Limbo Man

by Blair Bancroft

  Cade looked ready to shoot everyone in sight on general principles. “Your leak’s become a waterfall,” he growled.

  “Not my leak. Yours.”

  Cade’s mouth snapped shut. He nodded. “Homeland Security. Maybe in Frost’s own office.”

  Well, shit. If he lived through this, Sergei made a mental note to apologize to Wade Tingley.

  “Is not so bad,” Arkadi Petrovski interjected, switching to English. “We were going to find and kill the bastard anyway. Now we do it sooner.” His three bodyguards murmured their strong approval.

  “I hope I am not interrupting anything,” a strong baritone said from behind Sergei’s back. “May I join the hunt?”

  Petrovski, who had had a full view of his elder nephew’s approach, smiled his satisfaction. Zdrasvityeh, Misha! We can use you.”

  “Isn’t this where we say we’re going to the mattresses?” Cade drawled.

  “Ah, no!” Petrovski told him. “No hiding on mattresses. We go to Brighton Beach and take Boris Leonov apart in little pieces. And then, is okay to feed him to the fishes.”

  “What about Vee?” Sergei asked. “You talk big, uncle, but as long as she’s a hostage, we can’t make a move.”

  Arkadi patted him on the hand. “You think I do not have informants. In Brighton Beach of all places? First we rescue your woman, then we cut Leonov in little pieces. Karasho?”

  “Don’t forget your other army,” Cade Doucette added. “We may not be able to break the Brighton Beach wall of silence, but we sure as hell can do a lot once you tell us where to go.”

  For the first time Sergei regarded Doucette with something less than hostility. He pushed back his chair, nodded to his brother. “Let’s go. We’ll check out the condo while Arkadi does his magic discovery act.”

  The three men charged out of the restaurant, leaving Petrovski and his men to a gloom at odds with the expressions they’d shown to the Zhukov brothers and Cade Doucette. Vanya Gronski eyed his boss with wary concern. “He will never forgive you,” he told Arkadi, “if anything happens to her.”

  “He will kill me,” Petrovski agreed.

  “So we must do as you said, rescue her first.”

  “Too difficult. She is expendable.”

  “Not to Seryozha.”

  “Ah, da, but is more important Leonov is dead than the girl alive.”

  “Then you will have to kill them both,” Vanya warned. “Misha, maybe yes, maybe no. He has a family he would do almost anything to protect. But I think you are forgetting mama,” he added softly.

  “Govnó!” Petrovski groaned.

  Vee had never been a nonentity before. Helplessness came as a shock. Hand-cuffed to nothing more substantial than a wooden kitchen chair, she was being conspicuously ignored by the three armed men in the room. As if she, Special Agent Valentina Frost, was incapable of causing them a moment’s trouble.

  Unfortunately, appalling as the thought was, it was all too true. Even if she moved at the speed of light, she couldn’t get the damn chair up high enough to do any damage before they’d be on her, or shooting her full of holes. So here she sat, a hostage. For what?

  To control Sergei? But how would Leonov—surely this was Leonov’s work?—know Sergei cared enough about her for his ploy to work?

  Did Sergei care enough?

  Maybe. Probably. Oh, shit, this was a detour they didn’t need.

  Vee scanned the room, looking for any clue to where she was. An upscale apartment several stories up. Probably in Leonov’s known lair of Brighton Beach, the heart of Russia in the long-time immigrant incubator of Brooklyn. During her kidnapping the guards had given her orders in English, but here, among themselves, they spoke only Russian. They had dragged the kitchen chair into a living room that overflowed with knick-knacks that shouted of a female touch. But not the touches of ostentatious wealth she’d expect from a man of Leonov’s stature, so this was, perhaps, the apartment of one of his lieutenants.

  Vee shivered as the doorbell rang, reminding her how easily she had been fooled by the false Homeland Security badges. She heard voices in the foyer. Respectful. The three armed guards snapped to attention as a slightly older man entered the room. Vee went very still; goosebumps formed on her arms. The man had to be Leonov, but he wasn’t at all what she’d expected. She’d caught a glimpse of Arkadi Petrovski in Atlantic City. Almost a caricature of a mob boss—burly, well-dressed but always a bit rumpled, with a round but hard face that had gone to jowls and eyes that broadcast a false joviality. This man . . .

