Covert One 6 - The Moscow Vector by Robert Ludlum Read Free Book Online Page A

quietly. The line went dead again. He was back in less than a minute. “I’m going to arrange some backup for you. It won’t be much, not given the tight time frame, but I don’t want you hanging out there all on your own. Can you sit tight for an hour or so?”
    Smith nodded. “No problem.”
    “Good. Call me back before you leave that police station.” Klein hesitated briefly. “And do try your best not to get killed, Jon. Filling out all the paperwork involved is pure hell on my end.”
    Smith grinned. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he promised.
     
    A middle-aged man wearing a thick brown overcoat, gloves, a fur hat, and mirrored sunglasses hurried out the front entrance of the Konviktska police station. Without looking back, he walked briskly away, heading southwest toward the river.
    Not far off, a black Mercedes sedan with tinted windows sat waiting for him in a narrow side street. Although the Mercedes was parked illegally, the diplomatic tag displayed prominently on its windshield had so far kept Prague’s notoriously overzealous traffic wardens at bay. Despite the overcast day, sunshades were drawn down across the sedan’s rear windows.
    Still moving quickly, the man pulled open the driver’s-side door and slid inside behind the wheel. He took off his hat and sunglasses and tossed them onto the leather seat beside him. With one gloved hand he nervously smoothed down spiky tufts of newly cropped brown hair.
    “Well?” asked a grim voice from the rear seat. “What did you find out?”
    “The municipal police are still holding the American,” the driver, a Romanian whose name was Dragomir Ilionescu, replied, looking up into the rearview mirror. He could just barely make out the shape of the man sitting behind him. “But not for much longer. As you anticipated, they have arranged a flight out for him later today. First to London and then on to New York.”
    “With what official security?”
    “None, apparently. The Czechs expect him to make his own way to the airport.”
    “How far can we trust our informant?” the voice asked.
    Ilionescu shrugged. “He has always been reliable in the past. I have no reason to doubt him now.”
    “Excellent.” Teeth gleamed in the shadowed interior as the man in the rear seat smiled coldly. “Then we will be able to provide Colonel Smith with a most exciting journey. Signal the rest of the unit. I want everyone readv to hove immediately. They know their parts.”
    Obediently, Ilionescu reached for the car phone. He flicked the switch that activated its scrambler. But then he hesitated. “Is taking this risk necessary?”
    he asked. “I mean, Petrenko is dead and the material he stole is gone forever, washed away in the river. We have accomplished our primary mission. Given that, what real difference does the life of one American doctor matter one way or the other?”
    The man in the rear seat leaned forward out of the shadows. Pale light streaming in through the tinted windshield danced off his shaven skull. Gently, very gently, he touched the thick bandages covering his shattered nose.
    They were stained with patches of brown, dried blood. “Do you think the man who did this to me was only a doctor?” he said softly. “]ust a simple physician?”
    Ilionescu swallowed suddenly.
    “Well, do you?”
    Sweating now, the Romanian shook his head.
    “You show some sense, then. Good. So, whatever this man Smith really is, let us make an end of him,” the other man went on. His voice was now dangerously low. “Besides, our recent orders from Moscow were quite specific, were they not? No witnesses. None. You do remember the penalties for failure, I trust?”
    A muscle around Ilionescu’s left eye twitched at the memory of the gruesome photographs he had been shown. He nodded urgently. “Yes. I remember.”
    “Then carry out my instructions.” With that, Georg Liss, the man who bore the code-name Prague One, sat back again, hiding his ruined face in the