“So that’s where Bauer picked up his souvenir!”
“That would be my guess.”
His brow knit, Dodge mentally reviewed their growing dossier of information on the missing treasure. “Didn’t the Soviets sift through every ounce of rubble in Königsberg after the war, searching for the panels?”
“They did. Several times. Which is why most experts believe they were destroyed in the allied bombing raids. But…”
Smug satisfaction colored Tank’s voice.
“According to his immigration application, Thomas Bauer’s father dug sewers for a living before coming to the States. Stands to reason a sanitation worker would know every tunnel, every underground passageway in the city. Also stands to reason a son about to be sent into Königsberg as a saboteur would pump his father for that information.”
“Damn, Ridgeway! You’ve been busy.”
“That’s not all. I found out one of Bauer’s cousins is still alive. I’m thinking Blade or Rebel may want to pay her a visit.”
Blade stood by the window still streaming light at 11:00 p.m., the phone to his ear. The voice signals sent from OMEGA were scrambled and couldn’t be picked up by any listening devices that might be planted in the room. His careful replies could, however. So all he did was thank his unnamed caller for the update and snap his phone shut.
He pulled in a long breath, feeling as though he’d just bounced off the five-ton elephant that had been tap-dancing on his chest. Rebel’s story checked out. Tank hadn’t dug up all the details. Those remained buried in top secret DIA and CIA files. But he did confirm that Major Victoria Talbot had worked with an unnamed St. Petersburg source to gather information on a highly classified military research project. The Russians had subsequently put the project on the back burner for lack of funding. The U.S. was pressing ahead with it.
Blade could axe his insidious doubts. Trust his partner on this op. Breathing easy for the first time in more than eight hours, he crossed to the connecting door between their rooms.
They’d left it open by mutual consent. Or mutual suspicion. Whatever the reason, they’d filled the hours until their meeting with Kurov with desultory conversation and reading.
He wasn’t sure when Rebel had dozed off. Sometime around nine-thirty or ten, he thought. He was surprised she’d lasted until then, considering she’d spent the entire flight to St. Petersburg pouring through Professor Dawson’s book. It was in her lap now, propped up by nerveless hands.
He stopped just over the threshold and studied the sleeping woman. She was curled into a loose ball in her room’s overstuffed armchair. A silky tangle of hair brushed one shoulder. Her lashes fanned her cheeks. Her breath snuffled in, sighed out.
Blade’s mouth twisted. He might as well admit it. Tank’s call had relieved more than his mind. It had churned up his contradictory feelings for Talbot and distilled them down to one inescapable essential. He wanted this woman with an ache that damned near doubled him over whenever he let it slip past his guard.
Like now. It was there, knifing into his belly when he lifted her out of the chair and into his arms.
“Nnnngh.”
She gave an inarticulate grunt and blinked up at him owlishly.
“Whatimeizit?”
“Almost eleven. You can sleep another hour.”
Her head flopped against his shoulder. Her arm looped around his neck. With another grunt, she burrowed her nose in the side of his throat.
He tried to ignore the firm, full breast mashed against his chest and carried her to the bed. When he bent to stretch her out on the brocade cover, however, she wouldn’t stretch.
“C’mon, kid. You might as well get comfortable.”
Her arm remained hooked around his neck. He shifted until he sat on the mattress, her bottom resting on his thighs, and saw the question in her brown eyes.
“I was half-asleep…”
“You were all the way asleep.”
“…but I think I heard you talking to someone.”
“I got a call from home.”
Home being their agreed on code for OMEGA. She blinked more fully awake.
“And?”
“And they confirmed delivery of the items we discussed at dinner tonight.”
“They did, huh?” Her mouth curved into the irritating smirk he disliked so much. “Satisfied, Black?”
“Almost.”
One dark blond eyebrow arched. “So what’s it going to take to get you all the way there?”
He couldn’t help himself. She looked so smug, so self-possessed.
