Barricaded behind a wall of reserve, she spoke without meeting his gaze.
“While you were out playing Jason Bourne, I used your mobile phone to make a few calls.”
Alarm knifed through him. Had she called her Embassy for backup? Let the U.S. Government get wind of this little chess game, and it was fool’s mate for him. Between the FSB, the troubling penetration of his own team by an associate who’d just tried to kill him, and the “contingency plan” demanded by his MFA client, his pawns were overloaded, his defenses stretched dangerously thin.
Carefully he kept his voice detached, edged with idle interest.
“Tsk, tsk, Skylar, making social calls at this hour? You must have woken someone from his well-earned slumber.”
She shot him a look, one hand tucking tendrils of jet-black hair behind her ear. Was it a nervous tick? Everyone had them, even this cool-as-a-cucumber ambassador with her unreadable face.
“He’s an ally well placed to be helpful.” She shrugged. “He ran a Doppler radar report for me that confirmed we’ve seen the worst of this weather. And he’s arranged for a private plane and pilot to meet us at the airfield.”
“Very impressive, Dr. Rossi,” he murmured, gaze narrowed on the faint tire tracks that burrowed through the taiga. “You’re resourceful in a tight corner and cool under heat. For your sake and mine, I hope this friend of yours is equally resourceful, and that your pilot will ask no questions.”
“His discretion is guaranteed.” She sounded certain enough to make him curious. “Don’t worry. My friend’s credentials are unimpeachable.”
“Not the illustrious Alain Devereux, I hope?” he asked lightly, grip tightening on the wheel.
“He isn’t,” she said crisply. “We’re done with that subject, Nikolai.”
The headlights swept across snow-covered fields, dense groves of conifers grown tough and straggly in the harsh Siberian wind. He wished he could dispense with the headlights altogether, because someone was definitely hunting them.
But they’d end up in a ditch if he tried driving blind in this weather. When Sasha didn’t report in, there was going to be trouble.
It has to be some hard-ass at the Chemical Munitions Agency who’s after her. They have the most to lose from her visit. The question is, has the CMA penetrated my entire team? Has Ilya betrayed me as well, thrown fifteen years of collaboration down the toilet? Or was Sasha acting alone? Do I have the entire weight of the CMA stacked against me, or merely a lone wolf? If it’s the former, they’ll send another wet boy—and soon.
I’d better phone Ludmilla at MFA before Skylar sets foot on that plane.
Under these circumstances, given whatever Skylar had seen or surmised at Khimgorod, his client might very well instruct him to cut their losses and get rid of her. His hands tightened on the wheel. But he crushed his inner turmoil, buried it deep beneath his professional veneer.
Idle speculation and regret were no way to run his business. He was the Maestro, damn it, not some adolescent schoolboy with a crush.
He wasn’t Kirill, whom Russian intelligence should never have sent to close a deal with a business associate as cagy and ruthless as Dane Rossi. For eighteen years, Nikolai had dreamed of making Skylar pay for her role in his brother’s downfall. Only the FSB’s strict instructions to leave Dane Rossi’s daughter the hell alone, in the glare of the media spotlight that followed her father’s spectacular death, had saved her life.
Here’s your chance to make her pay, he reminded himself. Once you make that call, she may not survive the hour. Until then, you’ll stay closer to her than her own shadow.
_____________________________________
In the Niva’s close confines Skylar held herself rigidly, as far from Nikolai Markov as the shared space would allow. The knobby stick shift jutted between their seats to impose a little welcome distance.
But she’d seen the way Nikolai could move, uncoiling like a cobra from sinister stillness to lethal attack in a heartbeat. If he decided to make his move, he could crush her windpipe before she could say assassin.
Victor Kostenko’s terse warning echoed through her brain.
He’s one of the best in the business. In the FSB we called it wet work. Moscow brings him in when they want something special—a clean, elegant kill.
