Palace of Treason

Informationen zum Autor Jason Matthews is a retired officer of the CIA’s Operations Directorate. Over a thirty-three-year career he served in multiple overseas locations and engaged in clandestine collection of national security intelli­gence! specializing in denied-area operations. Matthews conducted recruitment operations against Soviet–East European! East Asian! Middle Eastern! and Caribbean targets. As Chief in various CIA Stations! he collaborated with foreign partners in counterproliferation and counterterrorism operations. He is the author of Red Sparrow ! Palace of Treason ! and The Kremlin's Candidate . He lives in Southern California. Palace of Treason 1 Captain Dominika Egorova of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR, pulled the hem of her little black dress down as she weaved through the crowds of pedestrians in the red neon, pranging chaos of Boulevard de Clichy in the Pigalle. Her black heels clicked on the Parisian sidewalk as she held her chin up, keeping the gray head of the rabbit in sight ahead of her—solo trailing surveillance on a moving foot target, one of the more difficult skills in offensive streetcraft. Dominika covered him loosely, alternately paralleling on the dividing island in the center of the boulevard and drafting behind the early evening pedestrians to screen her profile. The man stopped to buy a charred kebab skewer—typically pork in this Christian quarter—from a vendor who fanned the charcoal of a small brazier with a folded piece of cardboard, sending an occasional spark into the passing crowd and enveloping the street corner in clouds of smoke fragrant with coriander and chili. Dominika eased back behind a street pole: it was unlikely that the rabbit was using the snack stop as a way to check his six—for the last three days he had shown himself to be oblivious on the street—but she wanted to avoid his noticing her too soon. Plenty of other street creatures already had watched her passing through the crowd—dancer’s legs, regal bust, arc-light-blue eyes—cutting her scent, sniffing for strength or frailty. In two practiced glances, Dominika checked the zoo of faces but did not get that tingle on the back of her neck that meant the start of trouble. The rabbit, a Persian, finished tearing the strips of meat with his teeth and tossed the short skewer into the gutter. Apparently this Shia Muslim had no compunctions about eating pork—or slathering his face between the legs of hookers, for that matter. He started moving again, Dominika keeping pace. An unshaven and swarthy young man left his friends leaning against the steam-weeping window of a noodle shop, slid in beside Dominika, and put an arm around her shoulder. “Je bande pour toi,” he said in the crooked French of the Maghreb—he had a hard-on for her. Jesus. She had no time for this, and felt the smoldering surge in her stomach running into her arms. No. Become ice. She shook his arm off, pushed his face away, and kept walking. “Va voir ailleurs si j’y suis”—go somewhere else, see if I’m there—she said over her shoulder. The young man stopped short, made an obscene gesture, and spat on the sidewalk. Dominika reacquired the Persian’s gray head just as the man entered La Diva, passing through the scrolling lights framing the dance hall’s entrance. She drifted toward the door, noted the heavy velvet curtain, and gave him a beat to get inside, this diminutive man who held the nuclear secrets of the Islamic Republic of Iran in his head. He was her prey, a human intelligence target. Dominika ran the edge of her will rasping across the whetstone of her mind. It was to be a hostile recruitment attempt, an ambush, coercive, a cold pitch, and she thought she had an even chance to flip him in the next half hour. Tonight Dominika wore her brown hair down arou...

Product details

• Authors: Jason Matthews
• Publisher: Pocket Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 30.06.2016
• EAN: 9781501135071
• ISBN: 978-1-5011-3507-1
• Dimensions: 105 mm x 190 mm x 31 mm
• Series: Red Sparrow Trilogy; Red Sparrow Trilogy
• Subject: Fiction > Suspense > Crime fiction, thrillers, espionage