Leah explained how she’d seen Sokolov on a Wanted poster at the FBI offices and there was an immediate ripple of murmuring.
“How the bloody hell did the States know he was still alive and the rest of us didn’t?” Svein demanded.
Anders frowned. “They must have had reason to distrust that the Russians carried out the assassination.”
“The fact that they’re the goddamn Russians is reason enough,” Erik said through the computer. There was a general noise of agreement. “As for why they didn’t share that intelligence with the rest of their allies, your guess is as good as mine.”
Dag leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Who gives a damn about what the States know? The real issue here is Sokolov’s motive. He’s had facial surgery and most of the world believes him dead, so why reveal himself by gunning for Ian now? He could have lived out the rest of his life on a tropical island without anyone being the wiser.”
“Revenge is a powerful motivator,” Erik pointed out.
“Besides, he certainly didn’t intend for Ian to survive the attack,” Anders added. “He knew Ian thought he was dead and would never see it coming.”
Chani had remained quiet so far, but her intelligent blue eyes had been thoughtful as the others talked. When she spoke, her voice was soft and melodious, and yet everyone quieted instantly. “I’ll buy that. But more is going on here than simple revenge, and I think we can all agree on that. Sokolov chose to live in the States these past years—the one country on earth that still suspected he lived—for a purpose. If we can figure out why he risked doing so, I believe we’ll have answers to questions we don’t even know to ask yet.”
Mia’s fingers had been flying across the keyboard as the team went back and forth, and she interrupted then. “I just contacted my man inside NCTC.” She turned to Leah and explained, “The National Counterterrorism Center. They collect terrorism-related information from the different U.S. governmental divisions and then disseminate it to make sure everyone has access to the same crucial pieces of intelligence. They collaborate with international agencies as well.” Her expression turned grim. “They have no knowledge of Alexei Sokolov being wanted by any U.S. agency.”
Seven sets of eyes bore into Leah and her cheeks flushed. She knew they thought she was lying. “I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe it’s an old poster. Maybe when Agent Ashill talked about Sokolov in the present tense he wasn’t aware he’d supposedly been killed.”
“Except Sokolov is alive,” Ian said, “so I’m not buying the coincidence. The FBI has enough people to hunt without hanging on to defunct posters.”
Leah crossed her arms. She couldn’t explain it and wasn’t even going to try.
“Why don’t we start from the beginning,” Ian suggested. “You said you met Sokolov at a D.C. children’s benefit gala six months ago, correct?”
She nodded.
“I want you to tell us all about that night. Think back to when you were getting ready and start from there. No detail is too small. We want to know everything, from what Sokolov was wearing to how he approached you and what he said. What was your initial impression of him and how did you feel around him? Mia, will you record this?”
Mia nodded, and a few moments later she stuck a thumb with chipped black nail polish in the air. Leah took a deep breath and began.
Two hours later her throat felt as if she’d swallowed sand. She’d relived her entire relationship with Vincente out loud to a group of strangers. She’d described his apartment in painstaking detail and dragged on about what their dates had been like: where they’d gone and who they’d hung out with, the whole time awkwardly aware of Ian’s emotionless gaze on her while she talked about being with another man. Not even another man—the man he hated most in the world.
She’d done her best to remember any odd details Vincente might have dropped into casual conversation, but it was impossible for her to separate the truth from the lies. How was she supposed to know what might have an actual kernel of truth to it?
She wasn’t the only one with information to share. Mia quickly discovered that Vincente Barry had ceased to exist the moment he boarded the plane for Norway, making it crystal clear to Leah that he’d never intended to go back. His beautiful apartment had been rented under the alias Charles Brenan and actually belonged to a professor on sabbatical in Spain. New Dimensions Consulting, Vincente’s highly respected marketing firm, didn’t have anyone with the name Vincente Barry on their payroll. After Mia hacked into their server, she confirmed that neither did they have anyone who looked like Vincente in their employee ID database, leaving Leah to wonder what the hell Vincente had been doing with his time Monday through Friday. Where had he been all day when he showed up for dinner wearing a six thousand-dollar designer suit and looking like he’d just survived a grueling client meeting?
