by Rachel Grant
— DV
She gripped the flower in her fist. How did his Russian handlers find out about their relationship so quickly? Zack Barrow knew, but he’d wanted to steal the AUUV for himself, so he wasn’t on Team Russia.
She had no doubt the FBI agent had shared the information up the hierarchy. Likewise, Luke and Ian had likely made it known to Alec and Curt in their debriefings. Thanks to the FBI agent’s questioning, and Ivy’s lack of acting ability, she had few secrets.
But everyone who knew about Ivy’s relationship with Dimitri was on Team USA.
Unless there was a mole hidden in the system.
“We should have told her what the Hammer is,” Ian said after Ivy returned to her room in the suite.
“And risk alienating her from Veselov when she’s our best chance for bringing him in?” Luke said in a quiet voice. “No way.”
“She might be even more anxious to bring him in if she knew the truth. She regrets not warning anyone about Hill. This could be her chance to make up for that.”
“Maybe, but we can’t take the risk. Dimitri will come to her if he believes she cares. But if he caught wind of the fact that she hates him? He’d know it was a trap and stay far away. She’s not good at hiding her feelings. You saw her in there. She all but broadcast she knows exactly where Dimitri is searching.”
“I hope you’re right, Sevick, because taking Ivy and CAM out to play bait when she’s injured is damned dangerous.” Ian ran his hands through his hair. “You’re sure the Hammer isn’t a threat?”
“I’m not sure of anything when it comes to Parker Reeves or Dimitri Veselov anymore. But I think Ivy is in love with him. If any of that emotion goes both ways, we have an opportunity to take him in, get the AUUV, and save Ivy. Isn’t that what we came here to do?”
Chapter Thirty-One
Dimitri stared at the tree. The trunk was coated in sap, and according to CAM, there might be a void under the roots. He’d have come here first, but two other islands had been closer. Better to check them on the way and be methodical.
But standing here, facing the tree, his gut said this was it.
Thunder boomed in the distance. The evening rain was coming soon. Great timing. Poison tree and rain was a bad combination, according to Ivy.
He scanned the roots of the tree and the surrounding area. If the AUUV had been hidden here, it was five months ago, and nature had long since covered up the intrusion.
No help for it except to dig—which he’d done at the base of four other poison trees on two islands already, yielding nothing but sore muscles and the potential to break out in a blistering rash sometime soon.
Good times.
He broke the dirt with the spade, probing to see if there were voids he could exploit. When he found none, he chose what seemed like the most likely spot and began to dig in earnest. This was where RON would’ve come in handy. Ivy had explained her specialty in remote sensing—more than Lidar, she’d also equipped RON with ground-penetrating radar to glimpse below the surface without touching a shovel.
Digging in an archaeological site, she’d explained, was a destructive process. Documenting a site destroyed it. So archaeologists had turned to remote sensing, ways to gather data without ruining the site. It was why her process of mapping the Peleliu battle site was preferred—thousands had died and destruction was also desecration. But remote sensing could find the remains without disturbing them. The best of all worlds.
But he didn’t have Ivy anymore nor her technology. The truth was he missed the woman a hell of a lot more than the machines he’d abducted her for to begin with.
CAM might make this easier, but Ivy would make it fun.
It killed him not to know how she was doing. He’d wanted to wait for her in her hotel room, to surprise her and hold her and make love to her one more time.
But only a fool would take that risk when Luke and Ian would be right outside the door.
He doubted she would follow his instructions and leave, but he’d had to try. His next step was to contact Luke and convince him. Luke would never leave on his own account, but protecting Ivy was a different story.
At least they had Ian Boyd for backup.
The shovel hit limestone, and he grimaced. So much for his gut feeling. He adjusted, moving a meter south, and tried again.
He was on his fifth probe—following the technique Ivy had described for attempting to find or explore the boundaries of archaeological sites—when the shovel slipped through the soil and disappeared nearly to the end of the handle.
