A few minutes later, as chaos erupted around her, Vee found Seryozha, Glock in hand, poised in the door to their sitting room. “There’s a rear exit that may work. I scouted it earlier while you were playing cook.”
“So we can walk straight into an ambush.”
“Better than being here when they start lobbing RPG rounds or tossing firebombs.”
“Oh, shit.” Vee chambered a round in her .38.
“Right. Move it!” He loped off down the corridor, obviously expecting her to follow.
“Seryozha?” Vee planted her feet to the floor, struck by a thought that hadn’t occurred to her before. He charged back, grabbed her by the hand. She resisted. “Seryozha . . . we’ve been assuming they want you dead, but they could have RPG’d us in Manhattan. Boom. Problem solved. Same here—”
“Idiot female, they just haven’t done it yet. Now move! Think later,” he tossed over his shoulder as he dragged her down the corridor past agents scrambling to load every bit of firepower they had.
“They let you explore?” Vee challenged.
“I suspect Grimes okayed it. One of the commando types tagged along, but didn’t stop me.”
“You have a name we didn’t think of, mister. Chutzpah.”
Seryozha flashed a grin as he turned left into a cross corridor. “Keeps me alive.”
“Barely,” Vee grumbled, deliberately reminding him of his brush with death in New York.
He ignored her. “Trust, Valentina. You must develop trust.”
An aggravating bastard, this stranger called Seryozha. She was supposed to be minding him, and he’d seized the lead like a God-given right.
A door materialized out of the gloom at the end of the corridor. Seryozha put a finger to his lips, cautiously turned the knob, and cracked the door open. Dark. Silent. Vee felt a soft sweep of cool air, but not the expected frigid burst of mountain air in late September. With the hand that wasn’t holding Vee’s Glock, Seryozha fished a penlight out of his pocket.
“And where did you get that?” she demanded as the thin beam of a pencil flash swept over whatever was on the other side of the door.
“Kitchen drawer.”
Of course he had.
“It’s a walkway,” he informed her, “completely enclosed, like a tunnel. Leads out to a shed where they keep a snowplow and a four-wheel drive. Standard snow country safety precautions.”
“And you think no one’s covering a shed that size? More likely, we exit into a hail of bullets.”
“There’s a side door that leads directly into the woods.”
“With an AK-47 behind every tree.”
“Don’t forget the Tec-9s, MP-5s, and the RPGs,” Seryozha drawled. “Turning chicken, Valentina?”
“I’m fond of staying alive.” But she followed him into the windowless walkway. Come hell or high water, her job was to stick with him.
Seryozha put his ear to the shed door. Listened. Nothing but an unnatural silence. No footsteps, no voices inside the resort or out. Even the creatures of the forest had gone still, while opposing sides waited, tension mounting. “Too dangerous now,” he whispered. “Must stay in shed ‘til the firefight begins. Makes good cover.”
Vee could have done without the hint of Tokarev.
Motioning her to stay behind him, he inched the door open. The shed, like the wooden tunnel, was windowless and appeared to be empty, except for the two vehicles. On the far right end was a roll-up garage door, and on the opposite side wall, a standard-size door leading outside. Next to it, a large pegboard held an array of tools and a rack of fishing poles. Once upon a time the Frost family had fished together, Vee recalled. At a cottage in Maine, before her father was swallowed up by Washington, and her mother became more interested in defending big-time scumbags than listening to the woes of her teenage children.
Seryozha, gun in one hand, penlight in the other, inspected the interior of the covered snowplow and the 4 x 4 SUV. Empty. Returning to Vee, he flicked the penlight off and shoved it in his pocket. “This is it,” he whispered. “The road at the front of the shed leads to the resort driveway, but the small door opens to a path down to the stream that parallels—”
“Can we make a run for it in the SUV?”
“Instant target. Better we sneak—”
Gunfire exploded the silence around them, the rapid rat-a-tat of automatic weapons trading fire from both sides. Vee’s pulse leaped, then subsided into a sigh. Somehow she’d hoped they’d seen phantoms, that it was all a mistake.
