They did, but none that depicted the tunnels under the castle or the city’s sewer system. The proprietor was a squat, bald stump of a man who didn’t try to hide his amusement at their request.
“You look for the Amber Room, yes?”
“Well…”
“You would not be the first,” he said, chuckling. “So many have searched. I supplied city maps to the Soviet Commission who dug through the rubble of the castle one final time before it was bulldozed to build the House of Soviets. And to the professor who came five years ago, sure she had found a clue in some musty letter she had discovered. Even today they hunt. Germans, Russians, British, Bulgarians. Now you Americans.”
Rebel took a stab. “Has anyone besides us been in lately? Within the past two or three weeks?”
“No. Although someone calls yesterday. I tell him what I tell you. The Amber Room panels no longer exist. They were destroyed in the war, along with almost seventy percent of this city.”
The visit to the museum proved just as disappointing.
Rebel learned more than she would have ever imagined possible about the myths, legends and history of amber. She also read every detail describing the Amber Room’s brief return to its Prussian origins during WWII. She studied the black-and-white photos of the room’s exposition in Königsberg Castle. She spoke at length to the museum’s curator. But when she and Blade departed the museum, they were no closer to knowing if Thomas Bauer had stumbled on the missing panels than when they’d gone in.
“Today’s been a total loss so far,” she commented as they headed for their hotel.
“You think so, huh?”
She caught his crooked grin. “Oh. Well. The morning wasn’t so bad. Pretty damned good, as a matter of fact. Here, we can cut through this alley. It should take us to the street our hotel’s on.”
Unlike the alley housing the map shop, this one contained no stores or display windows. The cobbled path was narrow and dark and smelled faintly of urine. Brick walls covered with graffiti leaned in on both sides. Most of the scrawled messages were just obscene, although one or two aspired to pornographic poetry.
She was more than happy to see the busy, sunlit sidewalk dead ahead. As they emerged, Blade’s phone emitted a distinctive signal. She glanced over her shoulder, saw him slide it out of his pocket. “Yo, Tank.”
He walked toward her, the phone to his ear, and Rebel swung back around just in time to avoid a collision with two men on the outer sidewalk.
“Excuse me,” she said in Russian. “I didn’t…”
“You!”
The curse exploded from a face twisted with disbelief. The same face she’d glimpsed through the pouring rain yesterday, she realized as her breath got stuck in her throat. It lodged there like an ice cube swallowed unintentionally, freezing her from the inside out, as she took in the jagged scar the face had acquired since the last time they’d come nose to nose.
Feodyr Chernak. Or whatever alias the slime was going by now.
With another curse, the Bulgarian shot out a hand and stiff-armed her back into the alley. The violent move knocked Rebel into Blade and sent his comm device flying. The phone hit the brick wall, dropped to the cobbles, was still clattering when Chernak spun out a lethal little Marakov 9mm.
“Bitch,” he snarled in his gutter Russian. “They told me you were dead.”
Blade reacted so swiftly his movements were a blur in the dim alleyway. Shoving Rebel aside with one hand, he delivered a bone-shattering chop to Chernak’s wrist with the other. He was reaching for the Sig nested in its ankle holster when Rebel realized she had only seconds to act.
She tore at the flap of her purse. Closed her fist around her .38. Whipped it up and shoved the barrel into the back of Blade’s neck.
“Drop it.”
“What the hell…!”
“Drop it,” she repeated icily, “or I’ll take a page from our friend here and blow a nice, neat hole in your throat.”
Chapter 10
Sheer surprise froze the three men in place as Rebel gouged her gun barrel deeper into Blade’s neck and repeated her icy command.
“Drop it. Now.”
He lowered his arm, slowly, and let the Sig clatter to the cobbles. “Smart move.”
Pulling her lips back in a feral smile, she addressed the man she’d last encountered at what was supposed to have been a deserted airstrip on the outskirts of Moscow.
“So, Feodyr. You thought I was dead, did you? Lucky for you I’m very much alive.”