He’d found a void.
He dug with renewed energy. Thirty minutes later, he had an opening. A tunnel under the roots of the tree, just as CAM had predicted.
Rain was starting to fall as he crawled into the void. Maybe his wetsuit would protect him from the toxins. All he could do was hope. And strip as soon as he was done here.
Did the Chechen cling to the same feeble plan? Was Dimitri repeating his mistakes?
Would Dimitri too be found, taken, and tortured?
He had to dig as he crawled and wondered if the tunnel would collapse behind him. Days from now, Ivy and CAM might find him, delirious with thirst and hunger, desperate and pained from the blisters caused by tree sap.
It was a shame there was no Occupational Safety and Health Administration for spies. The hazard pay would be out of this world.
He’d never officially received a paycheck from Russia. Every dime had gone into a numbered account, which Sophia would find out how to access when she reached Jakarta.
He held on to that thought. Sophia and Yulian would be free.
Ivy… She might carry his child.
It was crazy the emotions that thought brought with it. He’d never realized how much he was ruled by biology. How much he’d had a need to fulfill that genetic imperative.
But dammit. He wanted to be there. To see Ivy’s belly grow. To witness sonograms and listen to heartbeats. To hold his daughter or son. To cheer for first steps. To hear his baby call him Daddy.
Ahh, fuck, and wasn’t this a shitty time to want the impossible?
He pushed through soil and vines. Crawled through musty earth and poisonous roots.
Fuck it.
He couldn’t have any of the things he wanted, but he could save his sister and nephew. He could save Ivy and Luke. He could do one damn thing right before he died. But to do that, he had to find the AUUV to draw out the sonofabitch who was calling the shots in his life.
He would die before this was all over, but he wasn’t going alone. This handoff would happen in person, or it wouldn’t happen at all.
He felt something hard in front of him. Limestone, probably, but he probed it with gloved fingers.
Smooth surface. He pulled off the dive glove that protected his fingers—getting a rash hardly mattered at this point—and palpated the surface. Cold, but not stone cold.
Plastic cold.
He wiped dirt from the surface as more rained down from above. He pulled out a flashlight and shone it on the object with one hand while he wiped the dirt away with the other.
He brushed away more soil, his light exposing a wide, curved panel that could be a wing, tucked up against the fuselage, like a bird’s wing tucked against its body.
Sonofabitch. He’d found it.
Or CAM had found it.
Either way, he had the AUUV, and the endgame had begun.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The house on Peleliu was untouched since Dimitri’s last visit, and had everything he needed to wait for the exchange. It even contained the tools he needed to open up the AUUV and see what secrets she held.
The AUUV was the length and width of a surfboard, but with wings that tucked in, like an eagle that could transform into a seal. The organic design felt more Asian than Russian to him. But he wasn’t an engineer, so what did he know?
He carefully opened the panels to access the data ports and power pack. He didn’t really give a damn if he returned th
e AUUV intact—the deal was he’d hand it over, not that it would be functional—but he didn’t want to advertise that he’d cracked it open, if he could avoid it.
The design was impressive. Lightweight, durable, and sleek housing. Watertight, yet it could transform shapes and launch from the water to take flight, or dive from the air and swim.
But the feature he found most worrisome was when he powered up the AUUV after it had rested under a poison tree for five months, it worked.
It had a hibernation mode that lasted for months, meaning it could be planted in a strategic place and be called into action much later. The ultimate sleeper spy.
He quickly powered it off, in case it could somehow contact its home base, although that had been Russia’s problem to begin with—the person who hijacked it had disabled the two-way communication with Russia. They could no longer control it by remote, and couldn’t locate it to recover it themselves.
Whoever had stolen the AUUV must’ve been able to hack the code to hijack it in mid-flight or swim. Was it possible the AUUV had been on a mission and not just on a test run when it was taken?
