by BWWM Club
“As to whom we are,” the man in the plain coat said, “it should be obvious. As to what we want, perhaps you can tell us.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told them.
“Perhaps you don’t,” he returned to her, “but there was an explosion at an office building several blocks from here and a witness told me he saw the black American lady who teaches at the gymnasium walking away after it happened. He said you must have been right next to it because you were wobbling as you walked. And we have found broken glass all over the front of your apartment.”
“Pardon me, mitsyia,” a voice called out from behind her. She turned around to see Rick wearing one of her floral robes. In any other situation, it might have been funny.
“The lady has been with me all evening,” he told them in Russian. “We have been preoccupied, although the blast did interrupt things, if you understand what I am talking about.”
“Nice wardrobe,” the man in the coat said to him. “I assume from your accent you too are from America?”
“Yes I am” Rick agreed. “I am Rick Wilson, here on business. I can get you my card, but I’ll have to fish it out of my pants pocket. It may be a little messy as they were close to the bed.”
“That won’t be necessary,” the man said to him. “I will make a note of your being here.” He turned to Monique. “You have an alibi for now, but I’m going to talk to you later. Don’t leave for any trips in the next week.” He turned back to Rick. “I’m going to go, but I advise you not to do the same, pending the investigation.”
He opened the door and let the uniform men leave. Before he exited himself he turned back and looked at Rick. “How many times and did she moan?” he asked.
Monique made a “daddy’s little girl” look on her face and cuddled with Rick. He turned back to the police detective.
“Four times,” he replied. “Two over the couch and two on the bed. She made noises each time but didn’t yell until the last time while I had her penned down. I’m going to make her say my name the next time. You can’t please this woman. She’s insatiable.”
“Then I will let you get back to your work,” the detective said, shutting the door behind him.
“You are disgusting,” Monique said to Rick, still cuddling him, but more out of fear than any other reason. She yelped when he bit her ear.
“That’s in case they are listening at the door,” he whispered in her ear. “Let’s go back into the bedroom.” He pulled her into her own bed and waited a few minutes.
“They’re gone,” he finally told her.
Chapter 3
They spent the night in Monique’s bed, although neither was able to get any sleep. Every sound in the apartment had her on edge; sure the police were coming back. To make matters worse, it was an old building, almost eighteen stories tall. The walls weren’t that thick and they could hear the conversations in the units next to them. At four in the morning the music became very loud from someone’s place. It was the weekend but a party was underway. Monique was used to it by now, but she could see Rick disturbed by all the sounds.
“So how did you know where to find me?” she whispered to him in the dark of her room. He was right next to her in bed with the sheet over him.
“I followed you after we met at the coffee shop,” he said. “And figured out what apartment was yours by the directory. There’s not too many Monique Harrison’s in St. Petersburg. In fact, I think you might be the only one. It occurred to me that knowing where you lived might come in handy. It did.”
“But you got into my apartment without my knowing,” Monique pointed out.
“The locks around here aren’t that sophisticated,” he told her. “Getting through them isn’t hard if you know what you’re doing.”
“And my hiding place?” she asked again.
“Really, Monique,” he told her. “An icon in the closet? You might as well put a red ‘X’ on it.”
Now she felt foolish and scared at the same time. Five years she’d lived in Russia, but Monique might as well have gotten off the plane yesterday for all the stupid things she had done. If Rick had been waiting for her, another professional could have accomplished the same thing. And the next person who came through might not be so helpful.
At the same time, this was the first time in years she’d shared her bed with any man. Just feeling his hot proximity was making her wet. Monique curled up against him and he didn’t pull away. Even if she was a cover he was using, it was something she hadn’t had in a long time. He wasn’t wearing a thing under that robe. All she had to do was pull on the tie and it would unravel in the bed. She kept wondering if he was uncircumcised. A few men she’d slept with in Philadelphia were; it was a strange thing to see if you weren’t used to uncut cocks. She didn’t notice any tattoos on Rick, did he have some piercings she didn’t know about? She’d played with a guy who had both nipples pierced once, back in the states. He’d asked her to tug on them when they were in bed. But Rick didn’t seem like the freaky type. Too bad, after this evening she could use a lot of freakiness. Or at least a cup of tea served by a naked man in handcuffs.
“Who do you work for?” Monique asked him when he rolled over to face her. “The CIA?”
“No,” he replied. “I wish I did because they have a good retirement plan. I’m an independent contractor. I work for a department which Uncle Sam uses for jobs he doesn’t want any connections to. I’m here because an office in that building needed to be eliminated in a very spectacular way. Don’t you think it was quite a spectacle?”
She looked into his blue eyes with her brown ones. “Yes it was. Why the hell did you draw all that attention to yourself? I thought you James Bond types worked with extreme discretion or something like that.”
He put one hand out and ran a finger down her face. Monique was ready to put it in her mouth but didn’t want to give him too many ideas just now. “Sometimes you want to make a point,” he told her. “Sometimes you want the bad guys to know never to fuck with you again,” he told her. “My job was to make them shit their pants if they even consider it the next time. I think I succeeded with no loss of life.”
