Don’t miss the next exciting thriller featuring Black
Ops specialist Dan Morgan
Silent Assassin
by Leo J. Maloney
Coming from Pinnacle in 2013!
Turn the page to read a preview excerpt . . .
“
I
’m here to see Roman Lubarsky.”
The voice was self-assured—brash, even—and if the accent had not given away that it belonged to an American, then surely the characteristic lack of subtlety would have been plenty to identify the nationality of the speaker.
“I’m afraid Mr. Lubarsky isn’t seeing anyone at the moment, sir,” said the girl at reception, offering him a practiced look of slight commiseration from across the counter.
“Oh, I think he’s going to want to see me,” the man said, and then he grinned. He was approaching middle age but still handsome in that rough American way, with a full head of dark hair with gray streaks, and a trim beard and mustache. He was not tall but had broad shoulders emphasized by his gray pin-striped suit. He had a briefcase in his right hand, which she had noticed when he walked into the lobby. She had also noticed that he was unusually fit and vigorous. The kind of man who could cause a lot of trouble if he wanted to. And she couldn’t quite tell, but he might have had a well-concealed gun holster tucked under his suit jacket. It was the kind of thing she was paid to notice.
She did not smile back at his comment. She could tell she wouldn’t get rid of him easily, but he wasn’t the first person who had insisted on coming in off the street to see the boss. She knew how to deal with them.
“Mr. Lubarsky does not receive anyone without an appointment,” she told him. She leaned in closer, as if to say something confidential, just between him and her, and said, “Trust me, sir, it will do no good to insist.” As she spoke, she reached down discreetly with her right hand and pushed the tiny button hidden on the underside of the counter.
“I have a standing appointment with your boss,” said the man.
“It’s not in my book,” she said, offering him a
What can I do?
shrug.
“Oh, I think he’s going to want to see me, anyway.”
This was getting tiresome. “I insist, sir, that even if you are the Pope himself, Mr. Lubarsky will not—” She was interrupted as Marko and Lyudmil emerged from the door next to the reception desk and flanked the American.
“This guy giving you trouble, Rositsa?”
“Some men just can’t take no for an answer,” she said, teasing the man by looking straight into his eyes as she spoke.
The man did not stop smiling. “Some just know when not to fold.”
“Come on, asshole,” said Lyudmil, grabbing the man’s left arm. “The lady has had enough of you.”
The American, totally unfazed, did not move. Instead, he reached into his breast pocket. The two men seemed alarmed by the gesture and moved to restrain him, but they relaxed when they saw him pulling out a business card. The American offered it to them, holding it between two outstretched fingers. One guard took it, examined it, and then handed it to the other. They exchanged nods.
“Please follow us this way, sir,” said Marko.
The three disappeared through the door the two security men had emerged from. Rositsa looked down at the counter and saw that they had left the card. She picked it up and looked at it curiously. On it was no name—in fact, no words at all. All there was on it was a drawing of a snake, a cobra, coiled and ready to strike.
D
an Morgan, Code Name Cobra, was taken into a back room off the lobby of the Sárkány, where the bare concrete walls and fluorescent lighting stood in stark contrast to the elegant wood paneling and soft incandescent lighting in the reception area. He had been led there by the two hulking grunts in black suits who had come, originally, to kick him out and maybe leave him in the back alley with a couple of cracked ribs and internal bleeding.
One of the two, tall and broad-shouldered with a jutting chin, scowled down at him while the other, a squat and wide man who might have been mistaken for an ape if he weren’t wearing such a dapper suit, tried to take his Walther. “No guns in the hotel,” he said, though of course he meant no guns that weren’t in their possession.
“My weapon stays with me,” said Morgan.
“Are we going to have to take it away from you?” said the tall one.
“You can try.”
The two looked at each other and then at him as if they wanted to take turns breaking his neck.
“Any funny business,” said the short, squat one, “and you leave this hotel in little tiny pieces—is that clear?”
“Crystal.”
They X-rayed his briefcase, scanned him for bugs, and then escorted him back to the lobby. Then they ushered him to an elevator that they opened with a key. The interior was red-carpeted and wood-paneled to match the lobby, and it had only two floor buttons, unmarked. The short one turned another key and pressed the top button.
The elevator was not large, and Morgan was wedged uncomfortably between the two guards. The cabin began its ascent, the movement imperceptible but for a gentle tug at Morgan’s gut and at the leather satchel he held in his right hand.
The elevator stopped as discreetly as it had started, after what seemed like too short a time to cover the necessary distance. The doors slid open, right into the penthouse foyer.
The first thing to hit him was the smell. It was a heady mixture of stale vomit, rotting food, alcohol, and sweat mingled with a few other bodily odors. Obscene squeals and moans from a pornographic movie drifted in, and it seemed like an appropriate soundtrack. The foyer itself was decorated in the most expensive poor taste achievable. He briefly wondered how much worse it would seem to Jenny’s professional eye—only a fleeting thought before his mind began to formulate his reaction in case things took a turn for the worse.
It was automatic, part of his training. Possibilities played in his head in short clips of sudden violence. The bigger one would go down with a swing of the suitcase in Morgan’s hand—a well-placed blow would be enough knock him out. He’d likely have to draw his gun to take down the other goon, but he could not count on doing it fast enough and might have to improvise. Morgan had a keen sense of his environment, and this one provided more than enough for him to work with: here a bronze bust of Elvis that could easily crack open a man’s skull, there a gold-framed mirror whose shards could slice open a carotid in a split second.
