The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller

by Karen Robards

  Which maybe she would be—for now.

  But not forever.

  They—whichever they got to her first—would come for her.

  Even if they didn’t, even if he was as good as his word and as good as he seemed to think he was and managed to help keep her safe, if she chose him her life as she knew it would be over.

  She thought of Savannah, of Evie and Hay, of her life.

  And then she thought, no. I’m not going to just give up.

  I’ve come too far. I’m too close.

  If she could get rid of him, nothing had to change. She could do what she’d come there to do, get out and go home.

  The thing was, there was no way he could know about the Pushkin, about the robbery she had planned. If he was telling the truth and he wasn’t working with the CIA, he actually knew nothing that mattered about her. He didn’t know what she was. And even the CIA didn’t know who she was. And she was going to do her best to make sure it stayed that way.

  She was going all in, shooting the moon.

  Keeping her secrets was the only way she not only survived, but got her life back.

  First order of business: ditch him. Only she had to do it carefully and with sufficient planning, because if things were going to work out the way she hoped he needed to stay ditched.

  He’d found her twice now. She needed to make sure it didn’t happen again.

  In his classic Art of War, Sun Tzu had said it best: All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.

  This was war.

  28

  “How about this?” Bianca was careful to make her response sound ever so slightly grudging. “I’ll try trusting you, and we’ll see how it goes.”

  “Fair enough. You want to impress me with your commitment to our new alliance, you could start by putting the knife away.”

  She hadn’t realized that he was aware she was holding it. It was megadark, and she pretty much had the thing palmed.

  “Fine.” She pocketed it, held up her empty hand, wiggled her fingers at him. It was a silent, see?

  “I’d reciprocate with my gun just to demonstrate goodwill, but I’m thinking I might need it to shoot somebody with in case our friends spot us.”

  She grimaced agreement. Then, because the thought made her uneasy, she leaned a little sideways and peered out. The headlights were still coming. Slow and sure, still some distance away.

  She shivered. Her heart beat faster. Which, given her recent near-death experience, was only to be expected. Probably she’d been traumatized.

  She said, “Maybe we should make a run for it. While we can.”

  “They’re not likely to see us in here. We’re out of the alley, in the dark. They’ll be looking ahead, into the light.” He frowned down at her. “You weren’t hurt back there, were you?”

  “No.” He was right, she decided. Running for it posed the greater risk. Now that the die was cast and her decision was made, she was beginning to get her act together, to plan. First things first: taking a deep breath, she unwound her scarf and unzipped her coat.

  “You were following me,” she said. There was accusation in her tone. What she wanted was to gather as much information about what he knew as she could.

  “I was,” he agreed, watching with interest as she slid out of her coat and thrust her arms into the sleeves, yanking them wrong side out. The brown coat reversed to blue. “Good God, do all your clothes do that?”

  “Not all of them.” If he read something suggestive into her words, whose fault was that? She slipped into her now-blue coat, zipped it up, stuffed her scarf into the pocket. “The question is, how did you know I was in Moscow? Were you looking for Mason?”

  “Finding people is part of what I do.”

  He was being evasive. She knew it when she heard it.

  “What’s the other part?”

  “Different things.” He smiled at her, a quick smile with a dazzling amount of charm that she strongly suspected was calculated to, um, dazzle her. With what end game? Cajoling her into giving up Mason, if she were to hazard a guess. “I’m not trying to be obtuse. I don’t actually work for Interpol, you know. I’m a contractor. I work for whoever will pay me, government agencies mostly.”

  “Like the CIA?”

  “Not lately.”

  “That’s reassuring.” Her voice was dry.

  “I’m trying to build trust here. I could have just said no, you know.” That smile again, a flash of white teeth in the darkness. “Your turn. Tell me something about you.”

  She wanted to tell him many things, chief among which was that she was never, ever, ever going to help him catch Mason, so he might as well give it up, but headlights shining past the doorway distracted her, made her stiffen and catch her breath.

  “Ah,” he said. “Here they come.”

  He pulled her against him, wrapped an arm around her and pushed her back into the corner. His back was turned to the alley. He held his gun down at his side. Bianca grabbed on to the front of his coat and ducked her head against his chest. His coat was dark gray. His hat was black. From the alley he should look like just one more shadow among many. What they had to guard against was having their faces reflect the light as the car passed.

  He was tall enough and wide enough to make a really effective wall, as she had discovered before.

  He smelled of soap and snow.

  They were in the far corner closest to the direction from which the car was coming. She could see the light as it hit the embrasure’s opposite wall. For a moment the light grew brighter, covered more of the wall, and she tensed.

  Then the light was gone. As darkness enshrouded them once more, she heard the slushy sound of wheels rolling over wet pavement.

  They waited. One minute. Two.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  That’s when she knew for sure the car was gone.

  She lifted her head, let out a breath and let him pull her out into the alley.

  His hand was wrapped around hers. She didn’t resist, holding his hand as they walked quickly back the way they had come, because the van and the car were going the other way.

