Double Deception

by Merline Lovelace

  She didn’t look at Blade to see how he’d reacted to her mention of the Amber Room and Vivian Bauer. She didn’t dare.

  “Did the Bauer woman give you anything useful before you shot her?” she asked Chernak. “Or Kurov, before you or your pal here threw him out the window?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  When he didn’t bother to deny he’d had a hand in either death, rage knotted Rebel’s belly. Savagely, she repressed it. She couldn’t lose her cool with Chernak. He was a minor slug in the Russian mafia hierarchy, but given half a chance he would eat her alive.

  “You should tell me because we’ve both landed here in Kaliningrad. Whatever you learned from your sources got you this far. Same with me. Where we go from here is the question.”

  “You think so?” Chernak tipped his chair onto its rear legs again. “If, as you say, you have useful information regarding the amber panels, there are ways to extract it. Drugs. Knives. Or, as my friend Nikolai here particularly enjoys, clamping electrodes to nipples and testicles.”

  “Electrodes really worked for you back in Moscow, didn’t they?” Her smile turned biting. “If the information you extracted from your so-called informant hadn’t been so garbled by torture, we might not have been caught in a cross fire. Incidentally, how did you explain that little foul-up to your bosses?”

  Red surged into his cheeks, fury into his eyes. Rebel noted both with vicious satisfaction.

  “So you couldn’t explain it, huh?” Her lip curling, she let her glance circle the room. “Must be why you’re operating out of such a dump.”

  She thought he might lose it then. The angry red had reached all the way to his hairline. Not a real good color for him. She decided she’d probably stomped on his ego hard enough and throttled back on the sneer.

  “My guess is that you’re still trying to recover from that fiasco. Show your bosses you can score something big. I can help you.”

  He drummed his fingers on the cracked table, thinking, considering, weighing. “If we make this score,” he said at last, “what percentage do you think to take from it?”

  “We split any profits fifty-fifty.”

  It was his turn to curl a lip. “You’re in Russian territory, Viktoria, searching for Russian artifacts long sought by the central government. You couldn’t get whatever you found—if you found anything—out of Kaliningrad without someone who knows which custom inspectors to bribe, which border guards are corrupt.”

  “That would be true—if I was planning to go through customs or cross borders.”

  Chernak didn’t quite succeed in hiding his sudden interest. “You have an alternate plan?”

  “I always have an alternate plan.” Rebel let that sink in for a few moments before pushing out of her chair with a show of impatience. “Look, we both know you don’t have the authority to make this kind of a deal. Talk to whoever you’re working for these days. Tell him how close you are—or aren’t—to finding the amber panels. Then we’ll settle on percentages.” She rotated her neck to relieve the tension, both real and pretended. “In the meantime, I’ll take my friend in the other room and explain the situation. Let me know when you’re ready to close the deal.”

  “Wait.” Chernak surged to his feet and planted himself in her path. “Nikolai relieved your friend of his weapons. You won’t mind if I do the same for you.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “No.”

  She show her teeth in a nasty smile. “You’re finally wising up a little.”

  Since he already had his hand on her purse strap, she surrendered it without a fight. He tossed it on the table and turned back to her with an equally nasty smile. Rebel rolled her eyes when he palmed her breasts but let him run his hands down her hips and legs to her ankles. When he started back up and aimed for her crotch, she’d had enough.

  “Slide those hands any higher and you’ll be eating your nuts for supper.”

  For the first time since they’d collided outside the alley, Chernak relaxed enough to laugh. Straightening, he hooked his thumbs in his belt.

  “That’s what I like about American women. They usually put up a good fight. Not like that sorry excuse for a whore in the other room.”

  Rebel’s rage flared white-hot again. Savagely, she tamped it down to only a barb. “Judging by the bruises on her face, I’d say she put up a pretty good fight. How old is she, Feodyr? Nineteen? Twenty?”

  “Why do you care?”

