An Uncommon Honeymoon

by Susan Mann

  Once all four passengers were clipped in, he took his place in the cockpit.

  God, I love that man, Quinn thought as she watched him punch buttons and confer with Lauren.

  The plane taxied into position, roared down the runway, jumped from the deck, and rocketed into the sky.

  Other than the whine of the jet engines, the cabin was quiet as everyone stared out their windows. As Quinn watched the ground below race away, her thoughts were with those left behind. The good-byes with Klara and Pyotr had been particularly heart-wrenching. Klara’s chin had quivered and giant tears had spilled out and traced down her cheeks. Pyotr had smiled, but his eyes were bright as they said good-bye. Quinn was sure they would never forgive her for leaving them, but the bone-crushing hugs they each gave her assured her she would always be in their hearts, just as they would always be in hers.

  When they reached cruising altitude, Quinn got up and rummaged in the drawers until she found a deck of cards. They took turns playing game after game of Go Fish, Crazy Eights, Speed, gin rummy, and every game Quinn could think of. She considered teaching them Texas Hold’em, but when she noted their enthusiasm waning and fatigue setting in, she put the cards away and suggested sleep. All three curled up in their seats and used their teddy bears as pillows. They conked out in less than five minutes.

  Quinn considered reading, but the cabin lights had been dimmed and she didn’t want to wake their sleeping charges. Deciding to do some work, she retrieved her laptop from her briefcase as stealthily as possible and opened it. Thanks to onboard secure Wi-Fi, she checked her various email accounts. Among the messages from her parents, the library, Nicole, her brother Monroe, and her new sister-in-law Kelsey, there was one from James, including an attachment.

  Curious as to why he would email her something, she clicked it open. Hey, Sexy. Thought you might like to check this out. She blinked. Was he sending her X-rated pictures of himself through their secure agency email accounts? That didn’t seem like a very professional thing to do. Plus, why would he do that when she caught the live show every day? She peeked at the kids. Their eyes were still shut.

  She faced forward again and, before she could change her mind, clicked on the link. A quiet chuckle escaped. To her simultaneous relief and disappointment, no racy photo of James appeared on her screen. He had forwarded the data he’d downloaded from Grigori Yefimov’s cell phone. Events had unfolded at such lightning speed, they hadn’t had a moment free to examine it.

  Now that she had hours to kill and nothing to do, she decided to see exactly what kind of shenanigans Yefimov had been involved in. And if she uncovered any new information regarding the ever-elusive kingpin Konstantin Borovsky, all the better.

  Her Russian had improved immensely during her time in Saint Petersburg, but she was in no way fluent. To make things easier on herself, she used an agency program to translate everything into English.

  She opened the photos file first. Given the fact that Yefimov had run a strip club, his pictures had the potential to be more than a little awkward. It seemed prudent to go through those while the kids slept.

  Her nose wrinkled at the many pictures of Yefimov with his scantily clad employees inside the Bronze Monkey. Whenever she ran across photos that featured Yefimov posing with non-employees, she took extra time to scrutinize each face. One with Rhys Townsend and/or Gibson Honeycutt might help to bust them someday in connection with either drug or human trafficking.

  When she reached the end of the photos, she slumped back in her seat and huffed a breath in disappointment. She hadn’t seen Rhys or Gibson, although there was a well-known CEO of an American tech company who would be getting scrutiny from the FBI in the very near future. Another face was vaguely familiar to her, but at that moment, she couldn’t put her finger on who he was.

  She rubbed her forehead with her fingertips and grappled with the fact she may have stared directly into the face of Konstantin Borovsky and not known it. The only pictures of him were grainy and taken from awkward angles. Undeterred, she sat forward and went back to work. She dumped every photo that included someone with Yefimov into a folder and flagged it for agency analysts to run each through facial recognition.

  Next, she tackled Yefimov’s email. Like with the photos, he had kept hundreds of messages from people she assumed were drug clients, most expressing their eagerness to visit the Bronze Monkey or thanking him afterward. Such innocuous-sounding messages were in no way incriminating. But now that there was proof he’d been running a drug ring and using child laborers, they turned much more sinister. The fact he’d kept them made her think he’d done so either for blackmail purposes or to guarantee his own protection.