  “Where to?” she asked, trying not to sound as wary as she felt. She was almost 100 percent sure he wasn’t delivering her to the CIA, but suspicion had been drummed into her from an early age and, anyway, there were other unpleasant things he could have in mind, like locking her up somewhere and throwing away the key until she told him what he wanted to know, as he’d threatened to do before.

  You pays your money and you takes your chances.

  “My hotel is right around the corner,” he said. “I suggest we go there, unless you have a better idea. It’ll get us off the street, give us a chance to figure some things out.”

  “All right,” she said, as inspiration dawned.

  Careful of the slippery stones, wanting to bend her head against the cold and swirling snow but afraid to look down lest she miss another vehicle on the hunt, or a search party on foot, or danger of any description heading their way, she kept pace with him.

  The hotel he took her to was in an old brick building near the river. They went in a side door, and, by silent, mutual, agreement, took the stairs to the fourth floor. The purpose, of course, was to avoid surveillance cameras in the elevators. They kept their heads ducked for the same purpose when they emerged into the fourth-floor hallway. When they reached his room, she noted the bit of thread that fell to the carpet when the door opened—positioned between jamb and door, it was a tell that would alert him if anyone had entered the room while he was gone—the clothes draped over the mirror to thwart any camera that might be filming through
it, the fact that the first thing he did was turn on the TV to drown out their conversation in case the room was bugged.

  Classic tradecraft, and she approved of it.

  He’d left the lights on, the better, she guessed, to make any observers on the street who might be interested think he was inside the room when he was not.

  “Who are you?” she asked when he came back to her after turning on the TV. The room was warm, and her cheeks tingled slightly as they thawed. She had little doubt that they, and the tip of her nose, were rosy red. A sweeping glance to ensure that they were alone had reassured her that they were. Also, that the room was clean, a little threadbare, nothing special. Earth tones everywhere. Double bed, sloppily made. A pair of tub chairs with a small round table between them in front of closed, patterned drapes. A console table against the wall she’d entered through that served as a mini-kitchen with coffee maker, foam cups, packets of mixes that, added to water, equaled beverages, and a small refrigerator. A door led to a private bathroom. The door was open and she could see inside: ordinary and empty.

  “My name’s Colin Rogan. Coat?” He gestured at hers. She slipped out of it and handed it to him, reluctantly removing her gloves and tucking them in the pocket before she did so. She hated the idea of having bare hands and leaving fingerprints, but then she could always be careful and wipe the room down before she left. She kept her purse.

  His gaze swept her, touching on her sure-to-be-disheveled wig, her cream-colored crewneck sweater, her jeans. As she did what she could to tidy her faux hair, he took off his hat and coat and stowed the garments in the small closet. Instead of having hat head, as one might have expected given the close confines of the ushanka, his black hair had succumbed to what was apparently a tendency to curl. He was wearing jeans and an untucked blue button-up shirt, and he looked hot.

  She wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t noticed. Not that it made a particle of difference to anything.

  “And you are?” he prompted as he turned back to her. “Real name now, mind.”

  “Beth,” she said. The man who’d tried to shoot her had yelled Beth McAlister at her in the street, and she was fairly certain that Colin—whether or not that was his real name, it suited him much better than Mickey—had heard him. Therefore, in the interests of truth and trust and all that good stuff, Beth she was. “Beth McAlister.”

  The flicker in his eyes told her that he had, indeed, heard that her name was Beth. She’d scored a point. Yay, team truth and trust.

  “Sit down. Can I get you something to drink?” He moved over to the mini-kitchen and rifled through the packets as she sat down in one of the tub chairs. They were gold, with a nubby texture. “I’ve got coffee, tea, hot chocolate—or booze. Lots of booze. The minibar is surprisingly well-stocked.”

  “Coffee, please.” She watched him put the coffee on. “When I asked who you are, I wasn’t asking about your name, although that was going to come up. What I meant was, what alphabet agency? If you’re really not CIA.”

  He shot her a glance over his shoulder. “None.”

  “I know spooks. And you’re a spook.”

  “Former.” He finished with the coffee maker, came to stand over her. He was tall, broad-shouldered, leanly muscular, very fit. She knew firsthand how good he was at martial arts. A worthy opponent—almost. “MI6. I left it a while back to start my own company. What about you? Spook? Former spook?”

  She gave a little shrug. “Nope.”

  “You’re better than well-trained. You’re a pro, one of the best I’ve seen.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So—Thayer?”

  “Among others.”

  “Is he here in Moscow?”

  She gave him a long look. “If this is some kind of quid pro quo, where I give you Mason in return for your protection, you can forget it.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Good. Because I’m not talking about him.”

  “Fine. Let’s circle back around to an earlier topic of conversation. What the hell did you do to get an agency kill team on your tail?”

  Well, see, I was born. “I guess they don’t like the company I keep.”