And the elegant kill that brought him to Khimgorod could only be Skylar: the nosy, stubborn, troublesome American ambassador whose organization the Russians considered a thin front for espionage. By digging for the truth, Skylar had finally pushed her luck too far. If he suspected what she’d discovered, if he found the VX purchase order still tucked against her tummy, she’d never leave Khimgorod alive.
A soft buzz filled the cozy darkness: a cell phone set on vibrate. She jerked and stifled a curse.
Too damn jumpy! Hold it together, Skylar, just a little longer. Once you reach the airfield, you’ll ditch him. Where you’re going, he’s not going to follow you.
Nikolai frowned and fished out his phone. When he glanced at the illuminated screen, his forehead creased. His dark eyes flickered toward Skylar.
She shrugged apologetically for the lack of privacy. “I’ll plug my ears if you like.”
In his gloved hand, the phone continued to buzz. His nostrils flared as he pushed out a breath. Then he thumbed the line open and spoke quietly in Russian. Skylar turned away from him to peer through the window at the impenetrable night, her reflection floating ghostly in the mobile phone’s subdued glow.
Yet she strained to hear every word, though he was almost whispering into the phone and her comprehension in Russian was far from perfect.
“Ira?” he murmured.
The Russian diminutive for Irina. He was speaking to a woman, one with whom he shared some degree of intimacy. Family member? Girlfriend? Cavolo! He could even be married, for all she knew.
The caller could be his wife. Or his daughter—unlikely though the image of Nikolai Markov as doting husband and father might be.
Something pinged in her chest that felt absurdly like jealousy. Just because he’d kissed her? What did that mean? Probably part of his cover, a seduction designed to make her trust him.
“This isn’t a good time,” he said softly. “Is there a problem?”
The voice on the receiving end was far too blurred for Skylar to make out anything except a woman’s rapid Russian. But the caller sounded upset—and very much an adult. In the corner of her eye, Nikolai’s gloved hand knotted on the stick shift as this flood of words washed over him.
“Ira, I know this is troubling,” he said soothingly, not a tone Skylar was accustomed to hearing from him. His tenderness made her tummy flutter. “Try not to get so upset. I’ve told you I’m going to take care of this—”
Another flood of Russian from the woman, too muffled to distinguish. Skylar snuck a glance at him to find his brow furrowed with what looked like pain. The expression was so foreign on Nikolai Markov’s cool, impenetrable face that her chest tightened.
He started to respond, but the woman wouldn’t come up for air, her voice now broken, halting.
Nikolai drove with eyes nailed to the uncertain road, his aristocratic features grimly set. At one point, he grimaced and shook his head. In a lesser man, a different man, she would have mistaken the hard glitter in his dark eyes for tears.
What the hell is this? A lover’s quarrel? A messy breakup?
Skylar sank back in her seat and pretended to be invisible. This was too personal, downright awkward, and she didn’t think it had anything to do with her. Why didn’t he just pull over and take the moment of privacy he needed to calm down his girlfriend, or whoever she was?
Even if he was unwilling to let Skylar out of his sight, they were in the middle of the Siberian tundra. It was forty below zero, not a light nor a vehicle in sight, and the Niva was barely rolling through two feet of snow.
Where did he think she was going to go?
“Ira.” He cleared his throat, the sound harsh, abrupt.
“Stop.”
The woman’s desperate monologue trailed into silence. He ground out each word, slow and deliberate, the syllables falling like bricks into the hushed darkness.
“I told you. I’ll get. The money.”
Caught by the raw anguish that tore his voice, Skylar turned in her seat to stare. His profile was chiseled stone, a muscle twitching in his temple, mouth set in a line that was utterly ruthless. In that moment, she knew what his targets must see when he squeezed the trigger. A tendril of ice slid down her nape.
So cold.
Why had she kissed him? Why, despite everything, did she want him? Clearly he was nothing human.
“We have five days until the deadline,” he said, low and intent. “I’ll wire the money directly into the offshore account. Until then, continue as we’ve planned.”
