Vee lay back and closed her eyes. It wasn’t as if she’d actually believed he’d choose Valentina Frost over his damned bombs.
Yes, she had. She’d thought the chance pretty slim that they’d have a choice at all, but if they did . . .
He could have waited to kiss her good-bye. Said he was sorry for leaving her.
Guess not.
“Hey,” Vee said softly, “guess what?”
Cade looked up, struggling for a smile. “What?”
“We’re only two hours from home.”
Chapter 27
It was closer to two days than two hours before they made it back to Sarasota. Homeland Security swooped into the hospital, parking the two of them with interrogators and megasecurity in adjoining rooms in one of the hotels along International Drive.
Was this how Seryozha felt, Vee wondered, when snatched by the GRU? Or had he gone willingly? Mission accomplished, back to the hunt. Well good riddance, damn him. If he hadn’t cared enough to want to know what happened to her . . .
Debriefing was a bitch. Her head hurt, her ribs hurt. Her heart hurt. During their short days together, she’d refused to look past the take-down, to wonder what happened next. Maybe because she sensed just how gut-wrenchingly bad it was going to be.
Seryozha . . .
Local television and newspapers described nothing more exciting than a multi-car pile-up on I-4. Wow! Someone swung a lot of weight on that one, producing a blanket of censorship that masked sighs of relief echoing along the East Coast from New York City to Miami. The magic wand of Homeland Security. One of the privileges of power.
Stop the questions, I want to get off.
On the third day, Vee and Cade went home. With orders to take a week off.
And that was worse. After two days at home, Vee begged to be put back to work. A desk job, answering phones, busy work. Anything not to be alone in her apartment, thinking. Remembering.
Maybe Seryozha had been too shaken up to resist his abduction.
Maybe he just didn’t like good-byes.
Maybe Misha had planned it all because he didn’t approve of Sergei’s attraction to an American, even if he’d acted as if he liked her.
And maybe Seryozha was going to recuperate at a resort on the Black Sea, with his choice of delectable Russian females, all anxious to kiss his scars, cater to his ego, and push all thoughts of Valentina Frost to the farthest reaches of his convoluted Russian mind.
Well, hell . .
And maybe, if he’d stayed, Seryozha would have been in considerable hot water, trying to explain himself to a hierarchy of Homeland Security that thought Jack Frost tended to play too much outside the box. Men who preferred to jail the arms dealer, Sergei Tokarev, rather than thank super bomb sleuth, Sergei Zhukov. And Misha, playing it safe, had made sure baby brother escaped the hole he had dug for himself.
The latter scenario was at least palatable, and made Vee feel not quite so ruthlessly abandoned.
Over the next month Vee elaborated on her list of speculations. Seryozha hadn’t really meant to leave her without a word. When he recovered, he’d call. Maybe an e-mail . . .
The phone rang, but it was never the voice she longed to hear. Her e-mail continued to offer sexual enhancements of the wrong gender. Cade kept trying to jolly her out of her misery, backing off only when she snapped at him.
After five weeks Vee pasted her best professional face over her anguish and went back on active duty. Sergei could hunt his damn bombs into the next millennium. There were enough bad guys on the Florida Gulf Coast to keep her occupied, thank you very much.
On a day in early December, with Christmas decorations along Sarasota’s Main Street sparkling under a sun that pushed the temperature to seventy-seven degrees, Richard Everett once again called Vee into his office.
“How goes it, Vee? Ribs holding up?”
“An occasional twinge, but they’ll do. I’m glad to be in the field again. Thank you, sir.”
“Well . . .” Special Agent in Charge Everett played with his pen, tapping it on his desk while gazing out his office window, seemingly lost in thought.
“Sir?”
“I’ve had an odd request,” he told her. “From Homeland Security. I was just wondering if you were up for it.”
Vee’s breath hitched. He was playing a game with her, she was almost certain of it. Her boss’s version of a friendly tease. She gulped, managed to get out an incredulous, “Again?” She’d swear there was a twinkle, and maybe just a hint of concern, behind his I’m-the-boss façade.
