The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller

by Karen Robards

  “Yeah.” With the thousand-dollar chips now in four neat columns in front of him, she started in on the five-hundred-dollar chips. There was no telling how much or how little private time they had, so she abandoned the less important matters to get to the point. “Darjeeling Brothers have a hit posted on me. A million dollars.”

  “I saw.”

  She glanced at him quickly.

  He said, “I follow the news.”

  She took that to mean the underground network of information that was always being traded among criminals and their associates. Well, she’d known that virtual Wanted Dead or Alive (okay, scrap the Alive part) poster would get wide dissemination.

  “I need to find out who placed the contract.”

  “So you can get it called off?” He shook his head. “Don’t even try. That’s exactly the move they’ll be expecting you to make. They’ll have people watching. You go near whoever it is, they’ll take you out.”

  Bianca’s fingers stilled on the chips. The icy knot of fear that had been lodged in her chest since she’d seen her own face on that computer screen made like the Grinch’s heart and grew three sizes. The possibility of a waiting ambush had occurred to her, but having him put it into words made it seem even more horribly real. The problem was, she didn’t have a lot of other options.

  “So maybe I won’t go near them.” She was thinking aloud. “Maybe I can find a way to bargain with them from a distance. You know as well as I do that getting that contract canceled is my only chance, and if I’m going to do that I first need to know who placed it. I’m sure it has to do with—” she almost said what I am, but thinking of herself as different, other, possibly even less than human, was not, she felt, conducive to good mental health; not that good mental health was her number one priority at the moment “—the Nomad Project. You were there. Who else is left who was there? Who was in charge of it?”

  “Kemp was around. He’s dead. Groton was around.” He lowered his head, peering at her through his spectacles. “Did you take him out, by the way?”

  Still stacking chips—the black and magenta hundred-dollar ones now—she shook her head. No need to tell him that she would’ve if she could’ve. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  He shook his head: no. Even so, Bianca couldn’t be 100 percent sure he was telling the truth. Although she supposed his physical condition precluded his involvement. Unless he was lying about that.

  The thing about liars is, they lie.

  Bianca said, “I think whoever’s behind the contract on me is out to have everyone who was involved in the Nomad Project killed. That means you, too, you know.”

  Reminding him that he had skin in the game might get him probing more deeply into his memory. Although he had to have thought of that. Mason rarely missed anything.

  He said, “I only came into play toward the end. After the powers that be got cold feet and decided to terminate the project. There were some scientists still around, some medical types, plus the women and babies, who were being kept confined in a hospital-like setting. Most of those were euthanized pharmaceutically right after I came on board. I doubt they ever knew what happened. I was sent after the runner. That was Issa. With you. God, she was a fighter.” A faint, reminiscent smile touched his mouth. Bianca felt a stab of pain so sharp that it was all she could do not to grimace. He said Issa, she thought, however erroneously, my mother. “Groton was there from the beginning. His boss at the time would be aware, I’m sure. I don’t know who that was right off the top of my head, but it shouldn’t be too hard to find out. Probably there was a whole chain of command. The project would have had political backing. Somebody high up. My guess is that somebody is now trying to cover his ass by burying the evidence. That would be you. And anybody who knows about you.”

  “You have a name?” She tried to keep the tension out of her voice.

  He shook his head, and she felt disappointment and anxiety combine to make her stomach twist.

  “I have something better,” he said. She looked at him wordlessly. The latex wrinkles, the semibald hairpiece, all faded away as she met the keen eyes she knew so well. “I didn’t come here empty-handed. I know how to get the Darjeeling contract canceled. I have a way to make this whole thing go away, to keep you and me and my family safe. To call off the dogs and keep them called off so we can all get on with it and have a life.”

  Her fingers stilled on the chips. She was so intent on hearing the rest that his reference to my family barely even hurt. “What is it?”

  “I know people at the BND,” he said, referring to the Bundesnachrichtendienstes, the German equivalent of the CIA, “who’ve spent years collecting information on the Americans. They’re not happy with what they see as the increasing subservience of the BND to the CIA and the other American intelligence services. The material they possess includes information, physical objects and video and audio recordings explosive enough to take down the current administration and possibly a number of other extremely powerful political leaders, as well. The Germans can’t use it. It was obtained in the most clandestine ways possible. If anyone knew they had it, let alone leaked it, it would cost them their lives. But they’re willing to trade it to me, to let me leak it for them. In fact, I’ve already made a deal with them for it that unfortunately I can’t fulfill now due to—” he made a gesture encompassing his body in the wheelchair “—this.” He looked at her. “But you can. As soon as you got in touch with me, as soon as I saw that contract on you, I knew this was the way to go for both of us.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What kind of deal?”

  “They’ll give me the material in return for King Priam’s Treasure.”

