The Old Sleeper by Tom Moates

Author:Tom Moates [Moates, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spinning Sevens Press
Published: 2020-02-25T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 27

Room 201, Lotte Hotel

Moscow, Russia

Noon

Gene sat in the splendor of his hotel suite in a cushy hair. The place was extravagant to the extreme, even boasting a baby grand piano in one of the spacious rooms. The South Koreans, who owned this hotel chain, obviously did luxury to a point that made him somewhat uncomfortable, and he longed for the rustic setting of his ranch house.

He had turned the chair so that it faced away from a large window—the amazing panorama it displayed was too distracting. The view overlooked the modern Arbat District of Moscow, a scene that seemed both familiar to him, with the grand Novinskiy Boulevard running past the hotel and the equally broad Moskva River flowing in parallel just past it, and oddly unfamiliar, with the colorful, cheerful, free moving busyness of a city he remembered as gray, lifeless, and decaying. The ornate five-star furnishings everywhere in the suite, from the intricately patterned carpet to the vaulted ceilings with fancy trim, also were distracting to him, but not as bad as looking out of that window.

Throughout the first half of his career, Gene could not have imagined that the Cold War world would cease to exist in his lifetime, and certainly not have unraveled so soon after Reagan’s presidency. Being in Moscow, and especially making contact with Anna again, had him a bit reflective.

Overall, it was pleasant for him to sit in a modern Moscow and think that the work he had done had helped secure the increased freedoms the Russian people now enjoyed. Of course, no “real” Russian would agree with his perspective, but he really did not care about anyone else’s acknowledgement of his work over the years. Just seeing the Arbat area of the city transformed into a truly thriving financial, shopping, and artistic district was proof enough of improvement over that dismal past for him.

“Okay,” Gene thought. “Enough of that.”

He had to shift mental gears now. His own country was at risk. He was in Moscow for a reason and he needed to concentrate.

Gene looked more closely at the papers Jeb had handed off to him at the airfield back in Arizona. The sheets showed long columns of seemingly random numbers in groups of five digits that had been broadcast recently by the English Man.

Flipping through the pages to see if anything might jump out at him—even though experience had taught him that with transcriptions of numbers station numbers, nothing ever did—Gene again rehashed what he knew of the current situation.

The attack on D.C. clearly indicated that active operations were afoot and somebody was not afraid to pull the trigger. People had died. A section of Interstate 395 and other roads were now a massive hole in the ground, and all this was in sight of the Pentagon. Not to mention that attacking Washington D.C. was an unquestionable act of war certain to provoke no small retaliation. Of course, the list of people who would like to do this was long, but

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.