by Dana Marton
He had killed when it was necessary, in the beginning. Now he had people who took care of that kind of unpleasantness in his life. Large-scale murder, however, held no appeal for him. It brought no money and got everyone in law enforcement after you. The concept of killing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people for esoteric principles, without an ounce of profit, seemed plain stupid.
He looked at the men, but was thinking of his next meeting already. Business was exhilarating, and he took it very seriously. But the spice of life was seducing beautiful women.
What these idiots did had nothing to do with him. His role was to get the virus and collect the money. He took a last look at the men then walked out of the room, leaving Dmitry to finish up.
The two bodyguards outside the door followed him to the private elevator that worked with a key, one floor up to the very top where his private office and apartment were.
He walked to the apartment, nodded to the men to stay outside the door. He punched in the security code and walked in.
“Alexandra.”
The young woman flew into his arms—all grace and loveliness already at twenty. She’d lost a little weight, but even so…Grief looked good on her. It gave her fresh beauty a haunting quality that hadn’t been there before. Like good art, she was becoming multidimensional.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, still pressed against him.
She thought of him as an uncle. He would work to change that. He didn’t want to take her by force, although he would if she frustrated him too much. He preferred seduction. He was a romantic at heart. He enjoyed making women fall in love with him, the power of that, specifically because it was different from the power he held over his men, over his business associates.
“How are you? What can I do to make you happy?” he asked.
“When will I go home?”
“You are not comfortable here?” He made a point to look hurt.
“I don’t want to be a burden. I should arrange…I should take care of…” She didn’t seem to be able to finish the sentence.
“I’m handling your father’s affairs. Peter was my friend. It’s the least I can do.” He ran his hand down her back, glad that he had sent a man to pull her at the last second. She’d been told to go see the new puppies in the back of the factory yard while her parents discussed business. Then she was whisked to safety after the terrible accident.
“Thank you.” Her luminous violet eyes teared up. “I would love to stay a few more days.”
“Maybe you should stay longer.” He schooled his features into a somber look.
“What is it?” She watched him, catching his change of mood.
If she was this quick a study as a lover, he was going to be very happy with her.
He shook his head. “Nothing. I don’t—You don’t need any more worries right now.”
“Please,” she pleaded. “Is this about my parents?”
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes. “That accident at the factory…”
“Yes?” She waited breathless, her lips slightly parted.
His body stirred. “I’m starting to think it might not have been an accident.”
She watched him with big round eyes and swayed a little. He was happy to support her.
“Somebody meant to kill them?” she asked finally.
“I’m not sure. Either them or me.” He stopped for a meaningful pause. “The pressure valve blew too early maybe. I was supposed to join them in a few minutes.” He shook his head then shrugged as if the possible threat to his own life was of no consequence. “In any case. I want to keep you safe until I figure out what’s going on.” His voice implied that he had the investigation well in hand.
She nodded, looking stunned and numb, but ethereally beautiful. He maneuvered her to the sprawling leather sofa with ease.
Chapter Three
“You must have been wondering what your mission is going to be.”
Brant Law stood at the head of a training room that was smaller, but much better furnished, than the prison classroom where the women had first met him. Tarasov and Moretti stood to the side, tension making the mood in the room brittle.
He turned to the desk that held his laptop and started a presentation, projecting his slides to the white screen on the wall. The first image was of a rectangle with a shadow of a man’s profile with a big question mark over it.
“Your target is someone who has managed to elude law enforcement for the last twenty years. He has no known picture. We haven’t been able to narrow his location to as much as a country. We don’t know his first name, or exactly how old he is.”
“So what do you know?” Gina spoke up.
The four women were together again. That she wasn’t completely alone in this mess made Carly feel slightly better, although she was far from trusting any of the people in the room. With her basic training over, she was allowed to spend most of her time in the computer lab while Nick was making mincemeat of the other women on the training course. She only saw him twice a day now. They ran together in the morning then did an hour of self-defense, and he continued her introduction to various guns for an hour each afternoon.
She was catching up with what she’d missed in information technology over the years, planning her disappearance, looking up some distant family on the Internet. She hadn’t contacted anyone to tell them that she was out. She never would, most likely. At the moment, not being able to discuss the mission, all she could tell them would be lies. And later, when she broke free, contact with anyone from her old life might lead law enforcement to her.
Her family had never been close. Her mother hadn’t kept in touch with her father’s side after his death. And since her mother was the only child of parents who had no siblings themselves, the pickings were all around slim for family reunions.
Anita and Gina had been allowed to call their families the first day they had arrived at the training facility, to tell them that they were out and involved in some kind of readjustment program where for a while they couldn’t be reached. They’d had visitors in prison who had to be told something. Sam had nobody, no clue where she came from, no memories of her life before she came to be living on the streets.
