Double Deception

by Merline Lovelace

  She stared him down. Not a real easy feat with the wind blowing her hair into her face and her shoulders now aching like nobody’s business, but at last he yanked the phone out of his pocket again.

  “Okay, I’m looking.”

  “Go to the saved files icon. Click on the last entry.”

  He did, not very enthusiastically. “It looks like some sort of topographical survey.”

  “That’s exactly what it is. A WWII aerial reconnaissance photo of this area. One of Chernak’s pals dug it out of the Russian air force’s archives. Find the coast and zoom in on Yantarny.”

  Frowning, he used the directional buttons to move the photo around on the screen.

  “Do you have it?” she asked impatiently.

  “Yeah.”

  He looked up, skimmed a glance across the dunes all the way to the horizon, and went back to the screen. “It’s not satellite quality but it’s good,” he conceded grudgingly, then with a little more animation, “Damned good.”

  “Okay, keep that file open and click on the second one.”

  “Looks like HTML code.”

  “Right. Just convert the…”

  “I’ve got it.”

  He was already ahead of her, his thumbs working the keys with a dexterity a teenager would envy. “Holy crap!”

  “What?” Forgetting how pissed she was at him, Rebel pushed off the car. “Lemme see.”

  He hesitated just long enough for her to serious consider delivering that swift heel to the groin she’d contemplated earlier. Then slowly, reluctantly, he angled the screen around.

  Rebel had studied enough aerial reconnaissance maps during her air force years to instantly identify the topographical features of the Yantarny Mine area. The sweeping coastline washed by waves. The undulating dunes. The vast, gray crater. Only instead of rusting, abandoned equipment, this photo showed two active dredges in the process of scooping sludge from the underground table. And a faint line in the earth! Hardly more than a bump. But the shadowy line corresponded exactly with the schematic overlay showing a rail spur leading from the mine in the direction of Königsberg.

  “Blade! It’s just what we thought! That tunnel must have…”

  She caught herself and threw a quick look at the other two. Nikolai still sat with his heads in his hands. Chernak was just coming awake. His legs twitched a couple of times, and a moment later his eyes blinked open. He stared up at the sky, obviously trying to clear the cobwebs.

  Blade offered assistance. Tucking the phone back in his pocket, he leveled the Marakov at the two men. “Hey! Asshole! Over here.”

  Chernak propped himself up on one elbow and put a hand to his jaw, wincing as he moved it from side to side. His furious gaze locked on Rebel, now cuffed instead of Blade.

  This was good, she realized instantly. The Bulgarian obviously thought Blade considered her one of the bad guys. Which he did, unfortunately, but she would straighten that out later. Right now she could see all kinds of possibilities if Chernak and his bosses believed she was, in fact, a rogue agent. She was envisioning the undercover ops she might work in that guise when the Feodyr issued a low threat.

  “You will be sorry for this, Amerikanski.”

  “Tell that to the cavalry. They’ll be here any moment.”

  Chernak looked so blank Rebel had to translate. “He means the police. The oblast.”

  The Bulgarian sucked in a breath. “He called the oblast? The Kaliningrad oblast?”

  Not exactly, but she wasn’t about to explain the call had been relayed by a supersecret agency of the U.S. government Chernak had never heard of and didn’t need to know existed. Still, she didn’t like the way Feodyr’s face closed down. He just went blank. Completely empty. As if he didn’t want to give her—or Blade—even a vague clue to what he was thinking.

  That sudden shutdown started a dozen uneasy thoughts racing through her mind. Foremost among them was the fact that Kaliningrad carried the reputation of being a wide-open city. Guns, drugs, white slaves. All available for the right price. Even Clara Soloff had mentioned that half the police took bribes.

  On the other hand…

  The police had raided Anatoli’s apartment and rescued the kidnapped girl. Blade’s comments during his conversation with Tank had verified as much. Unless she’d misinterpreted his end of the conversation. Had OMEGA merely confirmed that the police were responding, without knowing the final outcome?

