E-Book, Englisch, 464 Seiten
Reihe: Damascus Station
McCloskey Moscow X
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80075-290-0
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Bestselling Author of THE TIMES Thriller of the Year DAMASCUS STATION and co-host of hit podcast THE REST IS CLASSIFIED
E-Book, Englisch, 464 Seiten
Reihe: Damascus Station
ISBN: 978-1-80075-290-0
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
David McCloskey is a former CIA analyst and former consultant at McKinsey & Company. While at the CIA, he worked in field stations across the Middle East and briefed senior White House officials and Arab royalty. He lives in Texas. He co-hosts the podcast The Rest is Classified.
Autoren/Hrsg.
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– 1 –
Dushanbe, Tajikistan, present day
THAT DAY ARTEMIS APHRODITE PROCTER WOUND UP IN THE PENALTY Box.
She awoke to darkness and the air clouded with a strange musk, teeth chattering like a clockwork toy. Her eyelids were heavy, reluctant to open. Hardwood chilled her skin. Procter blinked through a spray of her curly black hair across the floor of a room she did not know.
Then footfalls and a hairy-knuckled hand gently lifted forelocks of hair from her face. A man knelt and waved.
“Good morning, Artemis,” he said in cheerful Russian.
Her mind swam and churned, thoughts lost in the murk. She took in the room. A table. Two chairs by a window. Her pineapple-print panties rumpled on the floor. A drained bottle of vodka tipped on its side, halo of someone else’s purple lipstick along the rim.
She sat up against a couch, stark-naked and cold. The Russian went to an armchair by the window. He lit a cigarette. She bent her knees into her chest and shut her eyes because the room was spinning.
“Quite the night,” said the Russian. “I have seen things no man should ever see.” Click of the tongue. “You monstrous little woman.”
“Who are you?” Procter said, also in Russian. Her eyes were still shut—light brought rotation, tilting.
“Anton,” he said.
After a minute she hobbled to her feet and looked around for her clothes. Other than the panties, she saw only her leather jacket and muddy Reeboks. And it struck her that there was a hole blown clean through her memory, pure black since ordering drinks last night. She’d been with a Russian developmental, a Moscow party boy with access to heavier hitters: the Kremlin, the security services. And he was either dead or in on this. Probably both.
As her vision steadied, Procter could make out the morning bustle on Rudaki through the window. A light rain pattered on the glass. The table in front of Anton was spread with platters of food, cups, and glasses for the morning hundred grams, the , of vodka.
Procter struggled into the Reeboks and panties, twice nearly losing her balance, and then paused for a breath before starting on the jacket. She felt along the front and discovered the pockets emptied of her phone, keys, and switchblade. Then she flopped into the chair across from the Russian.
Anton chuckled. “Artemis Aphrodite Procter. CIA Chief of Station. Underpaid civil servant. And, according to my sources, yet again bypassed for promotion to the Senior Intelligence Service. Quite the fall from Amman to a backwater like Dushanbe. And all due to unspecified discretions.”
“My discretions,” Procter said, “were quite specific.”
Anton clapped his hairy hands and laughed with the cigarette pinned in his teeth. “Yes, the good Procter. Sexual wanderlust. A deviant with certain . . .” He fixed her with a grave stare. “Appetites.”
“And hands wet with Russian blood,” she said.
A shadow fell over his eyes. He stubbed his cigarette into a brass ashtray and began to pick at his plate of , pickled herring with potatoes and onions.
A liter of yeasty horse milk sweated in a glass bottle. Russkies had done their research. Though more of a Kazakh or Kyrgyz delicacy, when granted the rare privilege in Tajik Dushanbe, Procter partook of the horse milk. But when Anton poured her a cup, she dumped it on the floor.
The Russian snickered and stepped over the slithering white stream to collect a buff-colored folder from the sofa. He handed it to Procter and returned to his food. “We have many more photos, of course. This is merely a teaser. There were a few of you facedown, for example, but I don’t think you’ll see them in there. I must say, though, I am curious about the tattoos. And why nine of them? I am sure the stories are riveting. Anyhow, go on, have a look.” He took a bite of fish.
Procter flipped through a stack of nude photos snapped while she’d been drugged. Some were quite imaginative. Artistic, even. Two or three were nearly perfect: the lighting, the energy, the intimate angles, these appropriately captured what Procter considered to be the animal spirits of her sexual id. Others were banal and garish: unworthy of trade in even the seediest flesh market. Procter, stranger to shame, found not a one embarrassing. Her tits, she thought, looked pretty good across the board. She tossed the folder into the puddle of horse milk. “Go fuck yourself.”
