18 Minutes - A Max Thorne Spy Thriller Prequel Novella: An Assassination Military Suspense Action Adventure Thriller by Ethan Jones

Author:Ethan Jones [Jones, Ethan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Knightsville Books
Published: 2019-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Three weeks later

FSB Headquarters, Lubyanka Building

Downtown Moscow, Russia

Maxim flattened the front of his gray jacket and tightened the knot of his black tie. His hands had begun to tremble, and he tried to steady them by holding onto the black briefcase resting on his lap. His left foot tapped almost involuntarily, and he forced himself to stop it. Maxim drew in a deep breath, but didn’t feel his lungs fill.

He stood up and paced to the end of the hall. He was waiting outside a conference room at one of the corners of the headquarters that he had never wanted to visit. Some people called it “The Dead Wing,” since that’s where careers—and sometimes operatives as well—died, or received grave news. The FSB’s internal inquiry had been completed three days ago. Maxim hadn’t asked around about the results. He knew they weren’t good.

The FSB forensic team ran the DNA analysis, and it was confirmed that one of the bodies burned beyond recognition in the airplane wreckage belonged to Rabinovich. The owners of MoscOil were furious. They’d wanted to interrogate the banker and extract punishment from him, opportunities that Maxim had taken away. Besides, the entire airport cock-up had cost a total of fifty million dollars in damages, not including the lost revenue from downed airplanes, cancelled flights, and the clean-up expenses.

The investigators hadn’t been able to locate the woman. There were no records that she worked or had ever worked for the GRU. Whatever ID she had shown to the AP security team was either a forgery or not a GRU agency card. Maxim wasn’t convinced the investigators had looked hard enough. She had no connections to anyone involved in this matter, and, as far as they were concerned, she was there at the wrong time and at the wrong place. Maxim didn’t believe in such things. There was a reason she was there. But what was it?

The security cameras along the walls of the Jet Solutions building had not provided anything of use. The largest part of the interactions had happened outside the frame of the security cameras’ lenses. And, as expected, not one of the company’s fifty employees, who had been in the building at the time, had seen or heard anything.

Maxim shook his head and returned to his uncomfortable leather chair. He glanced at the puncture holes the stitches had left on his right hand. The left-arm wound and most of the cuts had healed well, and he considered himself very fortunate. If one of the glass shards had severed a muscle, and he had lost the use of a finger—especially the index finger—or the thumb, his career in the FSB would be over.

He sighed and shook his head. My career might be over as it is.

He thought of how long this meeting was going to last and about the visit to Sasha at the hospital. He had fared much worse than Maxim. The bullet had fractured the femur of Sasha’s left leg. The surgeons had been able to reset the bone, and the initial recovery was going well.

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