Ekaterina (Heirs of Anton)

by Warren, Susan May

  He’d protected her from bullets, and she had his blood smeared all over her hands. She’d told him everything. . .he knew what this little jaunt to Russia meant to her. Didn’t that bond them into some sort of uncanny relationship?

  Kat swiped the tears and, conjuring up bravery, lifted her chin. It would help if he would wipe that guilty, concerned expression off his face, the one that told her yes, he remembered every second of their relationship. It did nothing but fertilize all her budding emotions. “Don’t make me leave. Not yet. I need to know more.” Her voice betrayed her, and made her want to wince.

  He moved closer, his gaze holding hers, his hand moving up to trace the scrape on her chin. He flicked a glance at his partner, then back. He was so close she could smell the day’s lingering cologne. “And what will you do, Kat? The key’s gone. Timofea is dead. You’ve run out of leads.”

  “I still have you.” Where did that idiotic statement come from? She cringed, shocked that it escaped from her mouth. But she was thinking it. The minute she saw herself in his eyes, she’d begun to wonder. Vadeem could help her. Didn’t the KGB keep a file on every citizen in the country? Yes, Captain Vadeem Spasonov of the FSB could help her. He could dig around for her, find out who Timofea was, maybe even find her grandmother, Magda’s, history. She had family in Russia. She knew it deep in her bones. And Vadeem held the key to unlock that past. “God sent me you,” she repeated, and tightened her gaze on him. She didn’t want to think about the way she’d just opened up her chest for him to rip out her heart, along with her dreams. Please, Vadeem, don’t betray me! “You can help me.”

  His eyes widened and something desperate filled his eyes. She’d hit a soft spot and, as she watched, his past roared up and consumed him whole. In his gaze, she saw fear, a painful, vulnerable, childlike fear that made her lips part and her mouth go dry. Then he blinked, and it was gone. In its place, the cold glitter of resolve. She felt as if a door had slammed on her face.

  “No,” he said quietly. “I can’t.”

  -

  Vadeem paced the hotel corridor, feeling dead on his feet. But he’d seen Kat’s intentions in her eyes, and he couldn’t let her run.

  She’d slammed the door in his face when he told her he’d be watching her. All night. Camped outside in the hallway. He didn’t like what that information did to her beautiful face, how it crumbled as her hopes shattered.

  He steeled his heart to it. He had to. He had a job to do and right now Grazovich could be lurking down the hall, waiting to finish her off.

  Of course, the thief would have to be a phantom to do it, because, according to Vadeem’s last phone call, Grazovich had spent the day exploring Pskov like a tourist, and was, at this moment, passed out in his bed, cradling a liter of Absolut in one arm and a café waitress in the other.

  So, who had mugged them?

  Vadeem rubbed his head. He probably needed a stitch or two, but head wounds always bled worse than they were. He’d sucked down the two aspirins Kat had fished out of that backpack of hers, which seemed to contain everything.

  Everything but answers.

  She’d nearly wrung him out with her heart-wrenching plea. “I have you.” Oh, did he wish that. Over the past twelve hours, Kat’s smile had awakened a part of him he’d thought dead. Or, perhaps, he’d only wished dead. Why did she have to cradle him in her arms, drown him with a look of authentic concern? It resurrected all the dangerous emotions he thought he’d successfully executed so long ago.

  He’d do well to veer a wide course around the enticing Kat Moore package. Twenty-four hours in her presence had him contemplating a career change. Personal Bodyguard. Escorting her through Russia like a tour guide and helping her dig up answers didn’t sound like such a terrible job choice. It didn’t help that she’d struck truth with her plea. He did have the resources to unlock her past. A few keystrokes and he could access files that still rang fear in the hearts of the general population.

  “God sent me you.” He didn’t even want to think about that statement. God. Back in his life. Fiddling with his circumstances. Sending him a beautiful, kind woman—like some sort of taunt? No, thank you. God had mixed up a potent brew in Kat Moore, and Vadeem had been sucked right in by her beautiful eyes, thick with need, her hand gripping his jacket, the same hand that had felt his heart beat. She even smelled good after her harrowing encounter. Her perfume now lingered on his jacket and jumbled his concentration. Her ragged plea nearly forced a husky Yes out of his mouth.

