The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller

by Karen Robards

  Showtime. Bianca had trained with some of the best military snipers in the world. They favored the BRASS method of assuring precise shot placement. The acronym stood for breathe, relax, aim, stop/slack, squeeze. She instinctively began the sequence.

  Breathe in.

  Many snipers were taught to hold their breath when taking a shot. Bianca’s instructors felt that this caused the body to struggle internally as it fought for air and thus interfered with optimal accuracy. Instead, she began to regulate her breathing so that when the time came she would be pulling the trigger in the two-to three-second interval between inhaling and exhaling.

  Breathe out.

  The house door opened and was held open by someone inside whom Bianca couldn’t see.

  “Let’s go, sir,” the bodyguard said as he opened the rear driver’s-side door. Groton stepped out. He was a tall man, rangy in the dark overcoat he wore over his suit, moving easily despite his seventy-three years. Sheltering Groton with the umbrella in a way that blocked the top half of his head from Bianca’s view, closing the car door with a backward sweep of his arm, the bodyguard stayed half a step behind him.

  The umbrella was unexpected. She would have to make adjustments. Bianca caught herself holding her breath as she concentrated on finding her shot despite its presence.

  Relax. Breathe in.

  Groton and the bodyguard strode toward the house.

  Bianca was still cold and wet, but she was no longer aware of either. The shivering had stopped. Her heartbeat was strong and steady. Her arm and neck muscles were loose, supple. Her trigger finger was relaxed. She briefly glanced into the nearby darkness to take the strain off her eyes, then squinted back down the scope.

  Her senses sharpened, focused, while around her everything else seemed to slow down. The spicy fragrance of the wet spruce intensified. The patter of the falling rain became a drumbeat. The steady drizzle separated into individual, beautifully rendered teardrops. She became supremely conscious of the direction and strength of the gusting wind, of the play of light and shadow over the target area, of the distortion created by uncertain lighting and distance.

  “Where’s Mrs. Groton?” Groton called to whoever was holding open the house door.

  “In the living room, sir.” It was a woman’s voice. A maid? Bianca couldn’t be sure.

  Still shielded by the umbrella, Groton reached the steps.

  Breathe out. Aim.

  Bianca aligned the target in the crosshairs. A body shot usually yielded the highest percentage of success, but a head shot was absolutely, positively lethal, and she couldn’t afford anything less. A miss would be disastrous. If she had to shoot through the umbrella, she would. The silky fabric wouldn’t deflect the bullet by so much as a hairbreadth.

  Groton put a foot on the bottom step. The bodyguard was still behind him. As her target began to climb, the umbrella tilted back out of the way.

  Groton’s craggy features and thick gray hair were exposed. Yes. Bianca refined her aim, refusing to be distracted by the rain that caught in his hair and shone like diamonds in the light.

  Stop/slack.

  Her index finger touched the trigger at last, the lightest of contact to ensure that there was no slack in it. She felt its carefully calibrated resistance throughout her body. The only thing that was required now was for her finger to retract and the weapon would fire.

  Groton was on the middle step.

  Breathe in.

  She had an unimpeded shot. All she had to do was pull the trigger.

  Squee—

  Thud. She was surprised by a sound that made her think of a fist punching flesh. It came through her earwig and was actually the sound of a bullet finding its target, she discovered a split second later as blood exploded in a red geyser from the center of Groton’s chest. The maid screamed. Grabbing for his weapon, the bodyguard lunged forward with an inarticulate cry. Groton’s body dropped like a stone, then tumbled down the steps.

  Bianca’s heart leaped. Her finger dropped away from the trigger. Stunned, she lay unmoving, her eye still glued to the scope.

  Groton had been shot.

  But she hadn’t pulled the trigger, hadn’t fired her weapon, hadn’t taken him out.

  Which meant—

  There was another shooter on the ground.

  2

  Panic wasn’t something Bianca did.

  Good thing, because her instinctive reaction felt a lot like panic.

  Her heart slammed. Her breath caught. She was instantly wired from head to toe as an explosion of adrenaline hit her body systems.

  Use it. Channel it. Make those physiological responses work for you.

  Across the road, panic was the name of the game. The bodyguard dropped to a knee beside Groton, who was crumpled on his side at the bottom of the steps hemorrhaging blood, then leaped to his feet with weapon in hand to sweep defensive arcs in the direction from which the shot had come. The maid, a plump woman in a black uniform, flew down the steps. The driver burst out of the car. The security guards ran toward the scene, dogs on leashes running with them and barking wildly.

  “Mr. Groton!”

  “Call 911!”

  “Let the dogs go!”

  “Pick him up! Get him in the car!”

  “—shouldn’t move him!”

  “Don’t you understand what’s happening? There’s a live shooter out there! The car’s armored! Get him in the fucking car!”

  The dogs, released, ran around barking. The security guards each grabbed one of Groton’s limbs and carried him in an awkward running shuffle toward the back door of the car, which the driver ran ahead to open. The maid followed, lamenting loudly. Another woman appeared at the top of the steps. She was tall, thin, dark-haired, and wearing dark slacks and a light blue blouse.

