Moscow Mule (A Thom Hodges Romantic Thriller Book 1)

by Owen Chance

  Thom lifted his head from between his knees and nodded, though he didn’t open his eyes. “It is a great irony,” Alcocer said softly, and Thom asked, “What is?” The shopkeeper laughed sweetly, “That you are a C.I.A. agent having a panic attack and I am an antiques dealer with a pistol in his hand.” Thom couldn’t help but laugh then, too, and the men stood up, dusting off the asses of their pants, though Alcocer didn’t put the gun away, not yet. Thom pulled his cellphone out of his pocket. A message from Ambassador Anderson waited for him: “Adams has had a stroke and we’re at the Hospital Central de la Cruz Roja San José y Santa Adela. Stay safe, Thom. Something doesn’t feel right about this. I will call you when I know more.” Something wasn’t right about the healthy-as-a-buck American vice president’s stroke, indeed, and something wasn’t right where Thom and Alcocer stood now.

  They walked around the counter and Alcocer sighed, “Ay, ay, ay. I had just had it repainted, too.” Thom picked up a large piece of the broken door and held it up to the light pouring in off of the street. It was beautiful glass, thin and flat with no bubbles rising to the surface. Alcocer, a lamp man, did not skimp on his shop, as it would send the wrong message to his customers, many of whom came to him from all over the world to decorate homes all over, from Sydney and Hong Kong, to Miami and Havana. Suddenly, Thom had an idea.

  “Señor Alcocer,” he said, “Can you take me to the man who made this door?”

  3.

  Grant Adams navigated the small Cessna 140, a pearly white single-engine two-seater, due east from Greenville, North Carolina, a small city lying 90 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. Though now the Vice President of the United States, his wealth was largely through marriage. He came from poor white trash generations back on his father’s side; his maternal grandfather had been an infamous drunk and gambler who had swindled away most of his family’s money. But his mother’s mother had inherited a modest, but beautiful beach house on Hatteras Island, and he liked to fly there when he could. Hatteras was a toddy community at the eastern most point of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, known mostly for its wine bars and lighthouse straight from a postcard. Cape Hatteras Light is the tallest brick lighthouse in the United States (and second in the world) with a classic black-and-white pattern snaking around from its base to its tip, not unlike a giant, monochrome barber pole. Sometimes Adams would pick up a small plane in Greenville or further up the coast in Norfolk and fly around the Outer Banks just to see the lighthouse, not even landing at the beach house where his family took respite any time they could.

  As a boy, Adams spent summers at this house with his grandmother. His dad died when he was 7, and his mom worked whatever hours she could at a Peter Pan Peanut Butter plant between Greenville and Raleigh. As soon as school was out in May, Adams’ grandmother, Opal, drove her huge and ancient Chrysler to her daughter’s house and picked up her grandson. When they returned to the beach, they slipped into a routine of early morning walks down the shore, then reading thick novels of all types — trashy romances and greats like Austen or Joyce alike — until lunch of peanut butter sandwiches and sour lemonade cookies, then an afternoon nap and time to explore their lives separately until dinner. Adams’ mother joined them on weekends when she could, which wasn’t often, but as a boy he didn’t mind these months on end with just his grandmother. She died Adams’ first year of college at Chapel Hill, and he almost quit from the sorrow. When he told his mother he wanted to come home, though, she reached across the dinner table between them and grabbed her son’s arm, spitting, “Like hell you will. Your grandmother didn’t work so hard, and I sure as shit didn’t work so hard, for you to quit and come running home because she’s gone. People die, Grant. I won’t let you do this to me, to her memory, or to yourself.” And that was that.

  As he adjusted the plane south, as he wished for one of his grandmother’s lemonade cookies, the radio in Adams’ Cessna crackled to life. “Attention all flights hugging the coast between Virginia Beach and Charleston.” The vice president turned up the volume, “Hurricane Jackson has turned inland and is heading to shore at 120 miles per hour. Please ground your plane A.S.A.P. Over and out.” The Coast Guard was calling all planes home, or rather, to the closest airstrip where they could land. But Adams had flown in far worse than the edge of a hurricane, if it even edged in that far, and he was only four minutes from the lighthouse. He felt the increasing need to see it before he turned around and hightailed it back to Greenville.

