Free Moscow Sting by Alex Dryden

first with its state-backed industrial giants who’d taken over the profitable parts of Montenegro’s industry, and then with its real estate developers who bought most of the country’s two-hundred-mile coastline.
    The Kremlin was advancing into western Europe through the back door of the Balkans, its historic hunger for warm-water ports, backed with its huge new wealth, bringing it closer than it had ever managed under communism. A fledgling new country like Montenegro, barely able to fly, had been swiftly gobbled up by Russian cash.
    Logan was looking away from the sea now, up at the cafés along the waterfront. He finally found the one he was looking for. It was called Slovenskja, named for the Slovenians who had made this little medieval Montenegrin town a popular resort in the 1920s.
    It was a Sunday, and all the locals had joined the tourists on the beach to create one complex, almost geometric puzzle of oiled, heaving, semi-naked humanity, beneath which “one of the world’s ten most beautiful beaches” was invisible.
    That it was a Sunday was of some importance to Logan. The man he was to contact would be stretched for backup. The day after he’d developed the photographs in Marseille, Logan was going to make the third and final delivery of the woman’s picture to the most dangerous and unpredictable of his freelance connections.
    Stefan Stavroisky, SVR chief in Montenegro and protégé of Putin’s from the days when he was deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg, had been stationed in Belgrade during the Serbian war. And that’s where Logan had originally made contact with him. In the thaw between the West and Russia, the KGB and the CIA had fraternised, at least on a personal level. When Boris Yeltsin was Russia’s president, both sides had been keen that the Balkan wars didn’t develop into an American confrontation with Russia.
    Logan had known Stavroisky well back then, in the late 1990s. NATO forces were pressurising the Serbs at the end of the war, and Yeltsin’s Russia made protests on the Serbs’ behalf that weren’t backed up by any serious threat of Russian military involvement. But the war had remained a deeply humiliating snub for Russia, and later, under Putin, the resentment it caused had aided Putin’s call to nationalism—the protection of fellow Slavs—when he’d become president in 2000.
    Logan and Stavroisky had worked, sometimes together, sometimes in opposition, during those times. There had been some cooperation between the KGB and the CIA, both to limit the damage and to pursue a closer relationship after the war ended. When NATO had accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, Stavroisky was one of those who had silently worked to calm the situation, and the Americans had been grudgingly grateful.
    Stavroisky was Logan’s age and had attached himself to Putin’s cause early on in Putin’s rise to power. He’d made the right choice, and had swiftly advanced through the ranks of Russia’s foreign service.
    Stavroisky was also meticulous in the cause of his own advancement. Like Putin, he was a fitness fanatic and took care to enjoy the sports Putin enjoyed. He was a keen fisherman and a judo black belt. He had played for the KGB’s volleyball team, Logan remembered.
    “What’s the transfer market like?” Logan had joked to him one evening over a drink. But Stavroisky drew the line at jokes about the KGB.
    Logan and Stavroisky had struck up a form of friendship, had met on maybe a dozen occasions, drunk together, whored together, and until Logan’s recall and dismissal, it might have seemed they were even working together during those times.
    Now, Logan heard, there was no fraternisation between the CIA and the KGB anywhere, let alone here. The Balkans were a new frontline of sorts. It had all reverted to the status quo ante 1989.
    It being a Sunday, Logan figured that Stavroisky would have fewer resources to call on; August weekends would draw out