by Elle James
“Then why would Sergei put the knife into Hans’s pocket? He would have as much at stake in this game as Anatoly, would he not?”
“One would assume so,” Alex said. “But sometimes in Russia, the only way to get ahead is to trip your peers. Or in this case, kill them. Anatoly is in charge of the negotiations. If he’s unable to complete those negotiations, Sergei would step up and fill his shoes.”
“If that were the case then why did he set up the German who’s on the other end of that negotiations table?”
“Perhaps he has plans to save the day, get Hans out of jail and then make him beholden to Sergei by freeing him to attend such an important summit meeting.” Again, she shrugged. “This is all conjecture. Knowing who plunged the knife might give us a better idea of who’s calling the shots.”
The bell rang, and the door slid open. Striker waved his hand. “Ladies first.”
Alex stepped out of the elevator and waited for Striker. He turned right and led her down the corridor to his room, wondering what he’d find inside and knowing that Charley had access. He waved his key in front of the door lock. Alex started forward.
He put his hand out. “Me, first.”
She frowned but stepped backward.
He pushed the door open and flipped on the light. Everything appeared as it had when he’d left, with the exception of a laptop lying on the desk. After a cursory check in the bathroom, he waved Alex inside. When she hesitated at the door, he gave her half a grin. “Afraid I might pull an Anatoly?”
“The thought did cross my mind.”
“Trust me, I think I’m more afraid of you than you are of me.” He sat at the desk and powered up the laptop. It immediately came up on a screen with the image of the reception hall and the approximate time of the incident. It appeared to be before the actual stabbing occurred.
Alex joined him at the desk and leaned over his shoulder looking at the video. “Like Sergei said, he was speaking to Anatoly moments before the stabbing,” Alex said. And there, a group of people moved across between Sergei and Anatoly as Anatoly left to go to the bar. Half a dozen individuals blocked the cameras view of Anatoly. The video switched to one from a different angle. “How did you do that?” Alex asked.
“I didn’t,” Striker said.
“So, you aren’t just an escort, you’re part of the security team, are you not?”
He shook his head. “I am not. I just have friends.” Which was a lie. All he knew was the voice of a woman who called herself Charley. She could have been the one out there on the reception hall floor plunging her knife into Anatoly’s rib cage. For that matter, she could have sent Alex to distract him and to make Anatoly more careless and unsuspecting when he returned to the reception hall. As the video played, Daniel watched Alex through his peripheral vision. Was she actually watching to make sure that the deed was done, and that the actual person who stabbed Anatoly wasn’t visible by any of the surveillance cameras?
The same incident replayed from the opposite angle. Striker zoomed in on Anatoly. Several men in tuxedos stepped between him and the camera, and they seemed to be laughing down at someone else. Striker couldn’t make out the person, considering they were looking downward. It had to be somebody shorter, possibly a female. He glanced at their legs hoping to catch sight of another pair of legs or the skirt of a dress, but nothing seemed clear, and the two men in the tuxedos weren’t close enough to Anatoly to plunge a knife into the man’s body. In the next second, Anatoly was down. Some of the people who had clumped around him continued across the reception hall floor unaware of the man who had fallen to the ground. “Do you know any of these people around Anatoly?” Striker asked.
Alex pointed at the screen. “The man in the lead is the Italian Minister of Energy. The one beside him is his aide.”
They slowed the video down and replayed it several times, zooming in on the people surrounding Anatoly. They looked at it from all the angles the cameras had to offer and came up with nothing. Any one of those people who were close to Anatoly could have been the one who had stabbed him.
Striker figured he should be doing this video review on his own but there was something about Alex that he trusted, even though she’d held a knife over Anatoly’s body. It was strange because he had no reason to trust her. He didn’t know her. He didn’t know what she wanted, but she seemed just as determined to find out who wanted Anatoly dead. Striker turned to her. “Why do you care?”
“I have my reasons,” she said.
“Is it because you wanted to kill him yourself?” he asked.
She propped a fist on her hip. “If I had wanted to kill him, I would’ve done it as soon as we walked into the rose garden. I only pulled my knife to reinforce the fact I didn’t appreciate his intentions. The French police will be reviewing the video surveillance,” Alex said.
Striker nodded.
“And they’ll come up with the same conclusion we have. We still don’t know who struck Anatoly Petrov. It could’ve been anyone in that group,” Alex said. She drew in a deep breath and let it out on a sigh. “Fortunately, the strike wasn’t sufficient to kill the man.”
Whoever had done it still had two days to complete their mission, which meant that Striker had to be on his toes for the next two days. He wasn’t sure how he would mingle with the diplomats as a paid escort. Alex had the better vantage point as a translator. She would be involved in all the sessions discussing the fate of the pipeline and the other items on the agenda for the energy summit. Unless he offered his services as a bodyguard to the Russians, he might not be able to infiltrate the conference room where the diplomats would be discussing the fate of several nations and their access to natural gas.
“I’d better be going,” Alex said and headed for the door.
