Death of a Spy
Authors: Dan Mayland
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Spies & Politics, #Espionage, #Political, #Terrorism, #Thrillers
ALSO BY DAN MAYLAND
The Colonel’s Mistake
The Leveling
Spy for Hire
DEATH OF A SPY
A MARK SAVA THRILLER
DAN MAYLAND
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2014 by Dan Mayland.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
All maps by XNR Productions
Published by Richard Curtis Associates, Inc.
New York, New York
ISBN-13: 978-0692287613
ISBN-10: 0692287612
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014915980
Cover design by
the
BookDesigners
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Author’s Note
At danmayland.com, you’ll find extras that might be helpful or interesting to have when reading
Death of a Spy
or other novels in the Mark Sava series—maps that may be downloaded or printed, my own photos of places featured in the novels, lists of characters, an annotated bibliography, and a glossary.
DM
If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
—From the poem “In Flanders Fields,”
by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae
Part One
1
Tbilisi, Georgia
The eldest of all the maids employed by the Dachi, a boutique hotel in charming old Tbilisi, massaged a knot in the small of her back, brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes as she examined her cleaning list, and sighed.
R
OOM
405. L
AWRENCE
P
RENTIS
BOWLAN
.
As far as she was concerned, there were two types of men in this world: those who thought it perfectly acceptable to proposition a sixty-year-old widow as she attempted to clean a hotel room—without receiving any encouragement that their affections would be welcomed!—and those who didn’t. Mr. Bowlan, she feared, was one of the former.
Standing with her cleaning cart outside of room 405, she could hear that the television was still on inside the room. She sighed again.
Mr. Bowlan had spent a night at the Dachi the week before, and had been in his room then too when she’d come to clean it. When she’d bent down to collect the
two
empty wine bottles he’d placed by the garbage bin, she recalled how his eyes had lingered on her for longer than they should have. Ten years ago, she might have been flattered; now, it just caused her to consider that the male libido was a particularly tiresome evolutionary trait.
It was one in the afternoon. She’d already cleaned all the other rooms on her list. Steeling herself to the task at hand—he hadn’t actually propositioned her the last time, he probably wouldn’t now—she knocked three times.
“Housekeeping,” she called out, in heavily accented English.
While waiting for a response, she glanced in her cleaning cart and confirmed that she had a second canister of air freshener. Last time she’d needed to use extra because Bowlan’s room had smelled faintly of cigarette smoke, despite the fact that smoking was prohibited throughout the hotel.
No one answered, so she gave two more sharp raps. An electronic key card hung from a loop on her apron; after waiting a moment, she inserted it into the lock.
“Housekeeping,” she called again as the lock disengaged.
The first thing she noticed upon stepping into the room was not the smell of smoke, but rather...what
was
that smell?
Moments later she saw him. Startled, she jumped back a step, but she didn’t scream, at least not in that initial pulse-quickening moment of discovery. She’d been cleaning hotel rooms for the better part of twenty years. It wasn’t the first time she’d walked in to find a guest passed out drunk on the floor.
He lay in a fetal heap, facing away from her. She hoped, upon waking, he’d at least have the decency to clean up the urine that was puddled on the tile floor around him. That was what she’d smelled.
Disgusting.
A man his age—Mr. Bowlan had to be near eighty—should know better.
She shook her head and frowned in disapproval as she stepped closer to investigate. Standing right over him, she still didn’t scream, even when she perceived that Mr. Bowlan was strangely still, and that his left hand was infused with a strange purplish tint, and that his head appeared to be twisted at an unnatural angle. Maids sometimes did find dead guests. Not often, but it happened. One had to be prepared.
As she stepped around Mr. Bowlan, she gripped the small silver cross that hung from her neck. And that was when she saw his face.
The deathly pale, wide-with-terror eyes would have been enough, but it was the mouth—lips pulled back tight, yellow skeleton-like teeth locked in a cry of pain—that would give her nightmares for years to come.
She screamed.