by Dana Marton
“It’s a chance to start over,” she told them, but some of her excitement was fading as bits and pieces of conversation floated back from the past twenty minutes, fully registering at last. Suicide mission and we’re disposable were definite buzz killers. She wouldn’t let things go that far. She would find a way to skip before the mission got out of hand.
She’d done more time, as it was, than any other hacker before or since her. And she had done no harm. She hadn’t been interested in any data, hadn’t stolen or damaged anything. She’d just looked at code, wanting to learn, searching for shortcuts, unique fixes and unusual solutions. She had paid for them dearly.
“Hey, we could have our own secret club. The Second Chance Chicks.” Samantha’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Or The Dirty Four. Maybe we’ll be in a movie someday.”
They’d never make a team. They were too different. Carly certainly was. She’d given up a long time ago on fitting in anywhere. And with this group, she didn’t want to fit.
Gina “the killer” Torno was giving Sam a dark look. “Don’t get too excited, kid. If they’ll ever make a movie about us, they’ll be calling it The Doomed and the Desperate.”
Not her, Carly thought, as she began to plan.
TSERNYAKOV CLOSED THE FOLDER on his computer and glanced out his office window that overlooked the factory yard, breathed in the sweet-musty smell of sugar beets being processed. Some people didn’t care for the permeating odor, much like broccoli cooking, but for him, it was the scent of his childhood.
Peter was late. Had he run? If he had, he would be found.
He glanced at the display of his phone when it rang, smiled at the familiar number and took the call. “How are you, Mother? What did the doctor say?”
“I was just thinking about you. What a good, good son you are. I’ll have to have more tests. I can just go in, no need to stay at the hospital.”
“Are you sure you want to stay here? I could have someone take you to Switzerland. They have better facilities.”
“This is where my strength is, in my country and in you. What would I do in Switzerland? I couldn’t even talk to anyone,” she said, then added, “You will visit soon?”
“In a few days. You have need of anything?”
“What could I want? My successful son spoils me.”
“You deserve it, Mamuska.”
She made a small sound. “I almost forgot, I ran into your aunt Irina at the hospital this morning.”
“Is she ill?”
“She was visiting her neighbor, you know the one who used to repair bicycles? He broke a hip. Irina walked with me for a while. Her cousin, Anna, invited her to England and she’s thinking about going. You remember Anna’s boy, Calvin? He is a big businessman over there. Not as successful as you, but he’s made something of himself. He’s in trouble now, that’s why Irina mentioned him. The government is trying to get his money. They’re accusing him of something crazy, they say he traded inside. What does that even mean?”
His mother went on for a while, lamenting the misfortune that had befallen Anna’s family.
Insider trading. Tsernyakov understood the charge well, as he understood why Irina had told his mother, why Anna had told Irina. They all hoped that he would fix it.
“Maybe with your shops in England, I thought you might know someone,” his mother finally said.
“I’ll see, Mamuska.”
“I knew you would. I told Irina not to worry, that son of mine can fix anything anywhere.”
He promised a visit soon, said goodbye and hung up. Then he ran an Internet search on Spencer Holdings and Cal Spencer, a cousin so distant he’d only seen him once, when he’d been ten and Cal a newborn, visiting Russia with his parents to be baptized there.
Looked like Cal had made something of himself. Seemed he’d been amassing a fortune in real estate. And, most interestingly, he was getting into warehousing. A handful of strategically placed warehouses throughout England. Maybe they could be mutually beneficial to each other.
He sent off an e-mail and asked for a full background check on Cal from his trusted source. He never did business with anyone he hadn’t thoroughly investigated, family or otherwise.
“Come in,” he answered to a knock on the door.
Ivan, one of his secretaries, stopped on the threshold. “The School Board has contacted us to see if you would agree to deliver the requested amount of sugar, sir.”
He clenched his jaw. “When I do, I’ll let them know.” They insulted him with their impatience.
“I’m sorry, sir.” The man bowed his head. “They insist that it is urgent.”
What were they going to do? Go to another source? No one could get what they wanted, in the amount they wanted. He wasn’t even sure if it was possible. If it was, he was the man to make it happen, and they knew it.
The money they offered was substantial, but he wasn’t prepared to deal with them until he was one hundred percent sure that this wasn’t some kind of a trap. “The School Board” was the code name of a zealous new terrorist organization that specialized in training camps. They had ambitious intentions but barely a record. “Sugar” was code name for anything Tsernyakov sold these days, a necessary precaution in a world where surveillance had become an art form. No one had ever got anything on him, and he was determined to keep things that way.
“They’ll get my answer when I’m ready.”
A car pulled up outside and he looked at the familiar white SUV, then at Peter as the man got out. The passenger side door opened and his wife Sonya stepped to the gravel.
“Thank you, sir.” Ivan left and closed the door behind him.
His cell phone rang, and Tsernyakov picked it up as he watched Alexandra jump from the back. Peter’s daughter was a beauty at twenty. How fast time flew. He could remember her as a little girl, riding on his knee.
“He’s here, sir.”