“Except now you’ll have everyone in St. Petersburg after your white ass,” she told him in anger. “And me too. How long do you think it will take them to figure out you planted the bomb?”
“Long enough for me to say vos voy danya,” he told her. “I’ve already arranged for my extraction tomorrow. You can come with me if you want. As a matter of fact, I think you should come along, just in case Mr. Rastolnikov comes back. This time he might not want to know anything about your sex life.”
“Mr. Who?” she asked.
“You know, Crime and Punishment, the novel,” Rick explained. “The one where the guy kills the old woman.”
“Sorry,” she told him, touch his hand, “I never read that book.”
“I want you to slap me,” he told her. “Do it hard so they can hear us in the next unit.”
She gave him a little pop in the face which barely registered.
“Oh come on,” he said, “Do I have to get you mad?”
This time she could hear it, but it didn’t carry very far. Why did he want her to slap him?
“Hey,” he said to her under his breath. “I’m the big bad man who just stole your teddy bear.”
Slap! She hit him hard across the face. Rick sat up and rubbed his cheek. Monique was up on her elbows looking at him, ready to kill. Her eyes flamed wide and he could tell her teeth were clenched. And at that precise moment, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.
“I hope no one in the next room heard that,” he said. “On second thought, I hope they did. It will back up your alibi if you need one.”
“You have a lot of nerve in my bed talking to me like that,” Monique growled under her breath. “I never had a teddy bear!”
“Christ you are a lively one,” he said rubbing his face again. “I think I found the
right combination of words. Little girl all upset?”
Slap again! This time harder. Rick put one hand to his face and pulled it back, looking at the blood on it. He licked the blood off his hand and smiled at her.
“Good,” he said. “Now you can be sure they heard it. You can tell the police I wanted to do something depraved and they won’t ask. Well they might ask, but you can come up with something. I’d say something but I don’t need you hitting me so hard I lose a tooth. Now slap me some more, princess.”
Slap! Slap! Slap! He grabbed her hands and she could feel the cold steel of his fingers in her wrists. She was breathing hard from the blows she’d just hit him with and was looking at him in rage. What she wanted to say she couldn’t because the last thing she needed right now was someone to call the manager. She was in a rage and wanted to pound him into the floor, in spite of the danger to her. And then it hit her: she was doing just what he wanted.
Monique looked at Rick and seethed. He was smiling; she was just a game piece in whatever he was playing. Monique could feel his breath on her face; his hard muscles were pushing up against her body. And she could feel his erection on her leg. She was tempted to slam her leg up and send his Johnson to the hospital. Who the hell did he think he was to mess up her life in St. Petersburg? Now the only thing Monique could hope for would be to get out with the money she’d stashed for an emergency. Good luck getting another job in the United States with this on her resume. All she wanted to do was eventually open a day care center in Philadelphia for poor families. Why did Mr. Secret Agent Man have to come and mess it all up? She felt the tears start to swell in her eyes. Why did she have to be walking past that building when the bomb went off? It wasn’t fair!
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you,” he said. “I’m sorry this has had to happen to you, but you’re a small little pawn on this chess board. I’m the knight who is running interference for you so the bishop doesn’t crush us both.”
She started crying and didn’t care who heard it. Hell, he probably wanted the people in the next room to hear her cry. It was all part of some sick plan and she didn’t even know what it was. He released her wrists and Monique fell to the pillow, soaking it with her tears. She was in some mess now. In the morning her mother would be reading about her in the paper. She could see it now: “Local Teacher Implicated in Russian Spy Sting”. She sobbed away for a good five minutes while Rick laid back and sighed.
“Cry if it makes you feel better,” he told her. “I can’t reach my dead drop till tomorrow when the sun comes up anyway.”
“Dead drop?” she said turning around. Monique was drying her tears.
“It’s what you call a place to leave messages,” he explained to her. “As opposed to a live drop. I have them all over St. Petersburg. It’s how I communicate with my handlers when I’m over here. I can’t trust the Internet in and out of this country. Too many people monitoring the traffic to make that a possibility. I need to check the one near your apartment tomorrow.”
Here she was, in bed with a handsome and hunky man and all she wanted to do was get him out of her life. A few days ago she was walking on air when he gave her his business card. Now she never wanted to see him again. It would have been better if she’d never walked into that coffee shop.
“We need to get a few hours’ sleep,” he told her. “The morning traffic won’t be starting till six and I can check my dead drop. I need to make sure they took what I left for them after I hit the building.”
“I thought you were sent in to blow something up?” she pointed out. Now that the confrontation was over, Monique was starting to feel a little better. She was still scared for her life.
“Setting the bomb off in their office and destroying their database hack was priority one,” he explained. “The bonus comes with providing my employers a copy of what those bastards had copied. They want to know how far they got into the system.”
“You still haven’t told me what you were doing or why it was necessary to blow up an office in the middle of St. Petersburg,” she pointed out. “Isn’t the United States afraid of starting a war?”