  He increased his ground speed and banked a hard southward turn. As he did, the hurricane blossomed before him like he’d never seen a storm do before. As he moved his controls forward in attempt to get under the cloudbank, a jet stream caught him off guard and looped him down, as if his plane was a toy and God was merely an angry child, throwing him towards the sea faster than Adams could recover control.

  But then the vice president shook awake and gasped for air. He wasn’t in a plane, but in a hospital bed, with a tube running up his nose and an I.V. dripping into his right arm. An Army nurse jumped to his feet and stood stiffly. “Welcome back, Mr. Vice President. You’ve had a stroke and you’re in a room at the Hospital Central de la Cruz Roja San José y Santa Adela in Madrid, sir. Let me go get your lead doctor and surgeon.” Adams reached out his arm to stay the young soldier. “No, son. First bring me my wife and Ambassador Paul Anderson.”

  4.

  When Petrov emerged from the Romeo Y Julius salon, he was, indeed, a different man altogether. His short brown hair had been bleached, rinsed, then bleached and rinsed again until it was so blonde it was almost translucent. He allowed the stylist to dress him, too, so Petrov walked out onto the street in a now-vintage concert tee from Madonna’s 1993 Erotica world tour and the skinniest pair of black jeans he’d ever worn, complete with a wallet chain and ripped ridges on each knee. He left the salon and walked nine blocks east to the Hotel Palacio Del Retiro, entering through a back entrance into the hotel kitchen, where he grabbed a bellman’s uniform off a shelf and changed in a locker room where nobody paid him any mind. The small British pistol Petrov tucked into the back of his pants near his ass crack, covering the top of the gun’s grip with the thick band of an apron monogrammed with the hotel’s initials.

  From the kitchen he took a service elevator to the top floor. The hallway was empty. No guests were on this floor but the Russian Foreign Minister and his security detail, all of whom were out for the Foreign Minister’s busy day of meeting’s. One of Plankov’s staffers rushed out of a hotel room and past Petrov, but she didn’t pay the man in a hotel uniform any mind. When he reached Plankov’s room, Petrov used the master key he’d lifted from the kitchen to let himself in. He expected it to be empty, but lying on the sofa cleaning his own gun in just a pair of tiny briefs was Trey, Plankov’s latest boy toy, but really, the C.I.A. analyst the agency’s director had sent here herself.

  5.

  Abi rushed into her husband’s room, leaning over and into his arms outstretched from the hospital bed where he lay. “If you ever scare me like that again,” she said, and then began to sob. “Come on now, Abi, don’t get my gown all wet,” Grant Adams laughed, but the truth was he found himself crying, too. Ambassador Anderson stood awkwardly in the doorway and after a minute or two, coughed nervously. Adams looked up, “Paul, it’s good to see you.” Anderson walked over and shook the vice president’s hand, “It’s good to see you, too, Grant.” Abi stood up straight and pulled a piece of her long red hair out of her face, “Honey, shouldn’t I get one of the doctors in here to explain to us what happened and what happens next?”

  Adams shook his head, “In a few minutes, Abi, but first, I need to tell you both something.” To his wife and his colleague, Vice President Grant Adams came clean about everything in a flurry of a timeline. How the nanny he’d had an affair with was a Russian agent. How the Kremlin was trying to blackmail him. How the plan to usurp NATO was nefarious, and how he found himself an unwilling pawn in Russia’s bid for domination, a bid t
hat loomed ever-more possible now that President Myers was on her way to Madrid to announce the new dawn of American-Russian relations.

  It wasn’t easy for Adams to say, and it wasn’t easy for Abi or Anderson to hear. But then again, it at least cleared Adams in Anderson’s mind. The vice president wasn’t a traitor. He was just compromised. Anderson nodded, and Abi held her hand over her open mouth. Finally, Adams spoke, perhaps just to break the pointed silence chilling the room. “So, what do we do now?” he asked.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  1.

  As Trey leapt to his feet in the finest suite at the Hotel Palacio Del Retiro, he almost dropped his gun, but managed to point the pistol right at Petrov, who managed to grab his own pistol from the back of his pants and point it back at Trey, who stood before him, a single testicle hanging out from leg of his briefs.

