The Cold Edge Read online

  “That feels much better,” Jake said. “You should give it a try.”

  She moved close to him and placed her hand onto his penis, which almost immediately responded to her touch. “I plan on it. But first. . .”

  Once they had tested out the bed, Anna went in for a shower. Jake picked up the SAT phone and checked the last number dialed. Interesting. Then he did the same with Anna’s cell phone. Not as interesting.

  Knowing Anna would be a while with the shower, the blow drying and the make-up, he took out his own phone and made a call across the pond to an old friend in Washington.

  “Sidewinder Three Eight Four,” Jake said. A pause of silence on the other end. He had only used this call sign a few times in the past few years. Only when he really needed information he could not get anywhere else. And why not? Since he had left the old CIA, the Agency had called on him many times for help. Now it was his turn to get help from them.

  “Lindberg one three three.”

  Jake smiled as the shower continued. He still had time. “Your favorite ex-officer. I take it this is a secure line on your end.”

  “Of course, Jake. What about your end?”

  “Where do you have me located?”

  Hesitation. “What the hell you doing in Brazil?”

  “I’m far from it,” Jake said, smiling. “Tell me everything you know about any Op in Norway.”

  His contact hesitated too long before saying, “You know I can’t talk to you about anything ongoing.”

  “I understand.” More than he was letting on. “Tell me if Colonel Reed is involved.”

  “Jake, you know the rules. What have you gotten yourself involved in this time?”

  How the hell should he play this? He could need their help down the road. Better to come clean. Jake explained what the colonel had hired him to do, and then waited.

  Heavy sigh on the other end, just as the shower stopped. “You’re on Spitsbergen Island right now.” It was a statement. “Colonel Reed was correct. Captain Olson, we believe, either died up there or was taken by the KGB or GRU. Either way, he’s long dead. It happened around the time of the Reagan Gorbachav Summit in Iceland.”

  Jake remembered that now. He thought his old friend had died on a flight to Iceland, where he was supposed to provide intel support.

  “What really happened?” Jake asked. He heard the hair dryer turn on.

  “Jake,” Anna yelled. “I hope you plan on taking me out to the best restaurant in town.”

  Jake turned the phone away from him and yelled back, “Of course.”

  “What was that?” Jake’s contact asked.

  “I have a lady friend.”

  “The Interpol?”

  Shaking his head, Jake guessed the Agency had done a complete background check on Anna. “Yeah.”

  “I’ve seen photos. Very pretty.”

  “Thanks. Now can you tell me what kind of shit I’m stepping into?”

  “I’ll need to do some research and get back with you.”

  He guessed as much. “I leave for some glacier in the morning.” He checked his watch. “I’ll call you in twelve hours.” He flipped his phone shut just as the hair dryer turned off.

  Anna opened the door to the bathroom and looked at Jake in the mirror as she put on mascara, dressed only in a thong and a bra. “Who were you talking to, Jake?”

  Jake shook his head. She had to have the best ears in the business. “Asking for a little help.” He came up behind her and placed his hand on her bare cheek. “I hope you have something to keep these cute buns warm.”

  She wiggled away from him. “Hey you just got that. And you saw me buy the silk long underwear.”

  He leaned against the door frame. “Well, I think I was still a little wasted.”

  She set down the mascara. She rarely used much make up and needed to use none at all. She was a natural beauty. “What did the Agency tell you?”

  “Not much. I have to get back with them in the morning. Ready to eat?”

  “Famished.”

  They headed out. Their hotel, the Radisson, was situated on the edge of Longyearbyen, which wasn’t saying much. The town was a cluster of colorful wooden structures in yellow, red and green. Walking the streets for a few blocks and finding only a pizza joint and a couple of cafes, they decided to return to the restaurant attached to their hotel.

  They had barely sat for a short moment, when Jake had a strong urge for a drink. He needed a drink. No.

  Anna ordered them both a strong cup of coffee, which came in a few minutes. Then they both ordered the salmon.

  “You could have ordered a glass of wine,” Jake told her.

  “That’s not fair. We need to have clear thoughts. Besides, I think I might be getting a beer gut.”

  He laughed. “You have the nicest tummy I’ve ever seen.” And if she wasn’t so hot it would have pissed him off. She could eat damn near anything and not put on a pound. “Did you make a pact with the devil to keep that beautiful figure?”

  “Ha, ha.”

  Jake casually glanced at a picture on the wall, as if admiring the photo of mountains and glaciers, but in reality was looking at the reflection. He pointed at the photo. “Isn’t that a beautiful place,” Jake said to Anna.

  “Yes, I hope we see that tomorrow.”

  Their food came and Jake kept his eyes on the food, Anna, and through the corner of his eye, the man across the room.

  “You all right eating fish?” Anna asked him.

  “You know I love fish.” He smiled, put a piece of salmon in his mouth and mumbled. “We have a friend.”

  She smiled and said, “Are you sure?”

  He held back a laugh. “What do you think?”

  “I think you should know.” She finished her fish and continued, “Let me take a trip to the lady’s room and get a good look. Which one?”

  “Big guy. Dark hair. Your five o’clock.”

