The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller

by Karen Robards

  She could almost feel the scar on the underside of her jaw tingling. It was two-inches long, fish-hook shaped—and it was all that remained of the tattooed-on number 44 that had once marked her as a product of the Nomad Project.

  A product. A thing. Groton had said, “We made you.”

  The idea of it horrified her. So she did her best not to think about it. After all, she’d lived in this body for over twenty-six years and had found nothing to complain about concerning it so far.

  In fact, it was a super-duper body. Only, that had been the point, right? A super-duper body for a super soldier.

  Fine. Next time she had a couple of hours to spare she’d schedule an official freak out. Right now, she needed to go to work.

  Bianca showered, washed her hair, blew it dry and pulled it back into a low ponytail at her nape, applied the minimum of makeup and got dressed. It helped that her closet was arranged by item, color and style, with coordinating pieces grouped together. That meant that she could pair a white blouse and black skirt with a gray jacket and the appropriate shoes, bag and jewelry without having to think about it. The reason for the skirt was, as always, that she meant to be prepared: this time for trouble.

  The sheer black stockings she wore with the skirt were held up by a garter belt. The garter belt had been specially made for her by SiuSiu Tseng, a tailor in Macau who crafted cheap custom-made clothes for tourists as well as, for a select list of highly confidential clients, what SiuSiu called spy clothes, although clothes for criminals was closer to the truth. Bianca’s garter belts bristled with well-disguised tools, including a screw driver, lockpick, hacksaw–pry bar and stun gun, all wand-thin, made of strong-as-steel polymers, and miniaturized to fit in the straps that clung to her thighs. The stocking clips at the ends of the slender straps concealed a button-size flashlight, a locator beacon (to be used only in the case of extreme emergency because, of course, when it was turned on, duh, it could be located), and two hundred feet of dental-floss-thin, 250-pound rated cord that spooled out from a hook (the clip itself, which was designed to serve as an anchor). The cord allowed her to drop or rappel down as much as nineteen stories if necessary. The fourth clip contained a tiny switchblade with a wicked, lethal blade.

  And, yes, she knew how to use it.

  The flimsy garments were lined with a substance that kept the concealed tools from being spotted on X-ray, and prevented them from being felt in the course of a pat down. Their sexiness was designed to serve as a distraction if (male) security encountered them. And security details almost always included at least some males.

  She’d often thought that the garter belts should come complete with an illustrative photo and a warning label: men—this is your brain on lingerie.

  Whatever, they were field-tested and did the trick.

  She had a nice selection of garter belts. The last time she’d had an up-close-and-personal encounter with someone who wanted to kill her, she hadn’t been wearing one. She didn’t mean to be caught off guard again. For the foreseeable future, she intended to be one with them.

  Passing on her usual morning workout and run—she was under too much of a time crunch and, anyway, taking part in the game of spot-the-sniper the run would entail would, she felt sure, rob it of its chill-out benefits—she extracted the Win Mag from the Acura. She took it up to the apartment in its custom-made case that made it look like she was carrying a guitar and stowed it in the walk-in-closet-size vault hidden behind a wall in the pantry that contained, among other things, a nice selection of weapons and a grab-and-go bag packed with essentials, including cash and a number of false IDs, because life, as the saying goes, is uncertain. She dropped Angela Pack’s revolver in there, too, where it would stay unless and until the woman (not Sage) came asking for it. Then she drove straight to work, grabbed a giant black coffee from the Starbucks on the corner and headed up to the fifteenth floor, where Guardian Consulting, her legit, young but growing security company was located.

  Taking a chance that an assassin wouldn’t be waiting for her in the hallway of a commercial office building with a security guard downstairs and tenants beginning to arrive, she rode the elevator. Climbing up fifteen floors was more of a concession to what in the bright light of day she really, really hoped was paranoia than she felt prepared to make right then.

  Anyway, the centerpiece of the dangly silver pendant with which she had completed her outfit was a throwing star. Encased in its Lucite setting, it made an attractive piece of jewelry. But if she needed to use it, all she had to do was pop and pitch.

  The lights were off, the air-conditioning emitted its usual low hum, and the sleekly modern suite of offices with its gray walls and black leather, stainless-steel and glass furniture was exactly as it should have been: no sign of a lurking assailant anywhere. Evie’s desk beneath the big silver Guardian Consulting sign that took up almost the entire long wall of the reception area was empty, Bianca saw as she entered. She hoped it stayed that way for a while: poor-little-rich-girl Evie’s zeal to excel in this, her first paid job, meant that she came in early a lot. Bianca had had no idea if today would be one of those days. Although they were temporary roommates and worked at the same place, they drove to work separately and frequently didn’t even see each other in the morning before arriving at the office.

  On this morning in particular, Bianca really didn’t want to see Evie for a while.

  Evie knew her well enough to know when something was wrong, and Bianca didn’t feel up to making up believable lies before she’d even finished her coffee.

  The doors to Doc’s and Hay’s offices were closed. Bianca didn’t think either of them would be in yet—it was 7:29, and work did not officially start until 8:00—but she didn’t stop to find out.

