Marissa felt warmth flood her body as Viktor Baran folded his imposing frame into the passenger side. His light blond hair hinted of his European ancestry, and he usually wore it in a buzz cut, but he had allowed it to grow recently. Now, with some locks falling over his chiseled countenance, he had become even more irresistible. Viktor was quite a specimen of a man, and she flushed every time she remembered the muscled hardness that lay beneath the civility of his leather jacket, cargo pants, and military boots.
He leaned in to give her a kiss on the cheek. Now this is new.
“What was that for?” Marissa quirked a brow.
“Sheathe your claws, sweetheart.” Viktor turned on his seat to face her squarely.
“You know, Viktor, you’re becoming more and more unprofessional at our meetings.” She tried to keep her tone neutral. But her blood was pounding through her veins. She wanted nothing more than to straddle him. Get a grip, Cole!
“And you’re getting more and more defensive.”
Marissa shook her head. She knew better than to argue with him, so she launched straight into their agenda to take her mind off her lusty thoughts.
“I’ve gone over the background of the men who abducted Jack McCord.”
“That was fast.”
“I didn’t have to dig very deep.” She paused. “All of them looked Caucasian, but one of them is actually half-Korean.”
Viktor stiffened.
“He’s not very high up in the chain-of-command, but he belongs to the National Korean Unification Front.”
“What the hell does the NKUF want with the AGS database?”
“That’s a good question. I have no answers yet. But someone may.”
“Jiro Matsuda,” Viktor said in resignation. “He’s left that life, Marissa. We got him out and gave him a new identity.”
“I thought I’d throw that out there.” Marissa shrugged. “I know how much you hate going back on your promises and messing up the life of a retired asset.”
“He gave up so much to give us that intel.” Viktor pinched the bridge of his nose.
“And he saved lives.”
“We failed to protect his wife and daughter. I’d hate for him to put his new wife in jeopardy.”
Marissa weighed her next words carefully. Viktor’s eyes narrowed at her. There was no hiding anything from him. At all.
“What aren’t you telling me, Marissa?”
“Viktor—”
“Let me guess,” Viktor bit out. “If I refuse to help you, the CIA will pick up Jiro Matsuda anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“One of our agents was assassinated last week.” Marissa told him the agent’s name, watching Viktor’s face grow passive. She hated it when he did that, putting on a mask to hide his real emotions. “It was made to look like an accident. Gas explosion at his home.”
“He was on that Syrian mission eight years ago,” Viktor said reflectively.
Marissa nodded, unable to speak, because it was that Syrian assignment that broke them up.
“I’m not getting a good feeling about this,” Viktor muttered. “If the Syrians and the North Koreans are in bed together on this, we have a big fucking problem.”
“If they are, they’re very careful because the NSA couldn’t pick up a damn thing,” Marissa said, letting her frustration show. “We’re dependent on our human intel for information.”
“Well, the NSA needs to keep their contractors on a damned leash.” Viktor referred to the recent scandal of the NSA whistle-blower. “Our agencies have embraced the world of advanced technology, but our enemies have decided to throw back to the old cloak and dagger ways.”
“CIA is still pretty cloak and dagger.” Marissa noted with amusement the scowl breaking across Viktor’s cold facade. “We value our HUMINT. They’re still considered one of our most valued assets and the CIA has a good network in place.”
“So, you’re saying I need to play nice with you guys?” Viktor said. The air in the car changed drastically, supercharging with a raw sexual awareness that pinged crazily between them. Marissa stared straight into his eyes; the light blue had turned to ink in the darkness, but she could sense desire in them.
Viktor leaned in, his hand snaking out to grab the back of her neck, drawing her face close to his. “I don’t mind playing nice with you.”
“Viktor, don’t—”
“Don’t what, Marissa?” Viktor said softly against her lips. “I’m tired of playing this cat and mouse game with you. We want each other. We always did. You’re too stubborn to act on it because you’re scared.”
“I don’t want to do this again, Viktor—”
“Too bad. Because I do.”