“It’s a short assignment, Vee. And shouldn’t be dangerous. Seems there’s some kind of a problem with a foreign agent, someone DHS would like to recruit. I’m told you’re the only one who has a chance of pulling it off.”
Instantly aware of what wasn’t being said, Vee nearly lost it. Mist filmed her eyes. Her jaw quivered, her hands white-knuckled in her lap.
And then the sun broke through. She lifted her chin, straightened her shoulders. “Where and when, sir?”
It was all a ruse, she knew it. The Powers That Be had arranged a reward—a golden beach, tropical waves, luxury accommodations, endless rounds of room service . . . and her own personal foreign agent to keep her company.
From the moment Vee first walked into Wade Tingley’s office, nothing had gone the way she expected. Why should this time be any different?
When she got to Washington, the still sullen Tingley threw her a curve almost as surprising as turning her into a whore. She was headed for Moscow. In the dead of winter.
Well, hell, it was still a government-approved assignation. Wasn’t it?
Maybe not. Moscow in December made Bratsk in early October seem like a walk through a spring garden. Vee didn’t think she’d ever been so cold. Her reception at the incredibly ugly GRU headquarters nicely matched the air temperature.
A grim-faced uniformed female officer escorted Vee down what seemed like an endless series of corridors before ushering her into a surprisingly well-appointed office and leaving her to the mercy of a female colonel whose attitude was only slightly warmer than the drifts of snow outside. Colonel Andropova asked her to sit.
“Ms Frost,” she said, “I understand you speak excellent Russian, but if you do not mind, we will speak in English.” The colonel was pushing sixty, with good bone structure and remnants of what had likely been considerable beauty. Her strength of character was unfaded by her years, even though Vee suspected her shining blond hair likely required chemical assistance. Her eyes . . .
Vee blinked, realized she hadn’t answered the colonel’s rhetorical question. “As you wish,” she murmured.
The older woman took her time looking Vee over. Finally, she nodded. Approval? Vee wondered.
“I understand you are acquainted with Sergei Ivanovich Zhukov,” she said. “And his brother Mikhail.”
“Yes, ma’am—colonel.” Vee wanted to add words of praise for them both, but she was on slippery ground here, with no idea which way this conversation was going to go. Or even why she’d been met at the airport by the GRU. She would wait, feel the colonel out . . .
“You are aware Zhukov is an arms dealer, smuggling weapons on a massive scale.”
“I am aware that he mascaraded as an arms dealer in order to track missing Soviet nuclear bombs,” Vee replied steadily. “I am aware that he has just saved the world from what could easily have escalated into World War III.”
“He is in jail.”
“I beg your pardon!”
The colonel closed her green eyes and sighed. “Not in a cell, Ms Frost. His accommodations are even better than what you call a Club Fed. He needed medical care, and it seemed the best place for him at the time. We didn’t want him slipping away again, chasing phantoms.”
“His phantom-chasing saved the lives of thousands.”
The colonel ignored her. “If we could de-program him, we would,” she stated with ill-concealed exasperation. “But he is stubborn, like his fat
her. Blind to any way but his own. Which is why”—she paused, her stern features dissolving into what appeared to be chagrin. “Which is why I wished to meet you, talk with you. To see for myself the woman powerful enough to turn Sergei Zhukov from his purpose.” The green eyes softened to a look Vee had seen a time a two before. In an occasional mellow moment when Sergei forgot himself.
“I wasn’t aware that I had.”
“Remarkable.” Colonel Andropova shook her head. “So much power and you did not even know.” She drummed her long, perfectly manicured fingers on the desk, suddenly looking ill at ease. “Before I can enumerate the conditions of Sergei’s release,” she said, “I am charged with telling you a story, because my children would rather cut their tongues out before admitting it.”
Ah! She’d guessed correctly. The colonel was Nataliya Andropova, the woman who had volunteered to become a spy in American suburbia. Vee had suspected it ever since she saw the eyes, but her intuition was out of whack these days, not as reliable as she’d once thought.
