by Cindy Dees
“Now where?” she asked in minor shock. They’d just stolen two cars.
“Tashkent.”
“Pardon me if my geography has failed me, but that isn’t in Kyrgyzstan.”
“Correct. It’s the capital of Uzbekistan. But it’s quite a bit closer than Bishkek, which is the capital of Kyrgyzstan, and Tashkent does not lie across mountains on a dodgy highway with fractious weather. If we’re lucky, our tails are Kyrgyz nationals and won’t be able to follow us into Uzbekistan easily. The two countries don’t like each other and our tails should get stopped at the border. Since we’re traveling on U.S. passports, the Uzbeki border guys shouldn’t hassle us.”
She was sure she’d seen him give the Kyrgyz customs guy a Russian passport—dark red with an embossed gold double-headed eagle totally unlike her dark blue U.S. passport—but she elected not to bring that up just now. Not until she had a better idea of just how dangerous Alex would become if he thought she’d turned on him.
“Watch the rearview mirror. Check for any cars that follow us for a long time.”
“What constitutes a long time?”
“More than, say, five minutes,” he answered absently. He steered the car across Osh and headed west on a four-lane road that rapidly became a two-lane road. “Anyone back there?” he asked her for about the third time.
“Road’s empty. What’s the local time? The streets are deserted.”
“It’s about midnight. And it’s a weeknight in a region with a large Muslim population. Not exactly a party crowd. I think we’re clear for now.”
She nodded and turned to face forward in her seat. “Okay, Alex. I’m on your side. But I think it’s time for you to start talking. Who are you, and what the hell’s going on?”
* * *
ALEX WINCED AT the questions but couldn’t blame her for asking them. Problem was, very little of his life was on the list of things he was willing to talk about. Still, he owed her a few answers, at least.
“I haven’t lied to you about anything. As the whole world knows, my father was a Russian spy who was caught when I was a kid.”
“Are you really a doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Why obstetrics?”
“I’m a trauma surgeon by training. All doctors get basic OB training, and I picked up a little extra practical experience so I could come over here on the Doctors Unlimited mission. Actually, delivering babies isn’t that different from trauma medicine. It’s explosive and high risk and you have to be prepared to react fast.”
“Who were those men chasing us in Osh?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
He sighed and considered the question. The Big Two were the obvious choices—the CIA and the FSB. It was a toss-up in his mind which bunch was trailing him.
What he couldn’t figure out was why the tails had actually tried to catch him and Katie. Why hadn’t the team just hung back and tracked where he went? Who wanted to actually apprehend him? That was a new and worrisome wrinkle in his ongoing dance with the intelligence services. Given that he’d stabbed an American and now this team was being so aggressive, he’d bet on the CIA. But based on her earlier question about turning themselves over to Americans, he wasn’t inclined to tell her his guess.
Dammit, Katie was still waiting for an answer. That girl was preternaturally patient about getting answers to her questions. Must come from being a teacher. He said carefully, “My best guess is some intelligence agency. Which one, I couldn’t say for sure. Why are they following us? We’re Americans who came to town on a Russian military aircraft, and that would send up warning flags anywhere on earth.”
She digested that evasive truth in silence, although he could practically hear the wheels turning in her head. If only she were a little less quick on the uptake. He’d promised her he would never lie to her, and he wouldn’t. It had been a stupid promise, made on impulse, but he was stuck with it now. Still, that didn’t mean he couldn’t repackage the truth to his advantage.
“How is it you were able to call for that Russian plane to come get us? My brother was a Navy SEAL, and maybe on a mission he could have pulled off something like that. But that would have been the extent of it.”
Her brother was a SEAL? Fuck. “Family connections,” he said shortly.
“You called Daddy?” she blurted.
He made a disgusted sound. “Don’t say it like that. It was a desperate last resort.”
“Was your father paying back a favor owed or do you owe him one, now?”
Crap, that was an astute question. He hedged and answered, “Our relationship is...complicated.”
“How so?”
He huffed. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Try.”
“He’s my father. My only family. He makes me crazy, but...” He didn’t know how to finish the sentence. It wasn’t something he ever tried to put into words.
“But he’s your father and you want to make him proud. You want him to love you back. You want him to approve of you.”
“I gather you’ve met my old man, then?” he responded wryly.
She laughed a little. “My dad’s not the easiest man in the world to love, either. He’s not as bad as your father, but he can be...demanding.”
Alex snorted. “There’s a word for my father. Demanding. Yeah, that about covers it.” There was so much more to his relationship with Peter, but he wasn’t prepared to discuss it with Katie. It wasn’t that he was being dishonest with her. But, hell, his entire life was a series of half-truths and evasions. Why should his relationship with Katie be any different?
He and his father hadn’t shared an honest moment between them in pretty much forever. But then, maybe that was how all spies did relationships. He might not work for an alphabet agency, but Alex knew himself to be a spy at heart, through and through. His father had been nothing if not thorough in training him.