  “Alex! My God, what’s happened? Alex!” She ran down the stairs and along the trail of blood toward the car.

  The maid turned back toward her. “Oh, Mrs. Groton—”

  Tearing her gaze away from the scene, Bianca snatched out the earwig, pocketed it, rolled to her feet and grabbed the rifle case, which she slung by its strap over her shoulder. The adrenaline burst resolved itself into laser-like focus, rapid, precise thinking, smooth, controlled movements—and an elevated pulse rate that pounded in her ears.

  Could anybody say holy freaking disaster?

  Oh, she could.

  Ducking low to avoid the dripping branches, the heavy rifle at the ready, her every sense alert, she emerged from the shelter of the tree to warily scan her surroundings through the veil of rain that distorted everything. Rain soaked through her mask so that it felt clammy and cold against her skin, but she dared not remove it. She bent forward again in an attempt to protect her weapon. Across the road, the car that was once again carrying Groton backed at speed down the driveway. In the distance she could hear the high-pitched wail of approaching sirens.

  Go, go, go.

  It wouldn’t be long before the area was cordoned off and the roads were blocked. The local police were just the first wave. The FBI would be on the scene soon, along with no telling what other alphabet agencies. Law enforcement would blanket the neighborhood. Helicopters would zoom overhead. Alexander Groton was an important man: every resource at the federal government’s disposal would be brought in to aid in the search for the shooter.

  Who, as it turned out in a surprise development, wasn’t her.

  It didn’t matter. If she was arrested, no one would believe she was innocent. Even if they eventually did, she was still Nomad 44. Someone somewhere knew that, or would figure it out. Once she was in custody they would have her exactly where they wanted her. In all likelihood her survival would be measured in hours rather than days. She needed to get gone.

  Except for the rectangles of light that spilled from the downstairs windows over part o
f a stone walkway and a section of low hedge, the two-plus-acre front lawn was as dark as the inside of a cave. That was good in that it helped conceal her and bad in that it helped conceal anyone else who might be in the vicinity, which was the part that made her want to jump out of her skin. Shadows lay everywhere. Small trees and topiaries and a damned garden statue all looked terrifyingly human at first glance. The sound of the rain was loud enough to mask any nearby movement.

  Judging by the angle of the shot that had felled Groton, a shooter with a high-powered rifle was approximately sixty yards to her left, down by the road at the far western corner of the very property she was fleeing. Or at least, that’s where he’d been when he’d taken the shot. By now he could be anywhere.

  Like right in front of her. Or behind her. Or beside her. Or overhead, as in, in a tree or on a roof.

  For all she knew, he had night-vision equipment and could see her. Had his weapon trained on her right that very moment.

  Her skin crawled with the knowledge that a shot could come winging her way at any second.

  You never see the bullet that takes you down...

  The only thing to do was exactly what she was doing: get the hell out of Dodge. Which she hoped and prayed the shooter was focused on doing, as well. After all, he couldn’t be waiting around to take a shot at her, because he couldn’t have known that she was going to be there, because nobody had known that she was going to be there, so taking her out couldn’t have been part of his agenda.

  All she had to worry about was him not being the type to say no to a happy accident if he stumbled across one.

  Which getting the chance to take out Nomad 44 might be, if he was there as part of an effort to clean up the last messy remnants of the Nomad Project.

  Back in that secret government gulag in Austria, she’d been given to understand that only a handful of people knew that Nomad 44 had ever existed. At least one—now two—of those were dead.

  But that was then, this was now. She had no idea who might at this point be looking for her, gunning for her. A government assassin? A contract killer? A whole army of them? For all she knew, her picture and the various false identities they had for her might have been added to an international hit list.

  If there was a price on her head, nobody looking to claim it would be too particular about why.

  They didn’t have to know that she was Nomad 44. They just had to know that someone was willing to pay the big bucks to whoever succeeded in killing her.

  Bianca shivered and immediately attributed the reaction to the cold and the rain. Like panic, fear wasn’t something she did.

  Fear will get you killed faster than any bullet: it was one of her father’s axioms. Wait, no, it was one of Mason Thayer’s axioms. Turns out the man she’d always thought was her father, Richard St. Ives, was neither her father nor Richard St. Ives. Instead, he was a former CIA assassin named Mason Thayer who’d been sent to kill her and her gestational mother when her gestational mother had run away with her as an infant before whoever was in charge of terminating the Nomad Project had gotten around to killing them. Instead of doing what he’d been sent to do, Thayer had fallen in love with her mother, Issa, and hidden the two of them. When her mother was killed by another CIA assassin, Thayer fled with the surviving child (her) and changed their identities to Richard St. Ives and his daughter, Bianca. All of which Bianca had discovered at the same time as she’d made the acquaintance of Alexander Groton, which was the same time she’d found out that every government official who knew of her existence wanted her dead. Preferably yesterday.

  Still, it was just as likely that Groton had been shot for a reason that had nothing to do with her.