“We know him as Tsernyakov,” Law said as he pointed to the shadow outline. “But we’re not sure if that’s his real name. He is one of the biggest illegal weapons dealers in the world. We suspect he might have had some position in the old communist government in the USSR, might have been in the military—his access to large amounts of decommissioned weaponry points that way. He has ‘ears’ in every branch of law enforcement of just about every country. He has unlimited access to money. He is ruthless. If he thinks someone crossed him, he doesn’t wait for proof. He kills on first suspicion.”
“So you want us to do what? Take him out?” Gina asked.
Carly was taken aback as much by the question as by Gina’s casual tone. Anita’s hand flew to her throat.
“Getting a location on him would be enough.”
“Why us?” The question escaped Carly, spurred by suspicion. “I mean, even if you teach us everything you know, which is probably not possible, you still have tons more experience. Why not you, a commando team or the FBI?” Not that the setup didn’t sound intriguing—a lot like one of her favorite video games, which she hadn’t played in ages.
“As I said, you have a unique set of skills. But more importantly, you have something none of us do, a one hundred percent authentic background that doesn’t involve any agency work—an unbreakable cover.” He hesitated a moment. “And as far as we can tell, our target, Tsernyakov, has only one weakness—beautiful women.”
He looked uncomfortable saying that, as if he expected them to jump up and yell sexual harassment.
She glanced at the others. They were all looking around at each other. He was right, she realized. Anita was a classic Latin beauty. Gina was petite with pretty features, her body round in all the right places, and a pronou
nced presence that made her hard to ignore. Sam had the beauty of youth, in spades, those large green eyes that would swallow you up. She was the odd bird out, Carly thought of herself. Too tall, too athletically built to be called feminine. They got her for her hacking.
“How will we find him?” Anita regained her balance first.
“You don’t find Tsernyakov. Nobody does. Your job is to make him want to find you.”
“How?” Sam drew up a black eyebrow that had two silver rings in it. She’d somehow managed to get her hands on an amazing number of body ornaments within days of release.
“We are going to put you in his way. The rest is up to you.” Law brought up another slide, a map. “Cayman Islands, off-shore banking paradise. One of the money-laundering centers of the world.”
“We’re going?” For once Sam seemed to forget her aloof pose and sounded genuinely excited.
Carly tried hard to keep the grin off her face. One of the to-do items in her slowly forming escape plan was to find a way to get out of the country once she got away from the “mission.” Looked like they were going to help her out with that. Excellent.
“He’s got businesses there?” Gina asked, then when Law paused, she added with some sarcasm, “No, don’t tell me. You don’t know.”
“We don’t know whether Tsernyakov has interests on the island or not,” Law said in an even voice. “But we suspect that some people he’s involved with do. Your job will be to get to know these people, get them to trust you and have them lead you eventually to Tsernyakov. Or—” he paused “—more realistically, lead Tsernyakov to you.”
“What will we be doing exactly?” Anita asked.
“Your cover will be a consulting company that facilitates entrepreneurs in setting up small businesses. Miss Caballo will handle accounting, Miss Jones will do IT, Miss Torno will take care of security, including background checks on employees, and Miss Hanley is the support person for the team.”
“I’m the freakin’ secretary? No way.” Sam threw herself back in her seat.
“You’re an undercover agent in a top secret operation.”
Apparently, Law said the right thing because Sam didn’t make another comment. God, if she bought that line, she was obviously way too easily scammed. Somebody ought to watch out for the girl.
The agent brought up another slide that had the name Savall, Ltd. at the top with a logo, an address, phone and fax numbers, Web site address and mission statement.
“What else do you want us to do? A start-up consulting company isn’t going to attract much attention from the type of people Tsernyakov would hang with,” Gina said.
“Correct. Savall, Ltd. is your cover. What you’ll really be doing is money laundering.”
“Are you asking us to engage in illegal activities?” Anita sounded shocked.
“You need to move in the same circles that Tsernyakov’s associates move in. You are authorized by the FBI and CIA to use whatever means necessary to get close to the man.”
Carly shifted in her seat. Official carte blanche. Man, it sounded weird. She’d spent the last six years angry at the government for making something as innocent as a quest for knowledge a punishable offense. And now here was an FBI agent telling her to go ahead, break the law as she pleased.
“This is not gonna come back and bite us in the ass, no matter what?” Gina nailed the man with a hard look.
“Correct.”
“You need us, people with authentic backgrounds instead of existing agents, because if we get lucky enough to get this guy’s attention he’ll have us checked out and he knows people in the right places,” Gina thought out loud.
“Yes.”
“I’m guessing something like this would be a last-ditch effort,” she added.
Law didn’t respond.
“You tried before with your own men and didn’t succeed. Did he have them killed?” Gina pushed.
“We lost a number of operatives.”
The room went silent for a long minute, then Law brought up the next slide, more on what Savall, Ltd. did and a list of how they could help their clients.
“Miss Caballo was convicted for the embezzlement of nearly four million dollars that was never recovered. Your operations will imply that she had that money safely stashed away, met up with the rest of you in prison, and decided to start a company that would grow her nest egg outside of the United States.”