Of course, Peter wanted him to become a field operative for the FSB in America in the worst way. But after Alex’s stunt of putting himself in jail to avoid his old man, Peter knew not to ask him outright to become a Russian spy. No, it was Peter’s intent to manipulate his son into doing his bidding and not to risk Alex turning him down outright. Which was why it had been such a big deal for Alex to break down and ask for that rescue, and why he’d known without a shadow of a doubt his old man would make the airlift happen. Peter would do anything to get his hooks into his prodigal son.
His old man couldn’t seem to grasp that to Alex, “home” was America. Not Mother Russia. The last time they’d spoken about him working for the FSB when Alex was eighteen, they’d had a violent shouting match over it, in fact. His father had insisted that Alex was Russian in his heart and had wanted no part of hearing that his son preferred the corrupt, capitalist, imperialist regime in the United States.
He’d have thought the guy would have given up when Alex put himself in jail to avoid his aggressive recruiting tactics. But no. Even after four years in jail, his father was still coming after him. Peter had just learned to be more subtle and vicious about it. Tough. Alex still felt the same way. He was American—even if the U.S. government didn’t trust him any farther than it could throw him. He couldn’t blame the Americans.
“Who was following us back in Zaghastan?” Katie asked, startling him out of his bitter ruminations.
Alex sighed. Might as well burst her patriotic bubble a little. “I told you. The guy I jumped was American. I have no idea who he worked for.” He didn’t mention the burner phone resting in his pocket waiting to ring. He was deeply interested to see who eventually spoke on the other end of that phone. Fortunately, it was a cheap model without GPS tracking in it, so he could leave it on without fear of his position being tracked. He would need to obtain a charging cord for it soon. He’d hate to miss finding out who’d sent a killer after him because the damned phone went dead.
“Was it just me, or were those rebels who came up the valley the night Dawn was
born trying to kill us?” she asked soberly.
“It was not just you. It looked to me like they deliberately torched our tent and then chased us.”
“Were they American, too? Did the guy you attacked work with them?”
“I don’t know.” Personally, he doubted it. Given his father’s insistence on telling him about that emergency bunker, he guessed Peter had knowledge of some Russian operation in the Karshan Valley that he’d thought would endanger his boy. Weird way of showing love for your kid. Knowingly send him into a death trap...but it was okay because he’d given Alex an escape route. His father was one twisted bastard.
“Why in the world would Americans attack us? Did they not know who we were?”
“Oh, I’m sure whoever came after us knew exactly who we were.”
Katie’s head whipped toward him. He swore mentally. He probably shouldn’t have said that. He sighed. “Like I said before. I have enemies. I don’t think that team was attacking you. I think they were attacking me.”
“Who specifically would attack you and why?”
“I already told you. I don’t know. But it could easily be one of several groups.” And he wasn’t about to list all of them off to her. The less she knew of him, the less danger she would be in.
Thankfully, a brightly lit border crossing loomed ahead of them, effectively distracting her. He passed both of their passports and the birth certificate he’d filled out on Dawn through his window to the border guard. The fellow gave them a little grief over him signing the baby’s birth certificate until he explained that he was a doctor and showed the guy his medical pack. But soon enough, they were speeding onward into the night. Hopefully, minus their Kyrgyz tails.
Tashkent was a larger city than Osh, somewhat more modern, but it, too, suffered from a general sense of post-Soviet decay. Independence might have been emotionally satisfying to the southern states of the former USSR, but economically it had been disastrous. None of the splinter states were strong enough to thrive on their own in a competitive global economy.
Had they all hated their neighbors a little less, they might have formed trade alliances and succeeded as a trading bloc. But hundreds of years of tribal rivalries made that impossible. Once the former republics’ economies had tanked, social unrest followed and the disaster was complete. In the chaos to follow, crime and corruption had flourished, and the states were all but failed.
It was nearing dawn as he chose a random hotel in Tashkent because of its covered parking garage. No sense flaunting their stolen car. He’d sell it tomorrow on the black market, where no one would be inclined to tell any authorities where it had come from.
He woke Katie, and she stumbled into the lobby with him. She was alert enough to frown when he pulled out five hundred American greenbacks to pay for the room and for the clerk’s discretion, but thankfully she didn’t comment on it.
He took Dawn from her, mixed baby formula from the can he’d bought back in Osh and gave the baby a bottle—in an actual baby bottle—while Katie collapsed in bed.
He had to admit, there was something deeply calming about holding a baby and feeding her. The sense of protectiveness that flowed through him was, frankly, shocking. He changed Dawn and laid her on several blankets on the floor that she wouldn’t suffocate herself on. With a sigh of relief, he crawled into bed beside Katie. Almost immediately she rolled over and draped her sleeping self over him.
He tensed at first. He made a policy of never sleeping with his women. But she was not one of his usual prostitutes, and she seemed to genuinely like him. If only she knew what she was getting into, she would run screaming from him. Resolved to enjoy this novel, one-off, what-it-would-be-like-to-have-a-family experience, he closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep with a woman in his arms.
Katie took the next shift feeding Dawn and he took the following one. The three of them slept nearly twelve hours, and it was dark again outside when they finally roused for good.
“Feel better?” he asked Katie as she smiled sleepily at him from her pillow.