  This man was closer to Vladimir Putin than a mob boss. Anywhere from late forties to mid-fifties. Wiry, fit, attractive, with a face that showed few seams from either sins or smiles. Dressed in a charcoal suit with a white tie, Leonov had straight hair the brown of a Russian bear and blue eyes close to the shade of her own. Eyes, however, that were chilled to a temperature not even a Frost could achieve. A dangerous man. But she already knew that.

  He strolled toward her, returning her once-over with the appreciation of a connoisseur. With her free hand Vee clamped her fingers around the edge of the chairseat. Any support in a storm. She lifted her chin, projecting her best salvo of silent defiance.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” Boris Leonov inquired softly.

  Chapter 23

  “Hostage?” Vee ventured. “But it won’t do you a bit of good. I’m just the Fed Homeland Security put on Tokarev when he left the hospital. No doubt he’s glad to be rid of me.”

  “He took you to Russia and Iran because he sold out to the Americans.” Hard. Uncompromising.

  Vee re-arranged her belligerent stance, draping herself over the chair, adjusting her facial features to those of a woman well aware of her gift of beauty. “He took me because it pleased him,” she murmured in softer, huskier tones. “I was handy. That doesn’t mean he gives a damn what happens to me now that I’ve shared his bed a time or two.”

  “Well done, Ms Frost.” Leonov favored her with a nod of approval. “An excellent bluff. Your government provides first class bait for its traps. A woman of beauty and brains. Almost, you tempt me to sample the bait for myself. But I fear we are short of time and, unfortunately, I do not believe you.” The rebellious capo offered her his cell phone. “Call your lover. He comes here, he tells us what we wish to know, and you go free. A simple exchange.”

  Exchange. Information or bodies? “And Sergei goes free after he talks?”

  Leonov almost smiled. “You disappoint me, my dear. Your sentiments are showing. Surely a Fed understands the rules better than that.”

  She could refuse to call Sergei and die here in this overfurnished apartment with a triptych staring at her from an étagère in the corner, or she could call Sergei and let him figure a way out of this latest disaster. The choice wasn’t exactly difficult. The moment for self-immolation had not yet arrived. Leonov was merely one more obstacle on the path to finding the bombs. Then, and only then, would she have to face the possibility of the ultimate sacrifice. Now was too soon. Vee took the cell phone and punched in the number for Seryozha’s satellite phone. Shit! The line was busy.

  Sergei had spent the last hour calling all of Tokarev’s contacts in greater New York. From Brighton Beach to Westchester, Harlem to Wall Street. All he’d discovered was that a great many rumors had been flying around town, mostly of his demise. In some of his former cohorts, loyalty wavered in direct proportion to his alleged loss of power. Others vowed they would help if they could, but the underworld grapevine was strangely silent. Nothing on Leonov, nothing on a kidnapped female.

  Sergei put down the phone and wriggled his fingers to restore circulation. Rubbing his forehead with his other hand, he let out a long breath. The only plus for the day was Misha’s assurance that he’d brought Kiril Mikoyan with him on his charter flight from Moscow. The bomb tech was safely stashed away, ready for his role if their charade got past the roadblock of Boris Leonov.

  “Nothing?” Misha asked. Cade Doucette glowered
in the background, obviously wondering what he was doing in an Upper East Side condo with two Russians, one a major in the GRU.

  The phone jumped under Sergei’s hand, its ring slicing through the acrid smell of defeat permeating the room. Re-energized, he swung it up to his ear. Perhaps one of his contacts was calling back. “Tokarev.”

  “Damn you, Seryozha. I’ve been trying to get you for the past fifteen minutes.”

  Sergei waved wildly to Misha and Cade, even as he breathed a choked, “Vee?” into the phone.

  Tersely, she outlined Leonov’s conditions. The man himself came on the line, giving directions. Sergei knew the classic rules for exchanges. Public place, lots of people around, no chance for a double-cross. One by one, Leonov rejected his counter-proposals. Typical boss, Sergei acknowledged grudgingly—his way or the highway. And he wouldn’t put it past Leonov to bargain with one part of Vee at a time. Beneath the elegant façade Boris Leonov was a monster.