Anton lit another cigarette. “Artemis, please. If you don’t cooperate, well, then these unfortunate pictures will be posted online. And we will out you as CIA.”
“You’re going to do that anyway, Anton. Aren’t you? Now, where are my damn pants?” The world had stopped gyrating. Slowly, she got up and began wandering around the room.
“You’ll be sent home, Artemis. Another black stain on your career.”
“Your pitch sucks. Whole point of this is to send me home. You’re after me because I like working Russians. You want me gone. In any case, you should invest in a better photographer, because some of those”—she jabbed a finger at the milk-sopped folder— “are terrible. My answer is this: Fuck you. I’m leaving now to report this to Langley and the ambassador. Say, better idea. How about instead of writing up a cable that makes you look like a dumbass, why don’t you spy for me? What do you say to that?”
Anton cast a jet of smoke across the food. “Screw off, Artemis.”
Procter was smiling. “I guess we understand each other. Now, where are my pants?”
She tossed a few couch cushions to the floor in a vain search. Pretty worked up about the missing jeans. A breach of the rules, she thought. Unprofessional. Nasty. She turned the place upside down for a few minutes while Anton smoked. Had they actually tossed out her pants?
“Come on, Anton. It’s cold and I’m a decent woman. Can’t roll out of here in pineapple panties and a leather jacket.” She stood over him, arms akimbo, while he burned down his cigarette. His chuckle at the word sent dark fantasies cartwheeling through her mind.
“Artemis, think of your Station. If you go home, they will have no Chief. And I hear a colleague of yours recently departed. Unfortunate medical situation.”
Two months earlier, Procter’s Deputy Chief of Station and his family had awoken in their apartment with vertigo and headaches. Wife went blind in one eye. Russian directed-energy attack, Procter suspected. Microwaves that fried your fucking brain.
Anton was smiling and examining her bare legs.
Procter was scowling and examining Anton’s pants. A siren was ringing through her skull.
Then Procter had her hand down on the drained vodka bottle and she’d shattered it against the table for a nice length of jagged neck, and before Anton could duck she’d slashed him across the cheek and packed the glass into the meat of his left shoulder and it just stuck there, purple- glossed rim pointing square at the ceiling.
Anton howled, tried to stand and pull out the glass, but she kicked him in the chest and he fell back into the chair. A run of blood washed down his cheek. She punched his nose, again, a third time, until she heard a sweet wet crunch and a ragged moan escaped his lips. Then she snatched the milk bottle from the table and broke it over his skull. His head slumped, the milk and blood mingling into pink braids.
Procter overturned the table and smashed it into the wall and harvested a splintered leg to churn Anton’s left kneecap into mush. After a batch of strikes, light filtered through her rage blackout and she tossed the table leg aside and smacked his cheek to wake him up. He did not.
“Anton,” she said, “wake up. I got a skosh carried away. Anton, can you hear me?” A few finger-snaps in front of his face. “Anton?”
Two fingers to his neck. She felt a pulse.
Never thought she’d be happy for a live Russian intel officer, but praise god.
Then she looked around the wrecked room and out the window and wondered if he had partners or a team watching on cameras. She shimmied off his pants and slipped them on herself and told the unconscious Russian, “Serves you right for ditching my jeans.”
He was much taller and wider, so she rolled up the pant legs about a foot and cinched the belt tight as it would go. The folder of nude photos disappeared into her jacket. Then she pulled it back out, rifling through until she found the one: A nice shot showcasing her flexibility and rugged femininity. Her quiet fucking strength. Crumpling the photo into a ball, she shoved it into Anton’s underpants. Then she was out the door.
THE DAY CONTINUED ITS UNRAVELING. AT THE EMBASSY THERE WAS A struggle session with the prick ambassador. She sent a cable recounting the ordeal and received a nasty gram response from the Director and the Langley mandarins. Then a clipped conversation with Deputy Director Bradley, words and tone evoking the reassurances whispered to a beloved dog moments before it is euthanized.
Dinnertime: The pictures appeared on several burner websites, the links amplified by Russian bot accounts across social media platforms. They also outed Procter as COS Dushanbe.
The formal cable recalling her to Langley arrived later that evening. End of tour: Get on the first...
