“Whoa!”
She applied the handbrakes instinctively, then realized there weren’t any handbrakes. Muttering, she dropped back on the seat and backpedaled just in time to avoid slamming into the earth blocking one end of the tunnel. She reversed direction, pedaling more slowly this time, and yelped in delight when the headlamp began to glow. Okay, so maybe whoever had cannibalized the Zundapp didn’t do such a bad reengineering job after all.
She brought the bike to a halt beside Blade and grinned. “Climb aboard.”
“You sure you can manage the additional weight?” he asked, eyeing the sidecar speculatively.
She’d figured out the physics now. The more weight they applied to the rails, the more traction they would generate.
“I can handle it.”
The sidecar presented almost as much of a challenge as Anatoli’s Mini. Once Blade had wedged himself in, Rebel stood on the pedals again. Two grunts later she had them heading for the black hole at the far end of the storage site.
Her exuberance faded more the deeper they got into the tunnel. The bike’s headlamp proved totally ineffective against the Stygian gloom. The puny beam penetrated barely ten or twelve yards ahead. The air got heavy, too. Heavy and dank and earthy, as though it hadn’t been replenished in fifty or sixty years. Not a good omen, Rebel thought. Odds were they wouldn’t find an escape route wherever this tunnel ended.
Worse, she could swear she heard subterranean creatures scurrying out of their way. What, besides bats, lived in this inky darkness? she wondered uneasily. Rats? Moles? Centipedes devoid of all pigmentation after millennia of nesting deep in caves? The idea some pale pink or dead-white troglodyte might glom onto her leg or drop down on her head had her so rattled she didn’t notice the solid black bulk looming directly ahead.
“Watch out!”
Blade’s shout had her standing on the pedals. She slowed their forward momentum, thank God, but they both put up their arms to protect themselves from the wall that came rushing at them.
No, not a wall, she saw when the Zundapp whispered to a halt mere inches from what looked like a railroad boxcar. The damned thing was just sitting there, abandoned in the middle of the tunnel. Or not…
The possibility it might have been parked there deliberately occurred to Rebel the same moment it did to Blade.
“Omigod,” she breathed. “This could be the one. The last boxcar out of Königsberg.”
“Could be,” he echoed, every bit as jazzed as she was.
She almost fell off the bike in her haste to dismount while Blade levered himself out of the sidecar. She said a quick prayer that she’d fed the headlamp enough juice to keep it alive while they checked out the boxcar. Those faint scurries had left an indelible impression on her psyche.
Blade reached the boxcar’s side panel first. Rebel was right on his heels. The industrial size padlock on the sliding panel elicited her fervent wish that they’d searched the storehouse area for a crowbar.
“Not a problem.” Coolly, he extracted the Marakov from his waistband. “This might take a couple of shots,” he warned. “They could ricochet. You’d better take cover on the other side of the boxcar.”
“Oh, sure! Like I’m going to leave you to dodge bullets.”
“Don’t be stupid. Take cover.”
“Did I not make myself clear?” Irritated, she planted herself between him and the padlock. “I love you. Lest you think that’s a trivial declaration, you’re only the fourth male I’ve said it to in my entire life.”
“Fourth?” His brows snapped together. “I thought…”
“My grandfather on my mom’s side,” she cut in ruthlessly. “My dad. My ex. Now you. Do not make me go for five.”
Laughter wiped out his frown. Taking care to keep the Marakov’s barrel angled away, he hooked his other arm around her waist. A quick tug spilled her against his chest.
“If it makes you feel any better, you’re on my short list.”
Her breath caught. Had she read this right? Was he saying he loved her? Feeling uncharacteristically and ridiculously insecure, she had to ask.
“How short?”
“I never knew one grandmother and the other was the grandmother from hell. So that leaves my mom, who I’m embarrassed to admit I never actually said the words to.”
Surprise, surprise. She was just thinking that a handsome charmer like Clint Black must have developed considerable skill at dodging the dreaded L word when he cupped her face.