“We don’t have the time it would take for either of us to satisfy the other.”
Rebel sucked in a breath and wondered for a wild moment if she was misreading the glint in his golden-brown eyes. Nope, no mistake. That was a taunt. A dare that stirred two instant reactions.
One, she knew better than to rise to such an obvious challenge. Two, she wanted him to knock it right back down his throat.
There was a third desire muddled up in there somewhere. One that made the muscles low in her belly quiver and warned her she was playing with fire when she reached up and undid the top button on his shirt.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” she murmured, “but I seem to recall someone saying I could snooze for another hour.”
She popped the second button and had the fierce satisfaction of hearing Blade suck air this time.
“I don’t know about you,” she purred, trailing a nail over the expanse of tanned chest she’d exposed, “but an hour might just do it for me.”
She bent forward and nipped the smooth, taut swell of muscle. Harder than she’d intended, apparently, because he had her flat on her back less than two seconds later. He leaned over her, caging her in, igniting a need that burned like phosphorous. He had to have read the white-hot hunger he’d stirred, but he gave her an out.
“You sure you want this?”
Hell, no! The denial fog-horned through her mind, forcing her to catalogue all the things that irritated her about this man. He was too cocky. Too overbearing. Too damned magnetic to the female half of the world’s population.
More to the point, she had to consider their mission. She’d already used it as a safety valve during that idiotic moment on the street outside NYU’s art history building. She fully intended to use it again. And would have, if the memory of how his mouth had molded hers back there in New York hadn’t slammed into her.
“Yes,” she breathed. “I want it.”
Him, she corrected. She wanted him. Had wanted him since the day she’d dropped him on his ass. She could admit it now, with his hands and mouth demanding a response from hers.
She gave it. Eagerly. Greedily. Her head angled. Her hips shifted. Breathing hard and fast now, she wedged her hands between their straining bodies and fought the remaining buttons of his shirt. Two gave, but the last held on stubbornly until Rebel tore it loose.
He was just as impatient. Hands rough, he yanked off the mock turtleneck she’d put on in place of the blouse with the bloodstained collar. She fell back on the now twisted bedcovers and reached for him.
He froze, his chest six inches from hers, his gaze locked on the small round Band-Aid she’d stuck on after washing the nick. An equal mix of regret and exasperation roughened his voice.
“Don’t push me like that again.”
She huffed indignantly. “Is that supposed to be an apology?”
He buried his fists in her hair. “Dammit, woman, don’t you know how close you came to the edge?”
“No,” she shot back. “Tell me.”
When he didn’t answer, her eyes searched his. What she saw in them sent a ripple down her spine. Not a shiver exactly. But close. Too close.
“Would you have cut me?” she asked in a husky whisper. “Really cut me.”
“Yes.”
He hadn’t hesitated. Hadn’t made any attempt to sugarcoat his curt reply. That answered one question in Rebel’s mind. Clint Black would take whate
ver measures he deemed necessary to accomplish their mission. The knowledge satisfied her on a professional level, and stirred a whole host of questions on another, not least among them was whether she would go to the same extreme. The fact that she didn’t know distracted her so much she almost missed the tick in the side of his jaw.
She didn’t miss the way his fists tightened in her hair, though. Or the sudden savagery in the mouth that covered hers. He’d been forced to cut someone before, she understood with blinding certainty. Someone he’d trusted. The realization burned a hole in her heart. It also made her lock her arms around his neck and strain against him. Their tongues met in mounting urgency, and he had her naked almost before she knew it was happening.
The man was good at this, she acknowledged ruefully. Way too good. Then she wiped the thought from her mind and gave herself up to the wild sensations he generated with his teeth and his tongue and his busy, busy hands.
He’d worked his way down to her breasts when a faint glimmer of sanity surfaced. “Clint…”
His teeth rasped her distended nipple.
“Clint!” Gasping, she arched her back. “We agreed. Back in New York. This isn’t smart.”
“Right.” He slid his body over hers, moved up to her mouth. “We did.”
