by BWWM Club
She lay in his arms for a long time and looked up at the room and the skylight which let the light in. It was truly a wonder with all the gold lighting it up. Monique speculated on how it must have appeared in the evening with the candle light providing the illumination. What other famous people had made love in this bed?
“So who else do you know of besides Liz and Dick did the nasty in this room?” She asked Rick.
“A bunch of politicians,” he told her, “but not too many movie star types. I was told Errol Flynn had a very fun evening with some young Russian women Stalin sent to him at the end of the Second World War. Some Hollywood actress named Jane tied her boyfriend to the headboard and worked him over with a riding crop. The KGB had those films for years and screened them to the right people every now and then. I don’t know who else had the benefits that went with having the right connections to the museum. But I’m sure there were quite a few.
“There’s a shower stall behind one of these panels,” he told her. “We need to find it so we can get cleaned up and see the rest of the museum. I’m not sure where my contact is working at these days. We’ll have to find her if we’re going to get any help at all. I just don’t trust the agency even if we have the super drive. They’ll find a way to get it from us and leave you and me to burn.”
Rick helped her out of the bed. They walked naked across the floor until he found the panel he was searching for. Once through the door, Monique found herself in a modern bathroom with a shower big enough for the both of them. Rick scrubbed her all over while they were in the shower and told her all the things he wanted to do to her once they got out of Russia.
Chapter 6
An hour later, a panel inside the Egyptian exhibit in the Hermitage Museum opened up and a figure emerged. It was Rick, trying to find out if anyone was near the hidden panel. He glanced around, felt secure, and went back to fetch Monique. When both of them were outside, he activated a lock which secured the door. They continued into the exhibits, appearing to be any other tourists.
“I expecting the men in trench coats to show up at any minute,” Monique said to Rick.
“They are out there,” he told her. “But they wear heavier coats this time of year and sheepskin caps. But with any luck we’ll be long gone before they know where we are.”
They moved into other rooms, looking at the paintings and statuary which filled the museums. The size of the museum complex was staggering. Monique remembered visiting the Smithsonian as a young girl with her mother in Washington, D.C., but this place made the one overseas look small. It had been constructed to let the world know the tsar was not to be ignored. His reign was absolute and his word was law. The rest of the country needed to shut up and do as told.
“So how did you end up in this line of work?” Monique asked Rick, taking his arm with her hand. They were moving down a row of exhibits from Japan. Few of the tourists were in this part of the museums, preferring to look at the Titan paintings and other masters from Italy.
“The usual,” he told her. “Got out of the army, couldn’t find a job which allowed me to jump out of a helicopter and shoot things. The agency had some openings and needed someone with my background. Did the round of interviews and got the job. It helps I speak a lot of languages, so I can be dropped into just about any place.”
He felt her chin on his back, rubbing him. Monique wrapped her arms around from behind. “You were something else back there,” she whispered into his ear. “Did you mean what you said when we were in the shower?”
“Every bit of it,” he told her. Rick turned around and embraced Monique. He glanced around and planted his mouth to hers. They held the kiss for a minute, and then he released her to make sure no one was watching. “And it wasn’t for an alibi, either. I’m taking you back with me, Monique.”
“But why me of all people?” she asked, tossing her hair back. “I think you could have a lot of women.” Rick brushed her hair back and took her hand when he saw someone walk into their part of the exhibit. He began to move with her down the hall, idly looking at the exhibits around them again. He stopped at a suit of samurai armor from the twelfth century and continued moving.
“I need to settle down,” he told her, while walking slowly. “I’m sick and tired of going into places like here to clean up someone else’s mess. I’ve just about got enough money saved to buy a little farm in Florida I’ve been looking at for the past three months. What’s the point in buying a farm if you don’t have someone to come home to after a day of working the cattle?” He gave her hand a squeeze. “I had just enough time on those thugs’ computer to check you out.”
She stopped and dropped his hand. “I thought you were trying to find us a way out of here?”
“I did that too,” he informed her. “If you know what you’re doing on the Internet, it doesn’t take you very long to find things and contact people. I had two objectives when I saw their connection: check you out and get us the hell out of here. It’s why we just spent some quality time in the hidden amber room and why I need to find my contact here at the museum.”
“What did you find out about me?” Monique demanded. Her fists were clenched at her side. One minute she was making love with this man, the other she was finding out he’d checked her background.
“You have an unpaid parking ticket in Philadelphia,” he told her. “Your mother works at a hospital and you haven’t seen your father since you were fifteen. Grades pretty decent in college and they landed you this job. You’ve been stashing your money in a stateside annuity account, which is pretty smart given the state of the economy. And you push your lovers away when you climax because you don’t think you’re supposed to enjoy it too much.” Her eyes narrowed when he said the final statement. “The last one I didn’t need the Internet to find out, you showed it to me less than an hour ago.”