  “What?” She knew what King Priam’s Treasure was: priceless artifacts including magnificent jewelry that was fabled to have once belonged to Helen of Troy. Unearthed in Turkey by a German archaeologist, it was kept in storage in a Berlin museum during World War II. When that museum was looted by the Red Army during the fall of Nazi Germany, King Priam’s Treasure was whisked away to the USSR, where it was secretly held in an off-site storage building that belonged to the Pushkin Museum of Art. While the Germans searched the world for it, the Russians spent almost fifty years denying that they had it or knew anything about its disappearance. Then, in 1993, the Russian Minister of Culture said to hell with it, thumbed his nose at the Germans, pulled the collection out of storage and eventually placed it on display at the Pushkin Museum. The Germans were up in arms, demanding the treasure’s return on the grounds that it had been stolen. Russia refused, declaring that the treasure would only be returned in exchange for the artifacts, such as the long-missing Amber Room, that the Germans had supposedly looted from the USSR.

  In a word, stalemate.

  “Your sources at the BND want you to steal King Priam’s Treasure?” Bianca had to ask, if only to make sure she had that right. He gave a nod. She knew her Greek mythology: Priam was the King of Troy and father to Paris, who ran off with Helen of the-face-that-launched-a-thousand-ships fame. No stranger to Moscow, Bianca had visited the Pushkin, seen the intricately wrought solid gold diadem that Helen of Troy had supposedly once worn as a headdress, seen the other jewelry, the plateware, the weapons, the tools. She thought of the tightly controlled state, of the urban environment, of the ubiquitous Russian intelligence service the SVR and its FBI-equivalent sister the FSB, of the abundant police presence in Moscow, of the Pushkin itself, its location, its security... “That’s impossible.”

  He made a face. “Difficult, rather. I could do it. So can you.”

  Bianca stared at him. “So the deal is that you, no, I steal this priceless treasure and turn it over to Germany, and in return they give you this blackmail file and you leak it for them? Because I see a flaw in the plan. If you leak it, then it loses its value as blackmail, and it won’t keep anyone from killing me. Or you.”

  “I’m not going to le
ak it. I’m going to use it, for me and for you, to keep us safe. But my contact doesn’t have to know that. At least until I get my hands on that file.”

  She stared at him. “You’re going to double-cross him.”

  “I’m going to do what I need to do. Don’t tell me you object.”

  Slowly she shook her head. “No. Whatever works.”

  A smile just touched his mouth. “I’ve always admired that practical streak of yours.” Her brows twitched together. “Speaking of my practical streak, since you didn’t burn up in that garbage truck, I’m presuming the two hundred million dollars from Bahrain didn’t burn up, either. I want my share of that money.”

  His smile widened. His eyes twinkled at her. A familiar expression employed most often when he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “No, it didn’t burn. But there’s not that much left. After we got out of Austria, I had to bribe a lot of people to find a safe place to stash Marin and Margery. And getting the kind of medical care I needed under the radar isn’t cheap, either.”

  She gave him a skeptical look. “You can tell me all about it later. When we talk about how you’re going to pay me my cut. But to stay on topic, why don’t we just steal the file? Seems easier than robbing the Pushkin.”

  “It’s not. The material’s been split up, and it’s kept in different, highly secure locations. Guarded by elite operatives of the BND, who will kill to protect it. Plus, if we steal it, the BND won’t have much trouble figuring out exactly who did it, and they’ll be coming after us with everything they’ve got. While if the Pushkin robbery is done right, the Russian intelligence services will be too busy wreaking vengeance on the Germans to worry about us.”

  Bianca knew it was a lost cause, but still she tried. “You couldn’t bribe some venal agent to hand the material over?”

  He shook his head. “These people are patriots, in this for their country. The German chancellor has let it be known that she wants King Priam’s Treasure back in Germany. This is personal for her. Several years ago, she made an official visit to Russia which included a tour of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg in the company of the Russian president. King Priam’s Treasure was on display there at the time. The chancellor took this flaunting of Germany’s rightful property under her nose as a slap in the face to her, and to Germany. She demanded of the president, in person, that the treasure be repatriated. He refused. The visit got tense. The chancellor went home mad, gave certain orders, and since then the intelligence services have been looking for a way to avenge her honor and Germany’s by regaining possession of King Priam’s Treasure. Stealing it back is the obvious solution, as well as being a huge middle finger stuck up in the air from Germany to Russia, but to begin with the BND isn’t quite sure they can pull it off, and if they tried and failed, or even if they tried and succeeded, the consequences of having German agents involved in stealing priceless artifacts from inside the sovereign state of Russia would cause an international incident at the very least. They’ve been casting around for a solution for some time, and eventually my contacts thought of me. If a professional thief manages to steal it and they buy it from him—well, that’s more an embarrassing reflection on the state of security at Russian museums than an incitement for war. I wasn’t interested, not for the money—there are all kinds of easier ways to earn the twenty million bounty they were offering that don’t involve possibly ending up being tortured and killed in a basement in SVR headquarters—but then I heard through the grapevine about this material they’d been collecting. So we struck a deal. I’d steal the treasure, they’d give me the material. My intention was to use it to put the fear of God in the CIA and have them do the same to every other bloody agency and operative who might be looking for us. I was just getting down to work on it when I was so rudely interrupted by the recent emergency in Heiligenblut. As you can see, I’m not quite up to par again, but now with the Darjeeling Brothers contract your problem is urgent so we’re out of time.”