“My husband was General Ivan Zhukov,” the colonel said, “a man from a long line of military officers. A hero of the Soviet Union, a man of unimpeachable honor and devotion to duty.” For a moment Colonel Andropova closed her eyes. “He was, however, unprepared to see everything he’d lived and breathed his entire life crumble into dust. When the Soviet Union fell, for the first time my husband panicked. He wanted to make certain his family had enough to survive, even if he was pushed aside to make room for the new regime. As it turned out . . .we adapted, the children and myself. Ivan Sergeievich did not.”
Vee could see it coming. She should have known the bomb hunt was personal. Here then was the explanation. At last.
“Using my brother’s connections to the Organizatsiya, Ivan arranged to sell the bombs. Buyers came from everywhere. Not that I knew anything about it until much later . . .” Colonel Andropova’s lashes rested against her cheeks. She seemed to sink into her chair. “Only later, when I realized we had become wealthy, able to travel the world while our country disintegrated, our economy plunged into chaos—only then did I understand. And by that time it was too late. My brother’s success created a criminal organization that made the Italian mafia look like pussy cats, while my husband’s guilt turned him into a broken old man before my eyes.” Andropova paused, obviously seeing into the past and her family’s personal involvement in the battle of good versus evil.
“Ivan was never again the man I married,” she said at last. “Day by day, he diminished, fading away until he was nothing more than a ghost haunted by a crime he could not take back. My older children are pragmatic, like me,” she added, returning briskly from her brief foray into emotion. “Shame might grip us, but we survive, we try harder. We become better people than we might have been without this shame.
“But Seryozha could not accept it. He said nothing—we had no idea—until after college when he set out on his mad adventure. Always keeping his eye on his obsession, never looking back, never settling down. No family, no proper job. Shame consumed him, and we could not turn him from it.”
“And you think I can?”
“I think you have.”
“Ma’am?” If Nataliya Andropova believed that, then she wasn’t as hard-headed as Vee thought she was. What on earth had Misha told her?
Shoulders stiff, eyes downcast, the GRU colonel examined her desk as if she’d never seen it before. This was the moment, Vee thought. The reason she was here. If Seryozha’s mother wanted to think Vee had power over her errant son, so be it. She wasn’t going to disillusion her.
When the older woman faced Vee once again, her green eyes looked out from a face that had softened into something close to a smile. “As you know,” she said, “there are unofficial means of communication between your country and ours. Quiet little one-on-one meetings in out-of-the-way places. Feelers put out, responses, negotiation. Baby steps that take time . . . and delicate maneuvering. It seems your Homeland Security believes Sergei could be useful to them, and as far as we are concerned”—the colonel flipped her fingers in a rueful wave—“he has become an embarrassment, a constant reminder of our family’s shame. Like my brother Arkadi, we all breath easier when he is several thousand miles away.”
“You would exile him?” Vee protested.
“No.” Nataliya Andropova shook her head. “We would not keep him from Mother Russia. It is in his blood. But for living, working . . .” This time she allowed herself a true smile. “I raised him to be an American. He has lived there for more than a decade. For him it will be like going home.”
Seryozha. Homeland Security. They were actually going to let him go. Vee had begun to think this was all one big run-around. The implications were staggering. Her whirling brain finally realized Nataliya Andropova was still speaking. Attention, idiot! It’s not over yet.
“ . . . conditions. First—”
“I beg your pardon, colonel. Would you please repeat that.”
“There are conditions to my son’s release, Ms Frost. Important ones. Perhaps you would be kind enough to pay attention.”
Yes, ma’am. Underneath the gruff reproof Vee thought she caught a gleam of understanding. This was, after all, the woman who had fallen so much in love with an army officer that she had turned her back on a commitment to her country.
“Firstly,” Andropova decreed, “no more bombs. Sergei’s hunting days are over.”
“He has agreed to this?” Vee asked, more than a little surprised.
“He has agreed if our final condition is met.”
“And that is?”
Holding up a second finger, Nataliya Andropova ignored Vee’s question. “Secondly, Sergei will never again work for Arkadi Petrovski.”
