Free Patriots Betrayed by John Grit Page A

KGB’s successors, the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) and SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service), his background, connections, power, and ruthlessness had ensured his good fortune once the wall came down. Everyone (except the younger upstarts) running the country was ex-KGB, so the coveted opportunities naturally had landed in the laps of the powerful in government.
    He punched a button on a remote with a thick finger on a fat hand, and a flat screen television lit up. After hesitating, his finger seemed to hit start on its own volition. An image of the street just outside the walls of his compound filled the screen. The color footage was clear. There was no sound. At the far edge of the field of vision, he saw motion, a man falling backwards into view, thirty yards from the camera, which was mounted twelve feet off the ground. The man was one of his security guards, ex-Spetsnaz and not a man to be snuck up on. Yet on that night someone had gotten close enough to cut his throat as he stood watch over Janowski’s home.
    A spray of blood was visible in the glow of the street light when the guard’s jugular was sliced, but he wasn’t interested in the guard or his fate. His eyes grew intense as he waited for the delicious second the image he knew would appear for a disappointingly brief time. There. As he had seen so many times before. A man, in black from head to toe, moving with the confidence of a high-speed operator – U.S. Special Forces. Though he learned later the assassin was not Special Forces, but CIA. One moment, the area was empty, the next a streak of movement as the figure threw a hook over the wall and climbed up a rope so fast he was over the lip and gone in one fluid motion. A second later, the rope snaked up and over the wall. Even he had not been that agile back in his prime, when he was young and thin.
    Then the final scene from a different camera. The scene that Janowski both savored and dreaded. He had watched it at least a hundred times.
    The view of a hallway inside his home. A man in black again. He opened a bedroom door and entered. His twenty-seven-year-old son was sleeping inside, staying with his parents that week on vacation from his work at the SVR, (Russia’s External Intelligence Service) where he spent much of his time collecting valuable information for his father to use in his business. Seconds later, the bedroom door opened again, and the black-clad figure stepped out, a streak of blood across its torso, the head masked in a balaclava. The figure moved down the hall closer to the camera, a pistol gripped in his right hand. And then the man looked up, as if he knew the camera was there. Janowski’s blood chilled. Every time he saw those eyes, he felt death stalking him. He froze the image and forced himself to stare back until his blood warmed, then began to boil from the special hate he reserved for the man who killed his son.
    He understood fully that there was no profit in hate, and profit had always been his main motivator — that is, after he had clawed his way up from the bottom and survival was no longer on his mind twenty-four-seven. And yet he couldn’t stop himself from hating. He had even wasted much money discovering the name and background of this killing machine from America, then wasted more money searching for him. By then the assassin had left the CIA and disappeared. Even the U.S. Government was looking for him without success. Then a break. Information fell into his hands when an informant told him the CIA had located his son’s killer and had his new alias and address. No further action had taken place, as higher-ups had not decided whether this Raylan Maddox, AKA, David Sutton, was really a security risk after all. He had been gone more than a year, yet there was zero evidence he had talked to anyone about what he knew of CIA activities during his work there. Perhaps it was safer to let this sleeping lion alone.
    He reminded himself that this