nail his ass to the wall, or whatever the polite terminology is these days.’

  They watched as she disappeared down the stairs, back ramrod straight, and turned to look at each other in amusement.

  ‘We should re-employ her,’ said Warner softly, in awe. ‘She’s scary.’

  ‘What do we do now?’ Andrews queried. He felt a sense of anti-climax, as if the potentially exciting day in the company of a couple of FBI agents had fizzled out to nothing.

  ‘We’re going to stay on the stuck-up little staff prick,’ Warner said, testing Dalkin’s door to see if it would give. It didn’t and he looked disappointed. ‘You’re going back to Langley to do whatever it is you whizziwig computer guys do when the oversight committee isn’t looking. Cahill will give you a ride. I’ll stay on here in case I get lucky and fall against the door.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ Andrews concurred. ‘I do have some digging to do.’

  ‘I bet you do. Let’s hope it turns up something useful.’ He turned back to the door saying, ‘Keep us in the loop, though, you hear? We didn’t give you this exciting day out for free, us being on the same side and all.’

  Andrews was relieved to get back to the familiarity of his desk. He’d enjoyed the momentary thrill of the chase with the two Special Agents, but he much preferred hunting down leads through his keyboard; specifically information on all things relating to Valentina Desayeva and her presence here in Washington, and anything else that his trawling through the archives might turn up.

  On the surface, Desayeva was a very open book with no appearance of trying to hide from anyone. She penned articles for magazines and journals on life and social history in Russia, about which, of course, she knew a great deal; she spent a lot of time schmoozing the rich and easily-flattered for donations to a list of socially worthwhile charities, appearing regularly on social media sites and gossip magazine pages in designer dresses; and being escorted to artistic events at the Kennedy Center, often on the arm of some senator or other D.C. worthy.

  However, anything related to her back-life was anything but open. There seemed to be no family, regular partner or significant other, and if she had a private life outside her charitable or public persona, it was well hidden. Equally, if any of the usual government agencies interested in foreign residents of Washington had anything on her, there was precious little available for him to trawl through.

  No wonder Callahan was annoyed; if she was a spy she was being protected by naiveté if not plain stupidity

  Which fact, in Andrews’ experience, narrowed the field of research and made him focus on the people around Desayeva instead.

  He decided to build up a photo montage, taking in the faces seen with her on the various social websites. He instinctively dismissed many of them as camera fodder seeking their own publicity, the familiar faces who seemed to thrive solely under the media spotlight. He dismissed, too, any expatriate Russians or members of the Russian diplomatic community who swirled in and out of her circle. Moscow, if they had any direct control over her activities, would not have been so clumsy as to make a direct personal approach to such a public figure.

  Instead they would have employed cut-outs, drops and seriously encrypted means of contact to give her orders or receive information. Which meant her ‘approved’ use of back-channels to Moscow for communication purposes were probably sanitized and would take far too long, quite apart from ringing alarm bells in the State Department who, Callahan had cautioned him, had placed her off-limits.

  And that was where he firmed up the connection with Dalkin. A case of pure luck, he admitted, along with inter-agency cooperation. But that was the way things should work. The rest was down to some electronic leg-work, at which he excelled. But Dalkin had proved to be his way in.

  It was time to talk to Callahan and flip the whole off-limits command on its head.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  ‘Dalkin’s definitely got something going on here,’ said Andrews on arrival in Callahan’s office. He was carrying a tablet and waved it in the air. It was early in his digging assignment into Dalkin’s background and he was looking energized by what he’d turned up. ‘I’ve saved it on here to send you. You want to read this or should I summarize it?’

  ‘Go ahead and summarize.’ Callahan sat back to listen. He’d become accustomed to knowing when an agent or asset had something interesting to say rather than re-hashing old news, and recognized by Andrews’ tone and nervy stance that it would be best to let him have his head.

  ‘OK. As we know, not long after Benson’s death Dalkin lost his job. Until recently he’s had little money, no long-term work and existing on whatever stand-in, short-term contract contracts he can find. But even that’s drying up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A self-inflicted wound. I’ve spoken to a couple of co-workers who said he’d made himself such a royal pain in the ass skulking around in Benson’s shadow, nobody’s in a rush to trust him again.’

