Patrick McLanahan #15 - Shadow Command by Dale Brown

Author:Dale Brown [Brown, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061751592
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-10-06T01:48:28+00:00

PRESIDENT’S RETREAT, BOLTINO, RUSSIA

A SHORT TIME LATER

They didn’t always meet like this to make love. Both Russian president Leonid Zevitin and minister of foreign affairs Alexandra Hedrov loved classic black-and-white movies from all over the world, Italian food, and rich red wine, so after a long day of work, especially with a long upcoming trip ready to begin, they often stayed after the rest of the staff had been dismissed and shared some time together. They had become lovers not long after they first met at an international banking conference in Switzerland almost ten years earlier, and even as their responsibilities and public visibility increased they still managed to find the time and opportunity to get together.

If either of them was concerned about the whispered rumors of their affair, they showed no sign of it. Only the tabloids and celebrity blogs spoke of it, and those were all but dismissed by most Russians—certainly no one in the Kremlin would ever wag their tongues about such things and about such powerful people in anything louder than a quiet thought. Hedrov was married and was the mother of two grown children, and they long ago learned that their lives, as well as the life of their wife and mother, belonged to the state now, not to themselves.

The president’s dacha was the closest to security and privacy than anything else they could ever expect in the Russian Federation. Unlike the president’s official residence in the Senate Building at the Kremlin, which was rather unassuming and utilitarian, Zevitin’s dacha outside Moscow was modern and stylish, fit for any international business executive. Like the man itself, the place revolved around work and business, but it was hard to discern that at first glance.

After flying in to Boltino to the president’s private airport nearby, visitors were driven to the residence by limousine and escorted through a sweeping grand foyer to the great room and dining room, dominated by three large fireplaces and adorned with sumptuous leather and oak furniture, works of art from all over the world, framed photos of world leaders, and mementos from his many celebrity friends, topped off with a spectacular panoramic view of Pirogovskoje Reservoir outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. Special guests would be invited up the double marble curved staircases to the bedroom suites on the second floor, or down to the large Roman-style baths, indoor pool, thirty-seat high-definition movie theater, and game room on the ground floor. But all that was still only a fraction of the square footage of the place.

A guest being dazzled by the grand view outside the great room would miss the dark, narrow cupola on the right side of the foyer, almost resembling a doorless closet, which had small and unimpressive paintings hanging on the curved walls illuminated by rather dim LED spotlights. But if one stepped into the cupola, he would be instantly but surreptitiously electronically searched by X-ray to locate weapons or listening devices. His facial features would be scanned and the data run

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