She would not fall into Clint Black’s arms again, accidentally or otherwise. Rebel repeated that mantra more than once during the twelve-hour flight to St. Petersburg. The man was too cocky. Too pushy. Too sure of himself. And too much like her come-and-get-me ex.
It didn’t help that he’d angled his seat back shortly after takeoff and zoned out. His long legs sprawled too close to Rebel’s. Not even their spacious business-class seats could prevent an occasional knee or elbow bump.
Nor could she numb her senses with the alcohol that flowed so freely in business class. She didn’t drink during an op unless circumstances dictated that she show she could hold her own. Instead, she downed too much coffee and spent the long flight reading the book Professor Dawson had pressed on Blade along with her card.
The professor hadn’t exaggerated. The authors of The Amber Room had uncovered amazing documentation during their exhaustive research. These documents included transcriptions of German radio transmissions collected by Britain’s formerly ultra-ultra-top secret Enigma project. One of these messages reiterated Hitler’s exhortation to his troops to return the Amber Room to Prussia, where it belonged.
The documents also included excerpts from the diary of the Russian curator charged with stripping St. Petersburg’s museums and palaces when the German’s invaded. The curator and his army of helpers had worked day and night, so feverishly that the frantic packers got nosebleeds from bending over crates without letup.
The Germans had advanced to the suburbs of St. Petersburg when the crates were loaded onto a train and shipped eastward into Russia’s vast interior. All except the Amber Room. That was deemed too fragile to move. Instead, the desperate curators had covered the panels with padding and constructed false walls to hide them.
The detailed account of the room’s discovery by the Germans and subsequent removal to Königsberg Castle kept Rebel riveted right up to the announcement that they would be landing at Pulkovo Airport in twenty minutes.
Blade blinked instantly awake. Bringing up his seat back, he glanced at his watch. “Almost noon, St. Petersburg time. Hope Tank got that meeting with the folks at Catherine Palace set up for us.”
“He did,” Rebel confirmed. “I received a coded satellite transmission while you were sawing z’s.”
“You get any sleep?”
“No.” She held up the book. “I’ve been reading.”
He scraped a palm across his dark bristles. “You can brief me after I shave and clean up.”
She vaguely recalled issuing a similar order when she’d hooked up with him at Andrews at the start of this op. She didn’t care much for being on the receiving end, though.
“Yes, sir,” she muttered to his back as he made for the galley and restrooms beyond. “Whatever you say, sir.”
The heat wave gripping North America and Western Europe hadn’t made it to this corner of the Baltic. Although the summer sun wouldn’t set until almost midnight, the daytime temperature hovered around sixty degrees. Just cool enough for Rebel to slip a hip-length leather jacket from her weekender to wear with her black skirt and somewhat wrinkled white blouse.
“There’s Anton Gorsky.”
She spotted the Russian contact whose photo and bio Tank had forwarded. The man was hard to miss. He stood almost six and a half feet tall and had shoulders like a bull moose. His bio listed his profession as a low-ranking official in Russia’s Ministry of Culture. Rebel knew otherwise, but didn’t betray their past association by so much as a flicker of an eyelid.
Blade had to suspect otherwise, too, when this supposedly minor bureaucrat supplied them with a signed and stamped visitors’ permit that allowed them to bring their weapons into the country. He then escorted them past long lines of arrivals to a uniformed customs officer who peered suspiciously at their faces and ran their passports through a special scanner before waving them through.
When they emerged into thin, cool sunshine, Gorsky signaled the driver of a car idling at the curb. “I have been instructed to take you directly to Catherine Palace. You wish meet with the director, yes? Then the curator who oversees restoration of the Amber Room?”
“Right.”
The driver popped the trunk so they could dump their bags and opened the vehicle’s rear door for Blade and Rebel. Gorsky shoehorned himself into the front passenger seat.
“So,” he commented, wedging his massive shoulders around, “you have visited St. Petersburg before?”
