Romanovsky Stain (eBook)

Duke Zimmer (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018 | 1. Auflage
298 Seiten
Yorkshire Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-948282-59-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Jacob Steiner left the intelligence world to join the NYPD where he worked until he was recently terminated for over zealous police work -- he beat the crap out of a child molester and broke the molester's skull in the process. Contemplating a quiet life in Los Angeles, Jacob soon discovers that a lifelong nemesis and former KGB agent, Sergei Romanovsky, has other plans for him.

---

Unbeknownst to Jacob, his former partner on the NYPD stole a flash drive from the molester containing information that could lead to an American Coup and a Third World War. Romanovsky has been ordered by the Russian government to recover the drive no matter what the cost. In order to persuade Jacob to assist him, Romanovsky kidnaps Jacob and injects him with a deadly neurotoxin. Jacob's mission, find his partner and receive the antidote or die trying.

Textauszug

woke up with a headache a bottle of aspirin couldn’t cure. A musty, oily odor hung in the air, stale and stifling, like a damp basement. The room was dark. I tried pulling myself up. No good. My hands were cuffed to a heavy pipe running along the floor, and my ankles were taped together. I half pushed and half pulled myself along the pipe to the wall. It was damp and metallic. Definitely not a police station. Unless the cells were in a medieval dungeon. Moving in the opposite direction, I estimated the room to be about thirty feet long. I stretched out my body and tried to touch the opposite wall, no luck. The room had to be at least ten feet wide. I put my ear to the pipe. Voices, distant, muffed, angry. I wasn’t alone. The knowledge didn’t make me feel any better. Neither did the sound of a door opening.

The figure of a man stood in the doorway, backlit by glaring light. From the heat, I knew it was sunlight.

“Lo, Jake,” the heavily Russian accented said. “Is long time?”

The voice made the bile in my stomach churn. It was like a bad dream that wouldn’t go away. I didn’t have to ask his name. I knew.

“Not long enough, Sergei,” I said.

“Is not same as Germany days.”

“No need to apologize” I didn’t have time to finish before Sergei’s foot landed square on my jaw.

The first time I ran into Sergei Federov Romanovsky was in the early 1960s, and I was a young counterintelligence agent with Sixty-Sixth Military Intelligence Group in Germany. I was a kid, wet behind the ears and just macho enough not to know it. There were lots of Russian spies running around Europe at the time. Sergei was one of them, not the best but good. Nearly half a million Soviet spies trained in the clandestine arts from an early age. They were ruthless and dedicated to the Soviet Union. Sergei was one of the most dedicated and most ruthless spies in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. Square-faced, with cold gray eyes, Sergei had been a kid too. A dedicated, ruthless kid. The worst kind. The kind that means trouble. It looked like it still did. He moved toward me. There was something in his step that told me I wasn’t in for a good time.

“We talk,” he said, maneuvering my face with his foot, forcing me to look at him.

All I could see was a dark void under a snap-brim fedora. A ghoulish Indiana Jones in an ill-fitting suit ringed by glaring light.

“Okay, okay,” I said, figuring that since I wasn’t dead, Sergei wanted something. No use beating around the bush. “What do you want?”

“Old green convertible is not hard to see. You are no longer a hard man to go behind.” He was laughing, not openly, but you could hear the chuckle in his voice. He was gloating over an inside joke that he wasn’t letting me in on.

“Not old, Sergei. A classic.”

“Is old car.” He laughed. “Very old car.”

“A classic, Sergei. A very nice classic. So you followed me from New York?” I already knew the answer. Sergei couldn’t resist confirming my suspicions.

“Of course.”

“Why?”

That’s when I knew the robbery had been staged, staged for my benefit. The perfect prisoner snatch. Out in the open. The police taking someone in for questioning. No one knew me. No one knew I was here and no one would ask about me. No need to call the police. The police were there. But why? Walking back the cat, I clicked through the angles. Nothing fit. Why go to the trouble? Why such an elaborate ruse? Why not spike my drink or hit me in the head? Something simple, direct, and easy. Why not just kill me and be done with it? There are plenty of unsolved homicides in LA. Plenty of unidentified bodies in the morgue, but an abduction in broad daylight? Why?

Then it hit me. If I had any question as to why taking down the hooded sweatshirt with the gun and money bag had been so easy, now I knew. Sergei could. More importantly, he wanted me to know that he had the power and connections to do anything he wanted, connections that would allow him to abduct me in broad daylight on a crowded a boardwalk. The only thing I didn’t know was why, and that was a very big question.

