The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller

by Karen Robards

  She imagined that by sunrise every newspaper, TV channel and internet source in the world would carry news of Groton’s murder.

  No connection here, folks.

  Unless he’d somehow managed to follow her despite her best efforts, the shooter couldn’t know where she lived. He couldn’t know of her life in Savannah or her identity as Bianca St. Ives.

  If he did, she’d already be dead.

  Unless she was somehow ranked below Groton on his hit list.

  The possibility sent a chill down her spine.

  It’s not paranoia if they’re really after you.

  The lighting in the parking garage was dim and spectral. As she drove down the row of cars closest to the wall, it flickered a little, probably because of a sputtering fluorescent fixture. Under the circumstances, the effect was unnerving. A wary glance around told her that—duh, it was after 4:00 a.m.—the structure was deserted. The thought that someone—an assassin, a kidnapper—could be hiding among the parked cars made her tense up, had her hands tightening around the wheel.

  Most of the spaces were filled. The space next to her empty one, which was her second space, was occupied by Evie’s blue Volvo. Evie was Evangeline Talmadge, her best friend dating all the way back from their shared school days at the Swiss boarding school Le Rosey. They were as close as sisters, but it was a fundamentally unequal relationship. Bianca knew everything about Evie, her hopes, dreams, fears, family, all her secrets. Evie thought she knew everything about Bianca, but the Bianca she knew was her friend from Rosey, the maid of honor at her wedding, her buddy and shoulder to cry on and confidante. She did not know Bianca the international criminal, the fugitive, the super soldier. Evie had no idea that Bianca even existed, and Bianca never meant for her to find out.

  Five months pregnant and in the process of divorcing her cheating dirtball of a husband, Evie was currently staying with Bianca. She was also working for Bianca’s company, Guardian Consulting, the security firm Bianca had founded when she’d been setting up a bolt-hole to go to ground in between pulling thefts or cons or other illegal but lucrative jobs with her not-father. Earlier, Bianca had told Evie that she had a meeting with a client tonight that might run way late, but if Evie happened to be awake she would be worried—and curious. And Evie was never one to keep her worry, or her curiosity, to herself. Fortunately, pregnancy made Evie the human equivalent of a Snorlax, so Bianca was pretty confident that she didn’t have to worry about Evie being awake and waiting for her.

  Anyway, if she made it inside alive and in one piece, concocting a believable lie for an awake Evie would be a small price to pay.

  Something—a sound, a movement spotted out of the corner of her eye—made Bianca sit bolt upright and look over her shoulder, with a suddenly accelerated pulse rate, just as she started to turn into her spot.

  Quincy Pack burst into view, running down the aisle she’d just driven through toward her car, his arms and legs pumping a mile a minute, his eyes as round as hockey pucks, his mouth moving nonstop as words spilled from them that she couldn’t quite hear.

  Recognizing him, Bianca relaxed a little. Her foot eased up off the brake—she hadn’t even realized that she’d hit it—and she continued to pull in. Quincy was the eleven-year-old son of the building’s live-in super, Angela Pack. He was undersized for his age and wiry, with buzzed black hair and a thin face that was all sharp bones and big dark eyes. Tonight he was dressed in jeans and a gray hoodie, she saw when he reached her trunk and pounded on it and waved his arms at her like that was what he needed to do to flag her down. This would be in complete disregard of the fact that she was easing into a narrow spot with cars on either side of her and a concrete wall in front of her.

  In other words, much as she might like to, she wasn’t going anywhere.

  Bianca frowned. If there wasn’t an axiom saying that no one ever got good news at four in the morning, there should be. It belonged right up there with, no good deed goes unpunished.

  Quincy now knew she was getting home at 4:00 a.m. He would see that she was most uncharacteristically (for Bianca St. Ives) dressed in a black turtleneck, black cargo pants and black combat boots, and that her shoulder length blond hair was pulled back into a tight bun. She cast a quick glance around the interior of the car. He might notice the empty foam coffee cup from the truck stop in South Carolina in the cup holder between the seats. It had Dum Spiro Spero, the South Carolina state motto, scrawled across a map of that state. He might notice that she was damp around the edges, although it hadn’t rained in Savannah for the last two weeks. He might notice that her coat, which was in the back seat, was waterproof and rain-spotted and too heavy for Savannah’s current temperature. He might—

  He was a kid. Kids didn’t notice those things.