A guttural voice spoke from the next room, in Russian. The short one responded in kind, and Morgan made out, in his speech, the word “Cobra.” The man in the other room responded.
“Go on,” said the short one thickly. “He is waiting.”
Morgan stepped through a columned arch, and the scene that had been only suggested by the acrid and intensifying smell appeared before him, inspiring in him alternately nausea and rage. The Sárkány was elegant and expensive, and the penthouse, on a good day, was by far the best suite in the hotel. But whatever class the place might have had was subsumed into the filth of the man he had come to see.
“Lubarsky.”
“Please, please, call me Roman,” said Lubarsky jovially. “Have a drink. Make yourself at home.”
Husks of top-shelf Champagne and vodka bottles lay strewn about, along with two upturned velvet-upholstered chairs. Slumped on the bed, half-covered by a stained white sheet, was a woman who wouldn’t have looked out of place on a high-fashion runway. She lay slack on the bed, her white-blond hair hanging off its side, her eyes eerily blank. Another woman, black with high cheekbones and wearing mussed-up lingerie, was huddled over an end table from which she had pushed off a wrought iron lamp. She was frantically cutting with a razor at a small mound of cocaine. Victims of human trafficking, most likely. Morgan knew what women went through to become playthings for the rich and unscrupulous. What he saw disgusted him, and made him want to kill Lubarsky even more.
“Lubarsky,” said Morgan.
The man himself was naked, rolls of flesh pendent between his open legs, his body hair so thick, he might as well have been wearing a sweater. Greasy black locks clung to the sweat on his forehead, and his eyes were open wide, red and manic, with pupils so dilated that they almost reached the outer edges of the iris.
“How long have you been on this bender?” Morgan asked.
“I take it that’s my money in that suitcase?” He snorted.
“Answer the question, Lubarsky.”
The Georgian looked at him with murder in his eyes. “Are you telling me what to do in my own hotel?”
“You and I have things to do today, and I want to know that you’re able to keep up your end.”
Lubarsky looked at him as if he were about to lunge for his throat, then burst out laughing, a hacking, throaty laugh. “Why all business, Cobra? Sit down. Have some cocaine. Have a whore. I just got these two fresh from a new shipment.” He looked at the woman who had been huddled over the table snorting coke. “You! Come here.”
She did her best to slink over, stumbling as she did.
“What is your name, sugar?” asked Lubarsky.
“My name is anything you want, baby.” She spoke in a lewd tone, rendered especially cartoonish by her heavy accent. Her eyes, red and heavy-lidded, were void of all emotion.
Lubarsky snickered and said, “You see? I have them well trained.”
“I’ll pass,” said Morgan.
“Are you sure?”
Morgan scowled at him.
“Fine, fine. You are a modest man. I cannot say I understand, but I respect it.” He waved absently at the woman, and she stumbled away. “Have a drink, then. I have a single malt from the highlands—”
“I don’t drink.”
Lubarsky laughed his hideous laugh again, and it made Morgan want to break his nose. “That’s the trouble with you ex-intelligence types. Always with the discipline. You make obscene amounts of money, but you never do anything obscene with it!”
“I hear Novokoff can really put away the vodka.”
“Yes, true,” he said, laughing. “But that is like the milk of his mother to Novokoff. He has the resistance of an ox. It doesn’t count as debauchery if he does not become drunk.”
“Speaking of the devil—”
“Yes, yes, I have not forgotten the business, Cobra. Your end first.”
Morgan set down the briefcase on the table in front of Lubarsky. “It’s all in there,” he said.
Lubarsky opened it and looked through the stacks of bills inside, a smile widening on his face.
“You are a man of your word, Cobra.”
Morgan wasn’t interested in compliments. “Novokoff?”
“It is set up for today, like we discussed.”
“Where?”
Lubarsky snorted. “He will not say until we are on the road. He is a paranoid bastard.”
“I’m guessing he learned it the hard way,” said Morgan. “Twenty years in the KGB will do that to a man.”
“And your side of the bargain?”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got it. All loaded up in a freezer truck and ready to take it wherever he is,” said Morgan.
“I tell you, Cobra, you are in the wrong business. This high-tech junk—biological weapons and nerve gas and smart bombs—they are crap business. All the special transportation, the lack of supply. And it’s all middlemen, middlemen, middlemen. Never a direct sale. The percentage is shit. The good business is in selling Kalashnikovs and grenades to African warlords. Get paid in diamonds, and no middlemen to pay.”
“But you’re still gracing us with your presence today, Roman?” said Morgan.
Lubarsky laughed. “I am making an introduction. Whole other animal. Little exposure, cash up front. Plus,” he added, “for Novokoff, I do this.”
“How sweet of you.”
“It is good for business. Not to mention, I’m scared shitless of the bastard.” He seemed serious all of a sudden. “You do not mess this up, you hear me, Cobra?”
“
You’re
telling
me
? Screw you, Lubarsky. Are you even planning on putting on some clothes?”
Lubarsky laughed. “You know, I like you, Cobra. I believe this is—how do you say?—the start of a wonderful friendship.”
Morgan looked at him disdainfully and hoped that he might have the opportunity to kill the man before this was over.
D
r. Eugenia Barrett opened the metal crate slowly and deliberately, and a thin mist poured out from inside, slowly dispersing to reveal four rows of cylinders.
“This is the real thing. A tiny whiff of this stuff will kill a grown man in forty seconds,” she said. “Same if you get any on your skin. Violent convulsions, projectile vomiting. The good news is, you probably won’t be conscious for most of it.”