The further Mia dug, the clearer it became how fabricated Vincente Barry was. His sleek silver sports car had been leased under the alias Richard Dawner and had been returned the day before their flight to Norway. The automatic monthly payments for the car lease had come from a bank account owned by Nathan Walford, a farmer in Idaho who had no clue he was living a double life—at least on paper—in Washington D.C. Nothing about Vincente Barry had been real.
Leah’s head was reeling by the time they finished and all she wanted to do was curl up in bed and sleep dreamlessly for two straight days.
With effort, she pulled herself to her feet. “I’ve told you everything I know,” she said. There were still unanswered questions, like why had Sokolov moved to the U.S.? Why had he gone through the trouble of creating such an elaborate identity? What had he really been after, and why had he needed her to be a part of it? But there were no answers to be found in this conference room. Sokolov was gone from her life and he wasn’t coming back. Hopefully whatever plans he’d been hatching had been thwarted when he failed to kill Ian Haugen. Now he was Northern Wolf Services’ problem. “I promise to contact you if I remember anything else, and I’ll leave my email if you have any more questions. I’m sorry I can’t be more help. I’m sorry for . . . everything.” She was looking at Ian when she said it, but she meant it for Svein, too. She meant it for anyone who’d been hurt by Alexei Sokolov.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Svein said grudgingly. “The fucker fooled half a dozen countries along with me and Ian as well.”
It was nice of him, but she wasn’t sure she was completely guiltless. She’d been too desperate to finally meet a nice guy and she hadn’t wanted to see the warning signs. She had to suck it up and admit she’d been an equal partner in her hoodwinking. When she got back to D.C., she was going to take a good hard look at her life and make some changes. For too long she’d playfully explained her lack of serious relationships by saying D.C. was extra full of losers. But maybe the problem wasn’t D.C. Maybe the problem was that she didn’t yet know who she was and what she wanted out of life. Maybe the problem was her.
Ian held the conference room door open for her. At the threshold she turned back. She didn’t know what to say, so she just nodded to the group of highly skilled contractors within. They weren’t bad people, but she hoped she’d never have to see them again.
Chapter 18
Alexei Sokolov sat at the bar and threw back his third vodka neat. He’d ordered the most expensive brand in stock and it still paled in comparison to good old Russian Stolichnaya—Elit, of course. The vodka here was weak and watered down, a fitting representation of its country of origin.
In the mirror over the bar he caught sight of a blonde with too-small tits checking him out. There were at least three women in the room that he knew would accept an invitation to his room upstairs, but he wasn’t in Oslo for the pussy.
The bar on the first floor of the Grand Carlson was as luxurious as the hotel itself. A bartender in a crisp white shirt and black bow tie kept the walnut bar top gleaming with constant swipes of his rag. The dark red vinyl booths and mahogany tabletops
were several steps above the diner variety, and the lighting was dim and intimate with the smoky voices of jazz singers crooning softly through the speakers. There was an old speakeasy vibe to the place, and everyone who entered was dressed as if they had come straight from the office, including Sokolov.
Of course he hadn’t been at work, but on a plane with a bunch of crying babies and fatasses. He’d touched down in Norway several hours after he’d been informed Haugen hadn’t murdered the bleeding heart bitch as he’d hoped, and instead absconded with her to his home country. Sokolov had jumped on the next available flight and ground his teeth as an obese woman snored beside him, consoling himself with fantasies of all the painful and permanent ways he could shut her up if only he had the time.
When he’d left Leah behind in Scotland it had been a rash decision, and one he’d regretted ever since. He’d been enraged when Haugen turned the tables on him—the big bastard hadn’t lost any of his skill or speed since they’d last tangled—and he’d left Leah out of pure spite. God, the look on her face when he sped past her still warmed his heart. She’d deserved to be left behind. After all, it had been her fault the ambush had failed. He’d asked her to do one thing, one simple thing, and she’d managed to screw it up. All she had to do was distract Haugen, and what had she worn? Rain boots. Not stilettos, not a tight dress, but rain boots. It made his neck burn to think of it, but he’d had to play the nice CIA role and pretend he cared about her feelings and dignity, so he’d flexed his jaw and kept his mouth shut. And look what had happened. If Haugen had been busy with his eyes on her legs, he wouldn’t have had time to react when Sokolov came behind him with the stun gun, and Sokolov wouldn’t be in this god-awful mess right now.