  But he had dredged up a negative reply, and felt like a snake for doing it.

  She needed him. How long had it been since he’d heard that from someone? He didn’t want to dare guess. She. Needed. Him.

  No, she needed his position. His connections. Somehow, he hung onto that reality until the cop in him caught up. God hadn’t sent him to Kat, or vice versa. Kat simply knew how to go straight for a man’s jugular.

  That thought had given him the strength to lock her in her hotel room, despite her tears.

  That thought had him camped out in the hallway, his eyes glued to her door, hoping she was feeling as rotten as he was, wishing they could instead be enjoying their last night dividing the spoils of a bag of M&M’s.

  Vadeem leaned his head against the wall, slid down onto his heels, and stared at the ceiling. Paint, nearly an inch thick, ran in cracks up the Stalin-era hotel walls. A mud brown carpet tunneled the length of the hall, and on the far end, he could just make out the night clerk sitting at her desk, her head braced on her hand, tapping her pen against the notebook she kept to record the guests’ activities. She’d be writing a big fat nothing for Kat Moore tonight.

  Not that an impulse to take Kat out on the town and show her a taste of midnight Moscow didn’t tug at him while he escorted her to the Rossia Hotel. St. Basil’s Cathedral sparkled like a Christmas tree; gold, red, and green cupolas brilliant as they pushed against the magenta backdrop of the heavens. Beyond that flowed the Volga, her dimples sparkling as she rippled south under the stars. They could walk along the Kremlin wall, ponder a moment at the eternal flame, where the fire would flicker in Kat’s eyes and turn her hair bronze. Maybe she’d tell him about her life in America, and how she happened to have Russian ancestry and speak his language. Perhaps he’d shed a few of his own stories, tame them down, of course, and omit most of the last twelve years, but he’d had some scrapes in the orphanage that might push laughter through those expressive, sometimes pouty, lips.

  Then, they’d cross the street to the new underground mall, where he could treat her to some rigatoni at Sergio’s or sit and listen to the streams of Chopin as they rolled off the grand piano in the mezzanine. Better yet, maybe the Bolshoi would have a performance of Swan Lake in season. . .

  There he went, thinking like a tour guide again.

  The only tour he was going to give her was a very non-scenic drive to Sheremetova 2 Airport.

  And he could bet there’d be no laughter on that excursion.

  Sometimes he hated his job. He rubbed a finger and thumb into his eyes, seeing stars but hoping the pain might keep him awake long enough to detect if Kat Moore had any more escape attempts on her evening agenda.

  -

  Oh, this was perfect. Why hadn’t he thought of it sooner? Ilyitch sat down at his computer, punched in two passwords, and, in an instant, he was in. What was her full name? Ekaterina Hope Moore. He typed it in carefully, mouthing the letters.

  A copy of her passport popped up on the screen. He read through it, and her visa, as well as the visa application notes, grimacing. This girl had the life of a librarian. Adoption coordinator? Ah, the selling of children. Sure, everyone’s a capitalist. Why hadn’t he thought of that?

  He typed in the name of her mother, listed on the birth certificate. Hope Moore. Nothing in the state computers. A big blank. Hope Neumann Moore. Again, zero. He backed up to the younger Moore’s passport information. Contact: Edward Neumann, grandfather.

  He typed in the name.


  Score. Edward Neumann’s file loaded for three minutes. Ilyitch considered getting a cup of tea while he read the file, obviously scanned into the system not long ago from some extremely ancient and secure vault. He was shocked it had been so easy to access.

  They probably thought the spy was dead.

  And they certainly didn’t count on his granddaughter returning to the scene of the crime.

  But how was the girl linked to Anton Klassen?

  He scrolled down, too absorbed to cut away for a cup of tea, not needing the caffeine rush anyway. This treasure hunt just got interesting.

  He tapped the screen over the name of the Pskov monastery where it appeared in Neumann’s file. “So that’s how Timofea knew the girl.” He’d have to see what Grazovich’s monk had dug up.

  Hopefully it matched this ancient KGB file.

  Then, there it was, the answer, written in digital black and white. He ran a thumb under the name. Marina Antonova Shubina, maiden name, Klassen.