Blade shook his head, and Rebel gave him the answer he already knew. “I made a couple of trips while I was assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.”
“Ah, then you know it is a city of glorious palaces constructed on a bend of the Neva River by Tsar Peter the first.”
Some parts of it were glorious, she recalled all too vividly. Some were gritty and downright scary. She merely nodded, however, and commented that she hadn’t made it out to Catherine Palace on either of her previous visits.
“Then I will tell you about it, yes?”
Gorsky launched into a description of the collection of summer palaces, parks and pavilions known as Tsarskoe Selo—the Tsar’s Village—constructed by Peter the Great and his successors twelve miles south of the city. Since Rebel had read much of the area’s history in the book borrowed from Professor Dawson’s collection, she listened with half an ear while St. Petersburg’s suburbs give way to a countryside dotted with small dachas. The well-tended gardens surrounding the dachas displayed the extraordinary abundance that came with upward of eighteen hours of sun a day.
Traffic was light so it took less than twenty minutes to reach the town renamed Pushkin in honor of one of Russia’s greatest poets, who’d studied at the school for boys established on the grounds of Catherine Palace. Broad avenues canopied by majestic elms led through the town.
“Look there,” Gorsky said as they passed a set of tall gates flanked by military guards. “Behind those gates is Alexander Palace. The last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family were kept there under house arrest before they were exiled to Siberia. The Soviet military used the palace as a research institute until it was restored and reopened as a museum some years ago.”
Rebel kept her face turned to the window. Gorsky was angled so that his was reflected in the glass. Their eyes met for the briefest instant before he resumed his patter. A few minutes later he directed their attention to a pair of massive wrought-iron gates.
“This is entrance to the palace built by Tsarina Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great. She named it Catherine Palace in honor of her mother.”
They car swept past the gates and pulled into a parking lot jammed with tour buses. While Gorsky maneuvered his bulk out of the front seat, Rebel and Blade exited the rear. Their escort issued brief instructions to the driver in Russian before sweeping an arm toward a tree-lined walkway.
“We will approach the palace through the gardens.”
Marble steps led to a succession of terraces decorated with statuary and fountains. Each garden was more elaborate than the last. All were crammed with tourists aiming digital and video cameras in every direction.
When they mounted a last set of steps and rounded a corner, Rebel fully expected something spectacular. What she got was incredible. She stopped dead, her jaw dropping as she took in what looked like a mile-long facade painted a vivid turquoise and lavishly adorned with white marble columns, pilasters and balconies, all embellished with bright, glittering gold leaf.
“It must have a thousand windows!”
“More,” Gorsky asserted smugly.
The extraordinarily elaborate facade evoked images of other Baroque masterpieces Rebel had visited in her travels, but the five onion-shaped cupolas rising above what she guessed was the royal chapel gave Catherine Palace a uniquely Russian character. The cupolas, too, were beautifully, blindingly covered in gold leaf.
Gaping like any awestruck tourist, she couldn’t help craning her neck as Gorsky escorted them to a marble staircase leading up to the center entra
nce.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” she murmured to Blade. “No.”
The flat response brought her head around. “Don’t let your enthusiasm carry you away.”
He shrugged and turned his attention to the attendants on duty just inside the cavernous entrance. One of them handed each of the new arrivals a pair of blue plastic booties. Pointing to their feet, she nodded encouragingly.
“It is required,” Gorsky apologized, “even though we have the special pass.”
Once they were booted, he steered them around the magnificent marble staircase and down a long corridor lined on either side with doors showing aged wooden frames and wavy glass insets. Servants’ quarters, Rebel guessed, now converted into offices, research cubicles, and storage areas.
“Here is the office of the director.”
Gorsky reached for the knob, but Rebel spotted a welcome symbol two doors down. All the coffee she’d consumed on the plane was now demanding an outlet.
“Hang on a sec. I need to visit the ladies’ room.”
“I could use a quick stop, too,” Blade added.
