FBI Agent J.J. McCall, a born lie detector, and her co-case agent Tony Donato have a week to catch an FBI traitor or they could become the primary suspects in their own investigation.
Her Family Was Vexed With a Generational Curse. Now for Lie Detecting FBI Spy Catcher J.J. McCall, the Truth is in The Seven Year Itch.
When turncoats betray America’s human intelligence assets, there is no greater failure than the loss of life—and no one knows that better than FBI Special Agent J.J. McCall, a born lie detector who recruits foreign spies to catch American traitors. She and co-case agent Tony Donato have lost two of their most critical Russian sources in the past two years, and they may lose another in just a few short days if they don’t catch him. The ICE PHANTOM. Code name for a near-dead investigation initiated to identify a rumored insider spy more insidious and elusive than Ames and Hanssen combined. After a decade of fruitless investigations, the Intelligence Community fears it might be chasing ghosts—but J.J. and Tony suspect he might be burrowed deep inside FBI counterintelligence. And his body count is going up.
Drawn into an unsanctioned mole hunt, J.J. and Tony have a week to catch ICE PHANTOM, save a key source’s life—and their own. While J.J.’s lie detecting ability helps them narrow down the list of suspects, the ultimate lie, the one she’s been telling herself for too many years, may help the ICE PHANTOM defect to Moscow and get away with the murder of the man she cannot live without.
Skye's debut FBI Series, filled with mystery, espionage, romance, and suspense, will keep you burning through the pages until J.J. catches the very last spy.
Excerpt
Mikhail Polyakov was murdered in a Solntsevskaya-owned cottage located in Lobnya, a small village just outside Moscow. It was a Russian organized crime death chamber. A hulking Mafioso known only as Maskov hovered over his mangled corpse. The ax in his massive hand dripped with the blood of a traitor. He would not live to betray his country another day. In the safe house basement, he lay on the concrete floor. A pool of crimson surrounded him, and his flesh had been gashed and hacked beyond visual recognition; death’s stench thickened the air. In order to serve its only noble purpose, his right hand, which bore a crescent-shaped birthmark, was left untouched.
A sliver of light shone through an undersized window revealing the wicked grin that parted the executioner’s cigarette blackened lips. Colonel Anatoliy Golikov. A Russian intelligence officer, he was a member of a cadre of Russian Foreign Intelligence Service—SVR officers—from the First Department. His professional mission had been recruiting people who sold U.S. secrets, but his personal mission was to kill anyone who betrayed the Motherland.
His skinny eyes, slight frame, and borderline gaunt face colored him weak, but his iron-fisted will and suffocating persona made him a man few crossed. Even fewer had lived to brag about it if they had. The son of a former hardline KGB General who executed Russians spying for the West, he’d filled his father’s sadistic shoes well. Left nothing in his wake except a trail of dead American sins against Russia.
Golikov compelled his two most reliable henchmen to observe the murder of their comrade. The gruesome killing would serve as a message to them and make them more effective purveyors of the one they’d soon deliver to their colleagues posted to Russian Embassies in the United States—spy for the Americans and your life will come to an abrupt and grim end.
Golikov circled the body at a measured pace, rage ebbing beneath his nerveless exterior. He teetered on the edge of insanity. “We should feed him to the sharks, Maskov. A fitting end for traitorous pig, wouldn’t you say?”
Maskov nodded as Golikov eyed his cohorts, his unnerving intensity intended to strike fear and warn. “Comrade Vasiliy, your passports are up-to-date, yes?”
Vasiliy nodded. “Mine and that of Comrade Igor.” Of the SVR coun-terintelligence officers working under Golikov, he’d achieved the higher rank—Captain.
“Good. Both of you are traveling to Washington. The Center has au-thorized funding for two temporary assignments and they have given me the authority to recall Comrade Viktor Plotnikov.”
“Comrade Plotnikov?” Vasiliy said, his surprise obvious.