“I’ll walk you to your room,” Striker offered.
She shook her head. “That is not necessary.”
He dipped his head in acknowledgement. “I know you can take care of yourself; however, I wouldn’t be much of a gentleman if I didn’t offer to see you to your room.”
She smiled. “I would prefer if you didn’t.”
“Very well,” he said, “then I’ll call it a night.” He walked with her to the door, reached around her to open it and held it as she walked through.
She turned and faced him. “I wasn’t going to kill Anatoly.”
The sincerity in her tone and the expression on her face made Striker want to believe her. But he didn’t know her, and he wasn’t sure if he could trust her. Still, his instincts told him he could. He didn’t like her walking around the hotel by herself at night even though the hotel security was pretty tight. They hadn’t stopped the attacker from stabbing Anatoly. “I’d rather you let me walk you to your room,” Striker said.
“I would rather you didn’t. Goodnight, Daniel,” she said.
Hearing her calling him Daniel was jarring to his senses. That was his cover, and he had no intention of blowing it. “Goodnight, Alex.”
She turned and walked toward the elevator. He stood in the hallway until she entered the car. When the doors closed, he ran down to the elevator bank and watched as the elevator rose two floors to the seventh. He punched the button to go up. He wasn’t sure why, she had specifically said for him not to follow her, but his gut told him to try. A different elevator rose. He waited and watched as the elevator she had gotten onto paused for a long time on the seventh floor before finally coming back down. Meanwhile, the other elevator’s door opened.
Striker stepped onboard and punched the number seven. The door slid closed, and he rose up the two floors. When he stepped out into the corridor it was empty. Short of knocking on each door until he found the right one, he’d missed his opportunity. He stepped back through the opened elevator door and went back down to his floor. When he entered his room, he couldn’t help but feel how empty it was without her presence. He sat at the desk and brought up the images on the laptop and ran through the recording several more times before concluding the videos wer
e useless at positively identifying the person who had stabbed Anatoly Petrov.
“Well done tonight, Striker,” a voice said in his ear.
He jumped, not having expected somebody to be talking to him at that time of night. His heart beat hard in his chest. “Charley, you’ve got to stop popping into my ear.”
She chuckled. “My apologies for startling you.”
“How can you say I did a good job?” Striker said. “I was busy out in the garden with a woman while one of the Russians was attacked.”
“Without being a personal bodyguard,” she said.
“Well, I didn’t protect Anatoly from an attack.”
“Even had you been in that reception hall,” Charley said, “you still might not have protected him from an attack. No worries,” Charley said. “However, we did perform a background check on Alexa Sokolov. We were able to capture her image when you two were viewing the video footage from the Baie de Anges reception hall.”
Charley had his attention. “And?”
“Her parents were CIA agents who were exposed and murdered in Moscow two years ago. Alexa was believed to have perished in the fire that burned their home to the ground. Apparently, she didn’t.”
“Does she have any other siblings?” Striker asked.
“No,” Charley said, “she was an only child.”
“What does she do for a living?” Striker asked.
“She was a translator before her parents’ deaths.”
Striker snorted. “She claims she’s a translator now. That jives with her story, except for one thing. I found her in the garden about to stab Anatoly Petrov. She swears she wasn’t going to kill him. She was just using the knife to send a message to the man to keep his hands off her.”
“She bears watching,” Charley said. “I’ll have my people go deeper into her background.”
“What about Natalya?”
“Your duties for her ended. She only needed an escort for the reception.”
“If I am no longer a paid escort, how do I maintain my cover?”
“The sessions are heavily monitored, and you won’t be allowed into those. However, they don’t go on all day long. The delegates will have to adjourn for lunch and for the evening meal. Lunch and dinner will be provided in one of the banquet halls. You’ll eat when the delegates eat.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Striker said.
“Oh, and, Striker, move about with caution and keep your eyes open. My sources assure me tensions are high and the stakes are higher.”
Chapter 4
Alex took a circuitous route back to her room on the third floor of the hotel, going up first to the seventh floor and back down to the third in case anyone was watching or following her.
Having traveled and worked alone for the past two years she’d learned various tricks for maintaining her anonymity and guarding her own safety.
Using her various passports, she’d bounced back and forth between the United States and Russia. In the U. S. she’d taken the time and invested in lessons in Israeli self-defense techniques, and she contracted several survivalist former special forces groups who trained civilians in combat techniques. She had learned to fire a number of different weapons and had strategically placed a variety of weapons in multiple locations in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Russia.
Her parents had left her a significant amount of money, making it unnecessary for her to get a job after their deaths. They had invested well and had Swiss bank accounts only she could access in the event of their demise.
All the information she’d needed had been on a flash drive, backed up on a compact disc and stored in a safe along with her passports and the money. They’d understood the risks of raising a child where both parents worked with the CIA. Though she’d long been out on her own, working as an interpreter, using their home as her base when she had to travel, her association with them had put her at risk. If their cover was ever blown, she would be in danger.
