Private Moscow

Chapter 94

We walked out of the SVR executive’s office as though it was just any normal day. Dinara said something in Russian before she shut the door behind us, and the man’s assistant glanced up from her work and gave a knowing smile.

I was shocked when Dinara lashed out at the woman, knocking her unconscious with a couple of quick punches.

“Help me get her inside,” she said.

I glanced around nervously. Cubicle dividers prevented the other executive assistants from seeing, but if anyone walked along the corridor...

I grabbed the woman’s shoulders and Dinara took her feet, and we carried her inside her boss’s office, and laid her on the floor beside him.

“I told her he was having an afternoon nap, but the first thing she would have done when we set the alarm off would have been to try to wake him up,” Dinara explained as we left the room.

“Good work,” I whispered as we hurried along the corridor toward the fire stairs Erin had told us were located near Salko’s office.

We found the fire escape where we’d expected, and went into the stairwell.

“Ready?” I asked, and Dinara nodded.

I smashed a tiny glass panel, and activated the fire alarm. A klaxon sounded almost immediately, and we ran up two flights of stairs to the upper service level before the first people began streaming through the fire doors below us. We concealed ourselves behind an air-conditioning unit, and the stairwell filled with people chatting as they shuffled downstairs.

When the last of them had left, we hurried down to the twenty-first floor, quickly slipped through the fire door, and sprinted to Salko’s office.

“Connect us,” I said.

“Connecting,” Anna replied via my in-ear transceiver.

Salko’s room was locked, but Dinara and I grabbed his assistant’s desk, turned it to face the door, and pushed as hard as we could. The heavy desk surged forward and smashed the door open, and we clambered into Salko’s grand corner office.

“Go ahead, Jack,” Mo-bot said.

“We’re in the target’s office,” I told her as I raced to his huge desk.

“Plug the USB into his computer,” Mo-bot replied.

I pulled a tiny plastic USB drive from inside my shoe. Dinara had downloaded Mo-bot’s program onto the tiny device. After a brief search, I found Salko’s computer in one of the cabinets built into his desk.

“Come on, Jack,” Dinara said, watching the doorway nervously.

No amount of fast talking would explain away the wreckage. I thrust the USB drive into one of the ports, and when the computer woke, I was greeted by a password screen.

“I’ll take it from here,” Mo-bot said, and I saw a series of DOS windows open. “Shouldn’t take too long,” she remarked, and the password screen vanished and was replaced by a desktop home page full of file icons.

“We’re in,” Mo-bot said. “I’m going to copy his entire drive.”

A status bar filled the screen, displaying a job completion percentage. The klaxon, which had been constant since we’d triggered the alarm, suddenly fell silent.

“They’ll have started checking the building,” Dinara warned.

I looked at the status bar, which was three-quarters of the way along. Mo-bot’s tech was impressive. Copying an entire hard drive in such a short space of time was no mean feat. Even so, we were in a precarious situation.

“Anything I can do to hurry this along?” I asked.

“You can have something done fast, or you can have it done well,” Mo-bot replied.

“I just want it done,” I told her sharply.

“I know you’re under a lot of pressure, Jack Morgan, so I’m going to forgive your tone,” she replied. “Almost... There.”

The status bar disappeared.

“You’re good to go,” Mo-bot confirmed. “Just grab the USB and get the hell out of Dodge.”

I didn’t wait to be told twice. I pulled the USB drive from the port, and Dinara and I scrambled over the desk, jumped through the doorway and ran along the corridor toward the elevators.

We took a car to the first floor and stepped into a lobby full of people being allowed back into the building.

“They know it was a false alarm,” Dinara whispered, translating the muttered conversations around us.

We pushed to the edge of the crowd, and made our way to the exit.

“Salko,” Dinara whispered urgently.

I followed her eye-line to see a grizzled man in his late fifties. He wasn’t much taller than Dinara, and his wrinkled face looked as though it was set in a permanent scowl. The guy radiated ruthless hostility.

Dinara and I turned away from the man who had ordered the city scoured for us, and hurried out of the building.

My heart raced like a jackhammer as we walked away from the gigantic headstone, and the burning adrenalin didn’t subside until we were in the car and on our way to rendezvous with Master Gunnery Sergeant West.