Dark Spies

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It 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.

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