“Yes, we suspect Viktor may be providing our communications codes to the Americans. Aleksandr Dmitriyev, chief of the counterintelligence operations line, will see him to the airport and my friend here and I will interrogate him accordingly when he returns,” Golikov said, nodding to gesture Maskov. “While I hope we’ve found the last of J.J. McCall’s traitors, I must take active measures to neutralize any who may remain. You are my most reliable officers. I trust you to carry out this mission.” His gaze shifted between the two.
Vasiliy and Igor both nodded, their respect for Golikov borne from fear rather than admiration. “For how long? My wife, she—”
“180 days minimum. But I’ll extend it as long as necessary to clean out the riff-raff,” Golikov replied, his expression affirming there would be no negotiation. “I would go myself but Washington is not the only residency with this problem.”
“Yes,” Vasiliy said. He and Igor both appeared anxious to leave. “Will that be all, Comrade Golikov? We should be getting back to the Center.”
“Not quite,” Golikov said, his every move, every expression, spilled with evil. “Please, have a seat. I need you to pay a visit to the U.S. Embassy. We have a gift for the new Chief of Station.” He turned to the murderer for hire. “Maskov? Will you do the honor?”
Maskov lifted the ax blade above his head and slammed it to the ground, slashing through the wrist bone like butter, his force strong enough to sever the appendage with one blow. Igor and Vasiliy cringed, and pressed their eyelids together. They turned away as Maskov lifted the hand from the unforgiving concrete floor. He placed the appendage in a steel ice-filled box specially designed to leave its contents undetected by embassy security measures. After sealing the lid, he put the container inside slightly larger cardboard box, sealed it, and addressed it to the Moscow station chief care of the security officer.
“Deliver this to Agent McCall’s boyfriend. I’m certain he will convey the sad news of that pig Polyakov’s death. Perhaps next time she’ll think twice about recruiting our people. Suka!” Golikov cursed.
Telephone rings cut through a brief silence as a herd of suit-clad diplo-mats shuffled through the consulate section. It was lunch time at the American Embassy in Moscow. The station security officer, Grayson “Six” Chance, glanced at his watch as his stomach rumbled. His gut told him he’d miss lunch again, and the phone rang in just time to confirm Grayson’s suspicions.
“Siiiiix,” the duty officer said, the tone in his voice teasing. Grayson’s nickname was the source of several running jokes. His IQ. The number of times it took him to pass his last lifestyle polygraph exam. The number of women he bedded the night before. But his skin was thick and his temperament easy. “We’ve got an ID on the hand. You might want to get up here,” the officer continued.
The light at the end of the tunnel dimmed. He’d planned to serve out the final two days of his sentence hunkered down in a corner and working in solitude until time to hop his flight to Dulles Airport. Golikov’s thugs had decimated his hopes.
“Give me two minutes.” Six typed the last two sentences of his final after action report. When the meeting ended, he’d let the administrative officer clean it up. After grabbing a pen and notebook, he made his way to the stairwell, preferred to take the steps up to the secure area.
His anxiety swelled with each step. He needed to tie up the last of his administrative loose ends in order to return stateside. For months, his every thought centered on J.J McCall.
Why hadn’t he realized sooner? She meant more to him than he knew. Six had grown to appreciate her uncanny knack for calling him on his BS. And he knew he was full of it. Unlike the others, she never let him get away with his tricks and posed an irresistible challenge. Now she’d severed him from her life.
No woman had ever made him feel that way, simultaneous apprehen-sion and lust. He’d built barriers to maintain his cover and conceal his heart. But J.J. cut through it all, straight to his core, his truth. She’d slipped beneath his cloak and dagger to see him for whom he really was. And she loved him in spite of it. He’d become a man on a mission. He wanted it back again, the life he’d lost, the love he’d sacrificed to advance his career and serve too many years overseas.
He’d served his country as a clandestine case officer, then a security officer in his latter tours. Now he was just one flight away. For the first time in over a decade, he looked forward to returning to Langley.
Fifteen years of service to his country, twenty years of bachelorhood and Six’s life still had no real meaning. His thick, well-toned, six-three frame helped keep his sex tank full, but he had no wife, no kids, nothing to show for his near forty years on Earth, nothing except an over-sized house, fast car, and a couple dozen commendations for jobs exceptionally well done. The bumper-to-bumper beltway traffic, Starbuck-induced morning highs, meetings in tight conference rooms filled with dull academics, and a daily grind filled with writing cable after cable would consume his days. But what a small price to pay for nights with J.J.