“So you’re the first, Victoria. I love you. Beats the hell out of me why, but I do.”
Oooookay. It didn’t exactly constitute a world-class declaration. But when he dropped a hard, fast kiss on her mouth, she decided it would do. Very nicely, in fact.
“Now go take cover.”
Since she didn’t see an alternative, she rounded the end of the boxcar. It was a tight fit, less than six inches between the car and the tunnel’s earthen wall. Rebel edged sideways and sucked in her gut. Two steps later she let out a shout.
“Blade! This side’s open!”
He joined in five seconds flat. Unfortunately, when he squeezed in beside her he completely blocked the headlamp’s weak, diffused glow. Rebel refused to climb into that pitch-black boxcar blind.
“Back out,” she instructed Blade. “You’re blocking the light.”
He complied, but still she hesitated. God only knew what kind of critters had taken up residence inside. She sidled to the opening, leaned forward a scant inch or two, peered into the inky interior. Gradually, her eyes adjusted.
“It’s empty,” she reported, swamped by waves of disappointment. “Completely, totally em— Wait! There’s something in the corner. Looks like a crate.”
“Only one?”
“Only one,” she confirmed.
That pretty much killed the chances that they’d found the missing Amber Room panels. Thoroughly bummed, Rebel leaned in a little farther.
“It’s got writing on it. Big, handwritten letters in white paint. ‘Kil’ something.”
“Kaliningrad?”
“No.”
She made out K-I-L-R-O but couldn’t read the final letter of that first word. She didn’t have to. The rest of the phrase said it all. Whooping, she wedged back to where Blade waited with a question written all over his face.
“Kilroy,” she told him, grinning. “It says ‘Kilroy was here, March ’45.’”
“I’ll be damned!”
As a former army grunt, he was as familiar with the classic bit of WWII graffiti as Rebel. American G.I.’s had scrawled the phrase on any and every imaginable surface, usually just below a cartoon showing the nose and bald head of a figure peeking over a wall. Reportedly, German intelligence had noted Kilroy on so many pieces of captured American equipment that they thought it was code for a top level spy. And Stalin had supposedly asked aides who the devil Kilroy was when he found the same graffiti on a wall in the VIP bathroom during the Potsdam Conference.
“My money’s on Thomas Bauer,” Rebel said, excited by the fact they’d solved at least this piece of the puzzle. “I bet you anything he found this boxcar stashed away here in the tunnel.”
Blade matched her grin. “That would be my guess, too. There couldn’t have been many other American G.I. s running loose in Königsberg in March 1945.”
“We need to go back to the supply dump and make one of those torches you talked about. I want to see what’s inside that crate.”
She’d already resigned herself to the probability that it didn’t contain even one of the missing amber panels. The original panels were too big, too heavy, to fit inside the box she’d spotted. But the crate could hold a smaller piece. A section from the Spring panel, perhaps. Or just the original rose medallion that Bauer had extracted his souvenir from. Lost in the possibilities, she didn’t notice Blade had come to a dead stop beside the Zundapp until she plowed into him. “What…?”
He sliced a hand through the air to cut her off and pitched his voice
to a low murmur. “We’ve got company.”
Leaning around him, she saw the thin, distant spear of a flashlight. “Feodyr and friends. Crap!”
The light was still just a pinprick in the darkness. And the Zundapp’s lamp was pointed away from them. There was a chance they hadn’t yet spotted its dim glow.
Blade had obviously been thinking along the same lines. He twisted, found the wire connecting the pedal-powered generator, tore it loose, and plunged them into smothering, suffocating darkness.
“We’ll see them before they see us,” he whispered in her ear. “We’ll have to maximize that advantage.”
Some advantage, Rebel thought as she shut her mind to all thoughts of nasty night creatures and focused on the problem at hand.
“You go right and climb into the boxcar,” Blade murmured. “I’ll take the left side of the tunnel.”
“That’s it?” she whispered. “That’s your plan? I go right, you go left?”
“You got a better one?” he shot back. “I’m wide-open to suggestions here.”