  Her breath caught when the name of a sender leapt at her from the screen: Dieter Ziegler. It was the same name as the doctor in Frankfurt from whom she and James had stolen the formula and prototype for a psychotropic drug.

  “Wait a minute,” she whispered aloud. She opened the folder marked for facial recognition and searched for the face that had niggled her earlier. When she found it, she pulled up an agency file and compared the two faces. They were the same. Ziegler and Yefimov had met.

  She returned to Yefimov’s email and read through the thread with Ziegler from several months earlier. The content was unremarkable, in that Ziegler informed Yefimov of his impending visit to Saint Petersburg to attend a pharmaceutical conference. While in town, Ziegler looked forward to visiting the Bronze Monkey. Yefimov’s email to Ziegler in response was predictably solicitous.

  It was the contemporaneous emails between Yefimov and someone only known as KB that had the hairs on the back of Quinn’s neck prickling. Yefimov had informed KB, whom she assumed to be Konstantin Borovsky, of Ziegler’s upcoming visit. Borovsky had told Yefimov to cater to the doctor’s every whim in order to curry favor.

  There was no reason for Ziegler to go to Yefimov and Borovsky to buy drugs. The guy had worked for a pharmaceutical company. The only thing that made sense was that Borovsky wanted to buy drugs from Ziegler. And while it was never expressly indicated in the messages, Quinn surmised Borovsky’s goal was to get his hands on the drug she and James had liberated from Ziegler’s office. She wondered if the agency had already uncovered the link.

  She searched Yefimov’s emails and retrieved only those between he and Borovsky. Most were about business at the Bronze Monkey. The one where Borovsky asked Yefimov to send some product, along with several kids, to his yacht for incoming guests was intriguing. She would ask Mila if she knew anything about a yacht. Given how little the agency knew about Borovsky, acquiring any firsthand knowledge would be akin to unearthing a gold nugget.

  A thrill of satisfaction buzzed through her when she saw Yefimov had sent a follow-up email after Ziegler’s visit to the Bronze Monkey asking if Borovsky had successfully secured the doctor’s product. The curt response from Borovsky had informed him the drug was no longer available.

  She knew why. After she and James had broken into Ziegler’s office, an anonymous tip—from James—had been called in to German authorities alerting them to Ziegler’s illegal drug peddling. He had been arrested soon thereafter. His computer, along with the formula, had been seized.

  She looked up when James emerged from the cockpit and walked toward her. He braced a hand on the top of her seat back and bent forward.

  She closed her computer, lifted her face, and received his warm kiss. “How’s it going?” she asked quietly.

  He didn’t move. Instead, he hovered over her, the gap between their noses mere millimeters. “Good.” He kissed her again. “Better.”

  She smiled up at him when he still didn’t move away.

  The heat behind the next kiss had her melting into her seat.

  “Much better.” He gave her one of those crooked smiles that caused her heart to bounce inside her chest like a rubber ball. After one final kiss, he dropped into the seat across the table from her and stretched his long legs down the aisle. “We’ll be landing in Reykjavik in a
bout thirty minutes. How are you?”

  “Good. I’ve been going through Yefimov’s phone.” One corner of her mouth lifted. “I must confess I thought the email attachment might be something of a more personal nature.”

  His smile was slow and sexy. “Sorry to disappoint. Maybe next time.”

  His smolder completely derailed her. Her mind careened into dangerous territory with visions of her and James doing all kinds of things to each other in the tiny lavatory. She bounced an eyebrow. “Since our joining the Mile High Club would be wildly inappropriate under the circumstances, why don’t I tell you what I found on Yefimov’s phone instead?”

  His voice rumbled from deep in his chest. “That’s probably a good idea.”

  She battled the increasingly vivid thoughts of her and James together by raking her fingers through her hair and saying, “I think Borovsky wanted to buy Dieter Ziegler’s psychotropic drug.”