  She shouldn’t. She’d been activated for a mission that could significantly impact U.S.-Russian relations. She would have to answer for her actions to Lightning, maybe to the President of the United States. Yet she couldn’t ignore either the vicious bruising or the hopeless slump to the girl’s shoulders.

  “How old is she?”

  Chernak turned to the thug with the overabundance of body hair and sweat-stained armpits. “She’s your toy, Anatoli. Do you know her age?”

  “No.” He scratched his chest. “She was snatched from a schoolyard. That much I do know. Still a virgin when they brought her here. But the sale fell through, so I decided to keep her to amuse me and my friends.”

  Chernak turned back with a look on his face that said he could care less where the girl had come from or what happened to her after he and his pals were finished with her. Most likely, Rebel guessed with another spurt of rage, she would end up in the river.

  “Call your boss,” she told Cherak with no effort to hide her disgust. “We’ll talk again when you’re serious about negotiating.” Switching to English, she crooked a finger at Blade. “Come with me.”

  Great, she fumed as she led the way. Just great! Now she had a kidnapped schoolgirl to worry about in addition to a homicidal Bulgarian, a presidential directive and a long-lost national treasure.

  When she passed the room where the teenager sat slumped on the end of the bed, Rebel wanted to signal a message, send her a tiny spark of hope, but the girl looked at the newcomers with dilated, unfocused pupils that registered nothing but a dull despair.

  Jaw tight, Rebel stopped just inside the second bedroom. Chernak and his friend couldn’t have occupied it for more than a few days but they’d left their mark in empty vodka bottles and unwashed clothes. She lowered herself onto the edge of the mattress, sincerely hoping the dingy gray sheets weren’t infested with bedbugs. Or worse.

  She expected Blade to be pissed. She also expected him to demand an explanation. She couldn’t give him one. Not with these paper-thin walls and three goons only a whisper away. He would just have to trust her.

  But when she hissed that to him, he positioned himself so he blocked the view from the other rooms. Rebel wasn’t sure how a handcuffed man could look and feel so threatening, but a ridiculous shiver rippled along her spine when he echoed two soft, dangerous words.

  “Double agent?”

  Chapter 11

  Nick Jensen parked his Jag and keyed the private entrance to his office. It wasn’t quite 8:00 a.m. Chelsea shouldn’t have been in yet, but of course she was. He’d given up reminding her that the agents on duty in the Control Center would contact him anytime day or night of significant activity affecting operatives in the field. They also had standing orders to provide an update as soon as he arrived each morning. Chelsea insisted on making sure that happened smoothly and efficiently.

  Nick had never thought anyone could replace the woman who’d served as the Special Envoy’s executive assistant for more than a decade. Like every other OMEGA agent he’d fallen completely under the spell of Elizabeth Wells. He’d been as smitten by the silver-haired grandmother’s smiling warmth as by the fact she could dead center four out of five rounds. He’d still acutely missed Elizabeth when he’d hired Chelsea Jackson.

  Warmth wasn’t one of Chelsea’s shining attributes, Nick thought as she responded to the silent signal triggered with the key. She exuded an air of cool reserve that belied the dark fire in her hair. Which was probably why she’d succeeded so well at the variety
of jobs she’d held while putting herself through high school and college. Including the job that Nick flatly refused to let himself think about while she greeted him with a polite smile.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Morning, Chelsea.”

  “Dodge and Tank called down a few minutes ago,” she informed him as she aligned three color-coded files on his desk. “They’re standing by for the morning brief. Shall I have them come down?”

  “No, I’ll go up.”

  Since he hadn’t received a flash from either agent, he wasn’t expecting to find them with their heads together and each wearing a frown. A familiar itch started just under Lightning’s skin. He’d been in this job too long, he decided as the itch raced along his nerves like an out-of-control bush fire. One look at a controller’s body language, and he was already fearing the worst.

  His glance flew instinctively to the status board with the map showing the location of field operatives. The absence of flashing red lights confirmed none was down. Relieved, Lightning snagged a cup of coffee before joining the two controllers.

  “What’s up?”