“I suggest you give me my .38.”
There was a moment of stark silence. The slam of it hit Rebel like a two-by-four. Oh, God! He still didn’t trust her! She was fighting to clear what felt like a throat laced with glass shards when he chuckled.
“Sorry. I forgot I had it. Here.”
He took her elbow and guided her hand. The familiar feel of cross-hatched steel hit her palm. Then his loose hold moved up her arm until his fingers found her chin and tipped her face to his.
“Remember,” he murmured. “You’re the first, Victoria. The first, and the only.”
All she could see was the faint gleam of his eyes. And, incredibly, the white of his teeth as he grinned down at her.
“When we get out of here, we’ll make it official.”
She decided this wasn’t the time to demand minor details. Like what, exactly, he meant by official. Especially when he followed that with a kiss and a low command.
“Just keep your head down.”
“Ditto.”
He threw a glance at the light spear still far down the tunnel and tightened his grip on her chin. “If you…”
He broke off, his body tensing, and Rebel felt her veins ice over.
“What?” she whispered.
“It’s my phone. The thing’s vibrating like hell.”
“Well, for God’s sake, answer it!”
Tank. It had to be Tank. Or Dodge. Or Lightning. Or one of the comm techs. Mentally reciting an entire litany of possibilities, Rebel conceded there wasn’t a damned thing anyone in OMEGA could do at this point. She and Blade had waited too long. They’d put all their effort into eluding pursuit, then the thrill of the hunt. Now they would pay the price.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Blade muttered into the phone. “No. No.”
The terse negatives were followed by another moment of stark silence, not quite as painful for Rebel as the last one but still pretty daunting. She eyed the bobbing light beam and had to bite back the urgent demand to know who the hell he was talking to. Stewing with impatience, she heard him ask only one question. “You’re sure?”
Her nerves were screaming when he slapped the phone back in his pocket.
“That was Tank,” Blade confirmed. “He’s been tracking our every step.”
“And?”
“And he had our contact in Moscow alert every cop, city official and street sweeper in Kaliningrad and Yantarny. An entire regiment reportedly converged on the scene topside just minutes after we departed it. Tank said they engaged in a real Wild-West style shoot-out.”
“And?”
“Chernak and his pals went down. Those are the good guys back there in the tunnel, searching for us.”
Wave upon wave of relief crashed through Rebel. Every part of her itched with the need to get out of the creepy darkness. And yet…
She had to admit this underground interlude had spawned some very interesting moments. The question now was how much of what she and Blade had shared down here would survive the light of day.
Chapter 14
Despite having been organized in less than three days, the reception to announce the return of Russia’s long-lost treasures would have delighted Peter the Great himself.
The palace named for his beloved wife Catherine preened in all its Baroque glory. Floodlights illuminated the 14-karat gold leaf on the onion domes of the palace’s chapel. Every window in the ornate, seemingly mile-long facade glowed with the light from glittering chandeliers and candelabra. A military band wearing tall shakos and eighteenth-century uniforms welcomed guests with rousing Russian marches. Footmen in powdered wigs and tight knee breeches escorted the gowned and tuxedoed VIPs up the palace’s magnificent central staircase. In the dazzling, brilliantly lit Hall of Mirrors, more footmen circulated with silver trays of champagne while a string orchestra filled the hall with lilting selections from Tchaikovsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov.
Nick and Mackenzie Jensen had flown over for the occasion. So had Maggie and Adam Ridgeway. They weren’t about to miss seeing their son decorated by the Russian government. The same son, Adam had reminded his wife drily, they’d had to bail out of a Mexican jail at the age of ten and royally ream out after an unfortunate incident involving his fifth-grade social studies teacher and the bad-tempered iguana Maggie had kept as a pet.
“There he is now,” Adam said, tipping his champagne flute to the tall, confident man his scamp of a son had become.