“Yes. Much. You?”
“Mmm-hmm.” Come to think of it, he hadn’t been this relaxed for as long as he could remember. “Interested in some supper?”
“I’m starving,” she declared.
He laughed at her infectious good cheer. “Are you always so chipper when you wake up?”
“Pretty much. Are you always so serious and grim?”
“Pretty much.”
She laughed at him and rolled out of bed. “I call dibs on the bathroom,” she sang.
He lounged in bed and turned on the television. He found a Russian news channel and watched it lazily. Interesting how no news outlet had picked up on the use of attack drones in Zaghastan against civilians. Had it been done in one of several other countries in the region, there would have been an international outcry over it. Hypocrites, he mentally accused the newscasters.
Katie’s voice drifted out of the bathroom as she sang a pop song at the top of her lungs. Something about halos. For an angel, Katie was pretty hot. He couldn’t recall ever reminiscing about non-sex with a woman before, but he was definitely enjoying the memory of her swollen, hot flesh dancing on his fingers while she moaned her pleasure against his neck. He swore under his breath at the fact that he was going to need a cold shower when it was his turn for the bathroom.
Katie eventually emerged from the bathroom wrapped in one of the hotel’s towels, her skin rosy and dewy, her face beautiful completely devoid of makeup. Her cosmetics had gotten torched back at the tent the night of their frantic flight from Zaghastan.
She went over to coo at Dawn, who was awake and learning how to wave her arms and legs around. A natural mother, Katie was.
He took a shower that relieved the worst of his frustration and shaved with the razor Katie had snagged when they fled Osh. He toweled dry and dressed, eager to spend the evening with her. She was a constant source of surprise to him.
The concierge recommended a good restaurant within walking distance and where Dawn would be welcome. They were most of the way to the place before Alex’s internal warning system fired off. Loudly.
“Keep walking like everything’s fine,” he murmured to Katie from behind a pasted-on smile.
“Everything is fine, isn’t it?”
“Nope. We’ve got company.”
CHAPTER NINE
“NOT AGAIN!” Katie exclaimed in dismay. “You’re a freaking trouble magnet.”
She’s just now figuring that out? “Normal, dammit,” he bit out.
She smiled back. “Exclamations of surprise are normal for me. Now what do we do?”
“We keep walking while I see how bad it is.”
“What do you mean?”
“I need to get a head count and check out these guys’ proficiency.”
“Can I help?”
He glanced down at her, surprised. “What can you do?”
“If you stop to kiss me, we can look over each other’s shoulders and check for bad guys or spies or whatever they are.”
That was an excellent idea, actually. He pulled her into a shadow next to a building and wrapped her in his arms. Dawn was a warm and squirming mass between them, but she didn’t seem to mind the group hug. Katie tilted her face up to him with what looked like a genuine smile and a spark of real desire in her eyes. It would be so easy to lose himself in her....
Their lips touched, and it dawned on him belatedly that this was the first time they’d ever really kissed. She tasted like mint toothpaste and something sweet. Or maybe that was just the taste of surprise. Either way, he deepened the light kiss, slanting his mouth against hers and moving his lips more confidently. She reciprocated and, furthermore, touched the tip of his tongue with hers. Well, then.
His hand plunged into her hair, and he cupped her head, sucking at her with a hunger that shocked him. Only Dawn in the sling between them kept the kiss from becoming entirely carnal. Which was a good thing since he was supposed to be co
unting spies and not thinking about how he was going to steal the next piece of this angel’s innocence. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw two men lounging on a street corner about two blocks back, lighting up cigarettes.
She murmured sexily against his mouth as she swayed into him, “I’ve got two guys across the street and down about a block and a half. And I think I see two more in the park across the street. But they’re hiding in the shadows so I can’t be sure.”
Damn. They were never going to shake a six-man team. But at least he had a good ID on their tails now. Only the FSB had the resources in this part of the world to find them so fast and launch so many operatives in a matter of hours.
“The restaurant’s just ahead,” he muttered.
“We’re going to eat with all these guys following us?”
“I doubt they’ll try to snatch us in a public place with a lot of witnesses. Uzbekistan isn’t publicly on friendly terms with the Russian FSB.”
She fell silent beside him, absorbing the implications of who was following them. He held the door to the restaurant for her and sneaked a quick glance down the street and into the park. She was not wrong. Two more teams were out there. He swore mentally.
She let him order for her, which was a good call. The menu included such local delicacies as yak steak and eel. In deference to her American taste buds, he scanned the menu and ordered her roasted chicken. Absently, he chose the same for himself.
It had been suicide to come inside a building like this. Both the front and back exits would already be covered. But with Katie and Dawn in tow, he didn’t dare confront the Russian agents directly. Were he alone, he’d risk a running shoot-out. But not with the girls depending on him.
Frustration at the limitations of playing spy with his little family in tow warred with a bizarre sense of protectiveness in his gut. He wasn’t actually enjoying having a woman and child hanging around with him, was he? Surely not. He was a lone wolf. Always had been. Just like his father—
The realization broke over him in a rush of horror. He was just like his father.