  Kids were also usually asleep at this hour.

  Crushing the telltale coffee cup with one hand, she shoved it into the small storage bin between the seats and closed the lid on it.

  “Miz Guardian! You gotta help me!” Quincy had reached her door and was pulling on the handle even before Bianca turned the ignition off. He called her that because of the magnetic signs advertising Guardian Consulting that she usually kept affixed to the Acura’s doors, because tax deductions were a wonderful thing. At the moment, however, the signs were in the trunk, along with the Win Mag and other assorted stuff she wanted to keep out of sight. “Quick! It’s an emergency!”

  Bianca might have been truly alarmed, if Quincy’s last emergency hadn’t involved a stolen Nintendo 2DS.

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed? Don’t you have school tomorrow?” If Bianca sounded grumpy as she pushed the door open and got out to survey him with a frown, that would be because grumpy was how she felt. She’d helped Quincy out by recovering the game system a few weeks back, no big deal. Tonight, though, she really wasn’t up to taking on the neighborhood bully on the kid’s behalf. I got ninety-nine problems but you ain’t one, was the response to his urgency that flitted through her head.

  “Snake and his gang took Francisca! And Sage went after them! He’s got my mom’s gun!”

  “What?” It was the gun part that grabbed Bianca’s attention. Sage was Quincy’s brother. At seventeen, he was the oldest of the three Pack boys, the middle one of whom was fifteen-year-old Trevor. Snake, aka Shawn Torres, was the previously mentioned eighteen-year-old, NFL-linebacker-size neighborhood bully she’d liberated the stolen Nintendo from. Bianca had no idea who Francisca was. She was really hoping that it wasn’t going to be necessary for her to find out. “Your brother’s got your mother’s gun? Did you tell her?”

  He shook his head violently. “She’s not here. She’s been working a couple of nights a week at some old folks’ home because we need the extra money. Look, what you did before—that beat-down you laid on Snake—it was awesome. Word’s all over the street that he got smacked around by some kind of ninja pussy, and the guys have been ragging on him like you wouldn’t believe. That’s because of you. You’re the pussy. I won’t tell nobody, but I know it was you. Please, you gotta help me save Sage. Snake and those guys are packing. They see Sage has a gun, they’ll blow him away!”

  “You’ve got to be—” Bianca broke off, because it was obvious from Quincy’s agitation—he was dancing from foot to foot and practically hyperventilating—that he wasn’t kidding, that he was, in fact, dead serious. Ordinarily she would have had a major problem with being called a pussy, but tonight it was pretty far down her list of things to give a damn about.

  Besides, in this case she could kind of see where it might be coming from: when she’d retrieved the Nintendo from Snake, it had required a certain degree of forceful persuasion on her part to get him to cooperate—and at the time, to conceal her true identity, she’d been wearing a Hello Kitty costume. Obviously there’d been a witness, and in the garbled, telephone-game way of gossip everywhere at some point the ninja Kitty might well have become
a ninja pussy. Sigh. Bottom line, what was the responsible thing to do here? “Okay. If your brother has a gun, we’ve got to call your mother. And we’ve got to call the police. And by the way, if you want to live a long and happy life, you should never, ever refer to a girl as a pussy. We don’t like it.”

  “Sorry.” He shot her a half-penitent, half-scared look.

  As Bianca reached into her pocket for her phone, she remembered she hadn’t taken it with her on her mission to murder Groton because cell phones were trackable and traceable. Also, a trackable and traceable cell phone left in a location where you were not provided something in the way of a cyber alibi. (As in, I was home watching TV the whole time. You can check my phone. See?) She did have a burner phone, acquired especially for the occasion in case of emergency because she believed in being prepared, but the last thing she intended to do was call Mrs. Pack and give her the bad news on it. Mrs. Pack would know who she was. Mrs. Pack would remember the call. The question of why she had called on a burner phone might never come up—but then again, it might. Don’t screw up the details: it wasn’t one of the rules, but it was important enough that it should be.