  His interest clearly piqued, he cocked his head and said, “Really.” James seemed to hang on her every word as she relayed the contents of the correspondence on the matter.

  When she finished, James said, “There’s a list of names that downloaded along with Ziegler’s formula. We assumed they were potential buyers.”

  She sank back, deflated. “So this isn’t new intel at all. You already knew Borovsky wanted to buy Ziegler’s drug.” She frowned and asked, “And why don’t I know about this list?”

  “Well, when the files were first analyzed, you were busy getting married and going on your honeymoon with this stud.” He jerked his thumb at his chest.

  She smirked and rolled her eyes.

  “And I only found out about it while you were neck deep in learning Russian.”

  “Fine. I get why I didn’t hear about it, but what’s the hold-up on using the list to set up a sting to draw them out or something?”

  “Ziegler gave all the buyers code names. We have no idea who they are. In this case, the names are of dead national heroes. We can guess at their nationalities, but don’t have any actual names. There’s Qin Shi Huang for China and Mohammed Ali Jinnah for Pakistan and Omar Mukhtar for Libya.” He shot her a knowing look. “Guess the name he used for his Russian buyer.”

  One name immediately popped into her head. “Alexander Nevsky.”

  “Ding, ding, ding.”

  “Okay, so finding out Borovsky wanted to buy the drug is a big deal after all.” Growing excited, she sat up higher in her seat. “We can use the formula as bait to draw him out. Maybe we can’t bust him for his drug and forced labor racket,” she said, snapping her head toward the slumbering Semenovs, “but we can nab him when he tries to buy Ziegler’s drug.”

  James slouched and rested his head on the back of his seat. With fingers laced and resting on his chest, he considered her. The pressure behind her sternum built as she waited, watching the gears turn in his head. “You and I stole the prototype. We’re right there on the security cameras.”

  “Exactly,” she said as softly as her eagerness would allow. She pitched forward, her words coming in a torrent. “We could come out now and say after we swiped the formula, we called the cops on Ziegler to get him out of the picture. With him in custody, he couldn’t reconstruct it.”

  He pushed himself up, leaned on his elbows, and tilted in until their foreheads nearly touched. “Giving us exclusive control. No competition.”

  “With your contacts in Moscow, I bet we can get a message to Borovsky informing him the formula is for sale again.”

  “We’d have to meet in person. Given his penchant for staying hidden, he might not agree.”

  “We’ll figure something out. If he wants Ziegler’s drug as much as it seems he does, we don’t give him a choice. No meet, no sale.”

  “We need to meet with Meyers about all this as soon as we get back to Langley.” Even in the faint light of the cabin, his eyes gleamed bright blue. “You ready for another adventure, Mrs. Anderson?”

  “With you, Mr. Anderson?” She rolled forward until their lips met in a tender kiss. “Always.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  James, Quinn, and the Semenov kids had flown countless hours and traveled thousands of miles, crossing both ocean and continent. Yet it was the final fifteen miles of their journey up the steep, twisting, narrow ribbon of road perched on the side of a mountain that had Quinn’s stomach flopping like she’d swallowed a live trout.

  James shifted the black SUV that had been waiting for them when they landed in Colorado into a lower gear and cranked the steering wheel. The engine whined as James took on a particularly nasty hairpin turn.

  Quinn blew out a nervous breath and rubbed her sweaty palms over the thighs of her jeans.

  James’s eyes never left the road when he asked, “You okay?”

  “Yeah. At least this road isn’t icy and snow packed like when we drove down from the cabin in Arrowhead. That was scary.”

  He smiled at the memory. “That was a fun drive. I was already crazy about you. By the time we got to the airport, I was a goner.”

  “I was head over heels for you before that.” Her stomach stilled as she recalled the beginning of their first op together. She shot him a sly look. “Admit it. You only fell in love with me because I kept feeding you In-N-Out.”

  “You found me out.” His tone was as dry as the dirt clinging to the hood of the SUV.

  “I thought so,” she said, sounding as wry as he.