“But…” He stared at her with slitted eyes and wrapped his free hand around the wrist Blade must have come near to shattering with that vicious chop. “I saw Karinski lunge for you! I saw the blood when you hit the dirt.”
“It wasn’t my blood, as you would have discovered if you’d stuck around until the shooting stopped.” She shifted her attention to the second man. “You! Pick up this one’s gun.”
He looked to his partner for direction. Chernak gave a jerky nod. When he’d retrieved Blade’s weapon, she issued another curt order.
“He’s got a knife strapped to his right arm. Get it. Carefully!”
She was speaking Russian. Blade didn’t understand a word. But she felt his already wire-tight muscles tense even more when Chernak’s partner took a step toward him.
“Don’t move,” she warned in English. “Do not move.”
She was still standing behind him, her weapon dug into his skin, and didn’t pull in a breath until Chernak’s partner stepped back with the bone knife in hand. She relieved the pressure on Blade’s neck but kept the .38 leveled on his head as she backed up a few paces.
“What is this?” Chernak snarled, still holding his wrist. “Why are you in Kaliningrad?”
“The same reason you are, Feodyr. Or are you using another alias? You have so many, I’ve lost count.”
He ignored the name issue, as she’d expected he would, and spit out a demand. “Tell me. Why are you here?”
“I’m searching for the Amber Room. Like you.”
“How do you know this?”
“You’re too sloppy, Feodyr. You left the Bauer woman alive. She died in my arms, but not before she choked out a description. I didn’t put it together until just now, though. The scar threw me. You didn’t have it when you turned tail and ran in Moscow.”
His thin, handsome face flushed almost as red as the barely healed wound above his eye but he didn’t dispute her account of that memorable night. Mainly because he couldn’t.
“And this one?” He jerked his chin at Blade. “Who is he, and why do you now keep him at gunpoint?”
“I wouldn’t have to if you hadn’t announced to the whole friggin’ world that you knew me. Christ! I hate having to deal with amateurs.”
“But…”
“You want to stand here all day reminiscing?” she interrupted impatiently. “Or shall we take this conversation some place a little more private?”
Red surged into his face again. He didn’t like taking orders from a woman. Especially one who’d treated him with such amused contempt the last time they’d collaborated.
“We have a place,” he ground out. “One block from here.”
“Let’s go.”
When he hesitated, his cheeks still suffused with red, Rebel merely lifted a brow.
“All right, all right. But first…”
He edged past Blade and bent to retrieve his 9 mm. When he straightened, he came in from behind and swung his arm in a vicious arc. The Marakov’s butt smashed into Blade’s temple.
Grunting, he staggered forward. Blade caught himself after another half step and pivoted, his fists bunched and murder in his eyes. Chernak slapped his hand on the slide and cocked the Marakov with a snap that ricocheted off the brick walls like a rifle shot.
“Go ahead,” Rebel drawled. “Shoot him. You’ve mangled this business so badly already you might as well silence the only person who can get to the amber panels.”
Chernak’s nostril
s flared. A vein bulged in his forehead, mere inches from the still healing scar. The urge to kill was written all across his face until she ended the showdown with a huff of disgust.
“For God’s sake, you’ve proved you’re a man! Now tuck your penis back into your shorts and let’s get moving before someone stops to see what all the commotion is about.”
He sent her an evil look but gestured to his companion to move out of the alley. “You go first, Nikolai. Then you and your friend, Viktoria. I’ll walk behind to make sure we all arrive safely.”
“Whatever.” She switched to English and met Blade’s stone-cold stare. “These nice gentlemen have invited us up to their place. Just follow Nikolai here.”
She could see him searching for some clue to what was going down in her face, her eyes. She kept both carefully bland as she slid the snub nosed .38 into her purse. She left her hand in the open purse, her finger curled around the trigger, and gestured to Nikolai. “Let’s go.”
Her comm device vibrated before they’d taken more than a couple steps. One long shimmy, two short. OMEGA control’s silent, urgent demand for verification of status. She couldn’t answer verbally. Not with Chernak hard on her heels. But she could send a coded signal. She pressed three digits, then flicked a switch to mute the phone.
