The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller

by Karen Robards

  Bianca’s blood froze. Her breathing suspended. Her eyes held his for one horrible, pregnant instant.

  Across a crowded room. Like no one else was even there.

  Even as her pulse slammed into triple time, she recollected herself enough to break eye contact and glance casually away.

  No way he could recognize her at that distance, she told herself.

  But her deepest instincts shouted that he did.

  “You little beauty!” Bix slapped his hand on the table.

  Which meant, she discovered as the Australians once more erupted, that he had won again.

  As they hugged and fist-bumped and otherwise congratulated their hero, Bianca dared a quick glance back in Mickey’s direction to find that he was moving toward her. Purposefully.

  Her stomach knotted.

  “I smell strawberries,” she said to Mason under the cover of the Australians’ noisy celebration. It was their code for extreme emergency, get ready to move.

  She could feel the instant uptick in his energy.

  No time now for an orderly exit. Forget sitting out another hand or two.

  Oh, God, the two men she’d identified as possibly being members of Mickey’s team—they were moving her way, too.

  The dealer was sweeping in the chips. Next she would collect the cards.

  Bianca already knew what she had to do. It was called hand mucking, and she’d been taught how to do it by one of the best card mechanics in the business. It was a minor talent, occasionally useful. She was good at it.

  The difference was, this time she meant to get caught.

  She palmed her ace before the dealer could take it, holding the tiniest sliver of an edge pinched between her thumb and forefinger with the rest of the card concealed in her hand. In a normal game, she would hide it in her lap or somewhere similar until the next hand was dealt, then swap out whatever card she chose to replace for the ace. It was an easy cheat, and if done well allowed a player to rack up an impressive pile of chips.

  No one noticed. No one spotted the cheat.

  A furtive look toward Mickey revealed that he was still coming. The other two men were even closer.

  The next hand was already being dealt. A card—she didn’t even bother to check to see what it was—landed in front of her. A harried glance confirmed that Mickey had cut the previous distance between them by half. He strode through the milling crowd like Moses through the Red Sea.

  She tilted her hand, flashing the ace she was holding toward the dealer, who didn’t notice.

  Quick, quick, quick. Holy crap, what does it take to get hauled off by security around here?

  In desperation, she fumbled with the card she’d been dealt, pretending to check it while flashing her concealed ace at Bix.

  Whose eyes widened.

  “What ho!” Bix grabbed her wrist.

  “Let me go!” Bianca pretended to try to yank free. His hand was thick, meaty, sweaty. She suspected he thought his grip was iron. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Bix!” his wife gasped.

  “Sir!”

  As if forced to it by the strength of Bix’s grip, Bianca released her hold on the card she held. The ace fluttered to the table. Everybody stared at it as it lay, in damning evidence of her guilt, on the green felt.

  “Bit of a bludger,” Bix said.

  “She was cheating!” one of the women cried.

  The dealer said, “Sir, let her go. Ma’am—”

  Bianca really hoped that the reason the dealer was reaching under the table was to press the button that summoned security.

  “Cooee! Cooee!” Bix stood up, waving his free hand, the subtleties of attracting security by concealed button apparently lost on him.

  Mickey’s attention was now riveted on their table. His strides lengthened as he dodged through shifting groups of oblivious casino patrons. He was close—maybe 150 feet away. His minions were closer still, and closing in—

  Bianca yanked her hand free of Bix’s hold, grabbed the rack that held the dealer’s neatly stacked rows of tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of chips and flung it—and them—up in the air in Mickey’s general direction in hopes that the swarms of people that immediately squealed and dived for them would slow him down.

  Then she grabbed her purse and ran.

  18

  Straight into the arms of the quartet of security guards that had rushed from another part of the casino to head her off.

  “Stop it! No! I didn’t do anything,” Bianca protested, struggling feebly as two of them grabbed an upper arm each and practically lifted her off her feet.