“I can see,” he snapped into the phone. Peter had brought his family with him. Perhaps he’d thought he would not be punished then, that he could use them as a shield. He’d thought wrong. “Take them to the factory.”
“Yes, sir.”
He watched as his men pointed toward the back building and Peter balked, the women going forward without a second thought. Thousands of tons of sugar beets stood stacked by the conveyer belt that took them up to be cleaned then chopped to a juicy mush. Right now, they looked like small muddy balls. When he’d been a kid, he and his friends had sometimes played soccer with them in the back.
Once he had found two human heads as he’d picked through the piles to find a beet that was rounder than the rest. The heads hadn’t looked much different from the beets, all caked with mud as they’d come up the conveyor belt eventually. His father had been an enforcer for the man who’d owned the factory at the time. Tsernyakov had grown up understanding the business.
A good education was paramount to a man’s success. He believed in that. That was why his children, when they were grown, would attend the best universities of the west.
He glanced at his calendar and considered his schedule, the machines’ incessant rumble providing a soothing background noise. The chopper was a fearsome piece of equipment that could grind anything to pulp in minutes.
Peter shouldn’t have done business with Yokoff.
Tsernyakov rubbed the bridge of his nose. He believed in Old Testament-style revenge. When someone betrayed you, you didn’t just kill him, you killed his family, his animals then burned his fields.
He wanted his enemies to be crystal clear on this—nobody went against him and lived.
Chapter Two
Her mother was there, visiting.
“I’m sorry, honey.” She wore her Easter hat. Seemed odd for September. Must have cut her hair short again—she did that from time to time on a whim—not a single chestnut curl showed.
She was as slim as ever but her face had aged. Too much so, Carly thought. How long had it been since they’d seen each other?
“It’s okay,” she told her. “I’m sorry, too.” I missed you. She didn’t say that or, Where have you been?
“Visitation over. All inmates, please line up for exit inspection,” the overhead loudspeaker demanded.
No. Not yet. She grabbed the edge of the table. She still had so much to say and no words to say it. She wasn’t good with words. Did her mother understand that?
“Bomb in building! Sixty seconds to explosion!” A real person yelled that, not the loudspeaker this time.
She turned back to the guards who watched over the visiting room, but they were disappearing into the darkness.
The next second she was pulled awake, in the middle of the night, in her cell, alone. Her mother had been gone for years, lost to cancer, was the realization the first split second brought. But the emotions that came with the thought were abruptly interrupted when the door slammed open and banged against the wall.
Her brain, heavy with sleep, struggled to catch up, her muscles tense from the unholy noise. She could barely make out the silhouette of the man advancing on her. She pulled her neck in on reflex, brought her hands up.
“Get out! Get out! Sixty seconds to explosion!”
This time, she finally comprehended the words and lunged away from the bed, heart racing, blood rushing. Get out! Get out! The order screamed in her brain now, her body propelled forward by stark terror.
The man stepped in front of her before she could reach the door. He shoved her back.
“Let me go!” She pushed forward and thrust her arm out to slap him aside.
He didn’t budge.
“Why are you doing this?” Who was it? Burge? He had hated her from the get-go. Didn’t he realize that if they didn’t get moving they were both going to die?
She kicked and went for his face with a fist at the same time. To hell with him. To hell with what she was going to get for attacking a guard. Somehow she squeezed past him and ran down the hall, realized a few steps out that it wasn’t the hall outside her cell. Where was she? Why weren’t the emergency lights on?
She could still be dreaming, she thought and slowed, then the man gripped her shoulder to pull her back—definitely real. She turned back to fight.
“Stop it, Burge! What are you doing?”
He said nothing, but slammed her against the wall and blocked her way. He was holding something in his left hand, his fist closed around a small object she couldn’t make out. A hand grenade? Was he crazy?
She ducked under his arm, kicked sideways at his knee then ran for all she was worth, fully awake now, the memory of where she was coming back to her. She turned right at the end of the hall, boots falling heavily on the tile floor somewhere close.
She slammed through the door to the staircase and leaped her way down. Then she was at the exit, throwing her body against the metal door, tumbling out into the wet night and away from the building. The man was right behind her.
She could see his face now in the light of the lamp-posts and stopped running, braced her hands on her knees as she gasped for air. She cursed the man who stood before her wearing a black T-shirt with black cargo pants, and an even blacker scowl on his face.
“Sixty-one seconds.” Stopwatch in hand, Nick Tarasov stepped forward until his combat boots were toe-to-toe with her bare feet. “You’re dead.” His voice dripped with contempt, his gaze as hard as the steel door she’d slammed her shoulder into moments ago.
Screw you. Her heart still beat like crazy. She was shaking inside, but she straightened and looked him in the eyes without reaching up to massage her aching shoulder. She didn’t want him to know how badly he’d messed her up.
A slow rain drizzled on her head, her body wishing for the warmth of her blankets. “If you’ve had your fun, can I go back to bed?”
He leaned forward, until he was in her face, his expression hard. “Night training,” he said, then shouted at the top of his lungs, “Obstacle course. Get moving, soldier!”