“Okay,” she said to Blade. “Let’s move it.”
He did, his head hurting like a son of a bitch with every step. The pain hammered at him with unrelenting force as he tried to make sense of the past five minutes.
What in hell was Rebel up to? She obviously knew this Feodyr asshole. Blade had to assume they’d crossed paths in her other life. She must have tagged the man as Vivian Bauer’s killer. The scar was a dead giveaway. So why was she playing along with him? She had to have a good reason, but it pissed Blade no end that she hadn’t tried to communicate by so much as a blink or a muscle twitch back there in the alley.
That reminded him of the “urgent” flash on his comm device. Tank had just been about to explain the signal when Rebel had sent the damned device flying out of Blade’s hands. It was still in the alley, right alongside his manhood. Christ! He couldn’t remember the last time he’d let someone get the drop on him. Of course, he hadn’t expected that someone to be his partner.
Head hammering, he swung between going along with whatever scheme Rebel had hatched and taking these two thugs out. He could do it now that he had their measure. Alone if necessary, although it would be easier if his partner had given him some damn clue what was going down.
That brought him back full circle. Frustrated, he gave up trying to decipher her game plan. Easier to sketch a mental profile of these two characters for identification purposes later. Nikolai was five-nine or-ten. Swarthy complexion. Dark hair, brown eyes, faded jeans, new Reeboks, a Breitling Airwolf chronometer strapped to his wrist. The watch would’ve cost two or three thousand U.S. if he’d bought it, which Blade considered highly unlikely.
His pal was taller, lighter complexioned and more dangerous. The kind who killed for pleasure as well as business. Blade had run across a few like Feodyr over the years. He hoped to hell Rebel had a handle on the man or they both might end up in the river he could see some distance ahead.
He used that ribbon of gray and the cathedral’s tall spire as reference points to fix their location in his mind. They were still on a main boulevard but soon left it to turn onto first one narrow side street, then another. With each turn the shops and apartments grew progressively less enticing. Some moments later Nikolai halted in front of a narrow wooden door with peeling blue paint. He jiggled an old fashioned brass latch but had to add a swift kick before the door opened onto a dark, dank entryway.
The mingled odors of old cooking grease and new sweat smacked Blade in the face as he followed Nikolai up two flights of stairs and down a narrow hall. Their footsteps thudded on cracked linoleum flooring. Water leaks stained the walls. This dump didn’t go with the Airwolf that Nikolai sported, unless these were temporary quarters he and his pal had decided to squat in while they hunted for plundered treasure.
Nikolai knuckled a coded signal on the door at the end of the hall. Two quick raps, a pause, another rap. A chain rattled, locks clicked, and a hairy ape in a sweat-stained undershirt materialized. He stood aside, raking both Blade and Rebel with a surprised look as they marched in and fired off what sounded like the Russian version of “What the hell?”
Since Blade couldn’t understand the terse explanations that followed, he used the interval to scope out the dingy apartment. The main room contained a beat-up chrome-legged table fronted by three cheap plastic chairs and a stained sofa planted in front of a sixty-two-inch flat-screen TV that had probably been lifted off the back end of a delivery truck. The kitchen was a sink, a hot plate, a fridge and some open-shelved cupboards.
Two bedrooms opened off the main room, both with unmade beds and mismatched furniture. A female wearing pink panties and a midriff-baring black T-shirt sat slumped on the edge of one bed. She was probably in her late teens or early twenties. Hard to tell given her dull, wasted eyes and the bruises purpling one side of her face.
“You! Sit there.”
The barked command came from the one Rebel had called Feodyr. He emphasized his point by jabbing the muzzle of his Marakov toward one of the plastic chairs. Blade ignored both the command and the jab.
“So you speak English.”
“When I wish,” the blond sneered. “Not everyone is like you Americans, too lazy or too ignorant to learn any language but your own. Sit, and I will have Viktoria explain why I should not shoot you between the eyes and dump your body in the river.”
