Fearless Pursuit (Off The Grid: FBI Series Book 8)

by Barbara Freethy

  He probably hadn't deserved her support, but he was glad she'd been with him. And her smart insight into his life, his parents' motives, had made him realize that they'd been in a very difficult position. Their friends had asked them to do something ridiculously huge—take care of their son—and they'd done it. They'd been extremely good to him. They'd changed their lives to protect him.

  Could he really judge them?

  Part of him still thought yes, he could judge them for not telling him when he was old enough to understand. But then, he hadn't been in their shoes. And, really, none of this was their fault.

  But maybe he could have discovered what happened to his parents earlier if he'd known. Maybe he could have used his resources to get to the truth before now. Or perhaps he would have ended up exactly where he'd ended up before, because the only leads had come from Natasha's journal and from Daniel Bragin.

  His mind spun in circles. He was getting nowhere fast. He still didn't have enough facts to come up with a clear picture. Hopefully, Brandon would be able to tell them more once he decoded the cypher.

  As he opened the garage door and pulled inside, he glanced at his watch. It was four o'clock. The day had flown by.

  Maya woke up as he turned off the engine.

  She gave him a sleepy, confused look. "Are we home?"

  "We are," he said, thinking his house felt more like a home when Maya was in it. He knew she was still angry with him, but he admired the way she'd managed to compartmentalize that emotion so that they could keep working together. "Feel more rested?"

  "A little, but I still feel tired." She gave him an expectant look. "What now?"

  "I'll check out the house. You wait here. And this time, don't have a panic attack while I'm gone."

  "No more secrets, right?"

  "No more secrets," he confirmed.

  "Then I should be fine."

  He went into the house, making a quick pass through the rooms. All was well. Maya was halfway through the door when he got back to the kitchen. He waved her inside. "We're good."

  She set her bag down on the kitchen table. "Any word from Brandon?"

  "Not yet."

  "So, we wait."

  "Are you hungry?"

  "I'm still full from lunch, but you should eat if you're hungry."

  "No, I'm good." His stomach had been churning since his parents had finally admitted the truth. "I'm going to get the boxes out of the car."

  "I'll help."

  "You don't have to."

  "I honestly don't mind. It will only be one trip if I help."

  He nodded and they walked back out to the garage. They took the boxes into the house and down the hall to the living room, where he set them on the floor.

  Maya sat down on the couch as he put the chess set on the table. The chess board sat inside an ornate black-and-gold box. He opened the lid and took out the board, then the hand-carved pieces from a side compartment, setting up the game.

  "It's beautiful," she murmured. "It feels very old."

  "My father said his dad got it as a boy right after World War II."

  "We should play a game."

  "Do you know how to play?"

  "Not really. You could teach me."

  "I barely remember myself." He sat down in the chair across from her. "I started last night's game with this move," he said, as he moved the pawn. "Bragin told me it was the Markov gambit. I guess my father had an opening move named after him."

  "What else did Bragin say?"

  "Only that my father beat everyone at the club. That he was a sharp, ruthless, aggressive player, and he moved quickly. I remember that about him, too. I'd study the board for several minutes before I moved, and he would have his piece taking mine off the board within a second." He thought back to those times. "We used to play a game every night before I went to bed. Other kids were having story time, I was playing chess. It was just me and my dad, too—my mother was never involved."

  "She didn't play at all?"

  "No." He raised his gaze to Maya's. "That's something that confuses me. He used to travel without her. She didn't always go with him. But that weekend she did. Why did she leave me behind? Why didn't she stay home that time? Why didn't she go with me to Carol's house?"

  Maya's green gaze filled with compassion. "I don't know, Jax. I wish she had. Maybe she thought she could save your father."

  "Or she was involved in whatever he was doing, and they both wanted to keep the danger away from me." He shook his head. "My mind is going down a lot of dark roads right now."

  "Let's put some light on those roads. What are you thinking?"

  "It's hard to say it out loud."

  "You can tell me, Jax. I won't judge."

  "All right. I wonder how long my dad was a spy, if he was sent to the US for that purpose. I wonder if my parents' marriage was real. Or was it part of their cover? Was I part of their cover? I think back to the fact that we never had any Russian things in the house. We were very Americanized. Aside from the food that my mom would make, everything else was US. All the pictures were of city scenes or sports teams. We didn't celebrate Russian holidays, but we had a big party on the Fourth of July."

  "Maybe they just loved America."

  "Maybe. They traveled a lot, my dad especially. Sometimes late at night, I would hear him on the phone. My mom also had this daily ritual where she would walk to the park and she would come back thirty minutes later. She never let me go with her. She said it was her time. I didn't think much about it, but now everything seems suspicious. Was she meeting someone? Was she handing off information? My dad had the best cover. With chess, he could travel all over the country. He met with celebrities and political leaders. He had access to so many people. And when he wasn't playing chess, he was teaching at a university where he met with students all the time, where he went to dinner with other faculty members." He ran a hand through his hair. "Do you know what 1985 was called?"

  She shook her head.

  "The Year of the Spy. Russian spies were everywhere." He paused. "Were my parents spies, Maya? Was I the son of two spies?"