He understood now how massively he’d miscalculated. He’d assumed Haugen would think Leah was Russian and take his rage out on her, but he should have known better. Haugen had always had a soft spot for women. Hell, he’d let Sokolov escape six years ago in a futile attempt to save that stupid informant’s wife. What had made Sokolov think he’d be any different now?
Even worse, he knew how exceptional Haugen’s interrogation skills were. Haugen had tracked down and punished enough of the men who’d worked the Kabul deal with Sokolov—and those hadn’t been names easily given up—that it made him uneasy that Leah was now in his possession.
As Sokolov sat with his elbows on the bar, disdainfully eyeing the nut bowl, he thought bitterly that the giant Viking was probably wringing details out of her she didn’t even know she knew. Christ, he never should have dated her as long as he did. She’d been a convenient cover and he’d become sloppy, let her see too much. But he’d never suspected she’d see the old FBI Wanted poster or recognize him after the surgeries even if she did. What were the goddamned chances of that? And then she’d discovered the phone tap and a decade of work had nearly gone up in smoke.
After he’d reported the breach to his superiors he’d been instructed to eliminate the old ball and chain. As if he needed those assholes to tell him that.
He’d been prepared to take her out in D.C. when he’d had a flash of inspiration. Why not kill two birds with one stone? A year earlier he’d hired a German PI firm to track down Haugen—the man who’d forced him to spend the past six years groveling like a fucking dog trying to prove himself to his superiors. So he’d figured, why not use Leah as bait to help him ambush Haugen? Then when the fucker was dead, he’d snuff her too. It was the perfect opportunity to follow orders while settling an old score. Then everything had gone to shit, as it tended to do when Ian Haugen was involved.
Haugen was never supposed to know Sokolov was alive. Well, he wasn’t supposed to know and survive. Now others knew, and that meant Sokolov’s advantage of being legally dead was over. This fact made him so angry that his fingertips turned white against the glass. His employer had spent a lot of time and money making it possible for him to disappear after the Shazada mission. Sokolov had suffered months of reconstructive surgery to change his appearance and cement his new identity. Now that Haugen knew he was alive and what he looked like, it effectively stripped him of his cloak of invisibility.
Sokolov’s problems were mounting like cow shit in the barn trenches he’d had to chip and shovel out in his frozen youth growing up in Russia. Each new fuck-up led to another, and if he didn’t get the situation under control there would be serious consequences. Or, as his handler so eloquently put it, he might as well eat the barrel of his gun.
The worst part was that while staring out the airplane window and reviewing his relationship with Leah, earplugs wedged in tight to drown out the snoring fatso to his left, it had occurred to him that Leah was in possession of more information than simply his former Russian identity. There had been a small incident between them a few months prior where he’d nearly blown his mission. After the incident he’d watched her closely for days, but she hadn’t acted any differently or appeared to even notice that he’d given her something that could destroy a tenuous relationship between two powerful countries. Convinced she’d never given it a second thought, he’d decided not to tell his handler about it. Now that she was in Haugen’s hands though, he couldn’t trust that the Norwegian wouldn’t ferret it out of her. There was a lot at stake, and if Sokolov didn’t silence the bagel-scooping bitch, everything he’d spent the past decade working for would unravel faster than a cheap whore’s robe.
He sighed as he flicked a finger for a refill. The bartender wrapped a white towel around the vodka bottle and poured a neat shot into Sokolov’s glass. The towel was pretentious, as the bottle was room temperature. Vodka should always be cold, Sokolov thought as he knocked the drink back.
He couldn’t wait for the day he no longer had to take orders from his employer. He’d fly somewhere warm and he’d disappear, maybe get a hut on the beach. No matter where he lived though, he’d always have a freezer stocked with vodka.