He wouldn’t have chosen a career as an undercover operative for Tank, any more than he’d wanted his daughter Gillian to work even temporarily with OMEGA. He knew all too well the dangers involved. Yet under his pleated white shirt, Adam’s chest swelled with pride at having his son follow in his footsteps. If not for the woman standing beside him, he might even have envied Tank the years ahead.
He slanted a glance at his wife. Maggie wore her light brown hair up, caught with the diamond clip he’d given her for Christmas last year. Baby-fine tendrils curled at her nape and stirred an instant need to nuzzle. All these years, Adam thought ruefully, and the woman still made his mind swim. He couldn’t indulge in any nuzzling at the moment but he could—and did—lean in and drop a discreet kiss on her temple.
Tilting her head, she smiled up at him. “What was that for?”
“Because you’re you.”
He would have said more if not for Nick’s smirk, Mackenzie’s grin and his son’s arrival.
“Have you seen Victoria or Clint?” Tank asked.
“No,” Nick answered. “We thought they were driving out in the limo with you.”
“That was the plan. But Clint called my hotel room and said something had come up.”
His four listeners switched instantly into OMEGA mode. Thunder and Chameleon might be retired from active service and Mac consulted only on an ad hoc basis these days, but they knew as well as Lightning that neither Rebel nor Blade would offend the Russian government by voluntarily skipping this ceremony.
The premier himself was here to view the masterpieces recovered from the underground tunnel. There were five in the crate, all lost in the chaos immediately preceding the brutal 900-day siege of St. Petersburg. Two Rembrandts, a landscape by Tintoretto, a still life by Jan Fyt and a portrait of Tsar Alexander in full dress uniform. The supposition now was that curators had missed the crate during their frenzy to pack and remove Catherine Palace’s treasures ahead of the advancing German army.
That Germans had subsequently shipped the crate to Prussia along with the original Amber Room panels was more than mere supposition, however. Catherine Palace’s director, Vassily Mikailovitch, had himself verified the authenticity of the amber rose tucked in the corner of the box. The world might never know what happened to the gem-studded panels the rose had come from but that piece, at least, had been restored to its original place and was ready for viewing.
A fact underscored by Mikailovitch and the towering figure accompanying him. None
of the OMEGA crew acknowledged that they knew bull-like Anton Gorsky in anything other than his role as a low-ranking official in Russia’s Ministry of Culture, but Lightning was sure he caught a flicker of concern behind Gorsky’s otherwise impassive mask.
“The premier should arrive soon,” Mikailovitch said to Tank, obviously worried. “We must get you, Mr. Ridgeway and your associates in place. Will you tell them, please?”
“I will, as soon as… Oh, good! Here they are.”
Seven relieved people swung to face the two now weaving through the glittering crowd. Blade looked smooth and sophisticated in his hand-tailored tux. He also, they noted with considerable interest, kept a proprietary hand at the small of Rebel’s back.
She snared second and third looks from every male present, including Nick and both Ridgeways. They’d worked with her in suits, in jeans and tanks, in hip-hugging leathers. None of them had seen her draped in a gown of shimmering gold split to midthigh, however, much less sporting an amber pendant the size of a half-dollar. It hung from a velvet ribbon tied around her throat and glistened with her every step.
“Sorry we’re late,” she apologized breathlessly. “I, uh, got tangled up in something and couldn’t get away.”
“It does not matter,” Mikailovitch lied, not very convincingly. “You are here now. Come, I will show you to your place.”
He took her arm and led the way. Tank and Blade turned to follow, but Lightning stopped them before they’d taken more than a step. “Hold on.”
He strolled up to Blade and reached for the half circle of steel just showing under the hem of his tuxedo jacket. Palming the cuffs, he slipped them into his own pocket.
“I don’t think you need these.”
“Not until after the ceremony,” Blade agreed. “I’m trying to teach Victoria how to spring ’em,” he explained solemnly. “I figure she might get the hang of it by our silver wedding anniversary.”
All eyes went to the woman now struggling to hold back her laughter.
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” she said, grinning. “I can be a real slow learner when I want to.”
Double Deception Page 15