“Listen up,” Seryozha barked. “Out the door and straight into the woods. Stay off the path, but follow it downhill. In case we get separated, follow the stream, and you should end up on the main road. Wait there. I’ll find you.”
He sounded so sure of himself. Just another day in the life of a wiseguy. Or spy. Vee envied his sangfroid. She was a detective, not a secret agent who thrived on a steady diet of derring-do. The gun battle on Thirty-fourth Street had confirmed her fears. The inevitable surge of adrenaline would get her through, but she had no taste for daring danger to do its worst. But she was certain Seryozha did. She could hear the excitement, the sheer bravado beneath his calm, precise instructions. Here was a man who was born to save the world.
“I go first,” he told her. “Is necessary, you understand?” Another touch of Tokarev.
Vee squeezed his arm to show that she understood. If anyone was out there, he would draw their fire, take the bullet. She also knew there was no way to stop him.
He snapped off the penlight, allowed time for their eyes to adjust, then eased open the small side door. “Watch where I go,” he ordered, and disappeared into the darkness. Vee took a deep breath and, zig-zagging with every step, crossed the narrow path and plunged into the woods. She swallowed a gasp as a black shadow loomed over her, a strong hand grabbed hers. Lips touched her ear. “No bullets. We are free, I think.”
Almost. Keeping inside the shelter of the trees, they followed the path downhill. Vee heard the gurgle of the mountain stream before she saw it, a susurration of water flowing over rocks, moss, and swaying water grasses, swirling into deep pools filled with mountain trout. And then the half-moon was glittering on the moving water, a sight worthy of a painting, Vee thought, until her glance moved on, revealing an odd-shaped shadow too wide for a tree, too dense for underbrush. A shadow that only fit a man holding an automatic rifle. Seryozha came to an abrupt halt, reaching a hand back to pull her into position behind him.
Had the man heard them? With gunfire still blasting around the resort, Vee doubted it. Seryozha pointed a finger downward, like a master ordering a dog to stay. Vee scowled, an automatic rejection of his autocratic command, until she realized he had tucked his gun away and produced a long and lethal knife in its place. Obviously, he’d had a good time exploring the kitchen drawers.
Okay . . . she was perfectly happy to let him play commando. Slitting a man’s throat was not high on her to-do list.
Smoke. Vee shifted her gaze from Seryozha’s shadow creeping steadily downhill back toward the resort. Behind the canopy of trees that had not yet lost their leaves . . . a red glow, dancing, twisting, burgeoning across the ink-black sky. Damn! They’d fired the resort.
Shouts echoed, some all too close, some muffled by walls. The automatic weapons fire grew more intense as the bad guys closed the ring. Vee gasped as Seryozha grabbed her arm. “Go!” They plunged downhill along the bank of the stream. The sound of gunfire faded. The drift of smoke billowed around them, the sky grew redder. Twenty minutes later, with the main road in sight, they found shelter behind a granite boulder the size of a pick-up truck and dropped, exhausted, onto a pile of leaves.
“You’re good,” Vee breathed. After pausing to cough up some of the smoke in her lungs, she added, “But it’s my turn. I can handle the next step.”
Time to chalk one up for the female Feeb.
Chapter 11
“So what now?” Jilian Frost asked as she steered her forest green Par
k Service utility vehicle down the mountain, giving a wide berth to the tanker trucks and fire crews streaming toward the glowing red sky behind them.
“Nearest town with a bus stop. Interstate-type,” Vee told her.
“Bus?” Jilian squeaked. “You want a bus when you’ve got me? I mean, Jackson’s the only town around. That’s like flashing a neon sign, saying, ‘Look for me here.’”
Vee turned a fond glance on her younger sister. Jilian had the Frost good looks, but with a rounder, more innocent face than her own, hair closer to brown than blonde. Although the family’s oddball drop-out from the danger game, Jilian had inherited her father’s height and big bones. At a sturdy five-feet-ten, she looked more like she wrestled alligators in the Everglades instead of conducting nature tours at Grand Teton National Park.