  She needed a short time alone with her coffee and a highly encrypted computer before the regular business of the day began. As Guardian Consulting’s head of cybersecurity, Doc—Miles Davis Zeigler, a twenty-five-year-old computer genius who’d gone to prison for hacking into the Department of Defense computer system, been released after three years and immediately thereafter started to work for her not-father as part of the team he’d put together to pull off a two-hundred-million-dollar robbery in Bahrain that had gone spectacularly wrong, which in turn had led to Bianca bringing him back to Savannah with her—had made their system unhackable and everything they did on it untraceable.

  That was her kind of system. Especially since tugging on the wrong string in the interconnected tangle of the web might set off an alarm in some watch-dog system somewhere that would alert the wrong person to her interest—and her presence.

  She neither turned on the light nor opened the curtains. Closing her door, she went straight to her desk, sat down, turned on her computer, drank her coffee, and searched every news outlet and gossip site and government feed she knew of for information on the shooting of Alexander Groton.

  The only thing of interest she found was a brief reference to an unrelated but major drug bust involving the Bloods on Savannah’s east side the previous night.

  Hah.

  At least she could chalk that up as one problem solved.

  It wasn’t until she heard Evie’s cheery, “I’ve got muffins!” and Hay’s interested reply of “Blueberry?” through her closed door that she realized that she was no longer alone in the office, that it was now 8:05 and that she’d spent over half an hour fruitlessly searching the internet while finding nothing pertaining to Groton. It was then that the truth hit her: she’d found nothing because there was nothing to find.

  Groton’s death wasn’t being reported anywhere.

  Bianca’s first thought—maybe he isn’t dead—was immediately countered by her memory of that gusher of blood erupting from his chest.

  And even if he wasn’t dead, there should be some report of his being shot.

  Maybe it was too early. Maybe the news wasn’t yet widely know
n. His wife’s Facebook page sported a recipe for apple-and-walnut stuffing from yesterday. His children—he had two grown sons—had no recent posts.

  The Department of Defense news feed contained nothing but links to hearings and scheduled appearances and live events.

  There was nothing on the DARPA site, nothing on the Director of National Intelligence site, nothing on the Great Falls, Virginia, police logs.

  Not even a record of a callout last night to anywhere in the vicinity of Groton’s house.

  There should have been a record of a callout. She’d been there. She’d seen the cop cars arrive.

  A knock on her door interrupted her thoughts.

  Bianca looked up and said, “Yes?”

  Evie stepped into the room. Five-three and currently the approximate shape of a Butterball turkey, she had a round, pretty face with big brown eyes, a small, upturned nose and a wide, well-shaped mouth. Her coffee-brown hair fell in a riot of natural curls to her shoulders; today a deep pink satin band held it back from her face. Her skin was milky pale except for the roses in her cheeks, which Bianca assumed could be attributed to a judicious application of blush. She wore a hand-knit cardigan in the same rosy pink as her cheeks over a deeper pink trapeze dress that exactly matched the headband. Her shoes were navy flats. Evie hated wearing flats, but pregnancy plus heels made her ankles swell.

  Everything she was wearing cost the earth, and looked it. That’s because Evie was rich. Or, at least, Evie had been rich. Right at the moment, not so much.

  The only child of a real-estate magnate and Savannah’s leading socialite, Evie was by birth one of the Deep South’s A-listers. As was the custom among the old money crowd that was her natural milieu, she’d been formally presented to Society at the age of eighteen and subsequently named Savannah’s Debutante of the Year, to her mother Rosalie’s immense pride. She had further fulfilled her destiny by marrying another scion of Savannah wealth, William Wentworth Thornton IV, otherwise known as Fourth, and getting pregnant.

  After that, unfortunately, it had all gone to hell. Fourth had cheated, Evie had found out, and she was in the process of divorcing him in the teeth of strenuous objections from Fourth and both sets of parents. In an effort to make Evie reconsider, Fourth had drained her bank account and stopped her credit cards, and her extremely wealthy family had cut her off financially.

  So Evie, who’d never previously worked a day in her life for pay, had given the entire bunch the figurative bird and gotten a job, with Bianca and Guardian Consulting. To her own surprise, and even a little bit to Bianca’s, she was proving to be excellent at it.

  “Is there a reason you’re sitting here in the dark?” Evie surveyed her with a frown.

  Bianca thought about saying that she had a headache, but Evie knew she never got headaches and would question that. She thought about saying that she’d been napping, but she rarely napped and never at the office and anyway the glowing computer screen—which now showed only her email inbox—bore silent witness to the fact that she’d been doing something, because if left alone it went into sleep mode.

  The real reason she hadn’t turned on a light or opened the curtains—that she hadn’t wanted to tip off any potential assassin on the street below to her presence in her office—was obviously not something she could share.

  “My hands were full,” she said. “I had to come over to the desk to set some things down, and while I was here I turned on the computer, and then I decided to check something out and—here I am.”

  That explanation was apparently believable enough, because Evie didn’t question it. Instead she asked, “How did last night’s meeting go?”

  Bianca experienced a frisson of remembered disaster. “Fine.”

