Free Counterspy by Matthew Dunn Page A

cell phone number and the location of the safe house, and established that Chrissie and I were getting close. Nor did I know who Trapper was and why he was doing this to me.
    That had to change.
    I had to make Trapper pay for what he’d done.
    But for now, I could no longer ignore my grief. I kept hold of Chrissie’s hand. She was dead because of me.
    Dead.
    I tried to clear my head, telling myself that I should call Patrick. But he’d come over here straightaway and sanitize the place. I knew it had to be done, but now I wanted a few moments with Chrissie before my life was completely erased from hers. I reached into my pocket, withdrew a tiny box, and flicked it open. I removed the pendant I’d bought for her yesterday, placed it in her hand, and brought her fingers over it.
    I wanted her to hold on to it for as long as possible.
    More tears ran down my face as I kissed her on the cheek and whispered, “Good-bye, my love.”

 
    Acknowledgments
    With thanks to my wife for being such an enthusiastic proofreader of my book; to my two brilliant mentors, David Highfill and Luigi Bonomi, and their second-to-none teams at William Morrow/HarperCollins publishers and LBA literary agency respectively; and to the lovely estate in the Scottish Highlands for enabling me to have the solitude to complete this novella amid inspirational surroundings.

 
    Keep reading for an excerpt from
    Dark Spies
    the next installment
    in Matthew Dunn’s
    thrilling Spycatcher series
    Coming in hardcover October 2014
    From William Morrow

 
    ONE
    Prague, 2005
    I T WAS NO easy task to identify a spy and make that person betray their country. But that was what the Russian man was here to do.
    Wearing a black tuxedo, he entered the InterContinental hotel’s Congress Hall and fixed a grin on his face so that he looked like every other insincere diplomat who was attending the American embassy’s cocktail party. There were hundreds of them, men and women, beautiful, plain, and ugly, from at least forty different countries. The less experienced of them were huddled awkwardly in small protective groups, pouring champagne down their throats to ease the pain of being here.
    The Russian wasn’t interested in them.
    Instead he was here because he wanted to watch the people whom he termed “the predators”: the seasoned, clever, heads-crammed-full-of- juicy-secrets diplomats who glided through events like these, moving from one person to another, offering brief, charming, inane comments, touching arms as if the act conveyed profound meaning, before floating effortlessly to the next person. Diplomats called it “working the room,” but the Russian understood that wasn’t what they were doing. They were controlling the room and everything within it, watching for a moment when they could snatch a vital piece of information from someone weaker than themselves, or choosing the right moment to speak a few carefully chosen words and manipulate vulnerable minds.
    The Russian knew the predators, and some of them thought they knew him—Radimir Kirsanov, a forty-something, low-level diplomat who was on a short-term posting to the Russian embassy in the Czech Republic. The women in the room liked Radimir because he had cute dimples, sky-blue eyes, blond-and-silver hair that was styled in the cut of a 1960s movie star, and the physique of a tennis player—the kind of shape that was not particularly good or bad in the naked flesh, but that wore a suit with rapierlike panache. Plus, they thought his dim mind made their superior intellects shine. The men, on the other hand, briefly glanced at him with disdain, as if he were a brainless male model.
    Radimir grabbed a glass of champagne from one of the dozens of black-and-white-uniformed waiters who were navigating their way across the vast room, dodging diplomats, and skirting around tables covered in immaculate starched white cloths kept firmly in place by heavy candelabra and artificial-flower arrangements. The