  But Sergei Tokarev was also a capo. And he’d just notified the most reliable of his own men that he was still alive. He was not without power. Time to use it.

  His men, he reminded himself, were essentially Arkadi Petrovski’s men. If push came to shove, which way would they bounce? A grim smile curled Sergei’s lips. As far as Leonov was concerned, there was only one way. Time for the boss wannabe to go. Which meant that when Sergei Tokarev spoke, he had about ninety percent of the East Coast Organizatsiya behind him.

  Karasho!

  Vee watched closely as Boris Leonov spoke to Sergei on the phone, puzzled at first and then fascinated as the mob captain blustered, backed off, flared once again into belligerence . . . faded . . . argued . . . compromised.

  Compromise? Leonov? That surely hadn’t gone down well.

  Boris Leonov tucked his phone inside his charcoal suit jacket. He turned to Vee, his blue eyes pits of mean and nasty. “Tokarev says you mean nothing to him,” he told her. “But he is a gentleman and pays his debts, even if you were not the best of his many women.” The rebel capo offered a condescending nod. “He will talk compromise if I spare your life.”

  Compromise was a long step up from a hostage exchange. Go, Seryozha, go!

  Leonov visibly gathered himself, restoring the mob captain image that had wilted under the final moments of his phone conversation. “Tokarev has made it clear that he holds the best cards,” Leonov admitted. “The isotope and the technician. He proposes we work out an arrangement where we both profit from this business. It is not what I planned, but we are both pragmatists, no? To earn our astronomical fee, we must work together. I do not have to like it to agree to it,” he added so softly only Vee could hear.

  Vee tucked away her unrealistic vision of a Wild West, gun-blazing rescue. Way too risky. And, besides, she knew Sergei well enough to believe he could talk his way out of anything “He’s coming here then?”she asked with wide-eyed innocence.

  “To the pavilion in the courtyard.”

  “Ah.” In the open. Not umpteen floors up in a guaranteed trap. Maybe, just maybe . . . “I have a question,” Vee said. Leonov, eyes still sparking from Sergei’s successful realignment of his plans, regarded her with the full force of a frustrated scowl. “Why,” she asked, “would you want to become the most hunted man in the world, more hated than Osama Bin Laden? Surely you’re a man who likes the good life, enjoying what money can buy. I mean, it takes a true fanatic to be willing to survive in a cold, damp cave in the mountains with a hundred million dollar price on your head.”

  “There are many places in the world that are not cold and damp,” Leonov returned with a sneer.

  “But not many that are inaccessible to Special Forces. Maybe you’re considering a cozy life in a submersible in the Marianas Trench? Re-supply could be a bitch.”

  “Govienka!” He slapped her hard. Even as her head rang, Vee could feel each stinging red fingerprint in her gut as well as on her face. But she couldn’t allow the insult to hurt. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t called herself whore more than a few times over the last two weeks.

  “Come on, Leonov,” she taunted. “You didn’t really think you could blow up a couple of American cities and go about business as usual?”

  Somehow he managed to speak past visibly clenched teeth. “The Brotherhood does not blow up cities. I am businessman. I sell arms and expertise. No caves for Boris Leonov.”

  Vee groaned, shook her head. “You sound just like Sergei. Mad, the pair of you. There’s no way your own people, let alone Homeland Security, are going to let you live. I abso-fucking-lutely guarantee it. You’re a dead man. Or a candidate for that cold, dark cave at the end of the earth.”

  “One hour,” Boris Leonov retorted, “and we will see if your lover keeps his word. Or if he runs as fast as he can toward his isotopes and his bomb expert, as Petrovski has undoubtedly ordered him to do. Pretty little American whores are so insignificant they are not worth the price of a bullet or the time it takes to pull the trigger. As your quaint American idiom says, Petrovski has bigger fish to fry. He will abandon you to your fate.”

  As Sergei Tokarev might, Vee acknowledged. But not Sergei Zhukov, who had an entirely different agenda from anything Leonov might picture in his worst nightmare. Seryozha would come for her, if only because he had to settle with Leonov before his snare could begin to close around the terrorist bombs. So . . . guess her kidnapping was a good thing. Leonov’s biggest mistake to date.