“We. Should. Stop.”
“Right again.”
“You first.”
Laughter rumbled in the chest crushing her into the mattress. The sound drove out her last remnant of sanity and made her desperate for more. Throwing herself to one side, she used the momentum to roll him onto his back. Her hands were frantic at the waistband of his jeans when the phone on the desk across the room shrilled.
“Dammit all to hell!” She threw a frustrated glance at the phone and scowled when it shrilled again. “Don’t move,” she ordered.
“No, ma’am.”
Snatching up his shirt, she dragged it on and stomped across the room.
Blade crossed his hands under his head and enjoyed the view. Her hair was a tangled, tawny mess. Her bare legs seemed to stretch forever below his shirttail. And damned if he didn’t spot a dimple in her left cheek when she leaned across the desk to snatch up the receiver.
“Yes?”
He watched her, fully aware that the relief generated by the call from OMEGA Control had battered at his restraint. It had collapsed completely when she’d curled in his arms and…
“On, no!”
Slowly, Blade brought down his arms.
“Thank you for letting us know.” She hung up and turned. “That was Anton Gorsky, our escort from the Ministry of Culture.”
The use of the man’s title was deliberate. Another signal, this one for any possible listening devices.
“Anton just heard on the eleven o’clock news that Petr Kurov, the curator we spoke with at Catherine Palace this afternoon, had a tragic accident.”
“What happened?”
“Apparently…” She wet her lips. “Apparently, he’s had some balance problems. Anton says his neighbors reported that he’d fallen several times recently. This time he stumbled and went right through the window of his fifth-floor apartment.”
Stumbled, hell. His mind racing, Blade swung off the bed. What had Kurov known? And who were the men he’d mentioned at Catherine Palace? The curator had turned five shades of pale when Rebel asked if one of them had a scar above his eye.
Had Vivian Bauer’s killers tracked Kurov to his apartment? Beat or choked a key piece of information about the Amber Room out of him? Pushed him out a window? If so, that was twice now scarface and pal had left a corpse in their wake.
Vowing it would be the last, Blade crossed the room. He slid his hand through the heavy silk of her hair and cupped her nape.
“I would suggest we pick up where we left off, but…” He squeezed her neck. “Takes the edge off, doesn’t it?”
She got the message. Following his lead, she let out a long sigh. “It does.”
“I need some coffee. Get dressed, and we’ll go out.”
The streetlights came on just as they emerged from the hotel. In the last, hazy glow of St. Petersburg’s white night, Blade hooked his arm through Rebel’s and briefed her on the second part of Tank’s call.
Nobly, she refrained from pointing out the parallel between Sergeant Thomas Bauer’s work with the OSS and her own covert activities, but the fact that his father had dug sewers for a living evoked a gasp.
“The authors of the book the professor lent us cited several references suggesting the Nazis moved the Amber Room panels out of Königsberg Castle into an underground bunker for safekeeping. The Soviets searched for decades after the war but couldn’t find it.”
“Maybe Bauer had better luck.”
“Maybe.”
When she whipped out her phone, Blade glanced down at her. “What are you doing?”
“Getting us on the next flight to Königsberg. Which, by the way, the Soviets renamed Kaliningrad.”
Chapter 6
While Rebel used her phone to check transportation to Kaliningrad, Blade used his to tap into the State Department database and call up information on the city and the country that shared the same name. A State Department map showed Kaliningrad to be a tiny slice of territory separated from Mother Russia by more than five hundred miles. The Russian satellite state sat wedged between Poland and Lithuania and boasted a small coastline on the Baltic Sea.
Allied and Soviet bombing raids had pulverized Kaliningrad—then Königsberg—in the closing months of WWII. After the war, the Soviets annexed the former East Prussian province and made it the headquarters of their Baltic Fleet. Since it was the only Russian Baltic port to remain ice-free all year round, Moscow had stubbornly hung on to it after the Soviet Union fell apart.