Gorsky shrugged. “Very well. I shall let the director know we are here, yes? Come in when you are done.”
As she led the way down the hall, Rebel couldn’t resist getting in a little dig.
“You hit the head before we landed, Black. You might want to have that weak bladder checked when we get home.”
“Yeah, I might,” he agreed, and promptly shoved her into the ladies’ room. “Hey!”
The two wooden stalls were empty. She saw that much in a brief flash before he slapped a palm against one of the stalls doors and crowded her against it. Then all she saw was the ice in his eyes.
“What’s with you and this guy Gorsky?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Tell me, Talbot.”
“I don’t…”
“You’ve got five seconds.”
She’d been scrambling for an answer, but that brought her chin up. “Or what?”
The ice turned lethal. “Or I extract the information.”
“You and what army?”
The jeer was pure reflex and stupid as hell. She knew that even before he began a countdown. “Four.”
“You’re starting to piss me off.”
“Three.”
“Dammit, Blade…”
“Two.”
She didn’t hear the whisper of bone on leather, barely saw him move. She felt the scalpel-sharp tip of his knife under her chin, though.
“One,” he said softly, pressing the tip against her flesh.
Chapter 4
For a moment Blade thought sheer stubbornness would make the woman clamp her damned mouth shut. She was just bullheaded enough to force him to cut her. Whether or not he would have became a moot point when she gave a low hiss.
“He’s one of ours.”
“What?”
She couldn’t turn her head with his blade pressed against the soft underside of her chin but she managed a swift, sideways glance at the door. When her furious gaze swung back, it lasered into him.
“Gorsky’s one of ours,” she ground out, her voice low and intense.
He didn’t ease the pressure. “Why do you know this and I don’t?”
“How I met him, when, has nothing to do with OMEGA.”
The blade pricked her skin. A crimson drop welled at the tip.
“You want to try that one again?”
“I can’t tell you, dammit! You’re not cleared.”
“And you are?”
“I was,” she spit, “when I was assigned to the embassy in Moscow. Now back the hell off.”
Blade ignored the snarled demand. He knew embassy personnel of every nation collected sensitive information on the countries they were assigned to. Military attachés, in particular, received special intelligence training. Some also engaged in covert activities. Had Rebel?
He’d find out, Blade vowed. And fast. Easing away, he swiped the bone knife against his thigh.
“Better wipe the blood off your neck.”
He left her peering into a mirror above the sink and cursing a blue streak.
As promised, the gorilla was waiting in the director’s outer office. “I have told the director you are here,” Gorsky pronounced. “As soon as Ms. Talbot returns… Ah, good. Here you are.”
Rebel didn’t look at Blade as she came in, her jacket zipped up to the throat. Nor did she betray any hint of the fury he knew had to be seething inside her. Was there fear churning around in there, too? Worry that she’d given away something she hadn’t intended to?
He couldn’t get that possibility out of his head. It hovered there while Catherine Palace’s director greeted them in stilted but perfect English.
“Will you have tea?”
They accepted the polite invitation, and Vassily Mikailovitch himself filled glasses set in filigreed silver holders. Blade took his with milk, Rebel with lemon, Gorsky with three heaping spoons of sugar. When Mikailovitch had refilled his own glass, he gave them a look of polite inquiry.
“Perhaps you will explain your interest in our Amber Room?”
“We’re looking into whether an amber rose medallion discovered a few days ago by an American woman might be from the original panels.”
“Ah, yes. The Facebook entry.”
“You saw it?”
Mikailovitch permitted himself a thin smile. “The Amber Room was Catherine Palace’s great treasure. Many called it the eighth wonder of the world. Of course we watch closely for any reference to it in books or articles or on the internet.”
And had been watching for more than sixty years, Blade guessed.
“The head of our Amber Room restoration team studied the Facebook photo,” the director said. “While the piece is very well crafted, he does not believe it was part of the original room.”
“Why?”