A click and her seatbelt was released. She found herself being dragged against Viktor’s chest, his lips crushing hers. The hand on her nape moved to the back of her head and gripped her hair as his tongue forced its way into her mouth in a way she felt straight to her core. Viktor’s hand that was gripping her ass shifted to cup the heated neediness between her legs. He groaned and kissed her harder as his fingers rubbed her through the soft fabric of her clothes.
Marissa’s hands found their way to his crotch. Knowing she was the reason for the hard ridge bulging through his pants, excited her, yet when Viktor began to lower the zipper of her pant suit, sanity returned and she tore her lips away.
“We need to stop,” she hissed.
“Fuck, you’re right,” Viktor muttered. “I don’t have a condom with me.”
“How does kissing lead straight to sex?” Marissa said indignantly. “Don’t you think you’re being a tad overconfident?”
Viktor chuckled. “I’ll get my way eventually. I never liked using a condom with you and I’m not about to start.”
“What?”
“Get yourself tested, sweetheart. I’m clean, by the way.”
“What?”
“You like repeating yourself,” Viktor chided, setting her back into place and fastening her seatbelt.
“There’s a briefing tomorrow with McCord and some of the Guardians.” Viktor switched back to all business. “I want you there to fill in the gaps on our intel. I’ll let you know the time.”
As usual, no requests—he dictated—expecting everyone to fall in line like lemmings. He opened the door and exited the car, but he ducked his head back in.
“I mean it, Marissa. Get yourself tested. We’re happening.”
And with that, Viktor Baran shut her door and sauntered back to his Charger.
*****
Viktor eyed the group of people gathered in the AGS war room. Jack, Derek, and Marissa sat at the end of the conference table on the right. Manning, Edmunds, and Nathan were seated on the left. Tim and Holly were seated next to Viktor.
“I guess we’re all here,” Viktor said in opening. “We’ve got reason to believe that recent attacks on our agents are a part of a vendetta determined to bring down AGS.” He looked at Marissa. “Ms. Cole and I have been piecing some intel together from weeks before the attack on Nasir’s convoy. Six weeks ago, CIA agents in Syria broke into a chemical weapons warehouse which was also the last known location of Rafiq Shadid—a freelance assassin.”
Viktor turned his eyes on Jack. “They found a slew of newspaper clippings. Most of them were from news coverage of past AGS ops. All of them have pictures of Guardians mixed in with the crowd of spectators in the aftermath of a mission. None of them were marked, but we don’t believe in coincidences.”
Almost everyone’s face changed to anger, but Jack’s features contorted with rage. He stood up from his chair, hands clenched into fists; he snarled, “You knew. You knew Maia was in danger.”
“Sit down, Jack. We didn’t know for sure.” Viktor passed around a folder and jerked his chin. “Those are the clippings. The photos are grainy. But what we could discern from some of them are pictures of Manning, Edmunds and Maia. None of them were missions you were on, Derek.”
He went on to tell them about
the circumstances behind the deaths of the two agents. “They’re after the CIA, too?” Nathan asked.
Viktor nodded. “Jack, can you tell us anything more about the people who abducted you? You said there were two unaccounted for.”
“Yes. The other two wore masks and were rarely present. One of them has a slight accent, almost British whenever he spoke English, but they’ve communicated in Arabic as well,” Jack answered.
A mumble of speculations went around the room.
“What aren’t you telling us, Viktor?” Derek asked.
“There was an op eight years ago involving the two agents, myself and Marissa,” Viktor said slowly. “A chemical weapon was about to be deployed in a very populated area near Damascus. We had Mustafa Shadid in custody. He knew the location of the chemical weapon, but he was dedicated to his cause. He was willing to die rather than tell us where the VX nerve gas was going to be released.”
Viktor fell silent. He had made many hard decisions in his life, but this remained to be one of the toughest, because only he knew all the facts and Marissa had been kept in the dark.
“So, what did you do, Viktor?” Jack asked, a hint of challenge in his voice.