Could there be data here that would be valuable to the US—or damaging to Russia?
The technology the AUUV represented was one thing—a tool for the new Cold War, and highly advanced at that. The sleeper-spy ability was worrisome in an age where both Russia and the US were trying to gain advantage with tools instead of weapons.
This tool all by itself could be very, very dangerous. But if it contained actual intelligence, if it had been spying on China, Taiwan, or a US military base in Japan when it was hijacked… That was different.
Intelligence was the real commodity. Intel could change the balance of power as tensions between the US and Russia grew ever more precarious.
Dimitri wasn’t a fan of the president of Russia and the way the man had returned the country to a dictatorship. Acting as the Kremlin’s enforcer had been an ugly, horrific pill.
His final act as the Kremlin’s puppet was to return their lost technology, but what if the cost of that was too great? His life, his sister’s life, and even his nephew’s life weren’t worth more than the thousands—even millions—of lives that could hang in the balance if the Russian president’s quest for power was bolstered by this technology or the data it contained.
Before he blithely handed over the AUUV, he needed to know if it held any actionable intel. He needed someone who understood computers and coding, and intelligence gathering via drone.
He needed Ivy.
He pulled out Ian Boyd’s business card again. No. Less risky to contact her through Ulai.
Ivy paced the deck of the cabin cruiser. It seemed all she could do these days was pace. At least now she had a hard cast protecting her arm. She’d opted for a vivid aqua-colored cast, because it matched the tropical sea, but now she wished she’d gone for bright pink, because she was getting tired of blue as they fruitlessly trolled the islands for signs of Dimitri.
She’d shown Dimitri’s note to Luke and Ian the evening she found it. Not surprisingly, they’d made sure her spy wouldn’t be able to access her via the lanai again, which was a bummer. Although she doubted Dimitri would have taken such a risk a second time.
Ian was more irked at the breach than angry. He admitted he’d left the lanai vulnerable in hopes Dimitri would do exactly what he’d done—thus triggering an alarm Ian had set up. But Dimitri had disabled the alarm, remaining one step ahead.
They were now heading back to Koror after a second day on the water. They would spend the night in the hotel again and plan their strategy for tomorrow.
Her cell phone buzzed, telling her she was within tower range as they neared the marina. She headed below so she could hear the call over the loud boat engine, noting as she went that the call came from an NHHC number.
“Ivy, it’s Mara.”
“Hey, Mara, I heard you’ve been ill, so why are you at the office?”
“I’m not ill, I’m pregnant, but I have been sick as a dog.”
“You’re pregnant? Congratulations! I’m so—”
“Thank you, we’ll celebrate when you get home,” Mara said, cutting her off. “Listen, you need to know something important. The DIA is doing their damndest to pin this on you. Curt didn’t want to tell me, but I overheard everything—my ear was practically right next to the cell phone—and I had an idea this morning, so I came to the office to check.”
“How can they pin this on me? I mean, I slept with Dimitri, but that was after they set me up for this nightmare of a job. They were the ones who sent me here.”
“Your phone logs indicate you called Dimitri twice before you even left for Palau.”
“That’s bullshit!”
“I know. But once Curt told me the calls came from your work phone, I decided to see for myself. You did call the number, twice, just like the DIA claims.”
“I didn’t call him, Mara. I didn’t know Dimitri Veselov existed.”
“I figured that. So I cross-referenced it with that list of contractors I’d passed on to you—people you were approved to work with on the Palau project. Because of CAM, we needed to do a background check on anyone who would have access to the equipment. Dimitri’s number was on that list as a scuba dive charter.”
“Liberty Charters was not on that list. I would’ve remembered when I saw the boat. It was clearly out of my price range.”
“On the list, it’s called DV Scuba Tours.”
