Read Spy Catcher: The J.J. McCall Novels (Books 1-3) (The FBI Espionage Series) for Free Online Page A

hours.”
    Jake swallowed hard, bit a hunk out of his burger. Anticipating the trouble ahead, he braced himself for a long afternoon. “When all hell breaks loose,” he mumbled to himself, “only the devil survives.”
    Moments later, Plotnikov, dressed in a black suit cloaked beneath a cliché trench coat, stepped outside the embassy doors as scheduled.
    Jake exhaled. The op should go down as planned. What could go wrong? A second later he was sorry he asked.
    His heart thumped, he grabbed the radio. Fuck! “Houston, we have a problem.”
    •  •  •
     
    Maps of the Washington, D.C. area poked with colored thumbtacks adorned the walls in J.J.’s and Tony’s tight compartment inside the vault. At a small round table, they scanned through each file, frantically flipping pages to ensure Jack would find no information that could damage their cases. And there were only three files for Russian intelligence officers operating in Washington that they needed to be concerned about, the most important of which belonged to Karat.
    Documents relating to Aleksey Dmitriyev, a counterintelligence officer linked to Karat since the day he arrived, must also be scrubbed. If any FD-302s mentioning him and Karat (as Plotnikov) didn’t reflect the information from the fake file, the jig was up. The file of Aleksandr Mikhaylov was last. The lookouts had spotted him in the company of both Dmitriyev and Plotnikov on multiple occasions. J.J. had been tailing him since he’d stepped on U.S. soil. She didn’t know if any pertinent information existed, but she’d scrub the file just in case.
    Call it a hunch. Perhaps an intuition. But Mikhaylov made her skin crawl. He ran the most insidious and evasive cadre of Russian spies—illegals. They assumed the identities of American citizens to gain access to classified information. Almost impossible to catch because the Bureau had little success in identifying them until the 2010 New York bust.
    “Tony, I haven’t seen the most recent volume of Karat’s file. You don’t have it do you?” J.J. asked.
    “No,” he said as he checked through his stack. “It’s not in my stuff. Maybe we left back in the breakout room.”
    “Hmmm. Maybe. I’m gonna check as soon as we get out of here.”
    They studied each case file, lookout log, surveillance report, and photo and decided to tuck the real files inside the jacket folders of long dead sources. As J.J. placed her hand on Plotnikov’s photo and prepared to stash it away, she recollected the moment she dug the hole into her present predicament, her promises to Viktor. Promises she wished she hadn’t made. Promises she wished didn’t have to keep.

 
    Chapter 4
    Two Years Ago…
     
    B efore Polyakov’s hand arrived at Moscow station, there was ICE Phantom’s second victim and J.J.’s second source—Kostya Belikov. He disappeared, vanished like billowing smoke in the night air. J.J. slept for what felt to her like five minutes a day in the following months. She was consumed to the point of obsession, determined to identify a replacement asset. She needed someone who could not only provide information on Belikov’s fate, but help her identify the FBI scourge who had all but delivered the fatal bullet to his head. When she wasn’t thinking and planning, she drank. Not guzzles, but little sips, every couple of hours, every day.
    Her barely conscious hours were spent at Dulles airport monitoring Russian diplomatic arrivals and departures, hoping to spot a new mark.
    And there he appeared.
    A diminutive schlep of a man in a slightly oversized navy-blue busi-ness suit. His shiny dome and silver-framed spectacles, unimposing and unremarkable, clashed with the more dapper attire of the counterintelli-gence officer accompanying him—Aleksey Dmitriyev, a Second Secretary and fairly high ranking for an intelligence officer..
    Weeks later, J.J. cornered Plotnikov in an empty men’s bathroom at an outlet mall during an embassy-sponsered shopping