A Hostile State by Adrian Magson (best finance books of all time txt) 📕

and Dalkin’s financial records and phone accounts. Ledhoffen has a business account at another bank which shows an input of two cash transfers totalling eighty thousand dollars.’

Callahan whistled. ‘Do you know where from?’

‘We do, sort of. One was for fifty grand from an offshore account – but that’s all we do know. It’s a dead end so far and I don’t hold out much hope of going further. My guess is the source is Russian. But the remaining thirty grand came from her favourite cousin, one Bradley Dalkin.’

Callahan was surprised. ‘That’s clumsy.’ Moving too much money around was a risky business, with banks liable to report unusual amounts; some getting nervous at anything more than ten thousand dollars. Maybe Dalkin and cousin Carly were getting carried away with themselves.

Warner agreed. ‘They’re amateurs, that’s why. I asked around the industry but not all banks worry too much about the numbers. We also took a long, hard look at the phone accounts for Ledhoffen and Desayeva. I figured there might be a connection we could follow along that line to see if the money might have Desayeva’s fingerprints on it. I figured it was a long shot and it was. No fingerprints … at least not there.’

‘And?’

‘We think Ledhoffen got careless or maybe too clever for her own good. Checking her phone we found a single text message from her to Desayeva in the last twenty-four hours. I figured you might have an idea what it means.’ He touched the keys and the screen showed three words.

Callahan’s brain fizzed. He recognized them immediately. They were the three-word code location for Portman in the marshland near Beauvais in France.

There it was: the direct link they were after. Carly Ledhoffen had sent Valentina Desayeva, aka Agent Seraphim, Portman’s precise location. And if that followed the same path as previously, the Russians would jump on it. He checked his watch. He hadn’t heard from Portman, which wasn’t good.

‘Can I use your phone?’ he asked. ‘It’s important.’

Warner nodded. ‘I thought it might be. Go ahead.’

Callahan dialled Portman’s number. It rang. And rang. He cut the connection. Portman either hadn’t got his phone with him or wasn’t in a position to take the call. Neither was potentially great news but he had to believe Portman had the situation under control.

‘Problem?’ Warner asked.

‘I’m not sure. I hope not.’

Warner looked concerned. ‘I know what those words mean, by the way. It’s a locator reference, right? Ledhoffen was telling the Russians where your man is located.’

Callahan felt guilty for assuming Warner wouldn’t realize the significance of the words. ‘That’s right.’ He was about to thank Warner for his work when the FBI man said, ‘We found something else.’

‘Christ,’ said Callahan. ‘Better than this?’

‘Potentially. We figured there had to have been other calls to Ledhoffen or Desayeva which we hadn’t picked up first time round. When we did another trawl we hit on a series of brief calls made to Desayeva’s landline. Each originated from five different public pay phones here in DC. They were single calls lasting no more than a minute or so.’ He smiled like a magician about to produce a rabbit. ‘The kind of calls confirming information with no idle chit-chat … or maybe complaining at being cut out of a deal. All five phones are located less than three blocks from Bradley Dalkin’s apartment in Rockville.’

‘Shazam,’ exclaimed David Andrews softly, and blushed when the two older men looked at him. ‘Sorry.’

‘Shazam’s good,’ Callahan said, and looked at Warner. ‘What do you mean cut out?’

‘First of all it’s hard to prove it was Dalkin calling unless we can pull up CCTV footage of him at those five locations. If we can tie in the time of the calls and his presence, then yes, shazam’s a great word. We’ll lean on him a little harder to find out why he was calling.’

Callahan looked at him. ‘You’re already talking to him?’

‘Sorry – didn’t I tell you? My bad. We decided to bring him in for a little heart-to-heart – a little preliminary dust-up. He’s scared shitless, to use common parlance, or what my young partner, Agent Cahill, calls a weasel scumbag. He’s already intimated that it might have been him finding your man’s code name – Watchman, I believe? – from some papers in his possession, although he hasn’t yet coughed to passing it on.’ When Callahan nodded he continued, ‘And he might have contacted Ledhoffen to tap her for a loan.’

‘A loan?’

‘Yes. He did it a while back. It seems she refused and told him she was nearly broke, too, so no go. That’s when we think he came up with the idea of selling the information about Watchman to a third party.’

‘Desayeva.’

‘Her. And that’s where he got all bitter and twisted because he let slip to us that when he mentioned her name to Ledhoffen, she told him she knew Desayeva very well. Eventually Ledhoffen began dealing with Desayeva direct and cut her country cousin out. That might explain the different payments exchanged, where Dalkin got forty-five grand and Ledhoffen nearly double that. She arranged her own sweet deal with probably more to come – and I’m guessing Dalkin knows that.’ Warner smiled. ‘Spies, huh? It seems you can’t even trust your own family not to screw you these days.’

As they walked back to the exit, Warner observed, ‘I guess it’s not going to be a bundle of laughs in Langley or the State Department when Ledhoffen and Desayeva’s names go public.’

‘Serves them right,’ Callahan muttered, referring to the State Department. He was remembering that, among others, Walter Broderick had been one of the Russian’s main champions for using her as a source. It would have been quite a career-booster for a man on the State Department ladder to have an inside source on all things Russian.

But this bit of news, when it hit the headlines, was going to hit him right where it hurt.

FORTY-SEVEN

Moscow

Two vans stopped outside Building No 3 on the corner of Grizodubovoy