Viktor looked at Marissa. Her head was bowed because she had vilified him for what he had done that day, and he had never told her the truth. He couldn’t, not then.
“We lined up his wife and son,” Viktor said. “Gave him a choice. We’d take out his family one by one if he continued to stonewall us with the location.”
“And did it come to that?” Edmunds asked.
“I shot his wife in the head,” Viktor stated flatly.
“Jesus Christ, Viktor,” Manning whispered.
Derek cursed and rubbed his forehead. Jack continued to stare at him with no expression whatsoever.
“I turned the gun on his son,” Viktor continued. “He gave up the target and we saved hundreds.”
There was an unspoken question in everyone’s eyes.
“I don’t know if I would’ve taken out his son as well,” he admitted. “But the point to all this is we may have found a link.”
“But Maia was not on that mission,” Nathan said.
“Whoever’s behind this doesn’t want to kill me, Stark,” Viktor said. “What would be the pain in that? Didn’t it ever occur to you how easy it was to take out the six gunmen? The RPG could’ve easily destroyed the limo. No. They wanted me to watch someone I care about, die. There were two shots. I’ve studied the tapes. It was meant to be a head shot, but Maia bent to take off the mask of one of their attackers. And when she straightened up, the other bullet struck her in the gut.”
Jack sprang out of his chair and started pacing and cursing. “Fuck you, Viktor.”
“Yes, fuck me,” Viktor shot back. “You don’t get to make the difficult decisions, McCord, so shut the fuck up.”
“Yes!” Jack roared and stabbed his finger at Viktor. “FUCK YOU! That bullet could have hit Maia in the head. She’d be dead now. So, yes, FUCK YOU!”
Jack turned and slammed out of the war room. Everyone was deathly quiet.
Viktor pinched the bridge of his nose. “Get him back here, Lockwood. We’re not done.”
Derek sighed heavily, pushed back from his chair, and went after Jack.
“Tim, can you tell us about the six gunmen, plus the RPG handler?” Viktor invited.
“They were all French citizens with ties to families in Syria,” Tim said. “We believe their families were the ones who received the payoffs.”
“We’re trying to figure out the source of the payoff,” Marissa spoke up for the first time. “It’s not going to be easy, because, for starters, the families are in Syria. Our closest station is in Lebanon. The payouts were most likely made in cash. We need boots on the ground to follow this lead.”
“And do you?” Edmunds asked. “Have boots on the ground?”
Marissa smiled mysteriously.
The door opened. Derek walked in followed by Jack, who sank into his chair but had his eyes averted, obviously still seething from their blowup earlier.
“Jack, I want you to take a look at the picture of Rafiq Shadid. He’s Mustafa’s son,” Viktor said. “He’s the only one I could see needing revenge for what happened to his parents. Mustafa died a few years ago.”
Viktor did not want to add that the man died while in CIA custody, the circumstances he never wanted to know.
Still not looking at Viktor, Jack opened the folder that was pushed in front of him. At first he looked disinterested, but an expression of recognition dawned on his face before turning into disgust.
“I know those eyes,” Jack said grimly. “Well, congrats, Viktor, you’ve manage to turn a—” McCord paused to look down on the information on Rafiq Shadid and added sarcastically, “—seventeen-year old boy into a twenty-five year old torturing prick. I hope you can live with your shit.”
Jack stood up and glared at Viktor. “I’m done here. I’ve a wife who’s coming out of a coma, no thanks to this bastard.”
After McCord left for the second time, Derek spoke up, “Give him time, Viktor. He’ll come around.”
Viktor nodded. “I’ve been branded worse than a bastard, Lockwood. I don’t give a fuck if he holds me responsible for the rest of my life. He keeps on forgetting what he signed up for when he married Maia.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Viktor,” Manning muttered. “The man just withstood three weeks of torture, all the while thinking his wife was dead. Could you show some humanity here?”
