As an agent in the international crimes department of the FSB, Vicktor spent too much time in the Russian casinos and strip clubs, tracking down foreigners trying to run from justice.
Yanna winced. “And people wonder why I don’t want to get married.”
Vicktor shook his head. “I’m not sure these two were married—he’s Russian and the girl looked awfully young. Besides, not every man in the world is like your many dads, Yanna. There might be a few good ones left.”
“Maybe,” Yanna said. “So, what brings you to my lair?” Yanna oversaw the Electronic Surveillance Department, something that had earned her the respect of her fellow FSB agents. But what Vicktor didn’t know was that she’d put in a request to transfer—to Moscow. The idea had been simmering for months, and when Elena announced her potential engagement, well, Yanna took it as a sign.
Besides, with Vicktor engaged, and Roman and Sarai spending every free moment together, she needed to get on with her life also. Alone. And far away from any reminder of the man she could never have. Because, really, why torture herself?
“Gracie called.” Vicktor didn’t smile, and the omission made Yanna uneasy.
“How’s Elena? Did Gracie get her settled in? I really appreci—”
“Elena never got off the plane, Yanna.”
Yanna’s breath hitched. “What?”
“Gracie searched the terminal, then contacted the airline. Elena wasn’t on the flight.”
“But I saw her ticket. I wrote down the numbers myself.” She leaned forward, pulled up her email to Gracie. Then she opened another internet window and typed in the address for Korean Air. The numbers matched. “Yeah, that’s the right flight.”
“She wasn’t on board. Just to be sure, I checked all the incoming Korean flights over the past two days. And then I checked the flights to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.”
Yanna’s chest tightened. “None of them?”
Vicktor sighed, looking past her, worry in his eyes.
Yanna let that information sink in, settle like acid into her bones. “I don’t understand. I saw her get on that plane, Vicktor. I walked her right through passport control, right into the gate area, watched her climb the stairs into the plane. Saw it take off. I’m telling you, she was on that plane.”
Yanna typed in her access code to international passport control information. “Did she clear passport control in Korea? She wasn’t supposed to exit the international side of Incheon Airport—her hotel was right in the airport, and she didn’t have to go through passport control to stay there.” She scanned the screen, scrolled down, and answered her own question. “No.”
The spiral of panic hit, affected her voice, lit her nerves on fire. “What about Katya? Was she on the flight to America?”
“No.”
Yanna pressed her fingers to her temples, her voice low. “Where are they, Vita?”
Vicktor shook his head again, a grim look on his face. Then he stood. “There’s something else, Yanna. The ME called. The Korean embassy faxed over a picture from their morgue. Utuzh needs you to come down to his office and identify a body.”
Yanna’s breath left her, and something inside snapped. She felt a moan deep down within her, but she wouldn’t, couldn’t let it surface. “Ladna,” she said, agreeing to his request in a voice she didn’t recognize. Then she stood and followed Vicktor from the office.
“I just want to know one thing, Bruce. How did Kwan find out about Chet?” David kept his voice low, but his tone meant business, as did the barrel of his Glock 47. He’d been asking himself that for three days as he lay low, not returning to his house or his humanitarian aid company he used as a cover business. Three days of waiting before he could sneak into the Kaohsiung hospital and see for himself that Chet was going to live. Three days to sort through his brain the scenario at the docks and come up with an answer.
Three days before he could track down Bruce, bribe a waiter, and yank his CIA contact away from dinner with a group of loud Americans and meet him in the bathroom. Where, just because he was angry and on edge and not entirely sure who to trust, he met Bruce with a right hook and a knee to his spine.
He drove the Glock’s muzzle into Bruce’s jaw, the other hand he used to tighten his submission hold on Bruce’s hand. He leaned close and leveraged the thinner man onto the grimy bathroom floor. Yeah, like that smell, pal? “How did he find out?”
“Back off, David.”
“Listen, I’m living off the grid, I look and stink like something that crawled out from under a dock, and it’ll take very little for me to simply disappear. I’ve already shot one friend, so it just may become a hot streak if you don’t start talking.”
“You were there. We were alone. What do you think happened?” Bruce tried to wiggle out of David’s grip and earned a moan.
“I think that you or someone inside your department is on Kwan’s payroll.”
“Why would I—”
“And I’m going to find out who.”
The silence behind that statement told David that Bruce heard him, and well. He swallowed. “I know.”
David said nothing.
“Yes, okay, we have a mole. But it’s not me.”
David didn’t move.
“C’mon, Curtiss. You know me well enough to know that I’m a patriot. We’ve worked together for years. I wouldn’t turn over a friend.” He lowered his voice. “And I wouldn’t shoot a friend.”
David flinched, but he let Bruce go. Bruce instantly found his feet. Stepping away from him, David watched the man’s hands in case he delivered a payback swing, but Bruce seemed to prefer the far end of the room.
Bruce smoothed his dress shirt, his office haircut, but his hands shook, just slightly. “Believe me, I’m as sick about Chet as you are.”
“You didn’t shoot him.”
“You had no choice, David. Chet told me what happened. He told me they jumped him, and that it was either him or both of you. You did the right thing.”