“Gregor, he work for us.”

“Us? Who’s us?”

“Businessmen. We have very good business with him and—”

“Had, Sergei, had a very good business.” I couldn’t resist correcting him. He didn’t appreciate the lesson.

“You know this business?” He snorted as his foot landed in my gut, knocking the wind out of me. He was well-trained. He knew how to cause maximum pain and minimal damage. I found myself wishing he hadn’t been such a good student.

“Always have the smart mouth, Jake.”

“I’m glad I’m not disappointing you. And no, I do not know about your business.”

His foot glanced off my chin, just missing my throat. I tried not to wince. No luck with that.

“Gregor is important man in organization.”

“Why tell me?”

“He was not good man—important, not good. But I do not concern myself with such things. I am businessman now. It is, how you say, good for business, good for businessman.”

Sergei was twenty-one and I was nineteen when I first encountered him outside of a bar in Bochum, a large industrial city in the German Ruhr. It was a place frequented by former members of the German SS and a host of other types bent on less-than-good citizenship.

The mission wasn’t supposed to be dangerous. Go have a beer or two and keep my ears open. I spoke German like a native, so it should have been simple. There was nothing Amerikanisch about me. Haircut, clothes, shoes, money—all German. I had passed easily before. The one thing I wasn’t counting on was my photograph in a Stasi dossier called up from a dusty East German archive.

Sergei taught me that danger is a relative concept. I was there to listen, gather information. So was he. We were both after the same information but for different reasons. Well, maybe not so different now that I look back. But while he’d read my dossier, the US Army hadn’t reciprocated. Seems the Soviets knew more about us than we knew about ourselves. That’s dangerous, too dangerous for a still wet behind the ears intelligence agent.

Long story short, you can’t fool everyone. Two hours and two drinks later, I was running for my life with a nasty gash in my right thigh from a round from a nine millimeter Makarov. The bullet had only grazed me. It hurt, but the pain was tolerable. Then again, maybe it wasn’t tolerable. Maybe it was the adrenaline rushing through my body that just made me believe it was tolerable. It was the last time I went on a mission without a weapon, but it wouldn’t be the last time I had a run-in with Sergei. Now, like me, Sergei was an old spy with something other than Mother Russia on his mind.

After a stint with the 101 Airborne Division in Vietnam and leaving with enough metal in my body to set off a metal detector seven feet away, I left the Army and headed off to college. Afterward, I got a gig with the CIA through a friend and former teammate in Vietnam, Daniel Bornaire. We called him Zippo, Zip for short.

After Nam, Danny joined the CIA and was involved in setting up front groups for clandestine operations. The European Quality Trade Union, or EQTU, was one of those groups. Danny brought me onboard. Officially I was a trade rep. Unofficially I was a spy. I worked for the EQTU until my cover was blown by a chance meeting with Sergei in the summer of 1988 at the Cologne Trade Fair. After that, no matter where the Agency sent me, Sergei was there waiting.

After 9/11, things changed at the Company. Danny was lured away by the Department of Homeland Security and asked to set up the Agency’s fledging antiterrorism counterintelligence unit. I left the Company and turned my investigative talents to the NYPD. We lost touch after that, and the intelligence stuff faded from my everyday consciousness.

The NYPD was a good gig. I could sleep at night—not always but most nights. At least people I didn’t know weren’t trying to kill me while I slept, not like now.

Think, Jacob. Do something. Anything, just do something. The words hammered in my head. I didn’t know what Sergei was up to but didn’t doubt that whatever his current motivation, he was as dedicated and ruthless as ever. Knowing that didn’t help, but it made me wonder what I was in for. All I knew was that it wasn’t for some minor slight. The Russian mob doesn’t bother with minor slights. If they want you dead, they kill you. Simple, clean, efficient. Ditto for Russia’s new KGB, the Federal Security Service or FSB. I wasn’t dead—not yet, anyway. So either Sergei was working for the FSB, or the Russian mob had something special planned for me. Either way, I wasn’t looking forward to what he had in mind.

“We talk later.” Another swift kick in my gut reminded me of my place in the world as if I needed reminding. Sergei backed out of the room, no doubt savoring the spectacle of his adversary handcuffed to a pipe on a cold steel floor with blood...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.2.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-10: 1-948282-59-3 / 1948282593
• ISBN-13: 978-1-948282-59-8 / 9781948282598