Spy Catcher: The J.J. McCall Novels (Books 1-3) (The FBI Espionage Series) by S.D. Skye Read Free Book Online

conjunction with the mall police. J.J. arrived in the small holding area and found Viktor seated and sipping on a Coke. Now, he and she could have a tête-à-tête before Vorobyev, the embassy security officer, suspected Viktor had uttered so much as a cordial hello to an FBI special agent.
    To J.J.’s surprise, they fell into easy conversation. The SVR gave Plotnikov shit work. Stuck him in a low-level position, assumed he’d never do any harm. But Viktor was sharp. Smarter than they gave him credit for. And he had loyal friends in the right places. The more they conversed, the more the deep-seated pain from his past bubbled to the surface. Plotnikov’s eyes flooded and he crumbled with emotion.
    “My Papa,” he said, his voice trembling, “was a former KGB Colonel who’d been falsely accused of working with the CIA and committing treason in the 1970s. Golikov’s father orchestrated his execution, tortured him, shot him in the back of the head with a high-caliber pistol. The penetration so powerful it blew off his face, so I’m told.”
    J.J. gasped as she choked down her own tears. With her own moth-er’s death still looming heavily on in the fabric of her life, she could relate to the pain spilling from his eyes.
    “Dear Papa. We never got a chance to say goodbye or visit his burial place. Golikov’s father and his thugs threw my father into an unmarked grave, face down, so his soul would go straight to hell. Our family was shunned, stripped of everything we owned, isolated from everyone we loved, betrayed by everyone we trusted. From a very young age, I vowed to one day make the KGB pay, to avenge our destitution.”
    His eyes tightened with contempt. He was a Predator drone, pre-programmed to strike in perfect time.
    “Twenty years later, the report was released. An American mole, one of the senior FBI or CIA officers controlled by our service, passed information that would set me on course to exact my revenge. Although one source was executed as a result of the intelligence, my father was exonerated, cleared of all charges.”
    “So you decided to work for the Russian intelligence?”
    “Yes, it was still the KGB at the time, in 1993, just before the break-up of the Soviet Union. They recruited me and a colleague from the Foreign Language Institute, gave me a dead-end government job with a promise of foreign travel to assuage my wounds. It was the KGB way. Keep your enemies even closer than your friends.”
    Nothing he confessed sparked a backlash from her gift. His hunger to avenge his father’s death seeped through his pores, loomed heavily on the conviction in his expression and the acid in his voice.
    Confident of his intent, J.J. set up a communications plan and gave him the code name KARAT because encryption codes were as good as gold. They would make periodic phone calls for updates and mark signals for emergencies. She also provided him with a throw-away cell phone to be used in only the most catastrophic situations. He concealed it inside the crumpled piece of paper stuffed in his new tennis shoes.
    “I understand how important family is to you, Viktor,” she remem-bered saying to him as their first meeting drew to an end. “I’ll do everything in my power to protect you and your family. You will not meet your father’s fate, not on my watch. That’s a promise.”
    Who had recruited whom?
    Plotnikov served as a code clerk, one of two to three embassy      personnel responsible for transmitting and receiving every classified and unclassified communication to and from Moscow Center, Russian intelligence headquarters. He owned the proverbial keys to the king-dom—encryption keys as it were. If he passed those codes to U.S. Intelligence, the FBI could decrypt intercepted Russian classified  communications.
    In his first dead drops, KARAT had only given the Bureau a few gold nuggets. To seal up the leak and identify the mole, the FBI needed Fort Knox, the identities of American government