Look-Alike

by Meredith Fletcher

  “Yes,” Sam said.

  “Then the CSI team is going to be wasted effort.”

  “Bet on it,” Riley said.

  “On the way over, I checked with the airport. Elle secured passage on a British Airways flight under her name early this morning. She was gone shortly after midnight. At the moment, she’s somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “Even if we could convince the British government to detain her, the Russian embassy in London would have her free before we arrived there,” Riley said. “Even if we found enough proof to make the theft of the car stick, which I doubt.”

  Kayla studied them. “Do you know why she left in the middle of the night?”

  Meeting her friend’s gaze, Sam crossed her arms over her breasts. “Did you just happen to come by the convenience store when she was there last night?”

  “No,” Kayla answered without hesitation. “The campus security department called me to let me know that you or Elle had left the school. With Riley in town, I guessed it was Elle.”

  “You were following her?” Sam couldn’t believe it.

  Kayla shook her head. “If I’d been following her, I’d have seen her boost the car at Bogart’s. I just wanted to make contact.”

  “To let her know she was being watched?”

  Kayla didn’t flinch from Sam’s anger. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Allison and Alex—all of us—felt it would be better that way. Just a reminder that she wasn’t on her home turf.”

  Sam didn’t know what to say.

  “We didn’t know you were bringing her, Sam,” Kayla said. “The investigation surrounding Marion Gracelyn’s death, the blackmail list, this is scary stuff. You haven’t seen the names on that list Marion compiled. If it’s all true, and Alex and Allison believe it is, some major power brokers in the political arena as well as movers and shakers on Wall Street are going to be affected.”

  “You don’t trust Elle,” Sam said.

  “We don’t know her,” Kayla said gently. “You don’t know her. You’re only now getting to.”

  “She’s my sister.”

  “She’s a Russian agent.”

  Sam sighed and nodded to concede Kayla’s point. A jet screamed by overhead. The vibration of the big engines shook the concrete beneath Sam’s feet. She felt exhausted, physically and emotionally, but those things were old companions. She knew how to deal with them. Just shut down, she told herself. Put up the walls till you get a handle on things.

  Unfortunately, all the programming she’d provided herself with as defensive skills no longer helped. In the past she’d been able to contain her emotions. There had only been her to worry about. Her life now was more complicated. She had Elle to worry about. And Riley. And the Cassandras. All of them—all of the people she cared about so much that she couldn’t just turn those feelings off— seemed to be working at cross-purposes.

  Riley stepped over to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Sam, Elle didn’t leave because she felt like no one trusted her. The trust issue was a given and she’s pro enough to know that. She left because she had a job to do.”

  Automatically, Sam pulled her hands together and drove them upward, breaking out of Riley’s gentle hold. “Don’t,” she rasped. “Just…don’t. I need to think.”

  Hurt showed in Riley’s eyes. He pulled his hands back and folded them under his arms. His mouth turned flat and hard.

  Without a word, Sam turned and walked back to the jeep. She crawled behind the wheel and drove away. Neither Kayla nor Riley made an effort to stop her.

  As she drove, Sam’s thoughts whirled. She didn’t know what she was going to do. The threat of Lenin’s Lullaby hung in her mind. Someone would be sent after Elle, and Sam had the feeling that Riley would be involved with that. He knew her and he sometimes served as mission control.

  Elle wouldn’t have just left on a whim because her feelings were hurt. She’d have stayed and fought. That was what she was about. Sam would have left as long as she’d had a way out of the confrontation and no reason to stay. She knew that was one of the differences between them.

  So Elle’s departure meant what? That someone had called her into action. But why would the SVR do that? Because Lenin’s Lullaby was real? Because after twenty years it was still out there?

  No matter how Sam chased the possibilities, she kept coming back to the same conclusion. Lenin’s Lullaby, in whatever form, had been real and still existed as a threat, and Russia wanted it cleaned up.