As Vee considered her sister’s question, she couldn’t help wonder if Jilian’s Frost genes were stirring. Was the quiet life beginning to pall? “I don’t want to involve you any longer than I have to,” she said.
“I drag myself out of bed, drive up an obscure mountain road, dodging bad guys careening down with the good guys hot on their tails, rescue my sister, and her battered–um, wounded warrior, and you want to be dropped at the nearest bus station? This may be everyday stuff to you, sis, but it’s a year’s worth of excitement for me. Come on, be generous.”
Vee squirmed around for a look at the narrow bench seat behind them, where Seryozha was sprawled, sound asleep. Except for a few winks on the island, rudely interrupted by dreams of Africa, and his brief, transformational snooze on the airplane, he’d been awake for four days. If she hadn’t slept the flight away, she’d be hurting for sleep as much as he.
Vee had made two phone calls from their shelter behind the boulder. The first to Jilian, the second to Jack Frost, ensuring their freedom. This time, not a plea for help—she was giving the orders. Hands-off, she’d told him, have back-up available when needed. Since his best arrangements had failed, he had little choice. The Tokarev operation had a leak as broad as Katrina’s levy breach in the Ninth Ward. Either Homeland Security let Sergei and Vee run free or a large chunk of precious American soil was going to become another Hiroshima.
To clinch the deal, Vee reminded her father of Robert Oppenheimer’s quote from the Bhagavad Gita after viewing the first A-bomb test. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” And the bomb they were after, she’d added for good measure, was a later generation, obsolete now, but infinitely more devastating than the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.
So Daddy had called off the dogs. No heat-seeking helicopters, no credit card surveillance, no attempts to rein them in. She and Seryozha were officially in the wind, with carte blanche to do whatever they had to do.
Not that Vee was naive enough to trust dear old Dad. She was still using the prepaid phone, and she had enough cash to get them far, far away without leaving a credit card trail. She hadn’t wanted to involve Jilian for more than a minimal amount of time, but her sister was, after all, a Frost. She knew the score. “We flew into some place south of here,” Vee said.
“Green River International Spaceport, I kid you not, that’s what they call it. Dirt runway, but you could probably grab a charter. Nearest commercial airport is Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone. How about that?”
“First place they’d look. That’s why I was thinking bus, but Sergei”—Vee nodded toward their sleeping passenger—“seems to think time is of the essence, so a charter sounds good.”
“Got money? I can hit an ATM—”
“We’re fine, thanks. Let’s make it Green River, unless we spot a tail. And I owe you.”
“Those guys were smokin’ when they went by me. Like the hounds of hell were on their tail. And they were. Looked like a van load of bad guys, with two black SUVs chasing behind. Believe me, the bad guys weren’t planning anything beyond getting away.”
“Maybe, Vee grumbled, “but we seem to be operating on Worst Case Scenario lately. One disaster after another.”
“I know better than to ask where you’re going, but if we drive straight to the airport, you should be able to get out before the bad guys have time to re-group.”
“A Frost to the bone.” Vee sighed. “And to think we figured you were the one who was going to escape the family curse.”
“Heard from Jason lately?”
Not the non sequitur it sounded. Their brother Jason had been in the thick of far-out-and-dangerous for nearly ten years now. “Not a word, but what else is new?”
Vee tensed as they approached the place where the narrow mountain road intersected the main road. Should she wake Seryozha? All appeared to be quiet, not a sign of another car. The potential fire-fight on wheels—the good guys versus the bad guys—had been swallowed into the cold Wyoming night. Vee tugged her broad-brimmed ballcap farther over her face, slumped down in her seat.
The main road, contrary to the suddenly busy mountain road, was nearly deserted. Vee’s stomach churned with each passing headlight, but as far as she could tell, no one seemed to care about a Park Service vehicle trundling along in the wee hours of the morning. More importantly, the road behind them was clear. As the half-moon set, the sky above remained clear of all but a brilliant panoply of stars. No small planes, no choppers. Incredible. They were going to make it. Thirty miles south of Jackson, Vee allowed herself to sleep. Daddy might be a tad doubtful at this point, but Jilian was true blue. Green River International Spaceport, here we come.