Monique turned her back on him and started walking the other direction. Is this what she could expect from him? One tumble beneath the sheets and he thought she was his own sex toy? She would take her chances elsewhere if he thought he could talk to her that way. And then she felt Rick’s stiff fingers on her shoulder. She stopped.
“I want you to enjoy it all the way next time, do you understand?” he whispered in her ear. “I want to hear you call my name and beg for my love.” Monique began to feel weak in the knees. Rick’s hands slipped around her body from behind and she was pulled tightly to him. Monique felt his hot breath on her neck and his teeth on her ear. She wanted him to bend her over the display case next to them and have his way with her.
“We’re going to have a life together after his,” he told her. “I want you Monique. I want you to wear my ring and have my children. You are as perfect a woman as I will ever find.” He heard her sob through his embrace and held her tightly. “We’ll buy the farm, you can open your day care and everything will be alright. Just hang on tight and see this through with me.” Monique clutched his hands, not even asking about how he knew about her plans to open a daycare center or how in the world she could do it while living on a farm.
“Remember I said you were an easy woman to fall in love with?” Rick told her while he held her. “I have fallen in love with you. I tried not to, but I can’t help it. There is a reason we ended up in the same place in Russia at the same time. Don’t you believe it was meant to be?”
“I want to believe everything you are saying,” she responded, through the tears. “But why did it have to happen this way? Why couldn’t we have met somewhere where people aren’t all trying to kill us?”
“We might as well ask why the Neva river freezes up every year,” he laughed in response. “Or why Russia lacks a warm water port to the sea. It’s just the way of the world.”
They stood silently holding each other for a long time. But the sound of footsteps alerted Rick they needed to keep moving. Other tourists were entering the section where they found themselves. They separated, but continued to hold hands like a high school boy and girlfriend
as they walked among the aisles. Monique would occasionally stop and read the title cards, while Rick continued to look for his contact. He was being quiet about who he was searching for, but he seemed to think his contact would be in this part of the Hermitage.
“How many times have you been here?” he asked her.
“This is the first time,” she told him. “I just never had the opportunity. Not enough money or no one to go with.”
“You must have been awful lonely these past three years,” Rick commented. “What did you do to occupy your spare time?”
“I read a lot,” she said. “Russians do like to read, so no lack of books or novels. You can get tired of the same ones after a while.”
“But you never read Crime and Punishment?” he told her. “One of the greatest books of the nineteenth century.”
“I didn’t read everything,” she explained. “I read a lot of Tolstoy. I read Lost Souls. And a lot of the newer writers. They still discuss Solzhenitsyn around here, did you know that?”
Monique slipped her hand into his jacket to feel Rick’s firm chest. He leaned over and gave her a light kiss on the lips before pulling back. She knew he wanted to kiss more, but they had to be careful. She didn’t care; Monique was spending time with a man who had just expressed his love for her. She wanted to believe him, but couldn’t give her heart away this early. Here they were, having known each other for a little more than twenty-four hours and already discussing marriage. Life was too strange.
“So what did you like to read, Rick?” she asked him. “Action books? I can see you reading all those military books I used to see at the airport. The Executioner? The Destroyer? Maybe a Doc Savage fan?
“Westerns, believe it or not,” he said, running his hand through her hair. It felt so soft and he loved the way it curled on her. “Louis L'Amour, Max Brandt, the classics. Pretty standard stuff.” Her leaned over and put his lips to her ear. “My favorite was one where a cowboy rides up to a house and finds a school teacher living by herself. He stays around to help her on the farm, chops wood and gets a fire going. She makes him dinner. Later that evening he takes her upstairs and makes her count the beams on her bedroom ceiling.”
A chill went through Monique again. What was he doing to her? Rick was making her wet again. She needed to be worrying about their situation, not how quickly she could find an alcove to take him. He had to be doing this on purpose; she could find no other reason. Even if she was increasingly becoming turned on by what he was doing.
“When are you going to find your connection?” she said to Rick. “We can’t stay here all day, as much as I’d like a whole night in that amber room. Is it someone who works here?”
“It’s someone I had to put out a call for when I was on the computer,” he told her. “They’re the station chief for the agency in St. Petersburg. I don’t trust this whole trip to Archangel plan they gave me. I want to talk to someone and find a way out of here. I’ve never met the station chief for this city before. You don’t usually get that opportunity unless there is some kind of emergency.”
“I thought the master spies all worked out of the embassy?” she asked him.
“You watch too many movies,” he told her. “They can be just about anyone who has good connections with the city. They can work in some import office or a trade delegation. You want people who can move around the city without trouble. The SVR watched the embassy to see who comes in and out. So it would be the last place you’d want a filed agent stationed. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s someone who works nearby.”
The other tourists continued to move around the exhibits. Rick was keeping a close tab on what time it was as he searched for something. Monique asked him what we was looking for and he told her a panel made of Jade from nineteenth century China. It was where he was supposed to meet the contact, but only at a set time. Five minutes in either direction would be useless.