Now? The course was nothing but a mud hole. “I don’t have my shoes on.”
He nodded toward the sidewalk by the building. Her boots and socks lay scattered on the concrete. He must have tossed them out the window after he’d chased her from her room. “Move! Move! Move!”
She collected and yanked on her footwear then turned toward the track and the obstacle course behind it, got going on the double, running on the slippery grass.
“Faster.” Nick passed her and turned around, jogging backward with ease.
Drop dead. She pushed harder.
Why had she ever thought that it was some awesome good luck being the first of the women to be let out? David Moretti had advised her lawyer to appeal her case. The appeal had been speedily accepted. Anita was left to serve out her sentence. She was expected here, at the FBI’s training course at Quantico, Virginia, tomorrow. Gina and Sam were getting out on parole next week within days of each other.
Carly had gotten out two weeks before anyone else. It hadn’t turned out to be two weeks of freedom. She was locked up at Quantico as tightly as she’d been locked up in prison. And each day, Nick Tarasov, the cold bastard, did his level best to kill her.
She tripped but caught herself, ran on.
“Let’s just focus on the first step and make sure that’s executed to the best of our abilities,” he said. That seemed to have become his mantra since she’d gotten here. Was he under the illusion that he was teaching her life skills as well as pushups?
The first obstacle course began with the old tire trap. She stepped into the first and moved forward, lifting her feet high as she ran across the tires, squishing into the mud in the middle.
“Again. Faster,” Tarasov yelled when she reached the end. He did the exercise himself, as he had done everything he expected her to do, always, from the very beginning.
She ran back to the start, her mud-crusted boots adding extra pounds. Her muscles were stiff, still aching from their work the day before.
“Again. Faster!” He was right behind her.
That much yelling couldn’t be good for a person. His blood pressure was bound to go up. Maybe he would have a stroke. There was a thought. She pressed her hand to her side and tried to hide that she was already starting to gasp for air.
He made her run the tires a half-dozen times before he let her move on to the rope. She lunged and caught on with her hands, but her muddy boots were too slippery to find purchase.
She needed long pants. The wet rope scratched her thighs where the shorts she had used in lieu of pajamas left her skin bare—a place she would just as soon not bring to his attention.
He was watching her closely. “Don’t use your feet. Use your arms. Go!”
She glared at him but put one hand over the other, made some progress, wiped her forehead on the rope when sweat rolled into her eyes. She’d worked out in prison. It had been something to do in solitude, passing the time. She’d been in far better shape when she’d gotten out than when she’d gone in. Decent shape, she’d thought. It had taken Tarasov less than half a day to prove otherwise.
“Another ten feet and you’re there,” he called up to her.
Might as well be a hundred. It seemed impossible that her arms would support her that long. She was still tired from her training the day before. She’d had two, maybe three hours of sleep. She had nothing left to give.
In her brief moments of rest, she’d been considering finding a way to break out of the compound, but each time she had pushed the impulse aside. Patience. Training wouldn’t last forever. Getting away would be much easier once she was out of here, in a normal, civilian environment. And whatever she learned in the meanwhile would aid her in escape and evasion later on.
She glanced at the man standing at the bottom of the rope. What would it take to get by Tarasov?
He grabbed the rope next to hers, went up, paused for a second at the top, then effortlessly eased himself down.
He was a damn machine. He was never tired, hungry or upset. If
necessary, he’d show her the same self-defense move twenty times in a row.
Getting away from him might prove harder than she had thought—he was even tougher than he looked.
She had always been a sucker for a good challenge.
She looked up, fixed her gaze on the steel bar above and moved forward. Eight more feet to go. Six. Three. By the time she finally touched the cold metal, her arms were shaking.
Now the way down. She lowered herself slowly, one handhold at a time. She was about halfway when she slipped. Still, she caught herself, tried to grab with her slippery boots onto the wet rope, but that didn’t work. She slipped again, this time for good, the rope burning across her palm. She let go in response to the sudden, sharp pain.
She was falling, falling free, bracing for impact.
Then she was caught in Nick Tarasov’s arms. The landing was soft—compared to the hard slam into the ground she had expected, but still it stole her breath for a second or two. She looked up at him wide-eyed, waiting for him to yell.
He swayed for a moment then steadied, and set her on her feet. His light brown hair looked blond in the moonlight. His brush cut hadn’t grown a millimeter since she’d first met him at the prison. He must have found time in between her torture sessions to get away for a cut. Everything about him screamed “commando.” He was raw power and confidence wrapped in black.
“Let me see your hand,” he said, his voice gruff. He was removing a small flashlight from his belt.
“First-aid station?” There was one on the ground floor of one of the buildings. Thank God, she was done for the night.
One eyebrow slid up his forehead. “There is no first-aid station. You’re in the woods. Your team has been taken out.” His voice was cold, matter-of-fact. “A dozen of the enemy are coming up about a hundred yards behind you with machine guns. What do you do?”
Was he for real?
Looked like she had hesitated for too long, because he reached for the hem of the FBI T-shirt she’d slept in and ripped it a few inches up, then around.
