Liberty by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online Page A

in her purse and left them in various drops in cities all over Europe. Ilin didn’t offer to pay her, and she didn’t ask. She was helping him, not the Russian secret police.
    She never learned the identity of Ilin’s spy on the inside, and in truth didn’t want to know. What you didn’t know you couldn’t tell, inadvertently or intentionally, even to save your life. All she knew was that the spy was probably a woman; the drop where she picked up information was in the third-floor women’s room. The janitors were men and cleaned the rest room at night, and one of them was a possibility. Yet it was more probable that the person leaving the information for her to find was one of the women clerks in the wire transfer division. Among the
countries in the Arab world, only in Egypt, and perhaps Iraq, did women work in banks, and then only in back-office clerical jobs. And that is where the hard intelligence is. That is where the information that Janos Ilin wanted could be mined, the who and how much and when.
    Two years ago Abdul Abn Saad had begun sending her on missions that were outside the sphere of legitimate banking. Indeed, he and the bank were involved in funding and directing terror.
    Four nuclear weapons.
    She had written a report of Petrov’s sale on the inside of a candy wrapper and left it in a drop on the Moscow subway for Ilin to find. She hadn’t telephoned or made any other attempt to contact him. Abdul Abn Saad and his people might be watching.
    These people were cutthroats, and hers was the throat they would slit if they learned that she told a solitary soul about the bank’s business or theirs.
    Saad paid her well for working at the bank, almost twice the salary she had been getting in Switzerland. She fancied that she earned it, but when the secret missions began she understood that she was being paid to keep silent and go along.
    They were evil men. And ignorant. They thought all Westerners were motivated by money. Virtue, they thought, was theirs alone. Women were some subspecies of human, useful only for recreation and procreation.
    She abandoned the window, sat at her desk, and examined her hands. They were shaking. The trembling was barely perceptible, but it was there.
    She was burning out. Saad had never threatened her before. What did it mean? Did he suspect?
    What if they had discovered the drop in the women’s room, or caught the spy and learned of it?
    It would be a simple matter to install a hidden security camera to see who serviced the drop. Interrogation and torture and death would swiftly follow.
    Four nuclear weapons …

    Perhaps she should have stayed in Moscow. Called Ilin, told him what she knew, and told him to get another courier.
    She hadn’t done that. She hadn’t wanted to abandon whoever was risking her life to acquire information here. The fact that it was a woman, probably an Arab woman, made it doubly difficult. No, she could not abandon a woman who was risking her life to fight evil.
    Yet now her hands shook all the time.
    Anna Modin stood, straightened her skirt, checked her reflection in the glass of the window, then went down the corridor to the women’s room. She pushed open the door and went inside. No one was there.
    She paused at the sink, studied the room in the mirror, then turned and scrutinized every square inch, looking for any changes to the room since her last visit two weeks ago. There seemed to be none.
    She entered the stall and removed her jacket, which she laid across the toilet paper dispenser. Then she rearranged her clothing and sat down.
    She glanced at the ceiling, at the walls in front of her. Everything looked as before.
    Finally she reached for toilet paper. Keeping the jacket over her hand, she reached into the hole behind the dispenser, felt with two fingers. Nothing there—the drop was empty.
    The rest of the day passed doing routine paperwork. She waited and waited for the ax to fall, and