“We had only drawings, the memories of those who worked at Catherine Palace and one color photo taken in 1917 to use as reference when we recreated the room, you understand. But those sources tell us the hues in the Facebook rose are too dark and the curvature of the petals is wrong. We are attempting to contact the woman who posted this picture, however, to ask if our experts may examine the piece.”
“She’s dead,” Blade informed him. “Murdered two nights ago.”
“And the medallion?” he asked sharply.
“Missing.”
Mikailovitch pinched his lips together. “How unfortunate.”
Yeah, Blade thought. That was one way to describe cold-blooded murder.
“We would like to see the reconstructed room. Then talk to the head of the restoration team.”
The director nodded and reached for the phone on his desk. “I will have a guide escort you to the room. Petr Kurov will meet you there.”
Rebel didn’t look at Blade while they waited for the guide. Her fury still simmered in a low, banked boil. She’d exerted an iron will to keep it from showing during the meeting with the director. Didn’t give any sign of it now. She would make the man pay, though, and pay big for the bloodstain on her blouse collar.
Their guide was a dour matron in rubber-soled black Oxfords and a blue serge jacket stretched tight across her impressive chest. After receiving instructions from her boss, she led the visitors up the soaring central staircase to a roped-off passage that shuffled tourists through a series of interconnected salons.
As pissed as Rebel was, she forced herself to put aside thoughts of revenge and drink in the splendor of the salons. The portraits and silk hangings in the Blue Drawing Room were exquisite. The table in the Cavaliers’ Dining Room was set with solid gold plate. Catherine the Great’s crimson Throne Room evoked the extravagant magnificence of the court.
In each salon was a small black-and-white photo under glass. The photos showed the condition of the room after the Nazis withdrew. The damage was horrific. Collapsed roofs. Shattered windows. Blackened beam
s, gaping walls and rubbish piled everywhere. Rebel couldn’t imagine how the Russians had restored Catherine Palace to such splendor in only six decades.
Or recreated an entire room crafted of rare and costly amber. She knew from her reading that the effort to create a full-scale replica had begun in the 1980s. Modern craftsmen moved into the same workshops their predecessors had used and relearned the fine art of working with amber. The new room was completed in 2003, just in time for the three hundredth anniversary of St. Petersburg, and dedicated by President Putin in a lavish ceremony attended by heads of state from all around the world. But everything Rebel had read in no way prepared her for the stunning reality of the recreated room.
“Whoa!”
She came to a dead stop just over the threshold, as did the tourists around her. Blinking, she craned her neck to take in the glowing ceiling, the ornate walls, the candelabra, picture frames, heraldry and carved reliefs all done in costly amber. It was a symphony, a celebration, an achingly beautiful masterpiece ranging in color from pale, lemony-yellow to smoky topaz.
“Come.”
Their guide unclipped the velvet rope and hooked an imperious finger at Rebel, Blade and Gorsky. When others in the crowd tried to follow them off the prescribed path, she stopped them with a scowl and curt nyet.
Rebel tabled her still simmering anger at Blade and moved slowly around the room. The intricate mosaics and glorious colors dazzled. Overwhelmed. Amber inlaid with wood and glittering gilt decorated the walls, the ceilings, the furnishings, even a magnificent eight-foot-tall grandfather clock. Trying to take it all in, she moved to the panels depicting the four seasons. Fall she identified by its harvest motif. Moving past winter, she stopped at spring.
Medallions in dozens of different shades and shapes were used to create the spring blossoms. Rebel bit her lip and scoured the flower bouquets.
“Here it is.”
She’d been so absorbed in her hunt that Blade’s low murmur made her start. Then again, it could have been the warm wash of his breath on her cheek as he leaned closer to examine the bouquet of roses.
When Rebel jerked away, the quick glance he shot her said she had good reason to be so jumpy. Obviously, her terse revelation in the ladies’ room hadn’t answered the questions in his mind.
Double Deception Page 4