“So we don’t even know who we’re looking for,” Monique said to Rick later on.
“No,” he told her, “but the time is getting close. I figure he or she will be early, but you can never be sure about these things.”
“How will you know who they are?” she asked. “You don’t know what your contact even looks like.”
“We have a series of conversational signs and countersigns to use,” Rick told her. “I know it sounds so corny, but it works when you need to meet someone in public you don’t know. I have the first part memorized, but the final sections I received when I was on the computer.” He turned and looked at the big clock on the top of the arch in the hall they were in. “It’s just about time, so we need to find the exhibit I’m supposed to meet them at.”
They wandered around until finding a bronze Buddha from the early fourteenth century from Japan. Rick stopped, looked at it and turned his head sideways. “This is it,” he said. “It fits in with the description I was given years ago. Now all we have to do is wait.”
Ten minutes later a small pretty brunette with dark Italian features appeared and began looking at the Buddha as well. She was fashionable dressed in heels and wearing a white leather jacket over her outfit. She had long black hair tucked under her cap and turned to face them while they were standing next to the statue. Rick frowned; she looked no more than twenty years old. Couldn’t be the person they were waiting to see. He turned away from her.
“Did you see the moon last night?” she asked Rick.
Stunned, Rick turned back and said. “I wasn’t outside last night. What did it look like?”
“It was a dark phase,” she told him, “so we didn’t get to see it.”
“I need to get out more often,” Rick said to her, trying to figure out if she was really the contact, “but it’s been a bad year.”
“It’s been a lousy year for me as well,” she replied.
“Black bear,” he said to her.
“Night hawk,” she replied again.
“You’re the station chief?” he asked her. “You seem so…”
“Young?” she said in a voice which was very soft and feminine. “I’m thirty-five, but thanks for the compliment. People say I look a lot younger. Comes in handy at times. People don’t suspect a little girl and will say just about anything around me.”
“I’m glad you got here,” he told her. “I’m not so sure about the agency’s plans for getting us out of here. Oh, this is Monique, she’s coming with me.”
“How does she fit into this mess?” the station chief asked him.
“She’s my fiancée,” he told her and Monique gave him a big hug.
“Great,” she commented. “Two to go. Now why don’t you tell me just what happened to send the SVR scurrying all over St. Petersburg.”
Rick went over what had happened, starting with him being contacted by the agency in Washington DC and his planting the bomb in the office building near where Monique had taught English. He went to great lengths to let the station chief know about her innocence in the whole matter and how she had nothing to do with the operation until he took it on himself to break into her apartment and ask for help. He concluded by talking about the last few hours and how he’d been forced to recover the super drive and commandeer a computer at a warehouse.
“So let me get this straight,” the chief said to him. “You set off a bomb in an office which is supposed to have hacked into an American database and use this lady, who you now call your fiancée although you’ve only known her less than two days, to conceal you and then you find out the super drive has been lifted from the dead drop but you get it back and pull a gun in a warehouse to use their computer before meeting me here? Did I cover everything?”
“That about sums it up,” Rick told her. “I don’t think I left much out.”
“Well this is just some kind of bullshit,” the chief swore. It was a little strange to see such harsh words coming out of the mouth of a woman dressed like a fashion model who didn’t look eighteen.
“So is there a better way to get out
of here than the Trans-Siberian Express?” Rick asked her. “The SVR is going to be watching everything.”
“First of all,” she told him, “do you have any idea what the office was doing when you set-off the bomb?”
“I was told they were hacking a pentagon database and I copied all the files I was supposed to on the super drive,” Rick explained.
“At least we have that,” the chief responded. “Because all hell is breaking loose in Washington over this mess. I don’t have to tell you what it’s going to do with any relationship we had with Moscow.”
“Why?” Rich asked. “It was their people hacking the database, wasn’t it?”
“I wish,” she said. “It would at least give us some closure. You might be interested to know you just blew up a CIA operation.”
Rick stared at her speechless. “But I thought the whole thing was approved by Washington,” he finally spoke up. “Isn’t that why they hired me? To take out the post these clowns were using.”
“Look, it’s been screwed up from the beginning,” she explained. “Someone approved a hack intrusion test to see if the big database could be broken into from Russia. We know it can because they repeatedly did it over and over. I hope the clowns in charge can use the information to better protect the firewalls. The men who were running the operation are all on their way back now. They managed to get them on a plane an hour after the explosion. But it didn’t take the local police long to figure out something wasn’t right about the whole set-up in the office building. They called SVR who knew what was going on. And let me tell you, they are not happy to find out the agency was pulling this stunt under their noses. It’s why they want you, to find out how the operation was pulled-off. You might not know a thing about that end, but they do know two Americans are on the loose in St. Petersburg with some information. So they will find you both unless I can figure out what to do.”