  Wasn’t it?

  There was no way to be sure. But the timing, she was afraid, spoke volumes.

  And it wasn’t saying anything good.

  Staying low to the ground, her every nerve ending attuned to the possibility of danger, Bianca fled across the acres of well-kept lawn toward the woods at the northern edge of the property. The smell of the rain, the sound of it, the way it obscured her vision, put her nerves on edge because it interfered with the normal functioning of her senses. Such obstacles as a birdbath and a garden swing and a couple of benches loomed up out of the darkness without warning, making her heart bump even as she identified and skirted them. Her gaze swept her surroundings in a continuous back-and-forth motion. Her finger stayed poised above the Win Mag’s trigger. In the direction she was heading, the ground was uneven and sloped away from the house. Her feet kept sliding on the wet grass. She tripped over a discarded hose and got slapped in the face by a branch and blundered into a flower bed, and blamed it all on the idea that the rain was affecting her depth perception. But no matter how much she tried to deny it, the truth was that she was rattled. Seriously rattled. As in, totally freaked out.

  Deep in her bones, she was convinced that Groton’s shooting had everything to do with the Nomad Project, which meant that it had everything to do with her. It also meant that the hunt for her was suddenly a whole lot closer to home than she’d thought.

  To her enormous relief she encountered no one, and no other shots were fired.

  As she slipped into the pitch blackness that was the woods, she spared a regretful thought for the tiny flashlight that she didn’t now dare use, because using it would be the equivalent of painting a target on her back for anyone who might be close by. Once again, being obsessive about preparation was paying off—she’d memorized the route back to the dirt bike that she’d specially modified to accommodate tonight’s need for stealth down to the exact number of steps it would take to get there. Looking out through the trees as she slipped beneath them, she saw half a dozen cop cars converging on the property across the road. Stroboscopic lights revolved in violent explosions of blue. The sirens’ screams tore through the night.

  In the house belonging to the old couple, more lights came on. They had clearly heard the sirens. Or maybe investigators were already knocking on their front door to question them about anything out of the ordinary they might have seen or heard.

  Which would be nothing, at least nothing that related to her. She’d been careful as always, and the rain, which was coming down in buckets now, should obliterate even the smallest chance for them to have seen or heard anything, as well as any minute amounts of trace evidence that might have been left behind.

  Every dark cloud...

  Anyway, if the investigators were worth their salt, the bulk of the forensics would be concentrated sixty yards from where she’d lain beneath the tree to take the shot that she’d never gotten off.

  Where the actual shooter had been.

  The shooter whose next target might well be Bianca St. Ives.

  A little more than eight hours later, Bianca pulled into the gated underground parking lot beneath the eight-story building in which she lived, in a top-floor three-bedroom condo, just outside Savannah’s historic district. As the gate closed behind her silver Acura and she drove toward one of her two designated parking spots, she allowed herself to sag a little with relief.

  At least the solid concrete walls meant she didn’t have to worry any longer about getting shot by a sniper.

  It was after 4:00 a.m. Her journey from Great Falls had involved the dirt bike, a stolen pickup and a lot of back roads until she’d retrieved her own car from where she’d left it in a one-time tobacco barn just outside of Fayetteville that she owned and had converted into a specially designed storage unit. Then, and only then, had she felt confident enough to hit the expressway. The journey had also involved an unnerving degree of paranoia as she’d wondered if she’d been spotted, if she was being followed, if she was being targeted. She’d employed every trick she’d ever learned about throwing tails. She’d imagined every possible scenario, from a sniper’s bullet blasting through her windshield to a team of operatives attempting to waylay her car and take h
er captive. That nothing like that had happened was good.

  Didn’t mean that it still couldn’t. That it wouldn’t.

  Even now, at the end of her journey, she was wired and slightly wet and a whole lot worried. Along with keeping an eye out for anyone who might try to do her harm, she’d spent the drive speculating about the identity of the shooter. The most obvious candidate was her not-father, Mason Thayer, whose motivation for getting rid of Groton was at least as strong as hers. He had the advantage of having been a professional assassin along with the resources to get the job done and the ability to kill without remorse. She would have instantly fingered him as the gunman except for the fact that he’d been severely wounded on the same day that she’d escaped from Groton. That made it almost impossible for him to have fired that shot. She thought almost, because experience had taught her to never totally dismiss anything where he was concerned, and he had escaped, via helicopter. Once she eliminated him, however, the other possibilities were legion. She couldn’t even begin to guess at all of them. By the time she got home, she was so fuzzy-headed from stress and exhaustion that she was no longer able to even try.

  The only thing she wanted to do was take a hot shower, pull on some dry pajamas, crawl into bed and put the events of this nightmare of a night on hold until morning.

  Under the circumstances she might have opted for a swig of NyQuil first just to settle her mind enough for sleep, but she had to be at work at 8:00 a.m. Yes, she was the boss, but she was never late, and the last thing she wanted to do was raise any questions in the minds of those who knew her about what she’d been up to the previous night to make her most uncharacteristically sleep in.