“That’s why they use me,” he explained again. “There is no official record I exist. Something happens to me, it can be explained away as an American with Russian mob connections. The SVR catches a known CIA or NSA agent and it’s a little harder to deny.”
“Somebody got in very deep to a pentagon database from that office,” he explained. “Real deep. Like information identifying every American intelligence operative in Europe deep. They didn’t think the damage was too bad when they first found out, but when I arrived here they discovered it was much worse. They don’t know how it was done yet and no one knows who the office is connected to. The best guess is some kind of rogue Russian mafia team that wants to sell what they pulled out to the highest bidder. I was sent in to destroy the office, but they also wanted me to get a complete back-up of what they took. I was given a super flash drive that could store the information they had several times over. It didn’t take me long to unlock the door tonight and get into the office. I can’t even remember what bogus name the office was called. ‘All Russian Historical Institute’ or some other fancy name.”
“Anyway,” he continued, “it took me five minutes to boot up the computer system in there and find what I needed. My employers had given me all the pass codes. I backed it all up on the super drive, put it in my coat pocket and wired the computers to blow ten minutes after I left. You saw me as I was leaving the building. The charge went off a few minutes early. It’s what I get for using local sources for the bomb parts and instead of building my own.”
“But I’ll get you out of this mess,” he concluded. “I promise. The extraction team is supposed to be ready tomorrow and they won’t give me hard time about bringing another person home.”
Monique had her face turned away from him in the bed and she felt drowsy. It was all so much to have to endure in one day. She felt his strong hands massage her back and she started to drift into sleep. She wanted to feel more of him on her, but now was not the time. Monique felt his arms wrap around her and give comfort. She sensed the day-old stubble of his unshaved face nuzzled against her neck and she was finally at peace. For the first time in years she had a man in bed with her and it had to be under these circumstances. Right now she would have been happy if he would rip off the robe she wore and do things to her. Maybe later, if they both survived what was coming up. And then Monique drifted off into the land of nod.
“I think it’s safe to get up and go out,” she heard a voice say into her ear hours later. It was Rick. The nightmare was real. She was in bed with an American agent in the middle of St. Petersburg who had just set off a bomb in a nearby building. A man the police knew about and who was suspect in the bombing. With her, an ordinary English teacher at a respectful school. Could things get much worse?
She looked up to see his tight, bare ass slide into a set of boxer shorts as he put his clothes back on. It wasn’t the worse thing to wake up to, Monique had to admit. The worse time was years ago while in college where she had come to in the middle of a frat house naked with three unclothed frat boys, two white and one black, piled on top of her. That had been some party; she’d spent years trying to forget it and what she’d done with those men the night before.
“We need to get moving,” Rick said to her, “if both of us are going to get back to the USA. Grab your money, passport and anything you can carry in a purse. There is a good chance we might not be coming back here.”
Monique moved out of bed and put her clothes on. She chose a suit she could wear for several days if she had to. The money and passport was still in her closet and she stuffed them all down her purse. She couldn’t think what to carry on short notice, so she grabbed a photo album of her students. She stuffed some extra underwear down her purse and put on a coat. Rick was already standing by the door in his coat and gloves. She had no idea what he had in mind, but she would have to trust
him.
“They will be watching the building,” he told her. “We’re going to act like we’re going out to get breakfast. We’ll walk down the street and get into the car I’ve rented. Do you have a Russian driver’s license?”
“Yes I do,” she told him, “but I haven’t had to drive a car in months.”
“No problem,” he continued. “I want you to drive. I’ll tell you where to go. They’ll be following us closely, but I have a few tricks they don’t know about. I just hope it’s the local cops we’re dealing with and not the SVR. Let’s go!”
Monique opened the door and went out first. No one was in the hall. Rick followed her and shut the door behind him. Monique turned and locked it. She might never return, but she had to act as if she would.
They took the stairs to the city street. The air was freezing outside, which both of them had suspected. Rick put his arm around Monique and tried to act like they were going to breakfast after a night of hot sex. It had been a long time for Monique, but she remembered how the “walk of shame” felt from college and it all came back to her.
“Oh Christ,” Rick told her. “Those men across the street are watching us.” She turned to look and saw two men in coats staring at them. “Don’t look at them! Just keep walking forward.”
“We don't need to give them a reason to follow us,” he said to her. “And they already are…” He put one hand to his ear and acted like he was scratching something. “Good, it’s the local police. The SVR haven’t been summoned yet. They’ll be here soon enough.”
“How can you be so sure?” Monique asked him. “They’re not exactly wearing badges.”
“I’ve got an earpiece in,” he told her. “I’m listening in to all the background chatter on the police and security frequencies. This time of the morning they’re pretty quiet. And the only suspects the cops are following around here happen to be us.”
They stopped at a small blue car which was parked off the street in an alley. Rick quickly unlocked it and had Monique get inside while he went around to the passenger side. She started the car’s engine up with a key he had given her. While she waited for the engine to warm, rick reached under the seat and placed a box in the back passenger seat.