David wished he could agree. Wished he didn’t hear Chet’s agony every time he closed his eyes.
If it weren’t for the high drama the sounds of the shooting wrought and the need for immediate egress, Chet would be lying in the Kaohsiung morgue and not in ICU. David had gotten clear and called Taiwanese police in time to save his life. Meanwhile, Kwan’s men vanished, and David went dark. Three days later, David wasn’t sure if he might find a bomb in his scooter’s carburetor, be dropped with a clean shot to his head from some sweet-potato kiosk, or if a Taiwanese call girl might show up on his doorstep as a gift from his new business partners.
The entire thing made him sick, and the smell of raw fish and tofu emanating from the café kitchen only made his stomach roll. He wished that someone would remind him again just why he was trying to take out Kwan. Because lately he had a hard time figuring out which side he was really on.
“I’ve run the scenario through my head a thousand times. The leak had to come from someone inside.”
“We’ll figure it out, David. Only a handful of people knew about this op. Me, my director, the American attaché to Taiwan. And even they didn’t know names. We’ve swept our phones for taps, scanned all the communication going in and out of the embassy. I don’t know, but I promise, I’ll find out.”
David closed his eyes, ran his hands down his face. He sighed. “Now what?”
Bruce stepped to the door, opened it, and glanced outside. When David shanghaied him, Bruce had been dining with two Taiwanese ladies and a small contingency from the American Institute, aka the American embassy in Taiwan. “I’ll talk to Lee. See if he knows anything.”
Lee Quinn, the khaki-wearing, apple-faced man from Iowa who ran the American Institute? The boys on Bruce’s staff called him Q, mocking his ability to even boot up his computer without crashing a system or two. Yeah, he was sure to have insider information.
Bruce closed the door. “Now we wait. Kwan’s men saw that you meant business
and got a taste of the merchandise. So, you let them take that message back to Kwan and let him get hungry.”
“Kwan could be on to me. My cover could be blown.”
“Maybe. Or maybe you’re one step closer to putting a face to the name and bringing down his operation.”
“So another criminal can slide in and fill his spot?”
“Kwan has fingers all the way from Canada to Taiwan and well into America. We bring him in, we cut him a deal and nail his counterpart, the other Serpent. Then we start to dismantle the Twin Serpents from the top down. And it’s not just arms. It’s drugs and human trafficking. It’s twelve-year-old girls from Burma that get to go home. It’s making life safer for the people you care about.” Bruce reached out to David, squeezed his shoulder. “It’s doing the right thing and looking at yourself in the mirror every morning and living with the person you see.” Bruce raised an eyebrow, patted him once, and left.
David let him go, not sure what to believe. Not sure that he could live with the man he saw in the mirror. And not sure who exactly might be on that list of people for whom he fought to make the world a safer place.
No, wait, he knew exactly who topped that list.
Now we wait. David had been a soldier for so long it felt unpatriotic to even question Bruce’s words. But suddenly he longed to jump on a ship and vanish. Head north by northwest to Russia. He felt so close…on the right side of the world, at least.
He waited five minutes then stepped out of the bathroom and cut left, past the kitchen and out the back entrance. Quick-stepping through the alley, he came out onto the sidewalk. Twilight bent shadows around the three-story apartment buildings that lined both sides of the street. The main floors housed businesses, restaurants, grocery stores, and kiosks of clothing and household goods. The families who ran the stores lived on the second and third floors. Toward the edge of the sidewalk, a thousand scooters lined up like dominos, leaving a narrow path between the buildings and machines. He smelled grilled something—chicken or pork—stuck his hands in his pockets, and stalked down the street.
After checking for traffic, he crossed the street and entered an alley to the next street, ducked into an internet café, and headed to the back booth. He sat down, aching for something, someone, to connect with. He’d been sleeping in flophouses for three days, eating strange food from street kiosks, and he’d begun to despise his own smell. All he wanted was a friendly face. Words to remind him that if he might be shot and left for dead in a shipping container, someone somewhere would miss him.
At least he hoped so.
He opened a browser and accessed his chat site. Something sweet and wonderful washed through him when he saw Yanna’s icon lit. He knew he shouldn’t—he’d been deep for so long that to screw up now would be colossally stupid—but, well…
He opened the chat screen and discovered she’d been looking for him.
* * *
Are you there?
* * *
* * *
He waited, watching his cursor blink. Blink. Blink. Blink…now in time with his heartbeat. Disappointment filled his chest. Probably it was wrong, even dangerous for him to long for something so much. But he couldn’t help it. Writing to Yanna had become more to him…well, he couldn’t rightly put it into words.
All he knew was that sitting here staring at his cursor was the one thing that made any sense to him at the moment.
C’mon, Yanna, I’m here. I’m right here.
Sometimes, Vicktor Shubnikov hated his computer. He couldn’t get past the feeling that the woman he loved had been captured inside his clunky machine, and that cosmically, the confounded computer conspired to keep her beyond his reach.
Like today, when it took him an hour to get online and his internet chat program to open. How did his brand-new pc turn into a relic?