  Suddenly and intensely worried, she tried to figure out how to convey her concerns without alerting Chernak. She was still trying when the sounds of engines carried over the wind and distant sea.

  She listened a moment, then felt her stomach sink like a stone. Those were engines. Not sirens. And they were coming fast.

  “Clint! We have to get out of here. Now!”

  “What?”

  “Do you hear those vehicles? They’re not the police.”

  “How the hell do you…?”

  He broke off. Cocked his head. Registered the absence of sirens.

  They could see the plumes of dust swirled up by the speeding cars now. The vehicles were still a couple miles away but closing fast. Her pulse racing, Rebel assessed their options. Climbing back into the Mini wouldn’t get them anywhere. Sand dunes blocked any forward movement. By the time they backed the car down the track and hit the main road, the approaching vehicles would have reached the turnoff. She turned to Blade, saw he’d made the same grim assessment. Aided, she guessed, by the feral smile now creasing Chernak’s face.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” she repeated urgently. “But I can’t run like this. Unlock the cuffs!”

  In that sharp, crystalline instant she knew her future with Clink Black hung by a thread. Would he trust her? Or would he think this was another of her devious ploys?

  She felt a vein throb in her temple. Tension churned in her stomach. She should have told him, she thought desperately. Last night, when he’d pinned her against the wall and driven her wild. This morning, when she’d straddled his hips and returned the favor. She should have told him then that he’d erased her last, lingering regret over her botched marriage. Should have admitted she’d shed her irritation over his come-hither grin. Craved it, in fact. Too late to tell him now, though. She’d missed her chance.

  “Turn around.”

  The curt command didn’t exactly spell hearts and flowers, but Rebel nearly whooped with relief. She did as he instructed, careful not to put herself between him and the other two. Incredibly, he managed to spring the cuffs with one hand while keeping Chernak and pal covered with the other. When they got out of this mess, she thought wryly, he had to show her how he did that.

  “Hook their ankles together.”

  She complied, being careful to avoid a grab or kick from either man. The moment she had them shackled together, she and Blade took off.

  They had a four-or five-minute start at most.

  Running full steam, they plowed over a series of low dunes anchored by scrub brush and clumps of tough, silvery grass. The sand was hard packed and more gray than brown from the decades of sludge the Yantarny mine had dumped into the sea. Rebel couldn’t bring herself to regret all that poisonous pollution at the moment. At least she and Blade weren’t having to wallow through soft white powder. They might just make it to the faded resort town of Yantarny and find some safety in numbers.

  Her brief burst of optimism sputtered and died when they topped a mound that gave them an unbroken vista of the Baltic. The resort beckoned in the distance. Too far in the distance, she saw in dismay. She and Blade would make prime targets if they tried to cross another mile or more of landscape covered with nothing but low scrub and wind-whipped grass. To her immense relief, Blade had already come up with Plan B.

  “That aerial reconnaissance photo,” he said, snatching the phone from his pocket again. “I only got a glimpse of it but I think… I’m sure…”

  When he slowed to work the on-screen image, she threw a quick look over her sh
oulder. She could see the speeding vehicles clearly now. They’d almost reached the turnoff to the dirt track. What she didn’t see were any distinctive insignia. Her last faint hope they might be unmarked police vehicles died when she spotted Feodyr and Nikolai running an awkward, three-legged race for the main road, arms locked around each other’s waists and their free hands waving madly in the air.

  Gulping, she tried to speed up the pace. “We’re going to have company pretty quick.”

  Blade jogged alongside, still working the screen. “I know I saw it.”

  “Saw what?”

  “A hole. I’m thinking it may be a cave-in.”

  She didn’t like the sound of that “may.” In a fever of impatience, she peered over his arm to see the area he was searching but their forward movement made everything on the screen a blur from her angle.

  “It should be… Yes! Here it is!” He whipped his head up, took a fix on their location and veered off at an angle. “This way.”