  Keeping his left hand holding the pistol, Trey reached down and adjusted his package, pulling the leg of his briefs down to re-encompass the ball that had escaped. “Who-who-who are you?” he stuttered, but before Petrov could answer, Trey cocked his head and squinted, “Wait. I’ve seen you before.” The recognition was blossoming slowly on his face like a cactus flower turns to the sun. “You’re Petrov Lubyanka. Except, except,” despite the two guns pointed at the two men, Trey broke out in a fit of hysterical laughter, “you look ridiculous, honey. Let’s put our guns down.” Trey sat his pistol on the coffee table before the sofa, and Petrov lowered his to his side.

  “You know who I am?” Petrov asked, and Trey nodded, “Let me get dressed. We need to talk.”

  2.

  If you would have asked Vice President Grant Adams just six months ago to list the people whom he trusted most, Ambassador Anderson would not have cracked the top 100. But that was before the Russians’ plan for global chaos became clear; before the assassination of a Russian ambassador, G.R.U. agent, and the First Gentleman of the United States; before his own attempted assassination at the hands of the Kremlin, what he suspected as he came to in his hospital room, in their desire to keep him under their control. Nobody was more shocked that Grant Adams had just come completely clean to not only his wife, but also the American ambassador to Russia, than Grant Adams himself.

  Abi was in shock, and though she said nothing, she sat in the chair beside her husband’s bed and took his hand into her own. Anderson remained standing and after a silence that felt not icy, but charged with the electricity of a thunderstorm, cleared his throat. “Well Grant,” Anderson said, managing to crack a smile, “This explains a lot, and I appreciate you telling me. To be quite honest with you, we’re in deep shit.” Both men laughed at the uncharacteristic turn of phrasing leaving the WASP-y ambassador’s mouth. Anderson continued, “But if we can work together, there might be a way out.”

  With his free hand, Adams reached for the cup of water on a tray beside his bed, “I don’t see how, Paul,” he said, “But we have to try.” Abi squeezed his hand a little harder just then, and the doctors entered the room, confirming the vice president hadn’t suffered from a natural stroke, but one brought about by a chemical they suspected was planted in his water at breakfast on the hotel’s rooftop.

  3.

  Señor Alcocer’s mint condition 1967 Renault 4 was parked in a slim space behind the shop. The hatchback was glossy black with high-polished chrome wheels and even given the circumstances, it was clear Alcocer couldn’t help but take pride in his pristine vintage car. “Be careful opening the door,” he bid Thom, “There’s not much room between the car and that brick wall.”

  They climbed into the car and as Alcocer started the engine to a purr, Thom turned to him, “We need to make a stop first,” he said, and Alcocer nodded. Thom showed him the screen of his phone, opened to the map with a pin dropped beside the address 11 Paseo de la Virgen del Puerto. Alcocer knew the block, a busy street of shops on the south side of the Campo del Moro gardens, and drove them there in silence, for which Thom was thankful. He needed the time to think. Alcocer parked in front of Hiper Antena and Thom ran inside the small electronics store. He knew exactly what he wanted and hoped the store had it in stock. He showed the clerk, a bored looking college student with a Radiohead t-shirt, two pictures on his phone, and the boy quickly returned with two small boxes. Thom handed him a credit card, signed the tablet screen the clerk turned towards him, and ran out the door saying, “Gracias! No necesito un recibo.”

  Alcocer drove them south out of the city on Autovía A-42, a six-lane highway that looked just like any six-lane highway in almost any large city, be it Atlanta or Sydney, Cape Town or Madrid. They exited in Getafe, a once-industrial center turned middle class suburb of refurbished lofts, automobile dealerships, and Starbucks coffeeshops. After a series of turns, Alcocer drove the Renault underneath a building that looked grittier than the others, parking next to a freight elevator, which he and Thom took to the building’s fourth floor. After they turned right, then left in a dimly lit but clean hallway, Alcocer knocked on a door, and a voice yelled, “Come in, come in!”