  "Maybe," she said with a helpless shrug. "And I might be the granddaughter of a Russian spy. I know it's different for you, because you were with your parents for seven years of your life and I never knew Natasha, but I do have some idea of the shock you're going through."

  "I know you do. I shouldn't be ranting at you."

  "It's good for you to talk it out. One thing you should remember, Jax. Your parents loved you. Whatever they did, whoever they were, they loved you enough to make sure you were safe and protected, even if they couldn't be there to do it. And there's something noble in that."

  "Is there? Or were they just cowards? Did they just run away?"

  "If they ran away, it was to protect you."

  "And themselves."

  "Possibly, yes. Do you think there's any chance they're alive? I know I asked you that before…"

  "My answer is still no. Not that there isn't a part of me that wouldn't like some fairy-tale ending, some incredible reunion, but it's been twenty-six years." He shook his head, a grim resolve in his eyes. "They're not coming back, Maya, no matter how much I want them to." He felt that certainty down deep in his soul. "But I will find out what happened to them." He picked up the chess piece and moved it around. "It's funny. There was a sequence of moves my dad once taught me."

  "Do you remember it?"

  A memory gnawed at the back of his mind. The sequence hadn't been used in the game. It was for something else…

  "Wait a second," he said. "It was a trick. There was a mystery compartment." He looked at the pieces so hard they started to blur and then he remembered. He moved each piece to a specific square. And then he did the same with the opposing pieces. At the last move, he heard a click, and the side of the box opened.

  "You did it," Maya exclaimed. "You opened it. What's in there?"

  He pulled out a roll of paper held together by a rubber band. He co
uld see pages and pages of ink. "I think we just found my father's version of a journal." He met her gaze and saw the light of excitement in her eyes.

  "Start reading," she said. "I want to hear every word."

  He slid off the rubber band and unfurled the papers. As he stared at his father's writing, he felt a sense of deep foreboding. "Whatever he wrote here could change everything I know about my parents and myself."

  "Yes. But knowing is always better than not knowing."

  He hoped she was right. He picked up the first page and began to read.

  "In case anything happens to me, this is my truth, the truth of Andrei Markov. I grew up in poverty, but I always excelled in school. When I was eighteen, I was told that a wealthy Russian patron would pay for me to go to Georgetown University in the United States. I spent eight years at Georgetown, getting my doctorate in mathematics before my twenty-fourth birthday. I also fell in love there with my beautiful Marianna. We married the day after I graduated. We had so many plans for our future. But those plans changed when I realized who had actually paid for my education and why they had done so.

  My education, my teaching credential, my position as a mathematics professor at Georgetown was all part of a cover. I was to become his asset. I was to fulfill his plans, or my family would be hurt. I tried to find a way out, but I could not. I was forced to become a spy.

  The friendships I had made within the DC circles proved to be quite valuable. My chess prowess also gave me access to power, and the opportunity to move freely around the world. I hated everything they asked me to do. I told myself I was just collecting information, but that was a lie. I was stealing secrets, and I was getting people killed. I shouldn't have been so naïve. I should have seen the truth earlier.

  A woman tried to tell me. Her name was Natasha. She seemed to know what I was up against even though we didn't speak of it outright. She told me she would try to help, that she would hate to see me go down the same road she had traveled. But only days later, I heard she was dead. I knew that would be my fate as well. So, I followed orders. Marianna and I had a son and tried to create a normal life for him. When the three of us were together, it felt right, but every time I had to leave, every time I received a new mission, I felt like I was betraying everyone—not only my adopted country, but also my friends, and most especially my son.

  I was lucky to have support from Marianna. I told her many times to leave me, but she wouldn't go. She said we would find a way out together. We've now made a plan to escape. If it works, I'll take this letter out and no one will ever read it. But if I don't come back, I hope someday my son will find this, and he'll know that I tried to make it right.

  I'm including all the information I've gathered over the past ten years. I don't know everyone who I've worked for, but I've had two people who have given me orders. Ivan Novikoff and Constantine Dimitrov."

  Jax paused, looking up at Maya.

  "Constantine," she breathed, her eyes lit up with amazement. "He's the one in charge. He must be the Wolf. But who's Ivan Novikoff?"

  "I don't know." He flipped through the other pages. "This is incredible. He lists all the people he spied on, the information he gathered, the companies that were targeted, bank accounts with wire transfers—it's all here."

  "Do you see any other names we might recognize, like my grandmother's?"

  "No," he said, skimming fast. "But you can look through the pages yourself."

  "It sounded like Natasha tried to help him get out."

  He met her gaze. "Maybe she had second thoughts, too."

  "And maybe Constantine killed both your father and my grandmother." She paused, her gaze darkening. "He scared me when I was talking to him. He told me if I found out who killed Natasha, he would make them pay. I thought he was talking about the killer, but I think he was talking about making me pay." She took a breath. "What are we going to do, Jax?"

  "I need to run this information through my team."

  "Can you arrest Constantine?"

  "Not yet. We need more evidence."

  "You have it right in front of you."