  ‘Skulking? Is that a current word?’

  ‘Apparently, he did it a lot according to my informants. You know – like the weedy pal of the playground bully? His wife must have felt the same because she left him and took a bunch of cash for a no-contest divorce. The way things look on paper, his credit’s maxed out and his prospects of staying in Rockville don’t look great. And get this.’ He grinned. ‘An old lady neighbour in his apartment building referred to him as a stuck-up little prick.’

  ‘Good for her. Is there a “but” lurking around somewhere?’

  ‘There is. I put a historic trace on his phone records and GPS and it shows he made a prior visit to the Pines View club three months ago. Until then he’d rarely left the city other than a couple of brief visits to Michigan where he has a sister, although they don’t get on much. The visit to Pines View could be when he and Desayeva first met-and-matched. Unfortunately the Pines doesn’t keep CCTV records back that far.’

  ‘So far so what?’ Callahan wasn’t being picky, merely impatient. He knew there had to be more.

  ‘Just recently he transferred in three separate sums of nine thousand dollars each to his checking account and two similar sums to a business account. There could be more but they haven’t found it yet. There’s no record the FBI can find immediately of where that came from, but they’re working on it. Dalkin also bought a new car, a Chevy Suburban. Before that he drove a crappy Honda Accord that he’d have had trouble giving away.’ He looked up and added, ‘For a guy who’s only five-seven, a Chevy’s a big chunk of vehicle.’

  ‘It’s a big chunk of money, too.’ Callahan’s interest had grown. There were plenty of short guys driving big cars around DC and elsewhere; it went with the territory. Fronting up beyond your normal capacity was a local pastime, especially if you wanted to climb the greasy pole of political ambition. More interesting was where did the fifty-plus grand it would have cost Dalkin to buy the car have come from, seeing as he had no proper job?

  ‘Warner ran a check of his phone calls and emails,’ Andrews continued. ‘Aside from job hunting Dalkin made a handful of calls over the past few weeks to a number assigned to a cellphone from a few years back. It hasn’t been used much recently, although the account is still open.’

  ‘Do we have a name for the account?’

  ‘Valentina Desayeva.’

  ‘That’s more like it.’ Callahan’s interest went hot. It was more than just a chance meeting.

  ‘There’s no indication why she kept the old phone going, but it could be she bought a new one and simply tossed the old one in a drawer like lots of people.’

  Callahan shook his head. ‘She wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Tradecraft. She’d have been trained to destroy it rather than leave it in a drawer and forgetting it. That’s how sleepers get caught: they don’t think about what’s lying around i
n the ether and on phone and computer records. Anyway, the battery would have died eventually so she must have kept it charged for a reason. Did anything else show up on the phone records?’

  ‘Not that we could find. But the earliest call Dalkin made was to her landline in D.C.’

  Callahan nodded knowingly. ‘That would have been the first contact. After that she’d have told him to use her old cell number instead. Simple and effective. Like I said, tradecraft.’ He slapped a hand on the desk in disgust. ‘Clean, my ass.’ Then he smiled. ‘Until now, anyway, which is when she slipped up.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Her old phone. She should have ditched it or got a new Pay-as-you-go Sim card. That would have given her a new, clean number. She probably figured nobody else would have a record of it after all this time.’

  ‘Does this mean we’ve got her?’

  Callahan brought him down to earth. ‘Not yet we don’t. We’re closer than we were, but no home run just yet. One question: has Dalkin put his apartment up for sale?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Because if he had it might be one explanation of where his sudden input of cash came from. And it isn’t. What else?’

  ‘That’s it for now. But Warner and Cahill are digging deep. They seem pretty excited.’

  ‘They would be; they’re hunters and can smell a rat.’ He nodded. ‘Keep working on it.’

  Callahan watched Andrews walk away and smiled. The young man was in the wrong agency, although he wasn’t going to tell him that – at least not yet. He’d got the instincts of a hunter, just like the two Special Agents, but he didn’t realize it. Give him the right tools and some FBI training at their Quantico Academy and he’d be downright dangerous to anyone on the wrong side of the law.

  THIRTY-FIVE