  They entered what Thom took to be the workshop of a mad genius, a craftsman so devoted to his art he had no time for tidying up. Kilns, large metal rods, buckets of hammers of every size, torches, metal files, and stack after stack of thin, perfect glass lined every surface, every square inch of floor and every shelf from top to bottom. Alcocer greeted his friend, who pulled a pair of thick leather gloves off of his hands and extended his arm to shake Thom’s hand, “I’m Paco, pleased to meet you.” Paco was tall and skinny, a man of about 45 with a thick Basque accent. “I’m Thom,” the American said, shaking Paco’s hand, “Thank you so much for letting us stop by. I’m sorry we’re in such a rush.” Paco waved him off, “No, no. Any friend of our lamp dealer here is a friend of mine. Now, how can I help you?”

  Thom handed Paco the two tiny boxes he’d bought at the electronics store, and the trio walked over to one of the great work benches before a wall of old, thick factory windows. Paco opened the boxes to reveal a tiny microphone and an even tinier audio transmitter. Thom smiled, “If you’re up for the challenge, I’d like to see if you can get these set in a glass toothpick?”

  Paco laughed, “I love a challenge. Be back at 3 o’clock. Bring a bottle of wine.”

  4.

  As Grant and Abi Adams and Ambassador Anderson brainstormed, or failed to brainstorm, a plan; as Foreign Minister Plankov left a meeting to greet President Vasily as the Russian leader arrived at the Hotel Palacio Del Retiro; as Trey and Petrov made their way to a dive bar in order to talk privately; and as Thom and Alcocer scoured an antique linens shop in Getafe waiting for 3 o’clock to roll around, the President of the United States of America, Meredith Myers, landed on Air Force One at the Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport, just to the northeast of Madrid’s city center.

  Security was tight, but a large crowd was gathered to greet President Myers, waving tiny American and Spanish flags in the hot midday sun directly over their heads. As she disembarked the jet, she couldn’t help but sigh. Her husband loved Spain, especially in the springtime. Myers didn’t have time to wax nostalgic just then, though. If she were to honor her husband’s memory, the best thing she could do was guarantee peace through working alongside the Russians, an unlikely bond, sure, but an important partnership nonetheless, and one that could change the world forever.

  5.

  Foreign Minister Plankov fetched Sullivan Andrews from the hospital. “Get in, Sully,” Plankov said, using the nickname he knew Sullivan hated. “Ride back to my hotel with me. We need to talk.” Sullivan slid into the backseat of the black Mercedes and closed the door. He had dreaded this moment, and that dread caught now in his throat.

  “Mr. Foreign Minister,” Sullivan choked out, “I don’t know what you think I can do, but the vice president seems hell bent on stopping…” Plankov held his oily finger to Sullivan’s lips, “Shhhh, my boy, shhhhh. You can do much more than you think you can.” He paused, looked out the window as they passed
through a busy plaza, alive with business people and tourists alike grabbing lunch at the beautiful cafés lining each side of the square. A group of pigeons took off from the fountain, and Plankov turned back to Sullivan. “Plus, what do you think will happen when the vice president finds out you’ve been sleeping with his wife?”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  1.

  The black Mercedes with Russian diplomatic plates pulled up to the entrance of the Hotel Palacio Del Retiro. Foreign Minister Plankov rolled down the glass between the front and back seats a tiny bit, saying calmly to the driver, “We’ll be just a minute.” He rolled the glass back up and looked to Sullivan Andrews, the American vice president’s chief of staff. He didn’t have to say anything, because Sullivan knew Plankov was waiting for a confirmation. A commitment he would help the Russians strong arm the American executive branch, a branch that would crumble if the Russians revealed not only what they had on Vice President Adams himself, but also his chief of staff’s affair with Abi Adams.

  Sullivan was between a rock and a hard place, an igloo formed by steely Russian ice. And now he was being made to make a loyalty pledge, something worth more than any bank account filled with Rubles to the Russian heads of state. He sighed. Plankov laughed lightly, picking at a hangnail, “If you refuse, Sully, I will make sure people die. Your dear Abi Adams, for instance. And you know your boss’s political career will be dead, too.” Sullivan nodded, “Yes, sir,” but this wasn’t enough for Plankov. “Yes, what, Sully?”