“Not a problem, colonel. Officially, Sergei Tokarev died in a courtyard in Brighton Beach.”
“There will be no miraculous resurrections,” Andropova snapped.
“Yes, ma’am,” Vee responded meekly.
“Thirdly . . .” Colonel Andropova folded her hands on top of her desk, reverting to the stern face of a high-ranking member of the GRU. “Thirdly, we are all agreed that the only way we can be sure these conditions will stay in effect is marriage. To you.”
Silence. Vee felt the thudding of her heart, the rasping breaths she couldn’t quite control. “You’re serious,” she choked out.
“Completely.”
“He has agreed?” Seryozha give up his quest? Impossible. This was some kind of GRU manipulation. A fantasy. But why—
“Yes.”
Vee returned the colonel’s bland stare with something close to fascination. “You are aware,” she pronounced with great care, “that no one can really control him. He is his own man and a very powerful one.”
“If you agree to our conditions, he becomes your responsibility. May you have joy in taming him.”
Not possible. But an amusing thought. “I can only give you an answer after I’ve talked to him,” Vee said. “Now, please.”
Colonel Nataliya Andropova stood, held out her hand. “It has been a pleasure, Ms Frost. Valentina. I hope to see you again at your wedding.”
Vee shook hands with . . . her prospective mother-in-law?
This wasn’t happening.
Well, damn. Seryozha was back in a Psych Ward.
The message had been clear after a meandering drive through a forest of slim white birch trees interspersed with evergreens, revealed a mansion obviously constructed in Tsarist days before Stalin turned utilitarian into an architectural dirty word. Seryozha was in a funny farm for agents who needed more R & R than a couple of weeks at a Black Sea resort.
Poor misunderstood Limbo Man. He couldn’t get away from being a head case. No matter the state of his sanity when he’d been incarcerated here, the inactivity had probably turned him into a raving maniac by now.
Vee followed a nurse up the graceful, curving staircase of the eighteenth century mansion whose ambiance had been destroyed by ugly modern fur
nishings. “The furniture was burned during the revolution,” the receptionist had told her with an apologetic smile when she noticed Vee’s shocked perusal of the foyer whose only remaining traces of elegance were its black and white marble floor, pale green walls, and empty niches where statues once stood.
The nurse knocked on a door near the end of a long corridor. A corner room, Vee noticed, in spite of her pounding heart and faltering feet. Royal accommodations. Yet surely Colonel Andropova couldn’t really have meant what she said. That the government would release Seryozha only if she married him. If she took him out of the country . . .
“Come.”
The nurse cracked open the door, stood back, and waved Vee inside. Suddenly, surprisingly, the woman flashed a broad smile before retracing her steps along the corridor.
Vee stepped through the door. Every word she’d planned to say, every emotion she’d thought of expressing flew out of her head. This was Seryozha? This ruggedly handsome man with a full, perfectly trimmed head of brown hair. Clear green eyes with no dark and deadly depths. A mouth that was sensuous instead of grim. A body that somehow stood straighter, taller, a few pounds heavier. A body that looked fit and confident, but not as if prepared to throw a punch or dodge a bullet at any second.
Well, thank you, funny farm. Maybe mama knew best, after all.
“Valentina?” He stood ramrod stiff, not moving a muscle.
She had to play it cool. Not fall all over him, crying a river of tears. If they were going to be married, it damn well wasn’t going to be because mama said so.
The room was large, with a double-sided view of extensive gardens, now nothing more than clumps of frosted plants beneath a blanket of snow. Vee moved forward, stopping just short of touching distance. “So you’re so desperate to get out of here, you’re willing to marry me,” she challenged.
“It seemed”—he gave an infinitesimal shrug—“not a bad idea.”
Right. Men! “Were you thinking temporary?” Vee inquired sweetly. “Just long enough to get you out of the country?”
One brown brow—the one over his scarred right cheek—shot up. “Well, actually . . . I was thinking of fulfilling my mother’s old assignment. House in the suburbs, kids, maybe even the white picket fence. Happily ever after without the call to fight.”
Limbo Man Page 27
