The Other Woman by Daniel Silva EPUB & PDF – eBook Details
- Author: Daniel Silva
- Genre: Espionage Thrillers, Women’s Adventure Fiction, Suspense Action Fiction
- Publish Date: 17 July 2018
- Size: 5 MB
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Avail for Download
- Price: Free
Budapest, Hungary
None of it would have come to pass—not the desperate quest
for the traitor, not the strained alliances nor the needless deaths
—were it not for poor Heathcliff. He was their tragic figure,
their broken promise. In the end, he would prove to be yet
another feather in Gabriel’s cap. That said, Gabriel would have
preferred that Heathcliff were still on his side of the ledger.
Assets like Heathcliff did not come along every day,
sometimes only once in a career, rarely twice. Such was the
nature of espionage, Gabriel would lament. Such was life
itself.
It was not his true name, Heathcliff; it had been generated at
random, or so his handlers claimed, by computer. The program
deliberately chose a code name that bore no resemblance to
the asset’s real name, nationality, or line of work. In this
regard, it had succeeded. The man to whom Heathcliff’s name
had been attached was neither a foundling nor a hopeless
romantic. Nor was he bitter or vengeful or violent in nature. In
truth, he had nothing in common with Brontë’s Heathcliff
other than his dark complexion, for his mother was from the
former Soviet republic of Georgia. The same republic, she was
proud to point out, as Comrade Stalin, whose portrait still
hung in the sitting room of her Moscow apartment.
Heathcliff spoke and read English fluently, however, and
was fond of the Victorian novel. In fact, he had flirted with the
idea of studying English literature before coming to his senses
and enrolling at the Moscow Institute for Foreign Languages,
regarded as the second-most prestigious university in the
Soviet Union. His faculty adviser was a talent-spotter for the
SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service, and upon graduation
Heathcliff was invited to enter the SVR’s academy. His
mother, drunk with joy, placed flowers and fresh fruit at the
foot of Comrade Stalin’s portrait. “He is watching you,” she
said. “One day you will be a man to be reckoned with. A man
to be feared.” In his mother’s eyes, there was no finer thing for
a man to be.
It was the ambition of most cadets to serve abroad in a
rezidentura, an SVR station, where they would recruit and run
enemy spies. It took a certain type of officer to perform such
work. He had to be brash, confident, talkative, quick on his
feet, a natural seducer. Heathcliff, unfortunately, was blessed
with none of these qualities. Nor did he possess the physical
attributes required for some of the SVR’s more unsavory tasks.
What he had was a facility for languages—he spoke fluent
German and Dutch as well as English—and a memory that
even by the SVR’s high standards was deemed to be
exceptional. He was given a choice, a rarity in the hierarchical
world of the SVR. He could work at Moscow Center as a
translator or serve in the field as a courier. He chose the latter,
thus sealing his fate.
It was not glamorous work, but vital. With his four
languages and a briefcase full of false passports, he roamed the
world in service of the motherland, a clandestine delivery boy,
a secret postman. He cleaned out dead drops, stuffed cash into
safe-deposit boxes, and on occasion even rubbed shoulders
with an actual paid agent of Moscow Center.
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