  She dabbed her mouth with her napkin, put it down and left. The guy tried his best not to watch her, which was hard for any man, and confirmed to Jake that the guy was watching them. Otherwise he would have checked her out more thoroughly.

  A few minutes later Anna returned. Same result from the man.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “The guy barely looked at you,” Jake said. “And, if I’m not mistaken, you added a little sway to your normal gate.”

  She took a sip of water and said, “Perhaps. But maybe the guy is more interested in you.”

  “I don’t think so. Let’s head upstairs.”

  They paid and left. When they got to their room, Jake quieted Anna with his finger as he moved about the room. “Salmon wasn’t too bad,” he said, searching under the lamp shade. He moved along the curtains, checking inside the edges. “I was really tempted to try the whale or the seal. But I hear they’re both out of season. And I’d hate like hell to have my first whale of the frozen variety.”

  Jake stopped and glanced about the room. Anna looked confused. Settling his gaze on the nightstand, he picked up the small clock radio and smiled. He went to his bag and found a Swiss Army knife; then he opened the radio with a screw driver. Inside, stuck to the small speaker, was what he was looking for. A bug.

  “Let’s see what the weather report says,” Jake said, switching on the radio and cranking up the sound. With the local radio blaring at its highest level, Jake pried the bug loose and brought it to the bathroom, where he flushed it down the toilet. He swept the room for anything else, including going through their bags, until he was satisfied that was the only device. Only then did he turn down the radio.

  “All right,” he said.

  Anna sat on the edge of the bed. “I thought you were being paranoid. Why would someone bug our room? And how did you know it was bugged?”

  “I wasn’t sure until I saw the clock radio had been moved slightly. It had been parallel to the back and side of the table.”

  “Someone placed it while we went to dinner?”

>   “Yes. They had to move it from the other room, which was supposed to be ours.”

  “That’s why you had us move rooms at the last minute?”

  He nodded.

  “Wow. What’s going on?”

  “I didn’t want to be, but I’m back in the game.”

  She put her hand over her face. “I did this.”

  “In the future, when a former friend of mine, a former spook, comes calling, make damn sure you tell me about it immediately. It’s usually not good news.”

  “But you’d always spoken so highly of Colonel Reed,” she pled. “In fact, he’s one of the only people you freely talked about. Why is that?”

  Jake sat on the bed next to her, his eyes glancing to the table at the SAT phone, which was still charging. He had already opened the battery compartment to check for bugs, but there was something else.

  “Anna, there’s a reason for that. Half the people I’ve worked with are either retired or dead. The other half are divided into the covert realm or at the headquarters. I can’t mention those.”

  “I understand. But what I don’t understand is why the colonel would put you in danger like this. I thought he was your friend.”

  “He is. He knows that I know that any time he would ask me for a favor, it could involve something nefarious and dangerous.” Jake got up and picked up the SAT phone from the table, checking the call record again. Even though he had cleared it, she didn’t know that. “Why did you call Interpol headquarters?”

  Her eyes gave away her embarrassment. “I work for them,” she said. “I needed to extend my vacation for a week.”

  Jake was going to hate himself for this, but he plowed forward. “That’s why you’d call your Vienna office.”

  She rose to her feet. “You bastard. You’ve been checking up on me.” Her fists were clenched at her side.

  He set the SAT phone down and came to her, grasping each of her wrists and moving his face along the side of hers. “I’m sorry. I checked the phone while you were taking a shower, seeing if Colonel Reed had left any numbers in there. I saw the number to your headquarters had been made while I was taking my shower, and deleted the record. Good thing, because whoever planted that bug would have checked the call record and known you work for Interpol.”

  Her arms went limp and she leaned into Jake. “I’m such an idiot. But I still don’t understand why this is happening. Isn’t it a simple search for an old friend?”

  “It’s never that easy, Anna. The colonel knew I was good friends with Captain Olson. I couldn’t refuse. At least not from Oslo. From the comfort of Vienna, maybe. He must have known I had been down and out lately, and figured I would jump at an opportunity. Especially if it involved you.”

  He let her hands go and she wrapped them around his back, pulling him tighter to her. “He used me.”

  “Yeah. And he did a damn good job. Just like he was trained. Now you need to tell me anything else the colonel might have told you, and what your bosses at Interpol know about this whole thing.”

  She sat back onto the bed and Jake followed her down.

  “Vienna knows nothing,” she started. “Just think I’m on an extended vacation. But I was required to contact Lyon after any contact with a foreign intelligence officer. You know that. They told me something was up, but they weren’t sure what at this time. Told me to keep checking in while they looked into it.”

  “You trust them?”

  “Of course.”

  Jake thought about it. Maybe this could work to their advantage. Pull info from them and the Agency and see how far off each of them is to the truth.

  “All right,” Jake said. “But from now on let’s be open with our contacts and agree on how much to feed them. We don’t give them shit unless they give us something first.”

  She nodded and then kissed him.

  “Let’s hit the sack. Have a feeling tomorrow will be a long day.”