  Quinn twisted around and checked on the siblings. Ilya sat between his sisters, the stuffed puffin James had bought him at the Reykjavik airport firmly in his lap. Sasha clutched the jackalope plush, complete with antlers and cottontail, purchased in the gift shop of the hotel in Boulder they’d stayed at the night before.

  Their faces showed no sign of the nerves the perilous road induced in Quinn. In fact, they were fully engaged in watching the scenery roll past. There were times when Quinn’s side of the car came so close to the wall of jagged rocks and boulders, a hand extended out the window would touch them. On the other side of the road, the terrain sloped down so precipitously they drove amongst the tops of pine trees. And still the vehicle climbed.

  Ilya leaned forward and peered out Mila’s window. The sky was an impossible shade of blue. “We’re so high up, we can almost touch the clouds,” he said.

  Mila’s gaze rose. “They look like piles of cotton balls.”

  Quinn turned forward again and looked out. They were just below where mountaintops met sky.

  The knot in her stomach loosened further when terrain on either side of the road flattened and the asphalt gave way to dirt. A dozen mailboxes of various shapes and colors sat in a row along one side of the road. They passed the occasional dirt driveway that disappeared into the forest.

  They emerged from the trees and drove along the edge of an expansive meadow. At its center stood a small pond. Beyond, the Rockies loomed in colored layers: the closest, green; the middle, slate; and the furthest, hazy gray. “Wow,” Quinn breathed.

  The SUV bounced over the rough washboard surface, the tires losing traction and sliding even in the gentlest bends.

  Quinn checked the GPS. “It’s about another quarter mile. The turnoff will be on the right.”

  As they neared the entrance, James slowed the vehicle.

  Most of the fences along the road demarcating property lines were of the rustic split-rail variety. The fence Quinn spotted just beyond the tree line was high and chain-link. Of this, she approved immensely.

  James drove at a snail’s pace as they approached where the map indicated the entrance should be. Quinn spotted the unmarked driveway and pointed. “There it is.”

  He wheeled into the drive and stopped in front of a metal gate. While James put his window down and pressed the button on the intercom, Quinn observed the security cameras installed on tall wooden poles. The people at Elkhorn Ridge Ranch were serious about the protection of their residents.

  James gave their names to the gatekeeper at the other end of
the intercom. After a pause, they were told to drive forward as the gate slid open.

  They drove another quarter mile through a dense forest of pine, birch, and aspen trees before arriving at the compound. The front of the large, ranch-style house made heavy use of wood, rock, and glass. There were two other buildings on the property. One was obviously a barn. The purpose of the other was yet to be determined. A dozen chickens strutted around a pen while five horses munched on grass in a paddock.

  James stopped the SUV at the end of a line of parked cars and shut off the engine. Before Quinn had her seat belt unfastened, Sasha asked, “You’re not going to leave us right away, are you?” The anxiety in her tone cut through Quinn like a knife.

  “No way. We’d like to meet the people here and tour the place.” She craned her neck and smiled. “And maybe pet the horses.” The uncertain faces she beheld brightened at the prospect.

  A small cloud of dust blossomed up around Quinn’s feet when she jumped down from her seat. The air was warm and dry and carried the scents of wood, dried pine needles, and horse. Chickens clucked, birds chirped, bugs and grasshoppers buzzed.

  A woman, her long brown hair in a single braid down her back, hopped down the front steps and strode toward them. “Welcome to Elkhorn Ridge Ranch. My name is Katie,” she said with a welcoming smile. “I’m on staff here and part of the welcoming committee.” In her jeans, boots, and loose, flowing top, she looked like a bohemian cowgirl.

  Quinn shook Katie’s hand. “I’m Quinn, and the beast of burden unloading the bags back there is my husband, James.”

  He poked his head out and waved.

  Katie acknowledged him with a wave of her own before turning her attention to the three kids. “You must be Mila and Sasha and Ilya. We’re glad you’ve come here to be with us for a while. If you need anything, you can always come to me.” The woman exuded genuine warmth and compassion.

  Three heads nodded while gazes were pinned to the ground.

  “Let’s go in the house and put your things in your bedroom. We have new clothes and personal items available, but it looks like you’re pretty well set,” Katie said.