  Since Tank was the newbie and still showing his stuff, Dodge let him take the lead. “We’re not sure. I was in the middle of relaying information to Blade when his comm device went dead.”

  Lightning bit back an instant rebuttal. His wife had designed OMEGA’s communicators. They were water-, fire-, earthquake-and bombproof. Mackenzie claimed the only thing that might knock one out was a direct hit from a fiery meteor tearing through the earth’s atmosphere to hit at twenty or thirty thousand miles per hour. To her intense disappointment she’d never had an opportunity to put that hypothesis to the test.

  Thankfully, Tank spared Lightning the task of informing his wife one of her babies had failed by amending his first statement. “Well, it’s not actually dead. It’s still sending a signal. We tracked it to a back alley in Kaliningrad. Blade’s last transmission has us a little worried, though.”

  He played a recording of the brief voice communication. It opened with “Yo, Tank” and terminated mere seconds later with “What the hell…?” That was followed by the clatter of the phone smashing into something solid and several indistinct voices.

  “Jane amplified the soundtrack and analyzed the voiceprints.”

  With a nod to the communications technician who’d worked some acoustical magic, Tank slid up the volume control. Even without Jane O’Conner’s verification Lightning had no trouble identifying Rebel as the one issuing the icy command to “drop it.” Most of the terse dialogue that followed was in Russian, translated by Dodge.

  Lightning listened intently. His brows soared at Rebel’s sarcastic suggestion to someone to shoot Blade but he said nothing until she ordered her partner to follow some character named Nikolai.

  “Did you get a fix on the people she’s talking to?”

  “We think we know one of them,” Tank confirmed.

  Tersely, he briefed Lightning on the information he’d received on the Bulgarian thug known variously as Kiril Deniv, Bogdan Chornasemski and Feodyr Chernak.

  “I had just started to relay the information to Blade when our transmission was interrupted.”

  “Did you get the ID to Rebel?”

  “I tried. I sent a request for status verification first. She came back with a five-four-eight.”

  Situation under control, going no-comm.

  The first part of the coded signal Lightning accepted. The analysis of Rebel’s voiceprint had detected surprise and a sharp spike in tension but no panic. Whatever was going on over there, she obviously felt confident she could handle it. The second part bothered him. Operatives didn’t cut themselves off from their safety net except in extraordinary circumstances.

  He had to respect her situational assessment, though. She was the agent on scene. One of them, anyway.

  “What’s their current location?”

  Tank brought up a digital map and zeroed in on a block of run-down apartments. The imagery was so precise Lightning could see a pot of tired-looking geraniums in the window of one apartment and wash strung out to dry on the rusted iron balcony of another. A beeping light indicated the signal emanating from a third-floor apartment at the north end of the building.

  “Notify our contact in Moscow to stand by. Tell him we might need assistance in Kaliningrad. And I want you on the next plane to the Baltic,” he instructed Dodge.

  Tank didn’t protest being left out of the action, although both men could see the effort it required. Dodge gave his upper arm a sympathetic punch that rocked him back a step.

  “You’ve got the next one. Assuming you make it through Offensive Tactics, of course.”

  “I’ll make it.”

  “Hope so. Better men than you and I have crawled home, bawling for their mommas. In the meantime, watch my back.”

  “Will do.”

  “And contact me as soon as either Rebel or Blade reopen their comm link. Sure would be nice to know what in blazes is going on with them.”

  Double agent.

  The phrase looped repeatedly in Blade’s mind as he tried to find a comfortable position on the lumpy mattress. The whispered command from Rebel a half hour ago hadn’t broken the vicious cycle. Trust her. That’s the only bone she’d tossed him. He was supposed to trust her. Like he had a choice?

  Now she was in the other room, summoned by Scarface to continue a discussion Blade had been cut out of. Seething, he listened to the rise and fall of their voices. They were speaking Russian, which irritated him even more since he now knew Chernak had a working knowledge of English. Rebel could have found a way to switch. Give Blade some clue to what they were talking about. The question of why she hadn’t kick-started the loop again.

