by Julie Miller
“I’m sure you can find other ways to entertain yourself. After all, I intend to break every one of Cameron Murphy’s team. I want them begging to do my bidding when we make that videotape and broadcast it.”
Breaking someone seemed to have a reviving effect on Marcus Smith’s mood. He was smiling as he looked up again. “Murphy’s men have been pretty stubborn so far. But I like a challenge.” He glanced down at Tasiya, giving his statement a double meaning. “I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve to try, if need be. This old pirate hideout is proving to be a very resourceful place.”
Fowler nodded, pleased with the answer that Tasiya couldn’t quite understand. “I don’t care how you get the job done. I just want results.”
“You’ll have them before we shoot the video next week.”
Tricks? Video? Were these the sort of things she was supposed to report to Mostek?
She hadn’t yet come up with an answer when Boone Fowler stepped beside her and demanded her attention. “I’ve got thirty men here who all need to be fed three square meals a day. When you’re done with that, in the evening, we’ve got seventeen prisoners. You’re to take them bread and water. Marcus will show you your room, the kitchen and larder, and the route you’re to take when you feed the prisoners.”
Three square meals versus bread and water? Compassion had her looking up into those cold, dark eyes. “Only one meal for the prisoners?”
Those dark eyes sneered. “Rule number one around here, Ms. Belov. Never question my orders.”
“No, sir.” Tasiya covered the unexpected flare of sympathy for someone besides her father by quickly lowering her gaze. “I just wanted to be clear on my duties.”
“You’re not stupid, are you?”
She had no trouble comprehending the insult. But she ignored it and made an excuse. “English is not my first language, sir. I only asked because I wanted to make sure I understood correctly. Three meals for your men. One meal for the prisoners.”
“In between, you can clean my office and the latrine. But I don’t want you in here without myself or a guard present. As a matter of fact, I don’t want to see you anywhere but your room, the kitchen or making your rounds to the prisoners unless you have a guard and my permission.” He bent his knees and brought his face level with hers. “Do you understand that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you’re dismissed.” He straightened and returned to his seat behind the desk.
Tasiya swallowed her anger and the urge to blurt out that he wasn’t a god. And that if he was as smart as he seemed to think he was, he’d realize he had a traitor in his midst. Standing in his office. A black-haired sheep in wolf’s clothing, to put a twist on one of those childhood stories her father had read to her.
Fowler was a lot like Dimitri Mostek. Full of himself and high on power. No qualms about being cruel and manipulative. The only thing lacking were the lusty overtures, and she had a sick feeling that Marcus Smith would be adding that dimension to this living hell.
“This way, sugar,” said Marcus, turning sideways in the doorway instead of stepping aside, so that her shoulder had to brush against his chest as she exited into the hallway.
Crinkling her nose at the whiff of stale tobacco and sweat, Tasiya clutched her bag tight against her stomach and hurried past him. She fixed an image of her father’s loving face firmly in her mind as she followed Marcus Smith down a spiral staircase of worn, warped stone to the doorless closet off the kitchen that would serve as her home for the next few weeks.
Chapter Two
“Please, Minister,” Tasiya whispered into the phone, glancing over her shoulder to make sure no one was eavesdropping on her call. She trimmed the wick on the kerosene lantern on her two-drawer dresser, dimming the light so as not to draw attention to her presence in the room.
By the end of the night, she vowed to at least find a blanket to hang across the arched opening so she could change her clothes without the curious eyes of Marcus Smith or anyone else ogling her. “I want to talk to my father. If he’s not safe, I have no reason to do this for you.”
“Anastasiya. Darling.” Mostek’s cultured voice tried to seduce her even across the ocean that separated them. “I like it so much better when you call me Dimitri.”
Tasiya swallowed her gag reflex and her pride. “Please… Dimitri. Let me speak to my father.”