  The half-dozen security guards who had been chasing her fell back in response to a sharp, Cantonese “Faan faan” (go back) from one of her captors as they changed course and, with two of them half carrying, half dragging her between them and the other two providing backup, hauled her away.

  Which is exactly what she wanted them to do. As far as distractions went, this one got the job—which was allow Mason to escape while keeping her out of Mickey’s hands long enough for her to do the same—done. Casino security in Macau being what it was, however, she suspected she would be in for a bad time as soon as they got her far enough off the floor that no one could hear her scream.

  Forget the civilized summoning of the police that might await a found-out cheater in Vegas. Here in Macau, ripping off or attempting to rip off a casino merited a far more old school response. Scamming a million or more would get you permanently disappeared. A couple of hundred thousand, tortured and beaten and finally, as long as they got the money back, tossed barely alive into the street. Palming a card, as she had done? She wasn’t sure, but having a sledgehammer crush the offending hand sounded about right.

  Add in throwing tens of thousands of chips to the crowd, and she had no idea what punishment the security staff might come up with. She did know that she didn’t want to know.

  Good thing she wasn’t planning to hang around to find out.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw Mason in his wheelchair whirring his way toward the east entrance. A quick glance over her shoulder found Mickey struggling to get through the tangle of people fighting over the chips she’d thrown. His minions had faded from sight, which told her that whoever they were, they weren’t working with security. She couldn’t see Doc anywhere. Her only hope was that, wherever he was lurking, he could see her and would stay close. Otherwise, when the time came to run for real, searching the casino for him was going to prove problematic. The only thing to do would be to join Mason on that rooftop, take her phone back from him and call Doc from there.

  “Where are you taking me?” Her faux-fearful question was in English, which was widely spoken in India, where Kangana was supposedly from. It came as they dragged her through a door in one of the golden walls into a long, dimly lit interior corridor. There was no answer. She had no idea if they spoke English, and speaking to them in Cantonese would raise too many questions about her in their minds. As soon as the door closed behind them and they were safely cut off from the view of the casino, their attitude changed. Their grip on her arms tightened. They hustled her along, conversing among themselves in Cantonese, which they clearly had no idea she understood.

  “She’s pretty.” That was a rough translation of what was said with a suggestive leer by the man holding her left arm. He was about eight inches taller than she was, which given the heels she was wearing meant he was around six foot six. He was built like the Hulk, all gorilla arms and bulging muscles. Like the others, he appeared to be a local. He wore the tux that was apparently required for all the casino workers. It strained across his back and shoulders.

  “What do we do with her?” This came from one of the men trailing behind.

  “I can think of some things,” said Left Arm Guy. Bianca was really beginning to dislike him. His fi
ngers dug painfully into her upper arm; she was going to have bruises. The way he was looking at her—well, she knew that look. If she’d been as helpless as she was pretending to be, she’d be in real trouble. As they hurried her along, she was supremely conscious of the ticking clock: Mickey wouldn’t just give up and go away. Whether he could get to her while casino security had her in custody she didn’t know, but she wasn’t about to chance it.

  She had to go, and keeping that in mind, she evaluated her surroundings with an eye to escape. There had been a single security camera facing the door they’d entered through, but she didn’t see any others. The floor was marble, the walls painted the same shade of yellow-gold as those in the casino. The lighting came from widely placed sconces up near the ceiling. Niches in the wall held bronze statues. It was cold from the air-conditioning, and smelled faintly dank, like a cave. No windows, and so far she’d only seen the one door.

  Going back out it was not ideal, but it might be the best she could do.

  “We take her to the office and leave it up to Novo.” The man holding her right arm seemed to be in charge. He was older, fiftyish, about six foot one. She was guessing he weighed around two hundred pounds to the other man’s 350-plus. “You two go back to the floor. Paulo is all the help I need.”

  The men walking behind bowed their heads in acknowledgment and left.