Vee’s ballcap was even lower when she stood in line for tickets at the airport in Omaha, doing her best to avoid face recognition software. Daddy had promised to give them space, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t order his people to keep track of her if they could. To ensure his cooperation, she’d had to admit they were on to something, that Sergei’s memory was coming back. A memory that only functioned when he was operating as a wild card, free as the wind. Even though that wind flirted with the boundaries of Limbo, the black void on the edge of Hell.
While Vee stood in line, Sergei was lingering in the Men’s Room. Not even the floppy canvas hat, which had somehow survived the last few days—probably because his ego wouldn’t let his bald head, bandages, and swollen face be seen without it—would be sufficient disguise. More likely, the canvas hat would single him out like a follow-spot on a theatrical star.
Vee made a mental note to buy him a new hat. Fortunately, the brains under the damn hat seemed to be snapping into high gear. When she woke him after the long drive to Green River, he had come to life instantly, approved her plan to charter a plane with a curt nod, then took charge of the arrangements as if he had a blueprint laid out before him. He’d even demanded a share of Vee’s wad of hundreds before talking to the charter pilot. After all, a man could not turn to his female companion and ask her for money at the critical moment.
Vee allowed him his pride. She could tolerate the role of little woman, if that’s what it took to keep him happy. At least for a while. Only when they were folded together in the rear seat of the Cessna did Vee lean close to Seryozha’s ear to ask where they were going.
Omaha? What was in Omaha?
Good connections to almost anywhere, he’d told her. And that was it, allowing her to seethe in silence all the way across the states of Wyoming and Nebraska.
And now she was buying two tickets to Philadelphia, which, knowing Seryozha, was unlikely to be their final destination. Though, hopefully, the flight from Omaha to Philly would be long enough for her catch forty winks. The world around her was turning into little more than a buzz of voices. A foggy blur where she could get by only by concentrating on the task directly ahead.
She had to remember something besides buying tickets . . .
Hat. A new hat for Seryozha. Vee tucked the two boarding passes into an inside pocket of her leather jacket, scanning the kiosks as she walked back toward the Men’s Room. Food, magazines, books, gift shop . . . something red caught her eye. Cornhusker ballcaps, a whole pile of them.
Vee rummaged through the bin until she found a black one, with nothing more than a large red N on the front. The brim was broad, however. Just the thing.
She slipped the plastic bag with the ballcap to Sergei, who promptly ducked back into the restroom, returning to the concourse a properly attired fan of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. He’d removed the bandage from his cheek, leaving the vivid red scar to the shadows of the oversize cap brim. Being the master spy she suspected he was, he’d also assumed a new persona, the bearing of the man who had scolded Walt Tingley, the man who had chartered a plane in Green River. She suspected Nick the Invalid had gone the way of the floppy canvas hat.
Vee heaved a sigh. Nick, she liked. Sergei—call me Seryozha—tended to steal her breath away.
“Cheapest flight we could get, don’t cha know?” Sergei winked at the car rental agent at Philadelphia International Airport. “Told the missus we could drive the rest of the way. Visiting the in-laws in Red Bank.” He leaned close to the male agent. “Not really anxious to get there fast, now am I?”
The agent grinned right back, not even raising his brow as Seryozha disgorged a stack of hundreds from his pocket. “With the economy in the tank,” he confided to the man behind the counter, “I’m doing my bit to keep debt down. Pay as you go, that’s my motto.”
“Sign here, Mr. Wilson.” The agent handed over the car keys. “Silver Taurus, third row on the right.”
“You drive,” Vee said as they fastened their seat belts. “I can barely keep my eyes open.”
“You had two hours on the plane.”
“Making about four hours in the last four days.”
“Is okay,” he assured her, at his patronizing best. “I planned to drive anyway.”
“Good thing, since I still don’t know where we’re going,” Vee ground out, her patience teetering on the brink of explosion.
“Atlantic City.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not at all. Best place to meet someone is in the middle of a crowd. A big crowd, with lots of security.”
Limbo Man Page 11