They’d taken care of their only daughter financially, if not emotionally. Fortunately, they’d insisted she learn a number of different languages. Not only was she fluent in Russian and English, she also spoke German and Italian. They had left her with connections to people who could provide her with passports, as well as computer gurus who were fluent in navigating computer databases and hacking into just about any government or mafia computer system. Although the pain of loss had faded over the two years, she still missed her parents and wished she had spent more time with them and paid more attention to the people with whom they’d worked.
When she arrived at the door to her room, she waved the keycard in front of the lock, pushed the door open and looked inside before stepping in. Her father had taught her to always look before she stepped into any situation. She’d only barely understood the importance of that advice upon their deaths. The house where they’d lived in Moscow had been designed with an escape route built into the kitchen pantry.
The night her parents had died, she’d gotten home from her job well before her mother and father. She’d been in the kitchen making a pot of tea when she’d heard the front door slam open.
Alex had hurried to the living room to see what was wrong.
Her father slammed the door shut and pushed a table in front of it.
“What’s wrong?” she’d asked.
Her father had reached into the desk beside the door and pulled out his pistol, dropped the magazine from the handle, checked it and pushed it back into the weapon.
Her mother turned to her. “Ally,” she’d said urgently, “go to the pantry.” When Alex had hesitated, her mother spoke more urgently.
She hadn’t moved, a rush of apprehension rippling through her body. “If something’s happening, I want to be with you.”
“Go, now,” her mother insisted. “Get to the pantry, there’s a flash drive in the safe. Take it and get out of here.”
“But—”
“We’ve been over this many times when you were a child. You can’t stay. We need you to get that flash drive and get out of here.” Her mother crossed to her, cupped her cheek with her hand and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “We love you. Now, go!”
“Hurry,” her father had said. “They’re coming.”
“Who’s coming?” she’d asked.
Something had crashed against the door. The door frame splintered but held.
“Ally, go!” her mother had said, her tone stern, her eyes filling with tears as she took another gun out of the desk drawer and aimed it at their front door.
In the next moment, the door to their home crashed open. Alex turned and ran to the pantry. The sound of gunfire reached her ears through the thick paneling of the pantry door.
Every instinct in her body had told her to go back out and fight for her parents. But what could she have done? She hadn’t had a gun. Though her father had taken her out into the country and taught her how to fire his 9 mm Glock, she hadn’t been comfortable with it.
The gunfire had sounded more like automatic weapons, machine guns. Though it tore her heart apart she’d pulled hard on the pantry shelf that worked as a hidden doorway. Opening it quickly, she’d stepped inside a dark and narrow stone-lined passageway.
Behind her the gunfire had ceased. The sound of furniture crashing and glass breaking, led Alex to believe that they were looking throughout the house for any others that might be hidden. They must have known to look for her. The safe containing the passports and money had been stored in that passageway. She’d grabbed the flashlight hanging on a hook on the wall and spun the safe’s tumbler. Her fingers had trembled so much that she hadn’t gotten the safe open on the first try. Before she’d worked the numbers again, smoke had filtered through the cracks in the wall of the pantry. Before too long, the smoke had been too thick; she’d had to leave.
She’d been down that passage many times with her father as he’d schooled her on where to go in the case of someone storming their home. When she’d been younger it had b
een a game, like hide and seek. As she’d grown older, it became a way for her to sneak out to meet her friends. It hadn’t mattered how stealthy she’d been, her parents had always known when she’d gone out and had been waiting for her when she returned. They’d never chastised her but hadn’t slept until she was safely back home.
The night they were murdered, she’d run down that passageway that led beneath the street and angled upward through a drainage grate into the garden of a Russian Orthodox church.
From there, she’d crawled up onto a wall and watched as flames filled the night sky from the home she’d known for fifteen years, knowing deep down her parents had not made it out alive.
If they had, they would have followed her along the passageway. The fire had burned through the night until there was nothing left of the house but rubble. The smoke had cleared before sunrise. Alex had covered her mouth and nose with her shirt and felt her way along that passageway back to the safe. By the beam of the flashlight she’d carried with her, she’d rolled the combination lock right then left then right again and opened the safe.
Her parents had always left a backpack beside the safe. That night she’d learned why. She’d filled the backpack with the contents of the safe, zipped it hurriedly, left through the passageway and emerged into the garden.
She’d wandered the streets of Moscow for days, wearing a knit cap, her hair tucked inside, her face down, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. If the people who’d killed her parents had known she was alive, they’d have come after her to finish the job.
Alex had found an abandoned warehouse and set up camp. She’d used internet cafés to catch up on the news. Her parents’ death had been nothing more than a blip on a newscast. Family perishes in a housefire. She’d also used the computers to tap into the flash drive her mother had been so insistent she safeguard.
At one point, she had thought she should notify the CIA of her parents’ deaths, but if she had then they would know that she was still alive. If the CIA knew she hadn’t perished in the house fire, whoever had put the hit out on her family might find out as well. She’d decided it was best that she had died in the fire, for all intents and purposes.