  And Elle was stepping into the line of fire.

  Old Arbat

  Moscow, Russia

  Elle walked through the early afternoon rain along Ulitsa Arabat and watched the street musicians and artists gathered in front of tiny boutiques, small antique shops and souvenir places that catered to the Western trade.

  The rain was gentle and cold, a Russian rain that came upon the city without warning. Dark clouds shifted and drifted over the onion-domed buildings in the center of the metro area.

  Fatigue ate into Elle’s body. For the last twenty-three hours she had been on planes. From Britain she had flown to Paris, then Munich, hopscotched to Prague and finally made the jump into Moscow along Eastern Europe. She’d catnapped on the flights, but her thoughts were never far from Sam. Her sister would be confused and hurt by the unexplained disappearance.

  “Umbrellas,” a young man called out from a pushcart loaded with umbrellas and rainwear. He called out his wares in Russian and English. “Umbrellas for sale or rent.”

  Elle smiled at the young man, thinking of how capitalist Russia had turned just during her lifetime.

  The young man smiled back at Elle. “For you,” he said in English, “I will make a special price.”

  “No,” Elle said. “Thank you anyway.”

  “But a lovely girl like yourself shouldn’t be out in the rain.”

  “I love the rain,” Elle responded in Russian. She always had. Even as a little girl she’d refused to come in just because it was raining.

  “I’m sorry,” the man replied, putting a hand over his heart. “I’d thought you were American.”

  “No,” Elle said. I’m Russian, and I’m proud of that.

  Only a short distance ahead, standing in front of a small bistro and holding an umbrella over his head, Fyodor Petrenko waited for her.

  Her father wore a black trench coat over a plain blue suit. Despite the rain, the creases in his pants remained sharp. His face looked like a hatchet, angular and sharp, blunted a little by the thin iron gray beard and mustache. He was trim and neat, only a few inches taller than Elle, not a man who would draw attention in a crowd. Crow’s-feet stood out in the deep olive complexion, but it was his eyes that drew people in. They were large and dark, brimming with feelings and passion.

  He dropped his cigarette to the wet sidewalk and crushed it out underfoot. “Elle,” he greeted.

  “Hello, Father.” Despite her father’s reluctance for public displays of affection, Elle hugged him tightly. There was never a shortage of hugs in the Petrenko house, though. After a moment, he wrapped his free arm around her and hugged her fiercely.

  “Are you well?” he asked as she stepped back. Concern fired his eyes.

  “I am.”

  “I know they sell umbrellas at the airport.”

  “I wanted to walk in the rain.”

  He shook his head. “You will never change.”

  “I get that from you, you know. That desire to have everything in its place, to do everything a certain way.”

  “You keep talking like that and your nose will grow.”

  Elle laughed. It felt good to be back home. Pinocchio had been her favorite movie as a child. The Petrenko children had worn out several black market VHS tapes her father had gotten over the years.

  “You love excitement and adventure,” her father said, “and the promise of new experiences.”

  “I do,” Elle admitted.

  “I was told you had
no trouble with your flights.”

  “You had someone watching?” That surprised her. She had seen no SVR agents.

  Her father shrugged and smiled a little. “But of course. For all I knew, the CIA might try to spirit you away.”

  “They didn’t, but I think they came close in Munich.” Those Elle had seen, all of them courtesy of Riley McLane, she felt certain.

  He nodded. “Not close enough. The agents I had there were set to intervene, but they didn’t have to.”

  “I was trained by one of the best at evading a tail.”

  “Yes, you were.” Her father gestured with the umbrella. “Walk with me.”

  Elle stood close to her father, accepting the presence of the umbrella though she longed to be free. “Lenin’s Lullaby was a real nerve toxin?” she asked.

  “It appears so. At least, that is what I have been told this time.”

  “Were Boris and Anya involved with it?”

  “They were.”

  “In what capacity?”