  He moved the file into the recycle basket, sat back and wove his fingers together, cupped his hands behind his head. He couldn’t let Kat Moore leave Russia. She’d just become their link to a tidy, more than he could count, fortune.

  -

  Kat paced the room. Devious leech that he was, Captain Vadeem Spasonov was out there. She knew it. He had a heart of stone in his chest. He was kicking her out of Russia in the morning, despite her pleas. Despite their bond. Despite the fact that he knew she would never find out who she was or what family she might have in Russia.

  She’d seen the icy glaze in his eyes. He cared about nothing except tracking down this Grazovich fellow, something she just knew, deep in her bones, had nothing to do with her, or that incredibly kind and helpful angel-man, Professor Taynov. But steel-hearted Vadeem had closed off her pleas with an in-your-face nyet.

  She’d have to find a way around the pit bull out in the hall.

  She buried her face in her hands. “Oh Lord, now what?” Perhaps the Almighty had forgotten she was floundering down here like a dazed tuna, but she needed Him now, more than air. She had the strangest feeling, however, that when she felt the farthest from God, He was closest. “Please Lord. What do I do now? This can’t be the end, can it? You didn’t tell Timofea to send me that key just so that it could end up in the hands of a thief, did you?”

  Fulfill the promise.

  Brother Papov’s solemn voice pulsed in her thoughts.

  What promise?

  Grandfather would know about Timofea. Didn’t the father-monk say that the monastery had once been a partisan headquarters? She rubbed her face with her hands. And Grandfather had worked with partisans. A distant memory flooded back. Crystallized. It was right after her parents’ accident.

  “I have to write a report, Grandfather, on the war.” Kat had approached him, on the porch, where he sat, staring at the sunset. Grandfather always loved the sunset and, for a long moment, he didn’t acknowledge her presence. Just stood there, hands tucked into his pockets, watching the sun bleed out over the western sky.

  The expression on his face told her now was not the time. It was Magda’s time, perhaps. The woman Grandfather loved. The grandmother who wasn’t buried in the family plot.

  Kat remembered how she’d made to move away, back inside the farmhouse.

  “What war, Kat?”

  “Why, World War II, Grandfather. Your war.”

  He’d turned, and she’d seen something of the past flicker in his eyes. “It wasn’t my war. I simply assisted the partisans as they fought for their freedom.”

  “Partisans?” He’d pique her interest. She’d read about the resistance in France, Belgium, and Denmark. “Were you in the French Resistance?” Later, the thought consumed her and she spent hours at the Schenectady library, digging up history.

  But he’d laughed at her question. “No, I couldn’t speak French to save my life. I speak Polish. And Russian. I helped the partisans in what you’d call the Eastern Bloc countries.”

  “Is that where you met Magda?”

  In the years hence, she never forgot his expression. He’d looked at her with passion simmering in his eyes, not angry, but alive, so alive it made her skin prickle.

  Then, in a flash, it was gone. Doused. He returned to the sunset, now merely a whimper on the horizon.

  Kat had tiptoed back into the house.

  Fulfill the promise.

  It was time for Grandfather to fulfill a few promises. Enough dodging the past and kicking her out of the family secrets. She wanted to know how he knew Timofea and why someone had ripped out a chunk of her hair to get a key that looked like it opened a crypt. She wanted to know who Magda was, and why Grandfather never talked about her. She wanted to know about the Medal of Honor, and the ancient yellow picture, still safe, thank the Lord, in her Bible. Most of all, she wanted a glimpse behind his secrets.

  She checked her watch. Moscow, 3 a.m. Friday morning. It would be 6 p.m. Wednesday in Schenectady. He would just be finishing dinner. She sat down on the ancient squeaky bed and pulled the telephone on her lap. Grandfather, please understand.

  The operator gave her a line outside the country, and she dialed the number on the rotary phone, her finger nearly missing the holes from the tremor of her hand. He wasn’t going to like this.

  But if anyone could get her out of this mess, Grandfather could. He had secrets tucked away. Powerful secrets. Such as a clandestine relationship with an organization that took him on trips outside Upstate New York for agonizingly long periods of time. Trips that never produced souvenirs or postcards. Trips where he simply vanished one day, then reappeared three weeks, or two months, later, whistling as he pitched hay on the Neumann family farm in Schenectady, New York. Mama always stayed behind, in the tender and watchful care of Grape-Granny Neumann, the family matriarch, and Kat’s great grandmother.