Rebel showed no reaction to the threat. Other than a moue of disgust as she glanced around the squalid apartment, she’d registered no emotion at all. She’d better have something good up her sleeve, Blade thought grimly as he folded his frame into the chair. Damned good!
Feodyr issued another command, in Russian this time. Apeman gave him a sour look but humped into one of the bedrooms. When he reappeared a few moments later with handcuffs dangling from a meaty fist, Blade conducted another fierce internal debate. Every instinct he possessed resisted the idea of voluntary restraint. What’s more, he fully intended to pay Blondie back for that smack on the head by kicking his ass from here to Sunday.
He had to balance instinct and intent against Rebel’s game, though. Whatever the hell that game was. Once again his eyes cut to hers. Once again she gave no clue. Jaw locked, Blade let Apeman yank his arms behind his back. The bastard ratcheted the cuffs on so tight they bit almost to the bone.
He could get out of them if he had to. It would take some doing, but he could inch his belt through the waistband loops on his jeans, get it to his back. The buckle’s metal tongue was flat and strong enough to use as a shim. He should know. He’d honed it himself. Granted not with this purpose in mind, but Blade had found more than one use for a sharp, pointy object in the past.
What he didn’t know were the parameters of this dangerous game Rebel was playing. Thoroughly pissed at being left to flounder around in the dark, he flexed his wrists to keep the blood flowing.
“Now we talk, Viktoria.”
Rebel’s heart was slamming against her ribs and a flophouse sweat trickled between her breasts, but she merely lifted a brow as Chernak yanked out a second plastic chair and kicked it across the scarred linoleum. He claimed the third, dropped into it, and rested his arm on the tabletop with the Marakov within easy reach.
She tried to remember where in Bulgaria he was from. Not Sofia, the capital. Somewhere farther east, closer to the Black Sea. Balchik, she thought, although he’d spent so many years dealing drugs and guns and prostitutes on the streets of Moscow he could probably qualify as a native.
“Who is this guy?” he asked, reverting to his heavily accented Russian.
“His name is Clint Black.”
She didn’t glance at Blade. Couldn’t. If looks were bone-handled knives, she would be feeling
a dozen stab wounds by now.
“He’s a treasure hunter,” she said coolly. “Like you.”
“How do you come to be with him?”
Suspicion coated Chernak’s every syllable. With good reason. The last time she’d come face-to-face to him the world had pretty much blown up in their faces.
As Major Victoria Talbot, she’d squeezed her air force connections to arrange transport of a planeload of unprocessed opium from Afghanistan. The Russian mafia’s second in command had driven out to oversee the hand-off personally. Karinski had gone down in the blaze of gunfire that lit up the night. She could still hear the bullets thudding into the body that slammed into hers and took them both to the tarmac.
“Things got a little too hot for me after that mess in Moscow,” she said with a careless shrug. “I decided it was best all around if I left the military.”
“I always wondered about that.” His chair tipped on its rear legs, he studied her intently through the screen of his pale lashes. “How you could wear the uniform of the United States and yet have so many contacts with the bratva?”
This was getting too close to a swirling vortex of lies and deceit that might well suck her in. Rebel had to tread carefully here. Very carefully.
“I found the brotherhood useful.”
“You, or your government? Or,” he said slowly, watching her closely, “were you working both sides? Like—how do you call it? The…uh…” He fumbled until he finally found the words he wanted in English. “Double agent?”
The vortex swirled faster and angrier by the second. Rebel didn’t so much as glance at Blade, but she almost could feel him icing over.
“It doesn’t matter what I was or wasn’t. As I said, things got too hot for me after Moscow. Now I freelance.”
“Freelance? What is this?”
“I work for myself.”
The Bulgarian looked less than convinced. “You hire yourself out to treasure hunters, as you say that one is?”
“Why not?” Her eyes were cool, her smile satirical. “C’mon, Feodyr. You know as well as I do the missing Amber Room panels are worth a thousand times more than what we would have pulled in from that botched opium deal. You wouldn’t have flown to the States and hunted down Vivian Bauer otherwise.”
Double Deception Page 11