  “Novo does not like cheaters. He will say she needs to be taught a lesson.” Left Arm Guy—Paulo?—stroked her arm with his free hand suggestively. Fortunately her dress had sleeves. Their long strides meant that her leg in its sheer black stocking flashed in and out of the slit in her dress as she was forced to hurry to keep up. Paulo openly ogled the display. “We could take care of that ourselves and save him the trouble.”

  “We will leave it to Novo,” Right Arm Guy said. They made a sharp left into an intersecting corridor and almost immediately came to a short flight of four steps heading down. About sixty feet beyond the steps, at the end of the hallway, were three doors. All were closed. Bianca presumed that they led to offices. A security camera mounted near the ceiling was trained on those doors. Its range did not extend as far as the stairs.

  The problem lay in the people who might be inside the offices. She was being taken to Novo, who was almost certainly inside one of those doors. There were likely others in there, as well.

  * * *

  Paulo released her arm as they reached the stairs, which weren’t wide enough for three to descend abreast, especially when one of the three was the approximate size of a building. Right Arm Guy hung on, staying beside her as he walked her down.

  This is it.

  “Oh!” Pretending to stumble, she fell down the last two steps. It was a simple matter to pull him down with her. They both hit the floor—and Bianca rolled and knocked him unconscious with a single hard chop to the side of his neck that landed right on target in a highly sensitive place between the bottom of his ear and the top of his spine.

  She liked to think of it as the G-spot. As in, gotcha.

  “Hey!” Paulo was on the second step on his way down as he apparently registered what was happening. Before he could even so much as finish processing what he’d seen, Bianca shot to her feet, launched herself at him and used on him the same blow that had felled his coworker.

  The lightning-fast strike didn’t even hurt her hand.

  “Ahh.” Paulo’s eyes rolled back in his head. He collapsed like a sack of potatoes.

  Unfortunately, he collapsed like a sack of potatoes right on top of her. All 350 some odd tank-like pounds of him slammed into her. She staggered backward, lost her footing on the steps and crashed to the floor. She hit hard, on her back, cracking her head on the marble as she landed. If she hadn’t had the wig for cushioning, she probably would have been knocked out. But the pain of that was nothing compared to the agony, a split-second later, of having the solid mountain of deadweight that was Paulo drop on her.

  “Ooph.” That was the sound of the breath exploding from her lungs as he landed. Instantly she was being crushed, flattened, suffocated, by his bulk. He lay facedown at a slight angle across her, and with her hands trapped between them there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.

  For a stunned moment she simply lay where she had fallen. Stars revolved in front of her eyes, and her compressed lungs ached with emptiness. Then her mouth opened, and she gasped like a landed fish as she fought to suck in air. Her lungs wouldn’t fully inflate, but she managed a couple of shallow, wheezing breaths. Paulo, unconscious, lay sprawled on top of her like a roofied gorilla. She tried to squirm free, tried to push him off her, tried to find some anchorage for her feet and use that and her body to heave him to one side, but the floor was too slick to provide purchase for her shoes, her hands were trapped and there was no way to get enough leverage with the rest of her body to shove the leviathan off her.

  Final verdict on the takedown: epic fail.

  Somebody could come along at any time. Paulo and Right Arm Guy could regain consciousness at any time.

  This is bad. Move your ass.

  She’d regained enough of her senses to start trying to pull together a workable plan to extricate herself that didn’t involve just lying there waiting for Paulo to wake up when someone stepped into her line of vision (which because she had Paulo’s side-of-beef-like shoulder wedged beneath her chin was pretty much limited to straight up) and smiled down at her.

  “Hello, beautiful,” Mickey said. “Or Sylvia. Or Cara. Or whatever name you’re going by tonight.”

  Bianca’s heart would have leaped like a goosed rabbit if her chest wasn’t currently being pancaked. As it was, it just gave an alarmed flutter and got back to the business of trying to keep her circulation going under such adverse conditions.

  No use pretending she didn’t know him. It had been clear from the moment they’d first locked eyes in the casino that he recognized her.

  The question was, why was he here? To capture Mason? Or to kill her?