  Kat had grown up thinking such disappearances were a part of Grandfather’s mystic. It wasn’t until she was eight that she realized perhaps, someday, he would never return.

  She’d never forget Grape-Granny walking them down a long hallway, gripping Kat’s hand in a vice. Grape-Granny had a wide, farmer’s face, tanned and deeply lined, and serious brown eyes that rarely sparkled, unlike Grandfather’s. She wore a white headscarf—Kat had never seen it off her head, even in the casket, years later. But this day, Grape-Granny’s face jerked and twitched, emotion pulsing against her stoicism. The old woman patted Kat’s hand now and again, in unusual sentimentality as they clipped down the hall in their Sunday best. Kat saw metal hospital beds, white cotton sheets, heard the clink of carts as nurses rolled them down the halls. Even twenty-five years later, Kat’s nose pricked against the pungent mix of antiseptic, cotton and iodine, ripe in her memory.

  Grape-Granny pushed open the door, and Kat stood paralyzed, transfixed in horror, at a hideously beaten patient with tubes in his mouth, his arms, his chest. His leg elevated, wired to an assembly of lines above the metal bed. Next to his head, a machine that looked like Kat’s slinky moved up and down, wheezing. And there was Mama, also, holding this stranger’s hand. “Come here, Kat. Your Grandfather needs to hear your voice.”

  Her Grandfather? She pushed against that thought, knowing that a childish wail would follow her acceptance of the gruesome reality lying in the hospital bed.

  So she’d spoken to the stranger. She’d talked to the frail person swallowed by bandages, his chest rising and falling with the hiss of the slinky machine. She told him about the farm, about the apple blossoms in the orchard turning to fruit, about the new litter of kittens in the barn. And when she returned to the farm, she’d prayed that Jesus would heal this broken man, who they said was her Grandfather.

  And then, just as suddenly as he’d left, Grandfather reappeared. Thinner, perhaps. But looking nothing like the fractured person she’d seen at that New York hospital. And now, Grandfather smiled more. He threw her in the air. And when Kat’s parents died five years later, he took her ho
me to the Schenectady farm, away from the cramped city apartment where she’d spent the dreary winters.

  He never left again.

  The secrets however, stayed. As Kat grew older they germinated, and blossomed into suspicion, even supposition. Grandfather had lived a life she hardly dared to guess, and he could help her now, by activating the power of some of those secrets.

  The phone clicked, and she could almost hear the call travel on a giant cable under the ocean, into New York harbor, up the coast, inland, and north until it connected with the family farmhouse, sitting in the middle of a New York cornfield, some five thousand miles away. “Hello?”

  “Grandfather?”

  A gasp, then. “Kat?”

  She started to sob. “Grandfather.”

  “Oh Kat, my dear Kat. What have you discovered?”

  Chapter 9

  The jangle of keys sliced through the darkness. Vadeem instantly opened his eyes and glued his gaze on a hotel patron in the process of locking his room door. The man cruised by him in long strides, not sparing a glance at Vadeem—the rumpled FSB agent slouched on the floor. Vadeem sat up and smoothed his leather coat, forcing the cobwebs from his mind. The early morning sun, already high above the Moscow skyline, pushed through the haze of lace curtains from the window at the end of the hall and sent a streak of amber down the brown carpet. Dust and fuzz he hadn’t noticed the night before filmed Vadeem’s pant legs, and pricked his nose. The sound of traffic gathered on the street below.

  And Kat’s door remained closed. Victory.

  Vadeem felt as if he’d gone ten rounds with Ryslan. Muscles bunched in his neck. His calves screamed, tense and sore. His head wound burned when he brushed it against the wall. He grimaced at how out of shape he was. He checked his watch—eight a.m. He’d had forty minutes of shut-eye. That should be more than enough—had been enough a few years back. Vadeem pushed to his feet and stretched, feeling frowzy. Maybe he could get Ryslan down here to keep tabs on Kat while he dashed home for a shower.