  Bianca frowned. “You really think this file is enough to get the contract on me canceled and call off the CIA and keep us both safe? What if your contacts are lying about what’s in it?”

  “Think I’d make a deal like this without checking out the merchandise first? I insisted on being given a look at the material in the file. I wasn’t shown everything, or even most things, but I was shown enough to be convinced that this is the poison pill we need.” His expression grew intent. “Plus, there’s still the twenty million. Fifty-fifty split. You in?”

  Bianca met his gaze. Trying to steal King Priam’s Treasure out from under the nose of the Russians came as close to being a suicide mission as anything she’d ever attempted. If Germany’s intelligence services were humming with the chancellor’s desire to recover the artifacts, one thing that was certain was that Russia’s intelligence services were aware.

  Forget Beauty and the Beast: spies spying on spies was the real tale as old as time.

  The Russians would be taking extreme precautions; their president wasn’t a man to be crossed.

  On the other hand, she took Mason’s word for it that trying to steal the material from the Germans would be potentially even deadlier.

  Also, finding whoever had placed the contract on her and threatening them with death to cancel the contract might work, especially if she killed the individual afterward. (People never liked being threatened; once they were in a position to do so, they inevitably came after the threatener with both barrels. Best to get what you need, take them out and have done.) But that did nothing to stop anyone else who might be coming after her. It did nothing to stave off possible future contracts. Unless she killed everyone who knew that she was—oh, God, might as well own it—a genetically enhanced super soldier, getting rid of whoever had placed that contract would be like cutting off one head of a many-headed hydra. There were lots more where that one came from, and sooner or later another one of those heads would be coming after her. Probably sooner.

  All righty, then.

  “I want four-fifths,” she said. “Sixteen million, because I’m the one doing the work, and I’m the one taking the risks.”

  “Done,” Mason said.

  “Then yes, I’m in.”

  He smiled. “Excellent. It’s the best solution for all of us, believe me. There’s a flash drive in my pocket with all the research I’ve done to get ready for the job on it. As well as information that will give you access to a fund to cover operational expenses, and how to contact me once the job is done so I can make the trade with my BND friends. I’m going to drop it, so you’d best drop something to cover picking it up. It’s encrypted. You can get that computer geek I hired to decrypt it for you. Oh, yes, I see him.” He shot a glance toward Doc, who was casually leaning against the railing now while glancing at his burner phone and pretending not to watch them. “He’s not exactly inconspicuous, is he?”

  Mason’s hand moved to his pocket as he spoke. A small object hit the carpet. Bianca struck a couple of chips with her elbow—“Oops!”—then bent to pick them up. Along with the chips she scooped up the elegant silver cigarette lighter in which the flash drive was undoubtedly hidden. The lighter went in her bag. The chips she restored to the table.

  Mason said, “I can’t believe you brought him with you, by the way. I can’t believe you’re still in touch with him at all. You should have left him in Bahrain. You know the rule about crossing channels.”

  Yes, she did. It was a simple one: never cross channels. That meant never let anyone brought in to help with a job know the real identity of anyone else. Well, so much for that. If she’d left Doc in Bahrain, he’d be dead now. After being captured and tortured until he sang like a bird. Not that at the time he’d known very much to sing about.

  Mason was a stickler for never crossing channels.

  She gave him a hard look. “He’s part of my team now. Leave him alone.” That carried a note of clear w
arning, in case Mason was having any big ideas about taking Doc out and thus uncrossing the channels she had crossed.

  “Like I said, he can help you out by decrypting that flash drive.” His tone added a subtext that she had no trouble deciphering: lucky for him.

  “Leave him alone,” Bianca repeated, with more menace this time. Their eyes locked. It was the first time she’d ever really stood up to him about an operational matter, but on this, on Doc, she wasn’t backing down.

  He gave a grunt that could have meant anything. “Don’t worry, he’s safe from me.”

  “Damn right, he is.” Bianca let that sink in for a minute, then added, “You going to tell me how that whole you-didn’t-die-in-Bahrain thing went down?”

  “The cab of the garbage truck had a false bottom panel. It was part of plan B, just like having a guy stationed at a third-floor window above that suq to fire on my signal was part of plan B. In case things went wrong and we had the military after us, which as you know is what happened. When the missile hit the back of the truck, which we’d larded with explosives tucked in with the counterfeit money, I gave it a strategic minute in which I pretended to be burning alive, then triggered the false bottom, dropped out and rolled into the bay.”

  “You didn’t think to tell me about plan B?”

  “Strictly need to know. And you didn’t.”

  Bianca fought the urge to grind her teeth. That constant refrain of his was getting old.

  “Were you going to tell me that you were alive?”

  “When the opportunity presented itself, certainly.”

  “There was no opportunity in almost six months?” The approximate length of time she’d thought he was dead and grieved for him, before stumbling across him, alive and well and apparently unconcerned about her or what he’d put her through, in Heiligenblut.

  “I needed to be careful.”

  “What about Grangier and Findley?” The men who’d been with him in the cab of the truck.