  Looked like she was about to find out.

  If he wanted to kill her, fate wasn’t going to present him with a better chance.

  You gotta ask yourself, do you feel lucky?

  Unfortunately, she didn’t.

  “Drop dead,” she said. Or, rather, gasped, breath being in short supply. She wriggled in an attempt to remedy that and managed to shift enough so that Paulo’s rib cage wasn’t pressing directly on her diaphragm and she could actually almost breathe.

  Mickey said, “Speaking of dead, I’m glad you’re not.” His caramel brown eyes twinkled at her. Okay, so she was in a ridiculous position. No need to rub it in.

  “Oh, that makes me feel all warm inside.” Talking halfway normally was an effort, but for him she made it. The citrusy smell of Paulo’s hair pomade filled her nostrils. She turned her head as far to the side as she could to get away from it.

  “What are you doing in Macau?” Hands in his pockets, Mickey walked around her and Paulo, pretending to examine the predicament in which she found herself from all angles.

  “Vacation.” Except for her eyes, which followed his every move, she lay perfectly still now: squirming like a worm on a hook was downright undignified. Useless, too. “What are you doing in Macau?”

  “Same thing.”

  “Enjoying yourself?”

  “The good part’s just started. Once again, loving the garter belt.” The smirk he assumed as he eyeballed her legs, which she was pretty sure were exposed all the way up to the toned, tanned and bare tops of her thighs, affording him a view of lacy black stocking tops attached to the satiny black straps of her garter belt, annoyed her. She remembered that in the course of a previous encounter she’d deliberately removed her escape cord dispenser from her garter belt in front of him just to blow his mind, and gave herself a mental kick. Showing off never ended well. “No one would ever guess you use it as a holst
er. That’s genius. Mind if I check it out?”

  “Touch it and die,” she said. “Pervert.”

  He grinned. “Careful, you’re going to hurt my feelings.” Without making a move to touch her garter belt—okay, so maybe not a pervert—he strolled around to where she could look up at him without straining her neck. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but you seem to spend a lot of time flat on your back when I’m around.”

  “Oh, ha-ha.” Her voice was stronger now. Watching him warily, she worked on getting her hands into the right position to give Moby Dick the mother of all shoves. Unfortunately, to do that she first had to get her hands out from between them: not that easy.

  “What are you going to do when Big Boy here wakes up, I wonder? Because it doesn’t look like you’re going anywhere until he moves.”

  She finally succeeded in jerking her hands free. Summoning all her strength while simultaneously giving Mickey an eat-dirt look, she got both hands beneath the behemoth’s shoulder and shoved.

  Paulo’s shoulder lifted maybe six inches. Then it fell back to exactly where it had been before. Once again, the problem was no leverage.

  Epic fail, the sequel.

  “Nice try,” Mickey said. “You’ve got to ask yourself, what does it take to get that big? A diet of raw meat and steroids?”

  Inwardly Bianca sizzled. Outwardly, she hoped, she remained cool. Well, as cool as it was possible to remain while being squashed like a bug by a hot, sweaty, NFL-linebacker-sized mound of human flesh.

  “Want to help me out here?” she asked, doing her best to keep the poisonous out of her sweet.

  “Depends.” He smiled down at her, his eyes crinkling at the corners, his teeth a flash of white against the bronze of his skin. “Are you going to attack me if I do?”

  He’d seen her in action. Actually, he’d experienced her in action. He knew what kind of fighter she was.

  “No,” she said. And tried to sound like she meant it.

  He laughed, and she felt some of the edginess that had kept her watching him like a hawk fade. The fact that he was really kind of gorgeous did not weigh with her. The fact that she possibly sort of liked him and that her inner antenna wasn’t pinging with all sorts of alarm messages did. She’d learned over the years to trust that inner antenna. Bottom line, she really didn’t think he was there to kill her. If he was, he did the best fake good-guy act in history, plus he was taking his sweet time getting on with it.