Kaliningrad’s physical separation from Russia had some unintended side effects, Blade gathered from the State Department brief. The distance weakened the central government’s authority in its satellite state. So much so that some DOS wag had likened Kaliningrad to the lawless frontier of America’s Old West. Except their cowboys ran guns, drugs and white slaves instead of cattle.
“The fastest way to get there is by air,” Rebel announced. “We can… Crap!”
“What?”
“The only direct flight is aboard a Belorussian variant of the DC-6.”
“I jumped out of a DC-6 down in South American during my Army special ops days,” Blade mused. “As I recall, it was a bucket of rust held together by wire and spit.”
“I’m not surprised. The last DC-6 rolled off the assembly line in 1958. It is—or was—a great airframe, but there’s no way I’m climbing into the back end of one.”
“We could have Tank set up a car.”
He was envisioning a sporty, kilometer-eating convertible and a night spent along the way when she nixed the idea.
“We would have to drive through Latvia and Lithuania, and we don’t have visas. We could get them, but border crossings from Russia take forever since the Baltic States thumbed their noses at their former Soviet masters and joined NATO. Let me check the train schedules.”
When she tilted her phone to catch the glow from the streetlamps, the light illuminated her face. Her mouth was devoid of lip gloss and slightly swollen, Blade noted with a tug low in his belly. He could still taste her, and felt an instant craving for another sample.
“We’re in luck,” she announced. “A fast train departs the South Station at 5:50 a.m. Since all Russian trains run on Moscow time, we’re actually talking four-fifty.” She thumbed the phone keys. “I’ll reserve our tickets online but we’ll need to pick them up at the station at least sixty minutes before departure.”
Blade checked his watch. That still gave them a couple hours. Enough time to finish what they’d started before Gorsky’s call. Or not.
Rebel hadn’t slept at all on the flight over and had only napped for an hour or so tonight. She had to be running on fumes. What he wanted to do with her would drain the rest. Not a
real smart move on his part, especially if someone had in fact sent Kurov sailing through a window. The bodies were starting to stack up.
“Besides,” he told her in the elevator taking them up to their rooms, “the next time I get you naked, I damned well don’t intend to keep one eye on the clock.”
She slanted him a quick glance. “You that sure of yourself?”
“Yeah,” he responded with a grin. “I am.”
Wrong answer. He realized that as soon as he saw the chill descend.
“God forbid I should spoil your perfect record,” she muttered.
The elevator door pinged open. He followed her into the hall, frowning. “I’m not keeping score here, Talbot.”
“Good to know.”
Her acerbic tone implied exactly the opposite. She keyed her room and when he entered after her, she gestured to the still open connecting door.
“Close that behind you, will you? I’m going to take a quick shower and pack. I’ll buzz when I’m ready to go.”
“Hold on a minute. You need to explain what just happened.”
“You said it yourself. Too many bodies stacking up. Let’s just leave it there.”
“The hell we will.”
Her temper flashed, melting the ice in her eyes, but she battled it into submission. “We have to pack, check out and catch a train. How about we table further discussion until we’re aboard?”
Even after they’d stashed their bags in the overhead rack and claimed facing seats in the first-class compartment, Rebel was in no mood to hash out her feelings. She rarely talked about her past. Couldn’t talk about parts of it, as Blade had verified.
She’d opened herself up for this particular chat, though. She’d let the man slip past her guard. Okay, okay. She’d all but dragged him into bed with her last night. Somewhere along the line the prickly irritation Clint Black stirred in her had morphed into an entirely different kind of itch. If Gorsky hadn’t called when he did…
To her profound disgust, the mere thought of what could have happened sent ripples of regret all through her. Calling herself ten kinds of an idiot, she wedged into the corner of her seat. Despite the early departure, a good number of sleepy-eyed travelers occupied the other seats. None sat close enough to hear a casual conversation over the whine of the train’s powerful electric engines, however.
Double Deception Page 6