  Her father hesitated. He did that, she knew, when he had to contemplate an answer he truly did not care for.

  “You did not ask me to come all this way to keep the truth from me,” Elle said.

  “No. Of course not.” He sighed, and it was a Russian sigh, filled with generations of perseverance and a quiet hope that simply would not die. “Your parents were working as double agents for Britain.”

  “I know that.” She hadn’t learned that for a long time, though.

  “Many of my colleagues—our colleagues,” he corrected himself, “fault them for that.”

  “You have never said what you felt,” Elle said.

  Her father shrugged. “There were a few hard feelings at first, after I found out, but they were dead by then and I had recovered you. Now that I am older, I truly believe they did not see the change coming that would render Russia different. None of us did.”

  Elle walked quietly with her father, easily matching his long stride.

  “I think they only wanted what was best for you and Natasha.”

  “Her name is Samantha,” Elle put in.

  “Of course. But I only knew her as Natasha. I was a friend to both your parents. I knew the two of you as babies.”

  “What happened with Lenin’s Lullaby?”

  He glanced up at the sky, toward the Kremlin. “In those days, the Communist government believed they had to keep the United States on a short leash. Korea remains an issue, but Vietnam was not so long ago. The cold war was very vicious. Russia did not have the resources or technology that the Americans did. They invented new and better ways to kill and arm their troops in the field. Also, the Communist leaders felt certain that the United States was continuing work on bioweapons as well. In politics, Elle, everybody lies. It’s just a matter of to what degree. To whom. And for what reasons.”

  Elle took her father’s arm as they walked.

  “Lenin’s Lullaby was concocted, as so many of the other nerve agents were, in a small lab under exacting conditions,” he said.

  “Outside Odessa.”

  “Yes. Boris and Anya discovered this, and the fact that the American Central Intelligence Agency was aware of the lab.”

  “The CIA was involved?”

  He nodded. “They felt the British were dragging their feet about getting Boris and Anya out of the country. And, in truth, MI-6 was. The Russians began a quiet investigation into their background, one that would have certainly proven them guilty of treason to our country.”

  “You’ve never mentioned this.”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference in your life.”

  Elle accepted that. The Petrenko parents had only told their children what they had needed to know. Her father had only told them their mother was ill when they had exhausted all medical help and the symptoms were becoming apparent. They hadn’t wanted any of their children to agonize with them.

  “Boris made a deal with the CIA to get all of you out of Russia,” her father went on. “He was going to force the hand of the British.”

  “The CIA wanted Lenin’s Lullaby.”

  “Exactly. Boris and Anya gained the confidence of Alexi Zemanov. He was the director of the bioweapon lab in Odessa. Unfortunately, Zemanov had made an agreement with a Stasi agent named—”

  “Klaus Stryker.” Elle interrupted.

  Nodding, her father said, “The American intelligence agencies know more than we gave them credit for.”

  “Sam’s friends at Athena do,” Elle acknowledged. “But that was only because of the files they uncovered.” Quickly, she outlined the story she had of the investigation into Marion Gracelyn’s murder and the resulting surprise blackmail history.

  “Fascinating,” her father said when she had finished. “Madame Web, do you think?”

  “The e-mails were signed with the English letter A.”

  “No mention of anything beginning with that letter exists in our files. You’re familiar with the Madame Web files?”

  “I am.”

  Her father shook his head. “Such a treasure trove of knowledge that woman must have. Millionaires, billionaires, politicians, religious leaders. If everything is true about her, she possibly has enough secrets to upset the balance of power in some nations.”

  “What happened to Lenin’s Lullaby?” Elle asked.

  “Zemanov agreed to sell samples of Lenin’s Lullaby as well as the chemical formula to the Stasi agent, Klaus Stryker.”

  “Why would Stryker want it?”

  “It was believed that he was merely acting as an agent for someone else.”

  “Who?”

  Her father shook his head. “No one ever had a clue. It died when Stryker was killed.”

