Flight of the Raven Read Free Page B

Jeronimo last night.
    Aleksei glanced at his watch and stood up. Bogolubov was obsessed with promptness, among other things. Taking his dark blue European-cut jacket from the coat tree in the corner, he shrugged into it and straightened his tie, noting with relief that even with his eyes half-closed he’d somehow managed to pick an ensemble that actually matched. The duty officer had rung his apartment at five in the morning. Aleksei had been at his desk not much more than a half hour later. But Bogolubov wasn’t going to be concerned with his lack of sleep, only his ability to do his job under pressure.
    He and the general’s son, Leonid, had been in the same class at MGIMO, the foreign ministry’s diplomatic training school. Despite his father’s high connections, Leonid hadn’t done well, and the disappointed father had apparently blamed that failure on those who had excelled in the class. Although the hostility was discreetly hidden, Aleksei suspected that the general was waiting for him to make a mistake so he could pounce.
    Carlotta, one of the Spanish secretaries employed in the cultural section, looked up with expressive dark eyes as he opened the office door. “I’ve fixed some coffee, strong and black the way you like it,” she said.
    Despite the stress of the morning, he flashed her a quick smile that transformed his carefully disciplined countenance for just a moment. Carlotta took care of him well at the office, and she’d offered none too subtly to take care of him during off-hours as well. He could have used the human comfort, but it would have brought complications he couldn’t afford.
    Accepting the coffee, he took a few quick swallows and left the half-full cup on her desk. “I don’t know how long I’ll be up there with the general. But I’m expecting some important calls. Transfer them to Ivan and record the conversations. I’ll listen to the information later.”
    “Of course, Señor Rozonov.”
    The strong Spanish brew helped sharpen his wits for what he knew was going to be a verbal fencing match. From long experience at self-preservation, officers in the Soviet higher echelons were skilled at speaking without saying exactly what they meant. Bogolubov was a master at obfuscation.
    Aleksei met Georgi Krasin in the elevator. The young political officer with the mop of sandy hair and somber intellectual face had also been summoned to the early-morning inquisition. But that wasn’t surprising, since he was in charge of monitoring—and sometimes abetting—terrorist activities.
    Feliks Gorlov’s presence at the meeting was another matter. Gorlov had been busy with trade negotiations for months trying to buy wheat from anyone who had a spare hundred kilos. So what was he doing here? The nattily dressed agricultural under secretary with the razor-cut brown hair was lounging back in his seat, giving the impression that he and the commanding officer on the other side of the desk had been exchanging confidences for some time. Aleksei shrugged. His own impression of the man was that he cultivated form rather than substance.
    Tabling his opinion, he shifted his attention to the person who had called the group together.
    In deference to the foreign setting, the general was also in mufti. Unlike Gorlov, he was dressed in a boxy, wide-lapel wool suit that would have stood out on the Paseo de la Castellana like a Spanish olive in a jar of Black Sea Caviar. As he took time to shuffle through the folder on his desk, Bogolubov ignored the new arrivals. Finally he cleared his throat.
    “Well, what have you got on that damn bombing?” he demanded.
    Georgi, obviously eager to please, began to summarize what he’d been able to glean from a half-dozen sources. It didn’t impress the general very much.
    “The Kremlin will want an angle we can use to make the Americans look bad. See if you can invent a link to that protest against NATO last month,” he prompted.
    Georgi scribbled madly on the pad he’d