Ivy closed her eyes, trying to picture the list of contractors. Trying to remember if she’d spoken with Dimitri in March. She had a good memory for accents—and that included voices. She came up blank. “I kept a copy of that list in my desk, with notes on who I talked to, pricing, et cetera. Did I have a note next to DV Scuba Tours? I don’t have the copy I brought with me anymore.” It had gone out to sea with Liberty when they abandoned her.
“You did. You wrote ‘automated voice mail, left message’ and the date and time you called. Which match the call log. As far as that goes—you’re in the clear. This can’t be used against you.”
“Good.”
“But, Ivy, I think—and Curt, who is here with me now, agrees—the more important point is this list was provided by the DIA. They supposedly vetted every contractor on the list to protect you and CAM. But I can’t find any record that DV Scuba Tours exists. If you can talk to Dimitri, ask him how his nonexistent business ended up on a DIA list of approved contractors.”
The conversation ended, leaving Ivy wondering how the hell she could get in touch with Dimitri. Talking to him had been the one thing she’d wanted since she woke up after surgery three days ago.
She returned to the deck to see the boat was pulling into their slip at the marina. Luke was at the helm as Ian was perched to secure the bow line. Five slips away was the enclosed hangar that housed Ulai and his seaplane.
The door to the hangar was open, a sure sign Ulai was there.
She glanced at the men who’d been guarding her for the last three days. If anyone knew how to get in touch with Dimitri, it was Ulai, but the seaplane pilot would likely clam up in their presence.
She took a deep breath and touched the holster at her back. It was completely illegal for her to be carrying concealed in Palau, but that was the least of the rules she was willing to break to protect herself.
Luke and Ian were focused on the boat. She slipped under the railing and onto the dock as silently as possible—not easy with one hand, but the engine noise covered the thump of her feet. She ducked down and darted around the boat in the next slip, using it for cover. She was halfway down the long main dock before she stood to her full height and hurried toward Ulai’s hangar.
When she reached it, she knocked once on the open door before stepping inside. “Ulai?”
A grunt sounded behind her.
She reached for her gun as she turned toward the sound. A leg—at the end of which she recognized Ulai’s broad bare foot—rested, toes up, on the d
ock just behind the open door.
“Run, Ivy!” Dimitri shouted.
The door slammed closed, revealing Ulai, stretched out on the aluminum floor. His head was bleeding. A bloody hammer rested on the dock next to his body.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The shock of seeing Ulai froze Ivy. She wanted to drop to her knees and check his pulse, but standing above him was Dimitri, his shirt and face covered in blood. Behind him was another man, who held a gun to Dimitri’s ribs.
The man shoved Dimitri forward and brought them both into the spill of light from the window. Ivy’s paralysis broke. “Rudy Fredrickson?” He didn’t look like the stiff bureaucrat she’d taken him for when they first met last fall. “What are you doing in Palau?”
Rudy continued to nudge Dimitri forward until he reached the bolt on the door and slid it home. “Tracking down a Russian spy. I found him over the body,” Rudy said. “He killed Umetaro.”
“I was helping Ulai. He’s not breathing,” Dimitri said.
That explained the blood around his mouth.
“That’s because he’s dead. You killed him.” Rudy pushed Dimitri to the side, and while the gun in the DIA man’s hand remained on Dimitri, the barrel tipped her way in a subtle threat. To keep Dimitri in line? Or her?
“Who is this guy, Ivy?” Dimitri asked, his eyes bright with a fierce anger.
“He tried to recruit me and CAM for the DIA last fall.”
“Ivy!” The shout came from outside. Luke’s voice.
“Don’t even think about letting Sevick in, Ms. MacLeod. He’s here to help the spy escape. Again. But I caught him—literally red-handed.” He smirked at his joke. “He’s not getting away this time. He’ll face charges in the US. Now help me tie him up.”
She glanced down to make sure her gun pointed at Rudy, not Dimitri. Not that she could aim worth a damn one-handed. She frowned at the DIA analyst. “I don’t understand. You aren’t a field agent.”