Soon, he thought. Soon his ten-year assignment would be over. All he had to do was spread a few brains around, and he’d finally be free.
Chapter 19
Ian handed Leah a mug of proper Norwegian coffee and deposited her in his office while he returned to the front lobby. Mia had information she wanted to share privately with him.
“You were able to trace the person who hacked into my phone’s GPS in Scotland?” he asked, approaching the blond wood desk.
“Yup. Server belongs to PI Solutions out of Berlin. It wasn’t easy,” she added smugly. “They did an excellent job covering their tracks. I’m just better than they are.”
Anders leaned against the front desk, crossed his arms over his chest, and rolled his eyes at her self-praise.
Mia continued. “Turns out PI Solutions is on retainer for a shell corporation named Kabul Allies.”
Rage pulsed through Ian’s body at the middle finger implied in the name. “Let me guess,” he said. “The founder of the shell corporation is Vincente Barry.”
“Actually Richard Dawner, the same name he used to lease his car in the U.S.,” Anders said. “The PI assigned to the Kabul Allies account is a man named Lutz Gunther.” He nodded to Mia and she pulled up a passport photo of a middle-aged man with dull brown hair, thin lips, and stooped shoulders. He was remarkable in the fact that he was entirely unmemorable—an ideal look for a man who made his living doing surveillance. “Mia found footage of him disembarking a plane in Oslo last week. It turns out he’s been on several flight manifests between Berlin and Oslo dating back a year.”
The knowledge that Ian and his people had been watched for over a year made Ian want to snarl. It would have been impossible for them to know they were being observed long range, but it still pissed him off. He looked forward to getting his hands on Lutz Gunther.
Anders looked none too pleased about it himself. “Mia used her computer voodoo to locate where this Gunther shithead is currently holing up.”
Mia sighed loudly. “It’s not voodoo, you’re just old as dirt so it seems like it. All I did was use a com
puter algorithm to identify Gunther’s gait at the airport. Then I hacked into the street camera footage in a three-block radius around Northern Wolf Services and ran a program that compared Gunther’s gait to the strides of people walking on the street. It popped several hits on him, but all of them within the last week. I ran the program back three months to be sure. It’s likely he’s been keeping his distance until recently. Once the program gave me a few hits, I was able to find footage of Gunther returning to his car. From there I used street cameras to track his license plate across town to the Grand Carlson.”
Ian clapped a hand on her shoulder. “Great job, Mia.”
She shrugged like it was no big deal, but he knew by the faint reddening of her cheeks that she was pleased with the compliment.
“Want me and Svein to pick him up?” Anders asked hopefully.
Ian looked at his black tactical watch. He really needed to get Leah some food and onto a plane so he could start his investigation. “No. Let Gunther enjoy his dinner. I’m taking Leah to the airport, and when I get back Svein and I will pay the PI a visit.”
Anders looked disappointed but rallied quickly. “Dag left to wrap up the Lilly case, and he’s agreed to take on our asshole client. Dave went home to feed his chinchillas, and Chani has the Adelen concert tonight.”
Ian nodded and took the photo of Gunther that Mia handed him. He folded it and said, “Where’s Svein?”
Anders crooked a thumb toward the hallway. “He’s waiting for you in Erik’s office.”
“Have you managed to stave off Erik?”
“He’s chomping at the bit. It’s killing him to be home in bed when he wants to be out there tracking down Sokolov with you.”
If their roles were reversed Ian would feel exactly the same way. But he knew, and Erik knew, that in his condition Erik would be more of a hindrance than a help. Besides, Ian had Svein, and Svein would stop at nothing to find Sokolov. Ian understood the sentiment, but he was also aware that Svein had suffered in ways he never had. That had the potential to drive a man blind with obsession, and Ian was intimately familiar with how dangerous that could be. He’d fallen victim to obsession once before and he’d nearly lost his life because of it. He wanted Sokolov, and he would find him, but he’d be sure to keep a cool head while he did it. No mistakes. No regrets.
Finding Lies Page 10