  They raced across another fifty yards of dunes with Rebel looking over her shoulder every few steps. She saw Chernak and Nikolai run out onto the main road. Saw the approaching vehicles skid to a stop. Saw four men emerge. Four heavily armed men, none of whom wore uniforms. Then, fortunately or un-, she and Blade plunged down the slope of a tall dune that cut off her view of Chernak and company.

  Only it wasn’t a dune, she saw when she half scooted, half slid into the depression. It was a bowl of hard-packed earth overgrown with weeds and sawgrass. Thankful she was wearing jeans, she got up, ready to run again, but Blade had stopped to take another fix.

  “GPS says this is it. The exact spot of the cave-in.”

  Straining to hear any sound of pursuit, Rebel surveyed the immediate area. She saw nothing promising while Blade paced to the right, turned left, then right again.

  She didn’t dare poke her head above the lip of the bowl. She wanted to, though. She hunched her shoulders in anticipation of an imminent shout, a shot and the slam of a bullet. She’d was about to tell Blade to give it up when he shoved the phone in his back pocket again and dropped to one knee in front of a clump of tall, silvery grass.

  Mother Nature knew what she was doing when she gave these coastal grasses such long, intractable roots. They had to go down deep to anchor the dunes and keep them from blowing away when storms howled in from the sea. But Mother Nature’s roots were no match for a tough, determined male with at least one cold-blooded killer and five other goons on his tail.

  Planting a foot against the sloping mound, Blade wrapped both hands around the plant’s base. It took several grunts, a vicious curse and three sweating, straining pulls before the grass gave up the fight. The roots tore loose, almost landing Blade on his butt. He recovered just in time and tossed the clump aside to peer into the small, dark hole he’d ripped in the earth.

  Or not so small!

  Too late he realized dislodging the plant had also dislodged the softer dirt below. It now crumbled beneath his feet. A few clods at first, then, before he could leap aside, the whole damned thing collapsed. Wearing an almost comical expression of surprise, Blade dropped out of sight.

  Chapter 13

  “Blade!”

  Dropping to all fours, Rebel crawled toward the gaping hole. Her heart stopped when the dirt under one hand crumbled, then started again with a painful kick when another tuft of grass kept the hole from widening and sucking her in, too.

  She peered over the edge, terrified she would see a black, bottomless pit. Or the top of Blade’s head sinking into a pool of viscous gray sludge. The sight of him dusting himself off and looking around a subterranean chamber of some sort made her go limp with relief.

  “Are you okay?”

  He tipped his head and flashed her a look of fierce satisfaction. “Better than okay. I see rail tracks. Looks like we found the spur.”

  “No kidding!”

  “Drop down,” he called. “I’ll catch you. Bring the clump of grass I dug up with you.”

  “Huh?”

  “You can stand on my shoulders and plug the hole. It might buy us some time.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  She grabbed the uprooted plant and switched from a doggie crawl to a squat. Now all she had to do was scoot around and tip over. Like in that dumb exercise where you were supposed to fall back and let your partner catch you. Just because she and Blade were having slight trust issues at the moment was no reason to think he’d let her land on her head. Still she did a mental finger cross as she angled around and toppled backward.

  She landed in his arms with a shower of dirt and her fistful of grass. Giddy with relief, she looked up into his face and suddenly, stupidly, all was right with the world again. The suspicion had disappeared from his eyes. His grin was back, and it sent Rebel into another crazy tumble.

  “When we get back to civilization,” she heard herself say, “remind me to tell you that I love you.”

  His startled expression was even more comical this time than when he’d dropped feetfirst into the hole.

  “If we didn’t have Chernak and friends breathing down our neck,” she said, laughing, “I’d show you how much.”

  He recovered fast. Shedding his surprise, he let her slide to her feet. “I’ll settle for a short demo.”

  And short it was. A hard, fast fusion of lips and bodies. And hearts! She could feel his accelerating against her chest. Feel hers speeding up to match him beat for beat. The ridiculous idea of making love in a dark, dank hole jumped into her head. The possibility of an entire colony of bats horning in on the action shoved it out again.

  “Okay.” Blade pushed her away, breathing hard. “We need to plug that hole.”