  "Everything will have to be verified, and this case has to be worked down to the last detail in a very quiet and thorough way, or Constantine will be in the wind before we know it."

  "So, he's just going to keep living his life?"

  "I hate it, too, but we'll get him, Maya." He jumped to his feet. "I need to get down to the office. I want to see where Brandon is on the cypher."

  She stood up. "I'm coming with you."

  He frowned. He didn't want to take her with him, but he also didn't want to leave her alone. "All right. You can come."

  "Good. I thought you were going to try to talk me out of it."

  He gave her a wry smile. "I didn't feel like wasting my breath."

  "You're getting smarter by the minute." She gave him a smile that had been missing most of the day. "I think we're on to something now. Your dad has filled in some big blanks. Hopefully, my grandmother will do the same in her cypher."

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  "This doesn't look like an FBI building," Maya said, as Jax drove her into the underground garage of a three-story building in Santa Monica.

  "I work out of a special task force. It's run by Flynn MacKenzie. We started out together at Quantico. In fact, almost everyone who works here was part of my class. We went our separate ways for the first four years and then once Flynn created his own specialized group of agents, we came back together, one by one. We have an amazing group of people. There's very little ego involved. When something needs to be done, someone steps up to do it."

  She was impressed by the passion behind his words. "You really like them, don't you?"

  "They're family."

  And she understood better now why he needed to feel a part of a family, one that he truly belonged to, not one that had just ended up with him, no matter how good they were to him.

  "What does it mean—that you're specialized?" she asked, as he parked the car.

  "It mostly means we operate with more latitude than the FBI field office. We can move fast when we need to. We also run a lot of undercover operations, some of which can take weeks or months. We occasionally work in gray areas that might or might not be approved in a more official setting. But our results are very good, and as long as that continues, we can keep doing what we're doing."

  "Which you love. I hear it in your voice. I see it on your face. You never spoke about acting or bartending with any real sense of ownership. But this is who you are."

  "Yes. Serving drinks felt incredibly tedious to me. I'm actually not a very patient person. I'm better at quick undercover moments than jobs that go on for a long time."

  "I can see that about you. And I don't know why I didn't see it before. The way you spoke about my grandmother's murder—your instincts and insights were so good. I should have realized you weren't just a bartender. You were calm in every crisis. Now I feel like a bigger fool."

  "Don't. You're not a fool, Maya. You saw what I wanted you to see."

  "But that's just it. I need to stop seeing what people want me to see and see what's really there."

  "You were starting to see through my cover. You picked up on clues even before you realized what they were."

  "I did do that," she said, feeling slightly better with that reminder. "Well, it doesn't matter now anyway. Let's go meet your team."

  "The full crew won't be here since it's after six, but Flynn, Caitlyn, and Beck are waiting for us in the conference room. They've been working behind the scenes. Brandon is in the tech center. Hopefully, he'll have something for us soon."

  They got out of the car and walked to the elevator. Jax used some type of security scanner to open the doors. They took the elevator to the second floor, where they entered what looked like a typical office suite. The reception desk was empty. They walked past that to a large room with open desks in the middle and glass-walled offices around the perimeter. They headed toward one
glass-walled room that held a long conference table and a wall of monitors.

  There were three people in the room. All appeared to be somewhere in their thirties. Two were men, one with longish dark hair and eyes, and a ruggedly handsome look, wearing black slacks and a button-down shirt rolled up to his forearms. The other was blond and blue eyed with a surfer vibe, or maybe that was the faded jeans and T-shirt that gave him that appearance.

  The woman was very pretty with long brown hair that had a touch of red to it. She had curious, assessing brown eyes and wore a sleeveless coral-colored top over dark jeans. Maya wouldn't have picked any of them to be FBI agents, but maybe that was the point.

  "This is Maya," Jax said, waving his hand toward the group, who had all gotten to their feet. Starting with the dark-haired man, he added, "Beck Maxwell, Flynn MacKenzie, Caitlyn Carlson."

  "Nice to meet you all," she said, feeling very much like she was under the microscope.

  "Have a seat," Flynn said, waving her toward a chair as they sat down around the table. "Brandon says he should have good news soon."

  She was relieved to hear that.

  Flynn turned to Jax. "You brought your dad's notes?"

  "Yes," he said, pulling out the papers. "I need to make copies."

  "I'll do that," Beck said, taking the pages from Jax.

  "Flynn filled us in," Caitlyn said. "I did a quick search on Ivan Novikoff, since that was a new name for us. He passed away twenty-six years ago. He was shot to death in a hotel room in New York City, two bullets—one to the head, one to the chest. His murder has gone unsolved."

  "Twenty-six years ago," Jax murmured. "That's when my parents disappeared. The last day I saw them was June tenth."

  "Novikoff died June fourteenth."

  "Four days later," Jax said tersely. "What else do you know about him?"

  "Novikoff was KGB, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather before him," Caitlyn replied.

  "Any ties between him and Constantine Dimitrov?"

  "They both attended the same school in Moscow. Novikoff ran an import/export firm that was based in Los Angeles in the eighties. I can't tie him to the Russia House, but I'm betting he was there."