  Evie walked around Bianca’s desk and started opening the curtains covering the floor-to-ceiling expanse of glass that composed the entire fourth wall. The large corner room was immediately flooded with sunlight.

  To the tune of rattling curtain rings Evie said, “You do remember that you’ve got that meeting at Cymba International at nine, right?”

  Bianca groaned, and dropped her head in her hands.

  “Shoot me,” she said.

  “It’s a big contract.” Evie finished with the curtains. From her desk Bianca could see a huge container ship chugging through the muddy green waters of the Savannah River, and, on the other side of the river, Hutchinson Island. “You should be thanking me.”

  “I take that back,” Bianca said, looking up as, on the way back out of the room, Evie paused beside her desk. “Shoot you.”

  “Networking is how the world works. I introduced you to Les Harper, he mentioned you to his father, who owns Cymba, and Guardian Consulting gets invited to make a presentation to take over Cymba’s computer security. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Right,” Bianca said. “No pressure whatsoever on me to sleep with Les.”

  Les Harper was a friend of Fourth’s. Right before Evie’s marriage went down in flames, Evie had tried to fix Bianca up with him by inviting them both to her beautifully restored mansion in the historic district for dinner. The thing was, Bianca had been expecting a dinner party, not a cozy foursome, because Evie hadn’t told her it was a fix-up.

  Les, on the other hand, had been in the know from the beginning and had considered the two of them on a date. To say it had gotten awkward was an understatement. Les had been calling weekly ever since, trying to get Bianca to go out with him on a second date.

  Bianca still blamed Evie for making him think there’d been a first date.

  “It’s a five-year contract worth a million a year,” Evie said. “Look at it this way—if you do end up sleeping with Les, you’ll be taking one for the team. In fact, if it comes right down to it, you can always close your eyes and think of Guardian Consulting.”

  “Evie? Don’t make me fire you.”

  “This is a great opportunity, and you know it. Les might not even be there. If he is, it won’t hurt you to be nice. Or to smile. And for God’s sake take that elastic band out of your hair.” Evie grabbed the coated elastic that was holding Bianca’s hair in its low ponytail and yanked it off.

  “Ouch!” Bianca’s straight, shoulder-length hair fell forward in a cool slide. Glaring, she instinctively tucked it behind her ears.

  Dropping the elastic into the pocket of her cardigan, Evie headed back out into the reception area, saying over her shoulder, “Sexy singles do not wear ponytails. Ten-year-olds do.”

  Bianca jumped up and followed her. “You know what? Forget firing you. I’m going to strangle you.”

  Evie kept walking, but wagged a finger at her. “Ah-ah. Violence is not the answer.”

  “So what’s up?” Holding a muffin in one hand and a coffee cup in the other, Hay emerged from the small kitchen on the far side of the reception room. They both stopped where they were to look at him. Hay was Haywood Long, Bianca’s second in command. Ex-military and a former cop, he’d been in charge of the day-to-day operation of the company when she was away since she’d hired him not long after Guardian Consulting’s inception four years earlier. He also oversaw all but the highest level jobs when she was present. Six-one with short fair hair that had been blond when he was a kid, he had bright blue eyes and the muscular, almost stocky build of the high school football star he had once been. He was twenty-nine, single, and his all-American good looks meant that he had plenty of women interested in him. Bianca had known him almost as long as she’d known Evie, and she considered him one of her best friends. He was down-to-earth, levelheaded and she trusted him, if not completely then enough.

  The thing was, she didn’t trust anyone completely, because she couldn’t. Hay, for example, had absolutely no idea about her secret life as a world-class thief, etcetera, much less the whole super-soldier thing and the nightmare that went along with it. With Hay, it was a case of what you see is what y
ou get, and he thought she was like that, too. But she wasn’t, and she could never be, and that created what was for her an insurmountable barrier between them. If he sometimes made noises like he wanted to be more than a friend to her, she overlooked them. She liked him far too much to spoil their relationship by letting it take a turn toward the romantic. Besides, he was great at his job, and that was more important to her than any transient hookup.

  “Evie’s doing her matchmaking thing again,” Bianca told him.

  Hay immediately frowned at Evie. “Stop. This is a sickness,” he said. He looked back at Bianca. “She asked Grace Cappy if she was going to that damned historic thing tonight, and when Grace said she wasn’t because she didn’t have a date, she told her that I didn’t have a date, either. So Grace called me. She asked me. What could I say? Nothing, that’s what, because she caught me by surprise and I couldn’t think of a damned thing. So now I’m taking her.”

  Bianca hooted. “You know that presentation I’m going to make to Cymba International this morning? That’s Les Harper’s father’s company. You know Les is going to be there. You know he’s going to ask me to lunch. Or dinner. Or something. Probably something.” She frowned accusingly at Evie. “She knows it, too. Look at her face. She’s evil.”

  “Grace Cappy is nice, unlike some women you’ve dated recently,” Evie said, defending herself to Hay. “I did you a favor. You’ll see.”

  Hay said, “You’re talking about Susan, aren’t you?” He looked at Bianca. “She’s talking about Susan.”

  “To be fair, we never did like Susan,” Bianca told him.