  Grimacing, she held out her hand. “Give me your phone. We’re going to call the police first, then your mother.”

  “No!” Alarm replaced Quincy’s penitent expression. “We can’t call my mom because she didn’t pay the cell phone bill and our service got cut off, so I don’t even have my phone on me anyway. Besides, what could she do? She’ll just get herself shot. And we can’t call the police because—” Quincy hesitated. Bianca braced for the new shaft of bad news that she could feel was getting ready to come whizzing her way. “Francisca’s illegal and Sage was selling weed and her and her family will get deported and Sage’ll go to jail.” He blurted that last part out in one long, run-on burst of words.

  “Christ on a cracker.” Bianca felt that stronger words were called for, but swearing in front of a kid just seemed wrong. Mentally, however, she gave herself full rein. Some people’s bad days consisted of things like traffic tickets and burned dinners. Hers tended to be populated with assassins gone wild and stupid kids with guns. “Do you know where Sage is?”

  “He was heading over to the Bloods’ house because that’s where Snake and them were taking Francisca.” He crossed and uncrossed his arms, bounced up and down on his toes. “Will you help me?”

  The smart thing to do here would be to walk away. After everything that had gone down tonight, she had too much at risk, too much to lose—like her life—if she got involved in something that attracted the notice of the wrong people.

  Job Number One: stay the hell away from trouble until you can get things figured out.

  His eyes begged her. “Please?”

  She said, “You know where the Bloods’ house is?”

  Quincy nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Eastside. Over on—”

  What was it Forrest Gump had said? Right, stupid is as stupid does.

  So buy her a box of chocolates and call her Forrest.

  She was about to do something really stupid.

  She knew the Packs’ circumstances. They were hard up for money and devoid of anything resembling power or influence. If things went south for them, they had nowhere to turn. Only this big-eyed kid had just turned to her.

  “You can tell me on the way,” Bianca interrupted. Opening her car door, she jerked a thumb at the passenger side. “Get in.”

  3

  “You rock!”

  Quincy fist-pumped, ran around the car and jumped in. By then Bianca was back in the driver’s seat and had the car started up again.

  She rocked, all right. As in, she had rocks in the head.

  “Smells like a wet dog in here.” His nose wrinkled as he looked around.

  That would be me. Thanks for noticing.

  “Put your seat belt on.” She backed out. “So where’s the Bloods’ house?”

  He put his seat belt on. “It’s over on Bay Street, right by Hitch Village.”

  “Oh, goody.”

  Hitch Village was a public housing development in one of the most crime-ridden parts of town. It had been torn down in 2010 and rebuilt, but the new development was just as crime-ridden as the old one. The primary difference was that now all that crime was happening around upgraded kitchens and bathrooms.

  “How long ago did Sage leave?” Bianca reached the street, looked both ways—one car farther down the street, but it was heading away from them, which meant that it probably didn’t pose a threat—and pulled out. The combination of the soft glow of the historically correct, reproduction gaslights on the corners of the tree-lined square out front and the security lighting for the condo buildings and storefronts and restaurants that lined the street kept the encroaching darkness at bay. A sweeping glance found a homeless guy asleep on a bench in the square. No one else in sight, and the homeless guy didn’t move as the Acura drove past, so she was pretty sure he wasn’t an assassin in disguise. Farther away, the twenty-story Stillwell Towers and the slightly shorter Westin Savannah anchored the downtown skyline. The lit-up buildings were bright against the moonless night sky.