  Double agent.

  She couldn’t be! Everything in him repudiated the idea. They’d had their differences, sure. The woman had been in his face since the hour she’d arrived at OMEGA. But there was no way in hell a military academy grad turned air force pilot turned OMEGA operative could have passed so many background checks without some hint of an alter ego turning up.

  Riiiight, a stubborn corner of his mind sneered. Just like she couldn’t toss you on your ass. Or spark a hunger so fierce you’d damned near wrung yourself inside out making love to her.

  No! She’d been right there with him. Blade was sure of that. She couldn’t have faked that panting urgency or those back-arching, throat-closing, mind-blowing climaxes.

  Riiiight.

  Dammit it all to hell! He was sick of the doubts. Tired of not knowing which side of Victoria Talbot was real and which was a role she’d played in her shadowy past. Or, that same insidious corner of his mind jeered, maybe he just refused to admit they might be one and the same.

  He knew one thing for certain. This was the last time he would play dumbass and let some goon like Apeman restrain him. He’d be the one slapping on the cuffs on next time. And a certain tawny-haired operative wouldn’t get out of them anytime soon. Nursing that dead certainty, he began inching his belt through the loops and around his waist.

  “So, Viktoria. We are agreed?”

  Rebel swallowed the foul taste in her mouth and nodded. After fifteen minutes of point/counterpoint, she and Chernak had negotiated a deal each knew the other had no intention of honoring.

  “We are.”

  Chernak shot a quick glance at his cohorts. Nikolai and Hairy Harry occupied either end of the sagging sofa. They’d followed the negotiations with varying degrees of interest. Nikolai now looked impatient, Fur Ball mostly bored.

  The girl hadn’t moved or said a word this whole time. She still sat on the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched, face dull. These slimes would pay for that hopeless despair, Rebel vowed fiercely.

  Blade had stretched out on the bed in the second bedroom. All she could see of him were his feet. Probably just as well. He’d made his displeasure at the situation crystal clear. He would like what might follow even less.

  �
��All right, Viktoria. What do you know of the missing amber panels that we do not?”

  “I know a number of people believe the statement of the one eyewitness who claims to have seen them crated, moved from Königsberg Castle and loaded onto a train in the last, frantic days before the Red Army arrived.”

  “Kurov told you this, yes?”

  She neither confirmed nor denied the aged curator had been her source, but her bland look managed to convince Chernak that’s why she’d traveled to Kaliningrad. She wasn’t about to reveal Sergeant Thomas Bauer had worked for the OSS and been dropped behind enemy lines, right here in his old home town. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to turn Feodyr and company loose on Clara Bauer Soloff.

  “Kurov told us about this train, too,” Chernak said dismissively. “But he could not say where it went from Königsberg Castle.”

  “So you shoved him out the window of his flat?”

  Shrugging, he brushed the curator’s death aside as totally irrelevant. “The old man was of no more use to us.”

  Rebel’s sardonic smile made him realize he’d just put his foot in it. His handsome face turned smarmy and placating.

  “We won’t shove you out a window once you’re no longer of use to us, Viktoria. You or your friend.”

  “No, you won’t.” Her voice was every bit as smarmy as his. “Because you need my friend to interpret the specs we’ve requested and you need me to convince him to do it.”

  Chernak dropped the Mr. Nice Guy facade. “What specs?”

  “Give me my purse and I’ll show you.”

  Suspicion flaring, he debated for several moments before issuing a gruff order. Nikolai heaved himself off the sofa, hooked the bag by its shoulder strap, ambled over and dropped it on the table. Chernak made a show of removing the snub-nosed .38 before sliding the purse across the chipped Formica.

  With another cynical smile, Rebel extracted her comm device. A single glance confirmed her five-four-eight had been transmitted and received. OMEGA wouldn’t contact her—or expect to hear from her—until she reversed the signal. She knew they were tracking her through the phone’s GPS signal, though. She didn’t doubt for a moment that Tank had her pinpointed on one of the Control Center’s megascreens.