Granted, getting her to reinvest trust in him wouldn’t be an easy feat. The debacle, his sloppy exit from her life, had left a wide gulf between them. But nothing worth having ever was easy and Six was up for the challenge.
Four flights of steps and a few paces through the main corridor, the one connecting the State Department’s political and economic sections to the “Company’s” section, and he had arrived at his destination. He badged into the secure space and headed for the conference room. Upon entering, his eyes locked on two reports sitting on the table in front of the seat left open for him. He turned to the duty officer, whose face wrenched in knowing discomfort. Six knew from his expression the stakes were higher than anticipated. Even the new boss had stopped by to check on the progress of the investigation.
“Six, come in and have a seat,” said Mark Levin, the new CIA Station Chief. He’d arrived three months prior and had been in crisis mode from day one.
Six gripped the chair back, pulled it from beneath the table. He posi-tioned himself beside the station chief. The sound of shuffling papers disrupted the silence. On edge, he waited for one of them to break the bad news.
“The legat had NCIC run the prints for us,” Mark said to Six, refer-ring to the embassy’s FBI legal attaché. “The hand belonged to Mikhail Polyakov. We’d been handling him on behalf of the Bureau since he left Washington and returned to Moscow Center last year. He was valuable, gave us information that’s still saving our asses on a number of critical operations. This is a significant loss.”
“Indeed,” Six said. He hesitated a moment before asking, “Who was the FBI case agent?”
Mark dropped his chin to his chest. “I’ll give you two guesses.”
“J. and J.”
Mark nodded.
“Do we have any idea who gave him up?”
“Same bastard who gave up her last source, I imagine,” the duty of-ficer said to Six. “It’s clear at least one agency in the Community has a mole problem. We think he’s in the Bureau and the Bureau thinks he’s in the CIA.”
“What else is new?” Six replied, shaking his head at the silent war. It had endured between the FBI and CIA for more than six decades, and intensified with each passing day. “Any possibility this is ICE PHANTOM?” Six asked, referring to a top secret multi-agency operation to find a rumored a mole in the Intelligence Community.
Mark’s eyebrows rose. “That operation’s dead—the Russians suc-ceeded in making us chase our tails. Ten years, millions of dollars in wasted resources. Langley hasn’t expended this much effort on a mole hunt since Angleton,” he said, referring to the CIA’s decade-long Cold War mole hunt that destroyed the careers of dozens of case officers and never yielded an insider spy.
The duty officer chimed in, “There’s no proof that ICE PHANTOM even exists.”
“Except two dead sources,” Six replied.
“FBI sources,” Mark injected.
“Yeah, one of which we ran on their behalf until his hand arrived in the mail yesterday,” Six countered. “ICE PHANTOM or not, we better figure who the hell is responsible before Golikov sends another—and the next one could belong to the source we can’t afford to lose.”
Mark nodded again. Six had made his point. The most high-placed recruitment they’d ever had within the SVR ranks was in danger. At least until the FBI apprehended ICE PHANTOM. Losing him would cripple their operations, not only in Moscow but around the world.
“Agreed. Time to get Langley involved. And someone will need to report this to J.J.,” Mark said as he turned to his colleague. “Six?”
He agreed to deliver the dreaded news. Damn! Six thought to himself. J.J. would conceal her devastation well but he knew another depression loomed. Losing her second source in as many years, her unbearable guilt for leaving another family without a father, might propel her over the edge this time. He’d warned J.J. a thousand times that her job wasn’t to care. Her job was to recruit and exploit. J.J. cared too much. Emotions drove her business—a fatal flaw for an FBI agent. Her steadfast concern both annoyed and endeared her to him. J.J. would succumb to the sadness; she always did. But her consolation was just days away. He’d resume his rightful place in her life, help her pick up the pieces—and then make J.J. his wife.
It takes you to a dark place in the company of two of New York's finest detectives as they go the extra mile to bring a sadistic serial killer to justice.