  “Right before you got home. He was with Francisca in front of her house when those guys drove up and pulled her into their car. He had to run all the way back here and get his car and the gun before he could go after them. I tried to go with him, jumped in the car and everything, but he pushed me out. I was out there on the sidewalk when I saw you drive past.” Quincy wrapped his arms around himself as if he were cold. Outside, it was a chilly 46 degrees, but the car was warm. Damp as she was and cold as most of the drive home had been, Bianca had had the heat cranked the whole way back to Savannah and it was still blowing strong, so she was guessing that cold wasn’t what ailed Quincy. Nerves, more like. Hey, she could relate.

  “Lucky.” Bianca tried hard to keep her voice irony-free.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Miz Guardian, no offense, but you drive like a girl. We got to catch up to Sage before he gets to Snake.”

  “You mean, like a smart girl? Because if I drive too fast, we’ll get pulled over.” Which wouldn’t be so terrible, except for the whole calling-attention-to-herself thing. To say nothing of the a-traffic-ticket-is-a-searchable-record-that-she-was-out-and-about-at-4:00-a.m thing. Oh, yeah, and there was the little matter of the Win Mag and other tools of her sometimes trade in the trunk if a cop got particularly curious. They were concealed, but not impossible to find.

  As if to underline the point, one of Savannah’s finest rolled through a cross street in front of them. Bianca, who actually was driving too fast but not, she judged, fast enough to get stopped, had to fight the urge to hit the brakes, which was always a bad idea, because if you did that when they were looking, cops automatically assumed you had something to hide. Quincy tracked the patrol car with obvious alarm.

  He said, “You maybe don’t want to drive too fast.”

  “Oh, you think?”

  The Acura bumped through the intersection without incident. They were deep in the east side now, heading toward the Savannah River. A few people—mostly hookers and drug dealers—hung out on street corners. Bars and pizza parlors and delis and hair salons, locked down for what was left of the night, crowded close to the sidewalks. Trash, graffiti and potholes became the norm. The buildings grew more run-down, and the vehicles parked in front of them grew older with every passing block.

  If anyone was following them, he deserved the Tail of the Year Award. She hadn’t spotted him, and she was good at things like that.

  “So your brother’s selling weed. Did he rip Snake and his friends off? Is that what this is about?” she asked.

  Quincy shook his head. “They’re mad ’cause he was selling in Bloods territory. Snake and them, they’re Bloods. Only Bloods are allowed to sell weed on the east side, they say.”

  With its stately ma
nsions and park-like squares and streets lined with Spanish-moss-festooned live oaks, Savannah was one of the most beautiful cities Bianca had ever seen. When she’d first started visiting, many years ago, she’d fallen under its spell. But since then she’d learned that beneath the history and the charm lay an ugly streak. Crime was a problem. Gangs—including the Bloods on the east side and the Crips on the west—were a part of that.

  “Sage is a Crip?” she asked. It was darker now as they reached Bay Street, which ran parallel to the river. Working streetlights were few and far between. A barge churned past, its lights catching on the boats tied up at the wharves farther along the shore. The river itself was as black as ink, so black that it was hard to tell where it ended and the sky began. Weeds grew waist-high along the rickety-looking chain-link fence that separated the street from a pair of graffiti-adorned, abandoned warehouses that stood close to the river. On the other side of the street were a few small houses and a row of identical two-story apartment buildings. The houses were dark. The apartment buildings had a couple of dim security lights on poles in their parking lots, which were overflowing because any number of people might live in a single unit. The next day must be trash day, because heaped-high cans were sitting out all up and down the street.

  “Hang a right,” Quincy directed, then as she obeyed answered her question. “He’s not in a gang. He was just selling some weed on his own to make a little cash. Now Snake says he’s got to give him all the money, and all the weed he has left, and tell him who sold him the weed, and maybe he’ll let Francisca go. Only Sage can’t tell them who his dealer is or the dude will kill him himself.”

  “Selling weed is wrong.” Bianca’s tone was stern. She was pretty sure that this was what people who dealt with kids would call a teachable moment, and she didn’t for one second want Quincy to think that she was down with what his brother had done even if she was prepared to save that brother’s ass. Just for good measure, and in case she hadn’t been clear, she added, “Smoking it is wrong, too. You need to stay away from weed. From all drugs.”