finished but Ivan wanted to be by his son’s side. He jogged toward the sound of the crash, his eyes searching for a sign of either hunter or prey.
He saw the moose first, crippled with a spine shot and struggling in vain to drag itself away from its tormentor. The large mammal dwarfed young Aleksandr, and Ivan was afraid that the moose would stomp the youngster or bludgeon him with his palmated spread of antler. But, as he approached, his concern turned to disgust; Aleksandr stood without fear, watching the animal writhe in agony. He was smiling. Ivan ran to the front of the animal to give himself a safe shot and fired a round into the bull’s chest, dropping him to the ground and putting an end to his suffering.
Turning to face his son, Ivan slowly took possession of the Mauser, chilled by the hatred he saw burning in his child’s eyes. That hatred directed toward Ivan for ending the animal’s agony prematurely would haunt the mafia boss for the remainder of his days.
CHAPTER 11
Petersburg Petroleum Company, Saint Petersburg, Russia
GREY HAD BEEN SURPRISED by the location of his office. He knew that Zharkov effectively controlled the regional oil firm, but he wouldn’t have imagined that he would find himself working openly in the headquarters of a publicly traded company. His morning commute was a relatively easy one from his flat near the city’s center. His office was only a few blocks from the Piskaryovka rail station, in an industrial section of town.
Zharkov expected immediate results and Grey delivered. The first order of business was to turn over the names of all the men and women in Zharkov’s organization, many of them residing in the United States, who were known FBI and CIA informants. Each would then be analyzed and evaluated for possible blackmail or the most permanent of solutions as a warning to others.
As he settled into his routine, he found it was strangely similar to his time at Langley. Delivering some quick wins for Zharkov’s organization provided him a little leniency in terms of how he spent his time and resources; his most important project was a personal one.
Feeling dapper in his custom suit, he strode with a newfound confidence that would have shocked his coworkers at the Agency. He used his access card to enter the building and took the elevator to the executive level. As he passed her cubicle outside his office, he bid good day to his administrative assistant, Svetlana, a sturdy and attractive widow a few years his senior. She doted on him in a manner that he hadn’t enjoyed since childhood, taking his coat as he walked by and fetching him tea or coffee without so much as an ask. She would straighten his tie and brush lint from the shoulders of his new suits, doing everything but licking her fingers before fixing his hair.
With no social life or family to distract him, Grey devoted every waking second to his new cause: finding James Reece. His analytical brain examined seemingly endless mountains of information. He scoured the media accounts of Reece’s one-man war that had left a trail of bodies from California to Wyoming, from the southern tip of Florida to the stormy New England coast. From there Reece had vanished, only to reappear in Odessa, Ukraine, where Grey had seen him before the assassination of the former Russian president.
Other than a few media references to the presidential pardon that had been issued the previous fall, James Reece was a ghost. The White House had refused to provide justification for the act, citing “national security concerns,” but the mere existence of that pardon all but proved Reece’s involvement in thwarting the attack on the U.S. president. Save a powerful man’s life and he’ll forget about the few murders you committed along the way.
Having exhausted his media search, Grey shifted his focus to sifting through the dry minutiae that was his specialty. A detailed search of property records led to no surviving family members. Reece was an only child and Grey had arranged his father’s death years earlier. According to an obituary run in the Flagstaff, Arizona, newspaper, his mother had died in a nursing home a few months ago. The only existing property record was for his home in Coronado, and Grey confirmed that Reece was not living there. If he’d purchased a home or a car, Grey would have found it. He’d never registered on any social media platforms and didn’t appear