The knot inside his chest began to unsnarl as the computer connected to the internet and dialed Gracie’s number. Vicktor pressed a hand against his computer screen as Gracie answered, and her video came up.
It used to scare him, how important their Saturday morning/Friday night online dates had become to him. How he lived for their conversations, their occasional online battleship games. Today, she seemed close enough to touch, breathing and beautiful and he could nearly smell her hair, the green apple shampoo she’d used last time he visited her. He’d said something about her smelling sweet and she’d reacted with a very strange, “I’m not as sweet as you think,” which only put him on edge all night. That, and the fact that when he’d kissed her goodnight, she’d kissed him back with more, well, um, passion, than was healthy for a guy trying to do the right thing.
Not that he wouldn’t—after all, being a changed man and trying to live life God’s way meant following some of the rules He set up for dating. Still, Vicktor knew from experience that once his emotions said go, his brain had a hard time putting on the brakes. Hence, his imitation of cold fish, and why, probably he spent too much time on that trip trying to nail down a wedding date.
“Privyet,” he said into his microphone.
“Hey,” she said back. Her blonde hair had grown almost down below her ears, although tonight she had it tucked behind her ears, and wore the earrings he’d given her. Oddly, although most women he knew wore it long, short hair on Gracie only made her more delicate, sculpted her face, accentuated her beautiful green eyes.
Eyes that seemed troubled, despite the delay in overseas connectivity. “Are you okay?”
She blew out her breath, covered her face with her hands. The camera caught her bedroom behind her, the single bed, the picture of them taken at Canal Park in Duluth the first time he’d visited. His last trip to America had been on business—and he’d only been able to sneak away two days to see Gracie.
Not long enough to spend with the woman who had become what felt like his very breath.
“I don’t know,” she said, and he watched her force a smile. “One of my girls—you know, from the bible study I lead at Calvary Chapel? She’s seventeen and I saw her at the mall last week with a guy who seemed much older.”
“And you have something against older men?” Vicktor gave her a smile, but she didn’t match it.
“I’m a rational, over-eighteen woman who knows what she’s doing. Ina is seventeen and is dying to get married.”
For a fleeting second, Vicktor wished it had been Gracie dying to get married. But regardless of the promises he made her—the most recent ones being that he’d find a way to move to America, restart his life—she refused to put their commitment to ink.
“But that’s not what has me worried. When I went to the airport, I saw him there, with another man.” On the other side of the world, Gracie made a face. “I’m probably just over-reacting. It’s just that this other guy made George look like a seventeen year old geek with pimples. He oozed mafia, from shaved head to his shiny black shoes. I’m worried about her.”
“She’s Russian?” Vicktor’s smile vanished. “And the guy?”
“Yeah. Lives in the Russian community here, I think, although I’ve never seen him around church.”
“What’s his name?”
Gracie looked up, into the camera. “Vicktor, you don’t need to get involved. I know you’re trying to help Yanna find Elena.”
“I want to get involved.” Vicktor minimized her screen to the top of his page and opened up his email. “What’s his name?”
Gracie wore a strange look. “Why do you always do this?”
“Do what?” He typed the address of his Seattle contact.
“That. I can see you typing. You’re going into agent mode. You don’t always have to fix everything. Sometimes I just want you to listen. I’m sure that Ina is fine.”
“Then why are you upset.”
Gracie shook her head. “It’s nothing. I’m…over-reacting. Tell me, has Yanna found Elena?”
Vick
tor minimized his email program. “No. She’s just vanished. We’re tracking down her beau in Seattle—maybe they had alternate plans to meet somewhere else. We’re checking all the flights out of Korea from the time she arrived until now.”
“Yanna must be going crazy.”
“Yanna knows how to hold it together.”
Gracie stared at the camera, said nothing. Even six billion miles across the ocean, her expression had doghouse written all over it.
“What?”
“Nothing. Listen, I gotta go.”
“No, Gracie—wait. I’m sorry, whatever I said, I’m sorry.”
“It’s nothing,” she said, but even he could see her rub her finger from under her eye. Wait—was she crying?
“Dorogaya, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Vicktor,” she said, her voice tight. “I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Wai—”
But she’d already hung up.
Yes, definitely, Vicktor hated his computer.
Anyone who knew his son would know that he’d raised an idiot. All those boarding schools in England and, later, Japan and America. The years of private tutoring, of taking the boy under his wing, and how did his son repay him?
By nearly blowing his cover.
By letting David Curtiss, operative and potential troublemaker, get too close.
Kwan stared out of his office window, to the snarl of scooters and traffic below, watching the trucks spit exhaust. The view in Moscow had been grander—overlooking the old district, with its bold architecture and cobblestone streets. He’d loved to stroll Arbat Street and dine with the ambassador at Spaso House. His time in Mongolia and China had been equally rewarding, and he’d earned an education he couldn’t put a price on. But it had been Hong Kong that changed his life. Where he’d learned exactly who his parents were and why he’d been born. Where for the first time, he understood the nature and sacrifices of love. And where the future had been conceived.
Run to You Page 4