Spying on the Billionaire
Ginny Sterling
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Epilogue
Afterword
About the Author
Winning the Billionaire
Tempting the Billionaire
Also by Ginny Sterling
Introduction
Galina Dombrosky always strived to make herself feel like an average American. Her family had immigrated from Russia, becoming citizens and learning the language in order to fit in to their new lives. Growing up, their home sounded like something exotic from across the globe, but in her heart – she was as patriotic as apple pie.
Galina becomes a CIA agent specializing in security in order to defend the land that she loves. But when an unexpected assignment drops her in St. Petersburg, Russia- she is overwhelmed by the variety of thoughts and feelings flowing through her. Her Russian heritage is welcomed and recognized, beauty surrounds her-creating a longing for a land she doesn’t recognize or know – as well as an overwhelming attraction to the man she has been sent to spy upon.
Nikodim ‘Nik’ Petrov is the most normal billionaire that she’s ever met (not that she has met many!) and so down to earth. He is caring, friendly, and devastatingly handsome – which makes her wonder if the CIA has the correct man after all? Galina had been tasked to track down a hacker accused of infiltrating their computer systems, using any means necessary to discover what he’d stolen from the government.
When secrets are shared, danger is in the air, and lives are suddenly torn apart – can their love overcome the distance between them? Can she return to America once her heart is lost– and will Mother Russia ever let Nik go?
1
Langley, Virginia
Galina sat silent in the small office alone. It was empty except for the bare minimum office furniture: two chairs, a table, a notepad and pen. She knew they were watching her through the one-way glass. It was classic and textbook: good cop, bad cop – only they weren’t officers. She was a C.I.A. operative and had worked for the Central Intelligence Agency since graduating college. Her parents were so proud of her and she’d fought hard over the years to get where she was now.
Her family had immigrated to the United States before she was born. She’d grown up here in Rockville, Maryland and only heard stories of the Motherland from her parents. She was one of the only kids in her school growing up that spoke fluent Russian with ease simply because that was what they spoke at home. Dedicated to her work and her family, she lived at home a life of luxury with her mother, father and brother in a small townhouse. While most people would say it wasn’t anything to write home about, to her parents it was breathtakingly wonderful.
Her father had found a job here in the states right away as a manager at a store in the mall. His broken English made it difficult, but they never gave up. He learned several phrases, bits of slang and verbiage from others on television and radio. In public, they always spoke English but at home…at home it was their tongue.
Galina’s tongue was what had gotten her into this mess.
Losing her temper at a coworker who’d damaged evidence by spilling his coffee onto files she’d been pouring over for weeks – his simple statement of ‘Whoops, my bad’ made her see red. She’d lashed out several obscenities in Russian before calming down and muttering to herself about the lack of brain cells in her coworker’s balding head…only to hear a choked laugh from behind her, making her turn around and stare at the tall man in a suit watching the whole scene.
“Her,” he said silently and walked off, resulting in Galina being escorted out of the giant room with their cubicles down a long hallway. She was routed along, ignored at every turn when she asked questions as to where they were going, only to be seated in an interrogation room by herself. She’d been in the room for about twenty minutes now and was getting antsy. Her training wouldn’t allow her to show it and she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of knowing they’d gotten to her mentally. After all, losing someone’s temper at work wasn’t a federal offense, but it could get her fired – that was the part that made her anxious.
Parker, her cue-ball-cohort she couldn’t stand, irritated the fire out of her. She’d say the paper was white, he would argue it was ivory. She’d say that she had a text message and he would complain about how often they were reached out to or contacted. If someone said jump, Parker would complain about his ankles instead of asking why. It grated on her last nerve but she’d wanted this position, this job, for as long as she could remember. It was heady to be giving back to the country that had given her family a home and a fresh start when they had nothing-or so she felt.
The door slowly opened and in walked the thin man, watching her and carrying two bottles of water. He set one down in front of her and leaned against the grey, brick wall studying her. They said nothing for several minutes before he finally spoke.
“Ya predpolagayu, chto vy byli v Amerike, no vy govorite sovershennym russkim. Tak skazhi mne, otkuda ty?” he asked calmly with a flat expressionless look on his face, watching her carefully for any reaction. It had taken everything in Galina not to act or show any surprise. His dialect was perfect and she could have been speaking with her brother, Ivan or her parents about the weather outside in his casual tone.
She had never confessed to being bilingual on her application, only that she was familiar with the language, much like she was familiar with French. She’d taken four years of French in high school but couldn’t construct a sentence any longer without issues. Russian she was fluent but she didn’t want to hamper or hinder her work. People always looked at her funny when growing up, asking her rudely if they were ‘commies’ or spies for the Russian government. It was simply ironic now that she was working to become an operative for the United States.