  They soon discovered plugging it was a whole lot trickier than making it. He got her on his shoulders and clamped fists around her ankles but every time he tried to push out of the crouch, she lost her balance. Finally he moved to the dirt wall, had her climb aboard, and inched toward the hole with Rebel steadying herself by flattening her free hand against the roof. She didn’t want to even think about what her palm encountered on its way to the opening. Some of it was earthy. Some of it was damp. The slimy parts she blocked out of her mind.

  She concealed the hole as best she could and resisted the impulse to attempt a Lara Croft, “Tomb Raider”-style somersault off his shoulders. Once on her feet, she finally had a chance to look around. Just enough light filtered through the hastily plugged hole to confirm this was, in fact, a man-made chamber. A storage area was positioned along the rail spur, if those stacked barrels and canvas-shrouded stacks were any indication. The white letters stenciled on the barrels snagged her instant attention.

  “That print is in German, not Russian! This cache must be prewar, when this was still East Prussia.”

  “Or stashed here in the last days of the war,” Blade concurred.

  The possibility one of those canvas tarps might conceal twenty-six hastily packed crates closed Rebel’s throat. “Do you think they’re here? The Amber Room panels.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  He yanked off a tarp and sent a cloud of thick gray dust swirling through the dim cavern. Rebel sneezed and crowded closer, only to grunt in disappointment at the sight of neatly stacked pipes. A second tarp produced stacks of rusting metal rings ranging in diameter from one to five or six feet.

  “Clamps,” Blade murmured. “Used to piece together hose sections.”

  The hoses themselves—or what was left of them—lay in disintegrating coils under a third tarp. The barrels contained gasoline, no doubt used to power the dredges.

  “Well, hell.” Her excitement fading, Rebel scanned the uncovered items. “Looks like it’s all mine equipment.”

  “We’ve still got the tunnel to explore. We might find something farther down the rail line.”

  She eyed the rusting tracks with something less than enthusiasm. A solid wall of earth from the cave-in blocked the tracks in one direction. Black, unrelieved emptiness swall
owed them in the other.

  “We need to check under the rest of the tarps,” Blade said. “We might find some candles or lanterns. If not, we can rig torches and soak them in the gasoline.”

  They didn’t find a lantern but the last covering Rebel twitched off made her gasp. “Look at this!”

  “This” was a 1940s-era German military motorcycle, complete with sidecar and rifle mount.

  “It’s a Zundapp KS 750,” she exclaimed, “designed at specific request of the German army. This baby could cruise at eighty kilometers per hour or creep at less than three alongside marching troops. It came with a preheating element so troops on the Russian front could start its 750cc engine even in subzero temperatures. Or it did,” she added dubiously as she moved around the sidecar and got her first glimpse of the bike’s gutted frame.

  Instead of an engine, this particular Zundapp sported chains, pulleys and pedals. And some sadistic soul had replaced the rubber wheels with railcar type wheels—two on the frame side, one supporting the side car.

  “Oh, no!” Rebel mourned. “They made a damned tricycle out of it.”

  “Could be it wasn’t safe to run a gasoline-powered engine underground with no way to vent the fumes,” Blade pointed out. “They probably had to jerry-rig vehicles like this to get back and forth from town.”

  “I guess.”

  The Zundapp’s mutilation was almost as painful for her as finding no trace of the Amber Room panels. Her only consolation was that a thin chain led from the multigear sprocket to what looked like a small generator attached to the bike’s headlight.

  Anxious to test her speculation that the pedaling might power the lamp, Blade hefted one end of the bastardized vehicle.

  “Let’s get this baby on the rails.”

  Rebel resigned herself to descending from the ranks of biker chic to scooter bitch and hefted the other. Gutted of most of its innards, the motorcycle and its attached sidecar were easily manhandled onto the tracks.

  Getting them moving proved even easier. Too easy, in fact. When Rebel swung into the saddle, her weight provided sufficient tractional engagement that one stand on the pedals sent the contraption zinging forward.