Read Online In the Name of a Killer by Brian Freemantle - Free Book Online Page B

assured that all necessary steps were being taken by the Russian authorities to arrest the killer: the full resources of American criminal investigation agencies were being offered to Moscow. In response to several questions, Burden said he might consider going to the Russian capital himself. Every television appearance was accompanied by still photographs of Ann Harris, some taken with Burden. They were all good reproductions, showing a smiling, typically American girl with brace-sculpted teeth and flowing black hair. Which was how Burden wanted people to think of her, so he said nothing about the shorn hair.
    The Ann Harris murder and Walter Burden’s interview remained the lead item through the day on Cable News Network, so William Cowley saw it several times on his office set in the FBI headquarters building. The anger at not already having been informed, which he considered he should have been as a courtesy at least, began and was just as quickly curbed. To have been informed would have been a courtesy, because his responsibility for Russian affairs was officially restricted to counter-espionage within the United States. And it was certainly not a courtesy he could have expected from the FBI agent stationed in Moscow, for altogether personal reasons.
    The old memories were inevitable, of course. He wished they hadn’t been. As he wished so much else, too late.
    William Cowley accepted that he was probably at the pinnacle of his professional career. Promotion beyond his existing position, as director of the Russian internal desk, was invariably political: he was, in fact, lucky to have achieved this much, after the carelessness. He certainly wasn’t careless any more: didn’t really concede he had been dangerously negligent in the past. He’d never put the job at risk. And now he was unquestionably the copy-book careerist in every way: utterly dedicated, first to arrive, last to leave, FBI personified. Which, he assured himself again, was how he’d always been, professionally. Maybe that was how the personal carelessness had arisen, from the confidence of a natural-born policeman who’d been additionally lucky with the breaks: achieving G–15 grade at the age of forty, eight highest-category commendations on his personal sheet, the most exemplary for jointly controlling with an Italian prosecutor the destruction of a Mafia-backed heroin operation when he had been attached to the embassy in Rome.
    Beneficial professionally but disastrous personally, Cowley decided, coming to the bitterest reflection of all. The posting to London had been a direct result of the Rome success: London where the FBI maintained a four-man office and where one of the agents had been Barry Andrews, finger-snapping, smart-as-a-tack, good old Barry, everybody’s buddy. Cowley had regarded the man as his best friend, never suspecting he was more particularly Pauline’s friend. The bitterness was brief, because after so long he’d become objective, the most sensible acceptance of all that none of it had been Pauline’s fault. Not really Barry Andrews’s, either. If the break-up hadn’t happened in London it would have occurred elsewhere: he was neglecting her completely by then, the drinking at its worst, the womanizing open and blatant. Everything had been his fault.
    So now he had his career and his title on the door and was as lonely as hell and by the Sod’s Law of fate had the permanent mockery of Barry Andrews in the same department although not in the same division.
    Cowley made a conscious effort to slough off the reminiscence and was reaching forward for the stop button to shut off a repeat of the Burden television interview when the telephone rang.
    ‘The Director wants you,’ said Ross’s personal assistant. ‘Now.’
    Petr Yezhov walked almost every night, a regular route and late, when there weren’t many people about. There’d always been people crowded around, in the hospitals. To walk, without people, meant he was