“Rockville,” she said flatly, reaching forward and opening her bottle of water. She slowly and deliberately removed the lid, staring him down, and took a large sip of water. “I’m from Rockville. Where are you from?”
Galina wanted to back away from him as he moved forward slowly, pulling the chair out from the table and taking a seat opposite of her. He grabbed the pen and wrote a string of letters on the tablet, pushing it towards her silently. She stared at the tablet and felt her world tilt.
If you can read and write in Russian – I have got a proposition for you.
“What is it?” she breathed softly, getting curious. He shook his head with a frown and tapped the paper insistently. He was judging her, watching her.
“Write it.” he ordered. She looked at him and finally her curiosity won out. This man spoke fluently without hesitation, making her wonder about the proposition he claimed to have. Galina obediently wrote down in cursive what is this proposition and what do you want from me? Who are you?
“I’m your new boss, Galina Dombrosky. My name is Adrian Dima,” he said with a confident smile that gave her goosebumps of excitement or fear – she didn’t know yet. “We need you to go undercover. Once you accept this new position, we’ll discuss details of your upcoming trip and what will be expected of you.”
“I’ve never been undercover,” she stammered in surprise, looking at him. He sat back in his chair watching her carefully, crossing his arms on his chest. Galina’s heart pounded
nervously as she tried desperately to keep from asking a ton of questions.
“I didn’t ask if you had been a spy before for us, I implied you would accept the position I am offering you – but perhaps I have judged you incorrectly? Even now, you sit here trying to hide your excitement but your breaths give it away. You need to slow and even out your breathing because it makes you look like you are hiding something. These things I will teach you over the next few weeks, but I cannot wait forever. If it’s not you, then I must find another person fluent in Russian and strong enough to do the job.”
“And we both know that is me,” she said confidently, slowing her breathing as he’d pointed out. Her hands were shaking, but she kept them tightly clenched in her lap to prevent them from being seen. She was beyond anything she’d ever felt before: scared, anxious, happy, and ready for anything.
“I accept.”
“Good,” Mr. Dima said softly, staring hard at her. “We begin today with correcting your clearance level and a little background on your client, a programmer by the name of Nikodim Petrov. Now, follow me,” he instructed her, getting to his feet smoothly.
Galina followed him obediently and was almost in awe in the flurry of activity around her for the next few hours. Her records were pulled and it was eerie to see photos of her parents and her brother casually paper-clipped to the front of a manila folder. As they sat in a large enclosed office, she watched as he opened the folder to reveal several other photos. There were pictures of her from a few weeks ago walking about town, a photocopy of her passport, as well as photographs of a few dilapidated buildings in a town she didn’t recognize.
“We are sending you to where your parents are from, St. Petersburg. This here,” he said, sliding the tiny photo across the table for her to inspect, “is your grandmother’s house. Think of this as not just doing your country a great service, but a chance to travel your past and research your family tree if you are into that sort of thing.”
“Now, let’s not get all mushy,” she quipped, feeling vaguely discomforted that he seemed to know so much about her. “What am I doing and where am I going…here?” she asked, tapping the photo.
“No, Petrov lives in the heart of St. Petersburg. He is watched constantly by the military and they are trying to draft him into the military for their own means. Like I said before, he is a programmer but completely beyond what any of us would have guessed. He can hack into almost any system, rewrite code or take down a program in record time.”
“How’d he get on your radar?”
“He hacked us – the CIA,” he said plainly, disproval evident on his face.
“I thought our system was infallible.”
“It is,” he agreed. “Petrov is that good. He doesn’t need the military except possibly for protection since there have been attempts on his life. He’s a billionaire in his country but you wouldn’t know it looking at him. He lives a meager life, a simple man about your age, but his extravagance seems to be computers, cars and we are assuming…”
“Women,” she said flatly, picking up on Mr. Dima’s suggestive look immediately, “which is why you selected me. Good thing I’m not exactly ugly and fluent in Russian, eh?”
“Fluent in Russian is exactly what we need, the fact that your looks are passable,” he said coldly, watching her, “can work in your favor or against you. You will need to sell the whole package to get to Petrov. He is extremely quiet and not an outgoing man.”
“Find him, flirt with him and see what he is doing?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“Tell me everything you know then,” she ordered, taking control of the situation. Galina had two weeks to prepare for her trip. Thankfully, they were sending her while it was summer and she wasn’t going to end up in Siberia with some fur-lined parka to keep from freezing to death. She was going to get the opportunity to travel to Russia with carte-blanche.