  “How did Sam and I get separated?”

  “Your parents put you with two different families. Possibly because if anyone started looking for the two of you, they would be looking for twin girls. After the explosion, the family that had you turned you over to me.” His voice turned tight and grew hoarse. “I couldn’t believe you were still alive. Seeing the remains of that explosion that night, I’d held out no hope. If you’d been with Boris and Any a—” He didn’t finish the possibility.

  “What about the family Sam was with?”

  “We found them by going through your parents’ lists of contacts and friends. Three days later. It wasn’t so much that we went to them after discovering them, but because they were murdered.”

  “Murdered?” The announcement started Elle. Neither she nor Sam had known anything about this.

  “They were,” her father said gravely. “The mother and father, and three of the children.”

  “Why?”

  ‘To this day, no one knows.”

  “How did Sam end up in America?”

  He shook his head. “Again, Elle, those are questions I can’t answer.”

  They walked on in silence. The rain thinned out to mist, then finally went away altogether and allowed the sun to shine. The humidity soaked into Elle’s skin and thickened the air.

  “Why did you ask me to come here?” she asked.

  “Because Lenin’s Lullaby must be found,” her father answered. “We are going—as the Americans seem so fond of saying—outside the box on this one. Intelligence wants you to find Lenin’s Lullaby and control the situation.”

  “How? Everyone connected with the investigation is dead or has disappeared. Stryker. My parents. Zemanov. I don’t know where to find Arnaud Beck.”

  “Beck is a hard man to locate. We have another avenue for you to pursue.” Her father looked at her. “We know where Alexi Zemanov is. You will begin with him.”

  Elle stopped, bringing her father to a halt. “What do you think I should do?”

  Sighing, he folded his umbrella and hung it from his arm. “The CIA is searching for Lenin’s Lullaby.”

  Meaning Sam is looking, too, Elle realized. And if Sam were looking, she would be in the middle of the action. Without her. Elle knew she di
dn’t truly have a choice.

  “I think,” her father said, “that you should be careful.” He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Very, very careful.”

  Chapter 16

  Criminal Detention Center

  Siberia, Russia

  Everyone in Russia talked about being shipped off to the Siberian wasteland. From the stories most people told, they each had someone in the family or a friend who knew someone who had been exiled to Siberia under the Communist leaders and had never come back.

  To Elle’s way of thinking, tainted by her exposure to Western culture, it was Russia’s own brand of six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.

  Siberia was still used as a threat in some circles, but not nearly so much as Chernobyl. Elle had never seen Siberia, but she had been to Chernobyl chasing after black marketers with international connections. Chernobyl was bleak and filled with death, burnt and twisted buildings and landscape, and wildlife filled with tumors and gross mutations. She’d had to wear a radiation counter the whole time she’d been there.

  The military helicopter cleaving the wind above the detention center struggled to its destination. Elle didn’t like flying in Russian military vehicles because they had a tendency to drop from the sky. Maintaining the army, even after the acknowledgement of capitalism, was no easy task. Government hadn’t gotten any richer for doing away with Communism, though crime now paid very well.

  The detention center sat exposed on a somewhat flat surface amid the mountains and crags. Men and women transported to the detention center were sent there to be forgotten until they died or killed each other.

  The compound was a rough rectangle, enclosed by high fences topped with looping lengths of razor wire. Snow covered most of the ground, but it was so cold the precipitation just piled up and didn’t stick. Blotches of hard gray rock showed through the white mantle.

  The pilot took the helicopter down, landing at a partially concealed helipad west of the small parking lot that contained trucks and jeeps with four-wheel drive. The landing was bumpy as the crosswinds caught them.

  A waiting jeep pulled next to the helicopter as Elle stepped out. Dressed in a greatcoat that allowed the tan and red colors of the Russian military to be seen, the driver got out of the vehicle and stood at attention. He carried an AK-47 on his shoulder.