His dark gaze slid toward Skylar. She didn’t look away. Pointless to pretend she hadn’t heard everything, on his end at least. Blackness had swallowed the tawny heat that burned in his eyes when he kissed her.
The blackness of despair.
Instinctively, without forethought, she laid her hand on his knee and squeezed lightly, moved by the same sympathy and compassion she would extend to any human being in misery. The lean sinewed strength of his body, so well camouflaged by his impeccable business attire, made her palm tingle.
He went so still he seemed not to breathe.
She snatched her hand away and stared blindly out the window, face burning with sudden heat.
“Ira?” he said huskily. “Get Kolya ready for school and tell him I’ll call tomorrow. Goodbye.”
He flipped the phone shut, dousing the pale glow of the illuminated screen and plunging the car into blackness. The silence of the snow-filled night enveloped the vehicle, and the faint amber glow of the dashboard dials. The heater blew against her legs, a welcome blast of heat against the breathtaking cold.
She had to say something, if only to eradicate the feel of his thigh beneath her hand. That moment of intimate contact still vibrated in the air between them.
“Sounds like a sticky situation,” she murmured. “I don’t know the details, of course, but maybe you ought to go home and deal with it.”
Silence pulsed between them, almost quiet enough to hear the muted thunder of a heartbeat.
“I am dealing with it,” he said softly. “You’re the way I’m dealing with it.”
It took a moment for the realization to hit. Then it went off like a hand grenade in her head. He needed money for something, or his girlfriend did—quite a lot of it, if disposable income and other assets couldn’t cover it. He’d taken this lucrative job in Khimgorod to pay the piper.
It had to be a hit they were paying him for. No common bodyguard on a diplomat’s two-day visit was going to make that kind of cash.
“I see,” she whispered.
He didn’t know she knew. He didn’t know about Victor Kostenko and the things he’d told her. That gave her an advantage, albeit a flimsy one. Victor had told her to pretend she trusted him. She couldn’t betray how desperate she was to get away from him.
“Anything I can help with?” she heard herself ask.
Always the crusader. You can’t save them all, Skylar.
“You are helping. The MFA is paying a handsome sum to keep you alive.”
He said it so smoothly, so convincingly, that she almost believed him.
She let the moment pass. They drove through the night, side by side, filling the space between them with lies.
“She’s a childhood friend,” he said abruptly, downshifting to ease the Niva through a snowdrift. “Whom I haven’t seen in years, since the hammer-and-sickle flew over the Kremlin. But her identity isn’t the important thing.”
Childhood friend, huh? Must be quite a close friendship, since you’d kill for her.
“Then what is important?” she asked.
Frowning through the ice-rimed windshield, he shifted through the gears. Silence filled the car. Clearly he wasn’t going to answer her.
“What’s important,” he said slowly, “is that she’s been diagnosed with a severe neurological disease called acute transverse myelitis.”
Skylar couldn’t swallow a gasp of dismay. He shot her an assessing glance.
“You’re familiar with the condition?”
“I took some neurology classes at Michigan,” she admitted, “though I majored in organic chemistry. Neurology is a relevant discipline when you’re trying to figure out how nerve agents work in the body and how to counter them. So, yes, I know a little about myelitis. It can be a devastating disease, but some patients do recover. What’s your friend’s prognosis?”
“Not very encouraging, I’m afraid.”
He spoke with rigid control. Once she might have thought him unaffected, devoid of emotion. But she was growing to know him, learning to read his signals. The tension in his slender frame, the muscle flexing in his temple, betrayed the reaction he was controlling so carefully.
“Irina’s illness was a rare complication from cat scratch fever she picked up on a trip to Central Asia. It resulted in severe spinal lesion, almost complete paralysis and sensory loss below the lesion, left untreated for far too long. Her prognosis is consequently poor.”
She stared at him, appalled.
“Nikolai, I’m so sorry. I had no idea that… Who’s treating her?”
His hands tightened on the wheel.