She’d had funds deposited into her account magically in order to purchase her air fare and hotel. Nothing could be traced back to the CIA. Everything had to look like she was taking the trip of a lifetime and that was the olive branch she was going to use to draw him in. She was going as a tourist and planned on conveniently bumping into her prey.
Nikodim Petrov was gorgeous. Blue eyes, black tousled hair in the small color photograph she’d been shown. In the photo, he’d been wearing a heavy black coat pulled forward around his neck, a scarf and knit cap. It didn’t give a lot, nor could she see any distinguishing marks like tattoos or birthmarks. She was told he was six foot three and approximately two hundred pounds, so he was tall and lean. She would be looking for a rich, smart, supermodel in the busiest part of town near the cathedrals and square.
A needle in a proverbial haystack.
Apparently when Petrov had hacked into the system, he’d been snooping around in the top-secret files regarding NASA’s newest shuttle schematics. Galina hadn’t even known that there was a new shuttle on the horizon being considered. To her, she thought of NASA and the only thing that popped into mind was what everyone else thought of: Discover, Challenger, Apollo and lunar modules. This was apparently very hush-hush to the point that even with her new clearance, she wasn’t allowed to see the photos or be privy to any more than she was being told.
Petrov had gotten into the file, poked around, downloaded a file triggering the warning and then tweaked a calculation. The adjustment had ‘made things better’, she was told and surmised that the CIA wanted him or to see what he was doing for that reason alone. They were probably scared that the Russians would develop the next big thing for space travel and another space race would be on between the US and Russia.
Understanding this gave Galina a bit more insight into what she might be searching for or looking for when she finally met Petrov. While things were good between the US and Russia, she could see how the superpowers would want to keep an eye on each other, watching each other. A space race between the two giants could cause growth by leaps and bounds – advancing both countries, which would be a plus in her books- but it could also reveal a potential weakness, which neither wanted, nor would they tolerate.
Politics, government, super powers of the world and such all created strife or drama in her mind, which is why she generally stayed far away from the subjects. She was here to do a job, that was it. A job that she couldn’t even reveal to her family, other than she was taking a vacation to a country that she’d never even considered going to before.
2
October 2017
Six months ago…
Peering out of the window of his corner apartment, Nikodim Petrov watched the cobblestone street below. He felt like a cornered rat and knew they were probably out there watching him again. ‘They’ he assumed was the mafia or possibly a high-tech thief – he wasn’t sure.
He’d come home from the market yesterday to see someone dart into another building down the street from him. He knew it was them watching him again. Ever since he’d built those software apps, he’d thought for sure he would be living life to the extreme. Money had begun to flow in, making things comfortable for him financially so he could take care of himself and his mother. That had also led to break-ins in their small home. Nikodim, or Nik as he preferred, seemed to be able to do magic when it came to computers but ended up alienating himself because of it.
Friends who were struggling to put food on the table would casually ask for a mistake in their bank, or to drop charges on black market sales when they got caught – things Nik couldn’t do. His moral ethics wouldn’t allow him to and had gotten him beat up more than once, just like today. He held the icepack up to his eye as he let the blinds drop. Today, he’d been pulled into an alley, punched, and had fought desperately to keep from having a cloth sack put over his head. They’d been trying to get him into a car to kidnap him. He didn’t know who it was but he was pretty sure that they wanted him for his newest program. He called it Soyuz after one of the failed mission trips.
Sigh
ing heavily, he took a seat at the desk chair and remembered back to that fateful day where his world changed. His father had been one of the Mir astronauts and as a boy, he’d been so proud. It was a place of respect and honor to serve your country in that manner. Astronauts were incredibly brave pioneers that pierced the envelope of space, seeing the horizon of infinity- or so he had thought.
As a boy, he remembered the parades and lavish gifts his family received because his father was going up again into space. There in space, there was no room for error, and only quick thinking when there was a problem kept you alive. The program he was designing could step in and help from the ground. It would enable protocols to be in place when fear paralyzed you.
This is what Nik told himself in order to make sense of it all. On Mir, there had been a collision resulting in the puncture of the module. As it began to depressurize, they astronauts flew into a frenzied panic to quickly seal off the module from the rest of the space station. Frantically cutting cables, hoses and blocking the hatch closed so they didn’t die painfully. Instead, they were able to seal it off and his father passed away of a heart attack on the ground not long after returning from space. The stress and trauma of it all had been too much for him – devastating to those left behind… ten-year-old Nik and his mother.
Throwing himself into his school work in order to hide away from the loss of his father, Nik had studied everything he could get his hands on. He would need everything he could to apply what he knew deep in his heart needed to happen… he needed a program that would take the flawed human element out of a problem situation. Math, physics, science, psychology- all came into play together to read and discover what made people tick, what made them react.
Spying on the Billionaire Page 1