“Very well.” Tasiya drifted toward the corner of the twin-size bed that took up half the room. She sank onto the hard mattress, hugging her arm around her waist while he spoke to someone on his end of the line. But Dimitri still had a few more words for her. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it, Anastasiya? I’m pleased you made it to your destination and are getting acquainted with the men you are working for.”
She had no desire to get acquainted with anyone she’d met thus far, but didn’t think it wise to share that information with Mostek. “No one complained about the dinner I prepared. In fact, I believe Mr. Fowler has ordered his men not to address me unless it is about my work.”
“Good. Your father’s well-being depends upon you doing your job there and then returning to be my mistress. I don’t want you sullied by American hands.”
“How can you—” Tasiya bit her tongue to keep the question to herself. It wasn’t her place to understand how men like Mostek and Fowler could do business when they didn’t like each other and trusted each other even less.
“How can I want you?” She let Dimitri run with the topic so she wouldn’t have to explain her impetuous question. “Because you’re a beautiful woman and I’m bored with my wife. I told you I could set you up in style in an apartment here in the city if you’ll let me.”
“What about my father?” She glanced at the clock beside the lantern, knowing she needed to cut the phone call short and get to her rounds delivering the prisoners’ rations before anyone questioned her absence from the kitchen. “What will happen to him when I return?”
“I’ll give you enough money that you can support him as well. But I don’t want him living with you.” She could visualize Mostek’s vulgar sneer. “I’ll require privacy for my visits.”
Not exactly the motivation she needed to successfully pull off this charade.
“Here’s Anton. Keep it short.”
Tasiya shot to her feet and trained every aural cell in her ear to the precious sound of her father’s voice.
“Tasiya?” He sounded tired.
“Papa?” This was what she needed to hear. “Are you all right? How is the cut on your head? Are you eating? Have they hurt you anymore?”
“I’m fine, daughter. They cleaned the wound and put a bandage on it. But I’m worried about you. So far away. So—”
“I’m fine, Papa.” He was being held by terrorists who wanted to use him as an example of how they dealt with anyone who dared oppose them. She wouldn’t be a burden to him on top of that. “The work here is no different from at home. I cook and clean.”
“But these men…” She could hear the fear in his tone. “Are you safe?”
She hurried to the open doorway and looked around the empty kitchen. For now, she could give him an honest answer. “I’m safe.” But Marcus Smith had warned her to start her rounds by eight o’clock or he’d show up to escort her himself. It was nearly eight now. She had to go, even though she wanted nothing more than to cling to the sound of her father’s voice. “I love you, Papa. We’ll be together again soon, I promise.”
“I love you.”
Those three words would have to sustain her courage. Dimitri Mostek snatched the phone from her father’s hand, ordered his men to take Anton back to his room and lock him in, and added a final threat.
“Your loyalty to your father is touching. I hope you will prove as loyal to me.”
Tasiya felt as if Mostek had ripped her father from her arms again. But she squelched her fear with a deep breath and kept her voice calm. “I’ve done everything you’ve asked of me thus far. I won’t disappoint you.”
>
“It’s imperative for your father’s health that you don’t. I’ll expect a call from you tomorrow. I want to know everything the militia is doing, the status of their prisoners, anything you can tell me. I also want you to find an American television—”
“A television?” In this drafty old place whose only modern amenities seemed to be its security systems? She’d had to hand-pump the stove to make it work, while a small generator produced electricity for the refrigerator and freezer. He wanted too much. “Where will I—”
“Do not interrupt me again.” Tasiya bit her tongue, lest he take his displeasure with her out on her father. “A radio or newspaper will do as well. I want to know what propaganda they are saying about Lukinburg, and what news they have of Prince Nikolai and Princess Veronika.”
“I’m to spy on them, too?”
The two royal heirs had remained in the United States after speaking out against their father’s inhumane policies in their homeland. Though branded a traitor by King Aleksandr and the Lukinburg press, Nikolai had apparently become the heroic darling of American women and politicians alike.