Four million dollars. Carly glanced at Anita, whose lips were pressed into a thin line. Damn, she hadn’t given the woman enough credit. She was all educated and classy, soft-spoken. But Anita had stolen four mil. Sam had done breaking and entering and boosted a couple of cars. Gina had killed a man.
Carly caught herself chewing her bottom lip and stopped. What was she doing here? She didn’t do teams. She’d always been the odd person out. All through school she’d taken accelerated classes, graduated from high school by fourteen, had her M.A. in computer science by twenty-one. She’d been the freak kid in every class. Her classmates, years older, had wanted nothing to do with her. She hadn’t been invited to parties, to sleepovers, to clubs. So she’d stayed home, on her computer, found online places to hang out where nobody had to know her real age.
Then she’d found her way into the vast and accepting community of hackers where being smart was no longer a disadvantage—dozens, hundreds of people just like her. For the first time ever there was a place where she’d been a perfect fit.
“So what’s going to keep us from taking off once you cut us loose?” Gina was asking.
Good question. Carly waited for the answer.
Sam seemed to perk up at the idea, too. She was leaning forward in her chair.
“You’ll be under constant surveillance. For your own safety.” Law nodded toward Tarasov, who stood to the side.
Great. Carly hung her head. Anyone but him. How on earth was she supposed to get away from that one? She closed her eyes for a moment. No. She was not going to let him intimidate her. She drew a deep breath and straightened her spine. She would find a way.
“Any questions about this part?” Law asked.
Anita raised her hand. “Has anyone managed to get close to this man and come back alive?”
He paused for a moment before responding, looked at the other two men, then back at the women. “None so far,” he said.
LITTLE PIG,LITTLE PIG, let me come in. Carly’s fingers flew over the keyboard as she bombarded the firewall of her target company with various bits of code, hoping to find the tiniest crack that would allow her entrance into their system.
Anita stuck her head through the half-open door. “That keyboard is about to start smoking. Any progress?”
“Lots. But not enough to get through.” They’d been on Grand Cayman for almost two weeks. She’d broken into Costa-Costa, Inc.’s system, a family owned French firm, on day three. The others were trickier. She was feeling the six years she’d wasted in prison. She’d been working day and night to catch up with the latest versions of programs she had missed. Might as well do that now while she was here, surrounded with the latest and best equipment money could buy. She might not have access again to stuff like this for some time to come.
On their first day on the island, Brant Law had given her a list of ten companies that were suspected of money laundering. Carly had been systematically trying to disassemble their computer defenses.
Her goal—as far as their mission was concerned—was twofold. She wanted to get into their systems to identify their client lists, cross-reference those lists and see if there were any names on it that had also been tied to Tsernyakov. Her other, more immediate goal was to get the client lists so she would know which companies needed money laundering. Anita then could approach those and offer the services of Savall, Ltd. They had to make a name for themselves, be known enough to raise Tsernyakov’s interest.
She wasn’t in a hurry. She was making plans on her own and implementing them. Her disappearance was going to require a lot of ca
reful planning, which she did each day. She was working on getting fake papers, several sets of them, money, and investigating various locations around the world where she could hide out for the long term.
She couldn’t not give her “official” quest at the office one hundred percent—her own thirst for solutions demanded that—but she wasn’t rushing. She did careful work, looking for the best method to do things even if that wasn’t the quickest, taking time to learn along the way.
“I’m doing good with the first list you gave me. We just got our fourth client, and I think we might get even more.” Anita sounded confident. “Brant called. He tipped off the authorities that Costa-Costa, Inc., was dirty. If they go down, I’ll do my best to grab as many of their customers as I can.”
She was the most devoted to the mission, which made no sense since she had the least to lose. Her sentence was up. Whatever happened, nobody was going to drag Anita back to the can.
“That’s good,” Carly said without taking her eyes off the screen. “Each new client is a possible link to Tsernyakov.”
“Want to hear something crazy? Brant told me one of the companies who ran their money through Costa-Costa is owned by an ex D.C. cop.”
“Figures. That’s cops for you.”
Gina, walking by, stopped and gave Carly a hard look as she glanced up. “What do you know about cops?”
Right. Gina used to be one. But the way the woman looked at her got Carly’s back up. “Nothing beyond dumb cop jokes,” she said, refusing to be intimidated by her.
“They can’t all be dumb.” Gina’s voice was cold. “They sure caught you.”
Like Anita, Gina had thrown herself into the work full speed from the beginning. If she thought the government would appreciate that enough to give her her old job back, she was a fool, Carly thought.
The mailman sashayed in the door with a handful of envelopes and flyers. “Hello, lovelies.” His smile showed every sparkling tooth he had. “Give thanks for sunshine. The earth says hello.” Then he stopped, obviously picking up on the mood in the room. “Okay. Maybe not.” He put his stack on the reception desk. “See you tomorrow.” He closed the door behind him gently.