  He folded his arms over his chest. “They wouldn’t be coming after you only because you work for Thayer. And that doesn’t explain the Darjeeling Brothers’ contract. I assume you know there’s a million-dollar price tag on your head.”

  Her instinct was to deny it. But he obviously knew.

  “I can see you do,” he said. The smell of coffee was strong now. He turned away to pour them both a cup. When he came back and handed her hers, she accepted it, wrapped her fingers around the foam and took a sip. The brew was on the bitter side, but it was steaming hot, strong and black, which was how she drank her coffee: no sugar, no milk.

  “Could I get some sugar?” she said. “Just one packet will do.”

  “Sure.” Setting his cup on the table, he turned away to get the sweetener.

  Quick as a cat, Bianca stretched her wrist over his cup. Prying up her watch face with a fingernail, being careful not to depress the windup mechanism so as not to release the contents as an aerosol, she poured the small pool of clear liquid contained in the watch case into his coffee. She gave the steaming brew a quick stir with her pinkie, wincing at how hot it was. Then she closed the watch face and wiped her pinkie on her jeans.

  “Sweet ’n Low do?” He turned back around with a pink packet dangling from his fingers.

  “Perfect,” Bianca said. It was clear he’d seen nothing. He brought the packet to her, she poured it into her coffee, stirred it with the little plastic stir stick he also brought her and went back to sipping the now repulsively sweet liquid. “Thank you.”

  Colin picked up his cup, stood in front of her again and drank. He, too, seemed to prefer his coffee black. He didn’t appear to notice anything wrong with the taste, and she heaved an inner sigh of relief: SiuSiu had assured her no one would. The liquid was a custom-mixed, souped-up form of Special K, ketamine, a knockout drug that in its unaltered iteration was known as a date rape drug. He was a big guy, and he was ingesting it a little at a time, but, working off the specifications that SiuSiu had given her, her best guess was that he had something less than fifteen minutes to remain standing upright. After that, he would sleep like a baby for up to twenty-four hours.

  And she would go rob the Pushkin, hand off the booty to Mason and go home.

  He said, “When I found out that both the CIA and somebody willing to pay a million dollars to make it happen wanted you dead, my first thought was that Thayer must have turned you into an assassin like himself. But clearly that’s not it. To my knowledge there’s only a short list of things that anybody can do to get those kind of people that pissed off—traitor, drug kingpin, human trafficker—so I repeat, what did you do?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Bianca said. She was deriving considerably more enjoyment from the exchange than she had been a few minutes ago. She wondered when the realization would hit him that he’d been drugged—or if it would.

  “Try me.”

  She sipped her coffee, smiling at him over the rim as he followed suit. “I have no clue.”

  His brows snapped together. He lowered his cup. “Bullshit. You know.”

  Keep him engaged—and drinking. “If I had to guess, I’d say it had something to do with the two hundred million we tried to steal from Prince al Khalifa in Bahrain, because as far as I know nobody ever wanted to kill me before then, but that’s just a guess.”

  His lips compressed. “What do you mean, tried to? You got away with it. At least, I assume that if Thayer faked burning up with the money, the money survived too.”

  Same conclusion she’d reached. Not that that was anything she wanted to share.

  “What I want to know is how you found me,” she said. “In Macau. And
here.”

  He gave a slight shrug. His coffee, she saw, was considerably reduced. But if he was feeling the drug, he gave no sign of it.

  “Intelligence,” he said. “Eyes on the street. A sixth sense. Lots of things go into it.”

  She frowned. That was too vague to be of any help at all. And vagueness, as she knew from experience, was usually employed as a means of masking the truth. In Macau, she could maybe see it. After all, she and Doc had flown in to Hong Kong, and international airports are seething nests of intelligence assets. But she’d sneaked into Russia, and in Moscow she’d kept to a limited area, and employed her very best antisurveillance tactics, which if she had to say so herself were pretty damned good.

  “What’s more surprising is that the CIA found you,” he said. His tone and expression were suddenly thoughtful. He drank more coffee. There couldn’t be much left in his cup.

  “Maybe they followed you,” she said. “Maybe somebody somewhere tagged you with some kind of tracking device.”

  She said it flippantly, because she thought it was unlikely and because she wanted to keep him talking and finishing his coffee until he started to exhibit signs of, say, collapsing in a heap.

  For the briefest of moments, his gaze dropped. She realized that he was looking at her purse, which was in her lap.

  “Stranger things have happened,” he said, his eyes back on her face, and she thought from his tone that that was him keeping it light. Not something that in her experience of him he was known to do. “I’m more inclined to think they got a tip that you’re here.”

  But by then a thought had hit her, and she frowned down at her purse, which, its appearance altered once again, was the same one she’d carried in Macau.

  As a general rule, men did not notice women’s purses. The way he’d focused on it, however briefly, struck her as being just slightly odd.

  Then she remembered how he’d picked it up off the floor and searched it in Macau.

  She remembered him running his hands all over it. He’d paid particular attention to the straps—