Providing news of the prince and princess to the king would no doubt bring some favorable reward to Dimitri. “I will try my best.”
“You will do these things,” he corrected. “Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“Such a good girl. Such a good, beautiful girl.” The false charm bled back into his voice. “I’ll be thinking of you tonight. In my dreams.”
Tasiya cringed at the implication, but checked her response. “Goodbye.”
She risked a rare, perverse pleasure in ending the call before he could answer. Hiding the phone inside her pillowcase, she glanced at the clock. Two minutes past eight. Marcus would come looking for her soon.
Her father’s life depended on her carrying out Mostek’s orders.
Her own life depended on her doing it without getting caught.
Ponderosa, Montana
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN they shot another one? Where the hell are my men?” The tall, black-haired man wheezed, trying to rouse himself from his bed.
“Easy, Colonel.” Trevor Blackhaw braced his hand against the shoulder that wasn’t bandaged and eased his boss at Big Sky Bounty Hunters back against the propped-up pillows. “You’ve been home from the hospital all of two hours. If Mia finds out we’re in here talking business, she’ll have my hide.”
Mention of Cameron Murphy’s wife, who had just stepped out of the bedroom to put Olivia, their four-year-old daughter to bed, seemed to ease his agitation. “I guess this means you had to cut your engagement celebration short?”
Trevor sank into the chair beside the bed. “Sierra understands. She might be free of the militia’s influence now, but none of us will rest easy until Boone Fowler and his men are back in prison where they belong.”
Cameron rubbed at the scruff of beard that had sprouted along his jaw in the days since barely surviving a chemical bomb attack by the Montana Militia for a Free America at a nearby mall. Though he’d suffered critical burns and some temporary damage to his lungs, there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with his intellectual capabilities or leadership skills. “Tell me what we know.”
Trevor picked up the grainy black-and-white photographs he’d brought in to show his boss. “An army search-and-rescue team found one deceased soldier down in Swamp Lejeune at the ambush site. Michael Clark,” a fellow bounty hunter whose background in army intelligence made him an expert detective, “dates the second photo about a week after the initial capture. The army ID’d the victim as one of theirs, but it’s too dark to get any kind of fix on the location.”
“What about where the photos were processed?”
Trevor shook his head. “Clark’s still trying to trace the source. It passed through a lot of hands before reaching us.”
“And there’s no way to track them from the ambush site?”
“Lombardi and Cook are in North Carolina now. But Lejeune training base covers thousands of acres over a variety of terrain. They found some heavy-vehicle tracks, but the trail went cold at the New River. Fowler’s men could have choppered out, taken a boat, landed a seaplane. They could be camped out next door or halfway around the world.”
Cameron crumpled the sheet and blanket inside his fist. “Fowler’s on American soil, I guarantee it.”
“Both his victims were military, both were part of the covert strike team that was running training ops for an intel incursion into Lukinburg. The executed prisoner photo was delivered in Washington, D.C., with Fowler’s usual demand—if the UN insists on sending our men into Lukinburg, then he’ll find a way to stop them.”
“By killing off hostages one by one?” Cameron shook his head. “Terrorist tactics aren’t going to change the government’s mind.”
Folding his long, olive-skinned fingers together, Trevor leaned forward. “He’s probably sending a subtle message to you, too. What he’s doing to these soldiers, he intends to do to your bounty hunters.”
The bad blood between Cameron Murphy and Boone Fowler went back a long way. “Dammit, Blackhaw—Fowler murdered my sister for his cause. How many other innocent lives has he erased in the name of what he calls patriotism? He’s taken potshots at every one of us—hit us where it hurts the most. Why can’t we get this creep?”
“We will. Campbell, Powell, the sarge, Riley Watson, Brown and the others—we’ve all sworn to end this bastard’s reign of terror. Fowler’s the one who made this war personal. But we intend to finish it. I promise you that.”
A painful breath rasped through Cameron’s lungs. Though his dark eyes remained sharply focused, his battered body was fading toward much-needed sleep. “How are we gonna do that if we can’t find him?”