“Her status as a citizen in her country of residence is…irregular. Therefore, she was afraid to visit the doctor. I was abroad and out of contact for some time. When I finally discovered her situation, I consulted various experts and unearthed an experimental treatment, unlicensed and illegal while the necessary research continues. But I found a neurosurgeon, a brilliant clinician utterly committed to the procedure, who’s willing to perform the surgery—for a price.”
“Are you saying he wants a bribe? For an illegal, experimental treatment? Nikolai, that’s completely unethical, not to mention dangerous.”
“What choice does she have if she ever wants to walk again?” He grimaced. “The expert in question is a disbarred physician who’s made a name for himself performing risky, experimental but frequently successful neurological procedures. He has recourse to a surgical team who naturally expect compensation for the substantial risk of working with him, as well as after-hours access to one of the leading medical facilities in the country.”
“Which country? And which facility? There are several places known for this kind of thing I wouldn’t recommend—”
“You’d recommend this one, I suspect,” he said dryly. Which didn’t answer her question, but it made her damn curious. “We’ve planned this procedure with the precision of a military campaign. Which security personnel to compromise or bribe. How to disable the cameras and alter the records. Where to acquire the necessary materials and pharmaceuticals. How much to pay the facility’s administrator to turn a blind eye.
“All of which must be in place within five days, after which time the neurosurgeon has no availability for months. By then, in his professional opinion, the damage to Irina’s ravaged neurological system may be inoperable and irreversible.”
“You should get a second opinion, Nikolai. I can do some research, recommend some good people—”
Desperate to persuade him, she leaned toward him. His head turned toward her, eyes bleak and empty, a vast field of darkness.
“Thank you for that,” he said quietly. “But it’s too late. She’s suffering, her condition growing worse every day. I won’t take the risk of inaction.”
“Surely you should offer her that choice—”
“She’s never had a choice in anything!” For a heartbeat, his control slipped. “Don’t you see? She’s been a fugitive for years because of her connection to me. It’s my fault she was hiding in Central Asia, my fault she has three passports and is afraid of the authorities, my fault she couldn’t reach me when the crisis might still have been averted.”<
br />
Lifelong fugitive because of a childhood friendship? Skylar didn’t think so. Which meant he was lying to her again. But his guilt seemed so real.
“Nikolai…”
“It’s my fault she’s alone in a strange country now with no one to tend her except the indifferent professionals I hire and a nine-year-old boy, called home from his Swiss boarding school to comfort his frightened mother.”
His torment lashed out at her. An overwhelming need to comfort him welled up—her eternal crusader’s instinct to help, to solve the problem, to save a human life.
Fired by compassion, she laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. The expensive wool was soft as sin beneath her fingers, still damp with snow, barely sheathing his tensile heat.
“Don’t do this to yourself,” she whispered. “Believe me, I know what you’re feeling. I understand remorse and self-loathing. They’ll tear you apart if you let them. But they’re not productive emotions. The only thing to do is to channel your guilt, your despair, your grief. To learn from your mistakes and look forward instead of back.”
“How did that work out for you, Skylar? How did it work out for your father and your lover Kirill?”
Stung, she let her hand fall. She’d pressed him too far, invaded his personal space both physically and emotionally, presumed too much on the enforced intimacy of their situation. This was not a man accustomed to accepting comfort.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, hugging herself against the cold that seeped through the vehicle. “I don’t usually offer unwelcome personal advice to people I barely know.”
Now that felt like a lie. Because over the past twenty-four hours spent almost constantly in his company, relying on him to keep her safe because she had nowhere else to turn, she had come to know him, even some of his secrets.
Except for his intentions, of course. They remained a rather important gap in her knowledge, she reminded herself dryly, chafing her arms for warmth.
He glanced toward her and dialed up the heat, though the Niva was already laboring to perform. The heater’s soft rush filled the tense silence and diffused the worst tension. Warmth crept slowly up her legs.
The Russian Temptation (Book Two) (Foreign Affairs 2) Page 14
