here might even make up for the exhausting, whirlwind trip he’d been forced to make to that godforsaken air crash site.
Well, he thought smugly, at least the trip hadn’t been a complete waste. He’d been able to take Helen Gray and her soldier boy down a notch or two. His comments on that relationship in her personnel file should make damning reading at her next promotion review.
The phone rang, abruptly ending that pleasurable train of thought.
Mcdowell scooped it up, expecting it to be the concierge confirming his dinner reservation for the evening. One of the National’s four restaurants was the Moscow offshoot of Maxim’s of Paris.
He was wrong.
“Is this Mr. Mcdowell? Mr. Lawrence Mcdowell?” It was a middleaged man’s voice, smooth, assured, educated, and with just the trace of an accent.
“This is Mcdowell.”
“Mr. Mcdowell, my name is Wolf, Heinrich Wolf. I represent Secure Investments, Limited. I’m calling about your local commodities account.”
The FBI official flushed angrily. Jesus, he’d heard that Moscow was turning into a center for wild and woolly capitalism, but he’d never expected a salesman to get through the Hotel National’s switchboard.
This guy probably had a standing bribe out to the operators for info on any high rollers who checked in.
Still scowling, he growled, “Look, Mr. Wolf, or whatever your name is, I don’t have an account with your company. And I don’t want an account. So you can just save your sales pitch.”
The man on the other end simply chuckled. “Of course you’ve done business with us, Mr. Mcdowell. We worked together years ago. In fact, we invested quite heavily in you — and in your career.
Don’t you remember your PEREGRINE account?”
PEREGRINE? Mcdowell paled. It couldn’t be. Not now. Not after all these years. He was safe. He should have been safe. He clutched the phone tighter. “What did you say?”
“You heard me very clearly: PEREGRINE,” the voice said calmly. “So you do remember us, then?”
Suddenly cold and dizzy, Mcdowell sat down in a chair. He licked his lips that felt as dry as bone. “But you don’t exist anymore!
You’re all gone. Dead. Finished. Kaput.”
“Come now, Mr. Mcdowell,” the other man chided. “Old firms may go under or change hands. but you know that debts and obligations never disappear. They must always be paid — sooner or later.”
Lawrence Mcdowell sat silent in his chair, still holding the phone with numb fingers — listening in mounting fear while the man who called himself Heinrich Wolf calmly outlined just what he would have to do to meet his old obligations.
CHAPTER FOUR
DATA STREAM
FBI Special Agent Helen Gray stared down at the jumble of scorched tubing and pieces of crumpled metal spread out across a folding table.
The NTSB’s chief investigator Robert Nielsen, Alexei Koniev, and Peter Thorn stood close by, studying the same pile of debris.
Even without looking directly at him, she could sense Peter’s rigid self-control and utterly expressionless face. Ever since that bastard Mcdowell had walked in on them yesterday, he had avoided anything but strictly professional behavior toward her. Whenever they met, it was “Special Agent Gray” this and “ma’am” that.
It didn’t take ESP or a degree in psychology to read his mind. Angry at himself for having caused her trouble, Peter was busy beating himself up — all in the name of some chivalrous, selfdenying impulse to spare her further humiliation. It was all very old-fashioned, and also absolutely unnecessary in her opinion.
Helen sighed silently in frustration. One of the things about Peter Thorn that had first attracted her to him was his readiness to admit her competence and to acknowledge her skills. Very few of the men she’d ever worked with — let alone dated — would do that. Even when she’d showed them she could beat them at their own games, most just patted her on the head and drifted off — probably wondering why this strange woman worked so hard to master “masculine” abilities.
Peter had been different. Even after she’d been wounded, he’d pushed her hard to get back on her feet and onto active FBI duty — just as hard as she had ever pushed herself. He’d also known that she had to fight her own battles. She’d loved him more than ever for that.
But he’d changed over these past few months. He seemed more hesitant — less sure of himself and of his place in her heart.
Part of that was her fault, Helen knew. She’d allowed herself to be swept up in the excitement of her new assignment. Tracking illegal drugs, money laundering, arms smuggling, and the other booming ventures of Russia’s organized crime syndicates was often a twenty-four-hour-a-day job — one that made maintaining a relationship across eight time zones and thousands of miles immensely difficult.
Of course, the time they’d spent together here hadn’t been very conducive to romance, Helen thought ruefully. She and Peter were two birds of a feather. Neither of them found it particularly easy to open their hearts to another person — even under the best of circumstances.
Being dead-tired most of the time made that more difficult still. And the lack of privacy only compounded their woes. It was tough to rekindle physical and emotional intimacy when you were liable to be walked in on at any moment. So far, they were exactly .000 for two on that score, Helen realized, blushing as she remembered the knowing leer on Mcdowell’s face.
“Have you seen enough, Miss Gray?” Robert Nielsen’s dry, precise voice broke in on her thoughts, tugging her back to the case at hand.
Helen refocused her attention on the wreckage heaped in front of her.
She turned to the head of the NTSB investigative team. “So what exactly am I looking at here, Mr. Nielsen?”
“Part of the An-3”-s port engine.” The tall, gaunt man nodded toward the table. “One of the recovery crews found it at the bottom of a pond last night.”
“And the starboard engine?” she asked.
Nielsen shook his head. “They haven’t recovered it yet.”
“But you’ve learned something about what caused this engine to seize up?” Helen prodded.
“Yes.” Nielsen pulled a length of gnarled, threaded sleeve off the table. “This is the housing for the engine fuel filter. Now take a look at what we found inside it.”
Straining slightly, the NTSB man unscrewed the sleeve — exposing another, smaller sleeve inside. Then he reached inside and extracted a blackened cylinder.
“That’s the filter itself?” Peter asked quietly.
Nielsen nodded. He held it up for closer inspection. “See that?”
“See what?” Helen peered intently at the filter. It looked pitchblack against the light. “I can’t see anything.”
“That’s exactly my point,” Nielsen replied. “You should be able to see the light shining through the mesh screens on this filter.”’
He tapped the cylinder with one gloved finger. “But this filter is clogged, Miss Gray. It’s choked with so many contaminants that I’m not surprised this engine seized up.”
Alexei Koniev raised an eyebrow. “Contaminants? What kind of contaminants?”
“Dirt. Metal shavings. Rust particles.” The NTSB man ticked them off on his fingers. “It’s all the kind of crap you expect to find in most aviation fuel — just multiplied about a thousand times over the normal levels.”
Helen framed her next question carefully, conscious that she was treading on touchy ground. Like most people in his profession, Nielsen hated being asked to arrive at hard-and-fast conclusions ahead of the evidence.