  Hopefully.

  “How the hell did you get him to agree?” Cade Doucette demanded.

  Sergei kept his gaze on his Sig-Sauer as he checked the clip. “He can’t complete the deal without me. He can’t bluff his way over the tightrope much longer. Without me he’s done.”

  “And when he is done with you, he will kill you,” Misha pointed out.

  “First, we get Vee back. Then we worry about the rest.” Sergei chambered a round.

  “Right!” Cade asserted, bouncing a triumphant glare off the GRU major.

  “You will pardon me,” Misha retorted, his tone knife-edged with sarcasm, “if I also care what happens to my brother. And the bombs.”

  “Not to worry,” Sergei said in his best Tokarev accent. “I am like cat with nine lives. So far I lose only one of them.”

  “You need to take Leonov out,” Misha insisted. “You cannot deal with him. He is too dangerous.”

  “You think?” Sergei Zhukov laughed in his older brother’s face. “I am hoping dear Uncle Arkadi will do it for me. Why do you think I called him?”

  “Because you needed his firepower.” Not a question.

  A pregnant pause before Sergei revealed where his thoughts were straying. “Perhaps the biggest chance I take is trusting Arkadi to execute the right man.”

  Misha breathed a Russian obscenity. “Uncle Arkadi? Is not possible.”

  “I think . . . I am almost certain I have become an inconvenience. Someone who has flirted with the side of the angels and been seduced, his usefulness lost. Also, a man who knows where too many bones are buried.”

  “But Leonov is his rival, not you. Arkadi knows you have no interest in his job.”

  “Yet no one would be surprised if there was collateral damage.”

  “Well, hell,” Cade said into the sudden silence. “So you’re walking up to that damn pavilion expecting to take fire from two different directions?”

  “With me dead, no one makes money. As far as Leonov’s concerned, I admit I am counting on that. As for Arkadi”—Sergei tilted his hand in a classic maybe-yes, maybe-no.

  “Merde!”

  A knock on the condo door announced the arrival of three titanium vests. Silently, the three mismatched warriors put them on.

  A good portion of the section of Brooklyn known as Brighton Beach is called Little Odessa. Cyrillic characters mark the signs on stores and restaurants. Some of the large influx of Russian immigrants live in modest frame houses; the more prosperous, in beachfront condominium complexes, where conversations in the hallways a
nd around the pool are rich with the accents of Mother Russia.

  As Vee, Leonov, and his three bodyguards walked the long corridor that led to the courtyard in the center of the complex, she caught the varying inflections of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Siberia. Wary gazes flashed toward them, then quickly away. Everyone recognized Leonov. Every last person would be careful to mind his or her own business.

  Their small group paused for a moment in the outside doorway, inspecting the wide expanse of green grass, punctuated by a fenced pool, tasteful shrubs and trees, numerous benches, and a small, white-columned pavilion. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Though too chilly for swimming, there were a couple of sunbathers stretched out on wooden lounge chairs. Several mothers were watching their children play.

  All quiet on Brighton Beach. No one waited in the pavilion, but how many of Leonov’s men lined the windows overlooking the courtyard, Vee wondered. Easy enough for Leonov, a man on his own turf, to be prepared in half an hour. But for Seryozha? Was this his home turf as well? Had he called Homeland Security? Or was he using Uncle Arkadi as backup? Surely Cade had phoned Home. We who are about to die are making jokes.

  How could she even think a joke at a time like this? Without humor I would go mad. Yeah, right. She’d have to discuss that with Seryozha if they ever got out of this mess.

  The three guards formed a cordon around them. Leonov tightened his grip on her arm, and they moved together into the open, striding toward the pavilion. Short of taking them all out with the sweep of an AK-47, there was little an adversary could do. And the pavilion’s roof protected Leonov from a sniper from above. So not a bad choice for the exchange.

  Seryozha had to have a plan, Vee thought. He wouldn’t actually go through with the exchange.

  Yes, he would. If it meant bluffing his way to the bombs. She was fortunate his obsession happened to coincide with getting her away from Leonov while inserting himself back into the center of the vortex.