Private Moscow

Chapter 60

My phone woke me from a dreamless sleep at 9:15 the next morning. My eyes were raw and my head pounded. My arms ached from having been suspended in a stress position, and I winced as I answered the call.

“Jack?” Justine said.

“Yeah,” I croaked. “What time is it there?”

“Quarter past two in the morning. We’re working round the clock,” she replied.

I rubbed my face and sat up.

“What’s been happening over there?” Justine asked. “I couldn’t get hold of anyone.”

I should have told her about my abduction by Veles, but I didn’t want her to worry.

“We’re following up some leads,” I replied blandly. “We caught a name: Veles. Probably Spetsnaz or Russian intelligence. Can you ask Mo to run an alias search? See what it flags up.”

“Will do,” she said. “I’ve sent Dinara everything we could get on Ernie Fisher, Robert Carlyle, Karl Parker and Elizabeth Connor. Personnel records, school transcripts, service histories.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you with her?” Justine asked.

It was a loaded question, and after the events of the previous night, I just couldn’t face it head on.

“Not right now, no,” I replied. “Anything else?”

There was a pause.

“No,” she replied at last.

“Stay in touch,” I said, before hanging up.

Twenty minutes later, I’d showered and got dressed, and, feeling a little more human, left my room and knocked on Dinara’s door. There was no answer, so I tried Leonid’s, but his room was also silent.

I went into the main building and found a few late risers finishing breakfast in the dining hall. I recognized some of them from the previous night’s vodka session, and when they waved at me, I nodded in reply.

I finally found Dinara in the library, where she was working alone, hunched over her computer. She looked fresh, free of any sign of her abduction and traumatic ordeal.

“Morning,” I said.

She looked up and shifted awkwardly. “Good morning,” she replied. “Justine has sent us some information on Ernest Fisher and Robert Carlyle. I’ve been pulling out the highlights.”

“Mind if I take a look?”

She shook her head, and I grabbed a chair. The library was one of the few rooms that didn’t look as though it had undergone any refurbishment since the place had been converted from a school. Books were arranged on low, child-friendly shelves, and classroom tables had been pushed together in clusters of four to create reading areas.

Dinara was at the cluster nearest the windows, overlooking football goals and a playing field that was buried beneath snow. She had a series of applications open on her laptop, but she was currently working on a simple document that listed key moments in Ernie Fisher’s life, from his birth in Featherville, a tiny settlement in Idaho, to his appointment as the US ambassador’s chief of staff.

“That’s interesting,” I remarked. “He and Karl Parker were both born and raised in small Midwest towns.”

“And both enlisted in the Marine Corps within two years of each other,” Dinara observed.

“Fisher was a couple of years older than Karl,” I said. “Similar academic profiles too. Solid but nothing flashy. Certainly nothing to indicate their later achievements.”

“What about Robert Carlyle?” I asked.

Dinara opened a similar document and showed me the Washington financier’s potted history. “Born in Arminto, Wyoming, enlisted in the Marines aged eighteen,” she said.

“There’s a pattern,” I remarked.

I thought about the key I’d found in Ernie Fisher’s apartment.

“What if their similarities aren’t just in the past?” I asked. “What if the key is for a safe in a warehouse like the one Karl Parker had? Someplace secret. Completely off the books.”

“He was planning to leave,” Dinara remarked.

“So his next stop was going to be to collect his passport and whatever else he needed,” I surmised. “It will be somewhere close by. Like Karl’s, it will be in the city, someplace Fisher could get to quickly.

“Any idea how we find it?”

“Old-fashioned detective work,” I replied. “We canvass. It’s time-consuming, but I don’t see any other way. We start at the epicenter, Fisher’s home, and work our way out.”