“Agreed.” Viktor clipped. There was no use defending his words or actions. He’d always accepted that he operated on a different level of empathy than most people. Turning his attention to Tim. “I want you to check the encryptions on all our databases. Our NOC database should receive top priority. If it falls into the wrong hands, every agent we have out there, active and retired, could become a target. Let’s not have that happen. We protect it with everything we’ve got. Understood?”
“Roger that, Viktor,” Tim said.
Viktor stood up. “I’ll send out further briefings if we hear anything. Everyone be extra vigilant, especially you two—Manning, Edmunds. Ms. Cole, I’ll see you in my office.”
*****
Marissa lightly knocked on Viktor’s office. She had stopped by Tim’s station to exchange some intel and get her security badge processed. Apparently, she was going to be a regular visitor here until they had the situation under control. But because she was with the CIA clandestine service, her visits needed to be logged in a separate database.
“Come on in, sweetheart.”
Marissa froze. She wished he would stop calling her that. She had not agreed to any relationship with him, sexual or otherwise, and he needed to stop assuming she would do whatever he mandated.
“What do you want to see me about, Viktor?” Marissa asked. “Unless you’re willing to use your connections to Jiro Matsuda, there’s nothing new I can tell you.”
“When will you move in with me?” Viktor asked. He wasn’t looking at her, but rather seemed occupied with the stacks of reports in front of him.
“Excuse me? Did I miss something?” Marissa countered. “I don’t seem to recall agreeing to your proposition. And I certainly wouldn’t move in with you even if I did.”
Viktor’s eyes flickered briefly to her before turning his gaze back to his work. “Two of the agents involved in Operation Smokescreen were taken down not two weeks ago. What makes you think you wouldn’t be a target?”
“I can damn well protect myself.”
“I would feel better if you stayed with me.”
“I don’t believe it’s my responsibility to make you feel better.” The damned man wouldn’t even look at her when he spoke to her, and that was when it dawned on Marissa that he was treating her like one of his submissives. The idea infuriated her as well as turned her on; however, her annoyance won out. “If that’s all, Viktor, I don’t want to waste any more of your time—or mine. I
’ll let you know when I’ve found anything else.”
With that, she turned on her heel and strode to the door. Just then, the glass walls to the office immediately frosted for privacy, and before she could reach the exit, she felt herself yanked against a hard chest. She was spun around and pinned against a wall.
Viktor was staring down at her, and he looked pissed.
“I told you we’re going to happen,” he said almost in a snarl.
“Put a lid on it, Viktor,” Marissa challenged. “I’m not one of your subs.”
“No, you’re not.” His eyes flared heatedly. “Or I would’ve turned you over my knee and paddled your ass by now.”
“How dare—” Marissa started angrily, but Viktor’s lips sealed over hers, effectively shutting her up. She could feel a cool breeze on her lower body. That was when she realized he had shoved up her skirt. He hiked one of her legs over his hip and thrust against her, making her aware of the hard ridge that was only getting harder. He continued to grind against her, fiercely taking her lips in a plundering kiss, his tongue licking the insides of her cheeks, coaxing her to respond. She moaned into his mouth.
He tore his lips away and ordered, “Grab my neck.”
Dazedly, she did as he commanded. He hooked her other leg around him and carried her across the room, laying her down on the couch, and stretching on top of her. Her legs were wrapped around him with his erection centered against her core.
She was throbbing with the need to be taken. If he intended to fuck her in his office, Marissa wasn’t sure if she could deny him.
“Viktor, wait—” Marissa gasped as his tongue trailed down her neck. His fingers slipped between her legs and pushed her panties aside.
“Wait for what, Marissa? You’re wet.” His fingers slid inside her. Oh God. Marissa tightened all her limbs around him. He continued to pump his fingers in and out of the moist walls of her sex. “Move in with me, sweetheart.”
It wasn’t fair. He knew he could manipulate her easily with sex. That much had not changed for she was putty in his hands right now.
Still, she could offer some token resistance mainly on principle. “No.”
Smoke and Shadows Page 3