“I’ve activated every contact we have around the country. There’s a Special Forces unit waiting to assist us the minute we know anything. Don’t think for one minute your men—the men we fought with down in San Ysidro and in Africa and the men you hand-picked to work for you now—are sitting in a cell somewhere twiddling their thumbs.” Trevor tucked the graphic photos inside his jacket and stood. “If I know Sergeant Martin and the others, they’ll find a way to contact us.”
Cameron nodded. “Then let’s be ready to roll.”
TASIYA SMOOTHED HER PALMS down the length of her cream-colored sweater and steadied her nerves before slipping the elastic band of keys Marcus had given her around her wrist. Then she unlocked the wheels of her stainless steel cart and pushed it out of the kitchen into the breezeway that separated the refurbished quarters housing the militia members from the prison section of the compound.
She passed back through centuries of time as she unlocked a thick wooden door and entered the long passageway that housed the prisoners. In this part of the stronghold, little had been done to reclaim it from its colonial past. The uneven settling of the stones paving the floor created an uneven, repetitive clanking sound that chafed her nerves as her cart bounced over bumps and into ruts.
With no central heating and few covered windows, the chilly night air off the ocean drifted in and caught in the dark, dank corners. The breeze swirled her skirt around her knees. She’d brought one pair of denim jeans with her, which she suspected were going to become her new uniform if she couldn’t shake the damp chill that permeated her skin.
Behind locked doors she could hear the hum of generators and other machinery, which she supposed had something to do with the island’s alarm system. Driven more by survival than curiosity, she didn’t test her keys in any door until she reached the rusted iron monstrosity Marcus Smith had shown her earlier. After unlatching a modern steel padlock, she scraped the dead bolt across its hinge. The door itself groaned from weight and age as she shoved it open and entered the prison proper.
Foul, musty air stung her nostrils and made her eyes water. It was inhumane to keep a man in these conditions, but then she supposed kindness and compassion weren’t on Boone Fowler’s list of virtues.
&
nbsp; Besides the padlock she’d slipped into her pocket to keep from being trapped inside herself, the only visible hint of technology was the single electric wire that ran the length of the stone walls to illuminate a bare lightbulb every twenty feet or so. And she suspected that had more to do with security than with the prisoners’ comfort.
Unintelligible snippets of conversation teased her ears and bounced along the walls, but the prisoners fell silent as she approached the steel bars that separated her from the men she was feeding. They all watched her with assessing, unfriendly eyes. Three soldiers in one cell. Four in another. Then three and three more.
They took the small loaves of bread and cups of water she poured for them with a variety of comments at seeing a woman, and a few jeers as they mistook her for a member of Fowler’s militia. But hunger quickly overrode their defiance, and they sat down to eat with a pitiful gusto that reminded her of some of the poor families she’d seen in Lukinburg.
Another key unlocked a second iron door. In this long, twisting catacomb, there were four isolated cells, each one separated from the other by thick stone walls and steel bars.
Here the men sat, bound by leg irons and wrist manacles, one to each cell like condemned murderers. These men didn’t wear uniforms like the others, but civilian clothing.
The first one had unusual blue-green eyes that looked right through her without blinking. She idly wondered if the blood on his torn shirt was his own or someone else’s. He never moved until she had passed on by. The next one stood up when she approached. Despite the bruising and swelling around one eye, he was a handsome man. He nodded a silent thank-you, then watched her every move until she’d rounded the corner out of sight. The third was deep in his own thoughts. And pain, she suspected, noting a dozen or so cuts across his roughly shaved head. Tasiya quickly set the bread and cup of water just outside the bars on the floor in front of his cell and moved on.
When she turned the corner to the last, most isolated of all the chambers, Tasiya hesitated. The lightbulb here had burned out, leaving the only illumination to the bulb twenty feet behind her, and the moonlight that streamed in from what must be the cell itself.