  3

  Edinburgh, Scotland

  Rain came down in a steady flow, the darkness of midnight broken by the lights of the Edinburgh Castle at the top of the hill at the end of the Royal Mile. A few blocks down from the castle in the Old Town and two blocks down a side street off the Royal Mile, a lone figure walked at a slow clip. He was dressed in dark clothes from top to bottom, no umbrella. When he came upon the pub with the photo of Robert Burns hanging out from the front entrance, he hesitated before stepping inside.

  Jimmy McLean, although an officer with British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, was working undercover as an agent with the MI5 Security Service, looking into domestic terrorism.

  At this hour the place was still fairly crowded, and that bothered him. He should have never agreed to meet here at this time. Knew better, that was for sure.

  There he was in the corner booth. The little man from Aberdeen. His stubby legs swung with the traditional Scottish music a foot from the floor. Gary Dixon had been picked up by MI5 so many times, he damn near had his own coffee mug in the Edinburgh office. They had never stuck him with anything, though, because he was far more valuable on the street. He collected information like a pack rat and sold it to the highest bidder. All MI5 had was leverage to avoid prosecution, and the fear that they would throw the man into a cell with a large man wanting an ass buddy.

  Removing his coat, he hung it from a hook at the end of the booth before taking a seat across from his contact.

  “You’re ten minutes late,” his contact said, his voice a combination of effeminate and Lilliputian.

  “Don’t get short with me.”

  “Hey, no need to start in with the short jokes.”

  “Right. I guess you’d be a little concerned with that.” He placed heavy emphasis on the word ‘little.’

  “Ha, ha.” He picked up his pint of Guinness with both stubby hands and downed the last of it, placing the glass down hard onto the thick wooden table. “Why don’t you get me another one of these.”

  McLean got the attention of the pretty, slim young bartender with multiple piercings, her tight stomach exposed, showed her two fingers and got a nod in return.

  “What you got for me?” McLean asked the little guy.

  “Right to the damn point,” Dixon said. “Jesus, don’t they teach you guys any people skills?”

  The two pints of Guinness showed up on the table and McLean handed the young woman cash and a heavy tip. She smiled and left them alone.

  “I take that back,” Dixon said. “Hot girls still get your attention.” He took a sip of beer and ended up with foam on his thick mustache, which he licked off with his enormous tongue. He caught McLean staring. “It’s not the only thing big on me. And the ladies like both.”

  “You were saying?” This was getting old.

  “All right, all right.” The little guy tried to lean across the table toward McLean, but he couldn’t get any leverage to do so. “I was home for a week and heard of something going down across the pond.”

  “America?”

  He shifted his thick head and said, “Other direction.”

  “Scandinavia?”

  “Norway. But off the coast on some island.”

  McLean thought for a moment, but didn’t know what to think. What of importance could possibly come from a Norwegian island. They had huge oil production facilities along the coast. Maybe someone was planning on hitting those. That would be a huge environmental disaster, and could shift the oil wealth equation.

  “What’s going on? What have you actually heard?” McLean pressed the guy.

  “All I can say is it’s something big. What’s that worth to you?”

  “Without details, not a helluva lot,” McLean said. “Who told you, and under what circumstances.”

  The little man’s eyes shifted around the room. “Listen, if I start giving away names at this point, my life will be shorter than my legs.”

  McLean held back a snicker. “Right. But I need more details. Get me more and you get another get out of jail free card. Other
wise, we picked up this massive man recently. . .could have been a basketball player. I understand he’s getting lonely. Needs a friend.”

  “Hey, hey,” the little man protested. “I came to you, remember. Soon as I heard something might be going down.”

  “Then take me to your contact,” McLean said.

  “No can do. They’ll see MI5 coming a mile away.”

  McLean considered his options, taking a long drink from his beer. He didn’t have many. He shifted in his chair and reached for his jacket.

  “Wait a minute,” Dixon said. “What about a little help.”

  Moving back to the center of the booth, McLean said, “You want money for telling me you might have something to tell me? That’s incredible.” But he also expected the man would ask for it, so he was ready. He reached into his pants pocket and retrieved a debit card, then slid it across the table at the man, who quickly scooped it up with his stubby fingers and looked it over front and back.

  “Who the hell is Amus McCloud?”

  “That would be you. That’s how you get paid from now on. There’s fifty Quid on it now. You give me what I want and there’ll be much more.” He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and handed it to the man. “Sign it.”

  “Fifty Quid. That isn’t much. How do you sign Amus? Let me practice a couple of times.” He scribbled on his coaster a couple times and then made it official on the debit card. Then he put the card into his wallet, which was so stuffed it was hard for him to find a spot for another card. “What if someone asks for additional I.D.?”

  “Right.” McLean was also waiting for this. “Here.” He handed the man a new driver’s license. “Sign this also.”

  “Where’d you get the photo? Wait a minute. . .that was my last booking shot.”

  “Right. Well, we had to Photoshop it a little.”

  Then he looked more closely. “Hey, I’m not three six. I’m three seven, maybe eight on a good day.”

  “Close enough.” McLean sucked down most of his beer, slid to the end, and got out now, putting his long jacket over his shoulders. Then he leaned closer to Dixon and said, “I want a call by noon tomorrow.” He left without waiting for a protest.