“Ross?” he called out.
“Never made it back here.” Owen remained with Lucy, staring and shaking his head.
The pressure of her loss punched into Macknight’s chest. He couldn’t breathe. Lucy’s hair, stained in blood, covered part of her face. She was missing a shoe on one leg. The other leg was gone. His knees gave out until he was kneeling on the ground next to Owen.
“What the hell happened?” He wanted a name, a person he could chase down. Someone had murdered the wrong woman. Someone who would wish they’d never stepped inside Belarus. Lucy had been his sanity. On his worst days, she urged him on. For her, he pulled himself out of his grief and went to work. He slid the earpiece off her to keep her anonymous, even in death.
Owen fisted one of his hands and paused for a few breaths. “I had a decent view of Lucy and Panin, but lost sight of Ross after he stepped out of the bar. When I turned to look for him, the bomb went off. Everything went to hell pretty fast after that.”
Owen glanced away from Lucy’s corpse toward him. Part of his ear was missing.
Shit.
“You okay?” An icy shiver shot through Macknight’s spine. He clenched his fist to steady the emotions coursing through him. He wouldn’t lose two teammates in one day.
“I’m fine. It’s Lucy…” Owen’s voice trailed away as blood streamed down his neck. He shook his head as though he had a bug in his ear. His skin was sallow, and he swayed like a drunk. “I missed something.”
“We’ll have time to figure it all out. Let’s get you out of here.” The tightening in his chest decreased enough for him to inhale a decent breath of air mixed with smoke and debris.
“Good idea.” Owen tried to stand, but his legs didn’t hold, and he fell back to the ground. Between the shock and the blood loss, his body shut down, collapsing in a heap next to Lucy.
Police and ambulance crews arrived. The sound of the sirens echoed through Macknight’s skull. Lucy was dead. But Owen wasn’t.
He lifted Owen into his arms and waved away the ambulance workers, telling them his friend had passed out from the bloody scene. Owen could get medical treatment on the jet back to London. With a final look at Lucy’s remains, Macknight headed to the airport. Ross better have been abducted, because if he had any part in this, he was a walking dead man.
Chapter Two
Dried blood on the mattress was the only color Edward Ross could make out. For two days, he sat in a musty dark cell, tied to a bed, soaking in his own urine. Two men, both with nearly shaved heads and dour personas, refused to speak while in the room. They approached him once a day to give him water and something to eat. Leftovers.
Their non-confrontational tactics gave Ross some solace. If they’d intended to kill him, it would have happened at the plaza in Minsk. Someone wanted something, either from him or someone close to him, and he was more than patient enough to wait it out.
The door opened with a creak and a whine, on hinges too old to function without a struggle. An old acquaintance entered. Maslov. Ross had expected the Kremlin’s involvement, but he hadn’t expected his old colleague to still be on the job. Then again, Maslov, a vulture with no soul, had never been one for the formality required in a desk job. He strolled to Ross, still restrained with bindings on his wrists and ankles, and shook his head in disappointment. Their relationship from the start had always been one-sided. Maslov had all the power.
“Alexei. You’ve strayed from your boundaries.” Maslov spoke in Russian and referenced the name Ross had been given years ago. Alexei Popov.
“Minsk? I come here often, as you probably know.” Ross replied in Russian as well. Maslov hated the English language and avoided it, probably to hide his weak grip on verb structure and pronunciation.
“Isidor Panin. He’s not in your circle.”
“What of it? We spoke about North Sea oil exploration.”
“Panin is a nobody. You should not be associating with nobodies.”
Ross twisted his aching body to sit as upright as possible. The pain was mostly confined to his muscles. At his age, almost sixty now, his body wouldn’t bounce back easily, but it would bounce back. Time and focus healed most things.
“What does it matter?” Ross asked. “He must have died in the blast. Sloppy work, by the way. You’ve always been known for your subtlety, not making international headlines.”
“I do what’s necessary.” Maslov usually fulfilled his duties with more finesse than something involving mass casualties. Yet everything about the bastard had always been brutal. Poison, a gunshot wound, tossing a woman off the tenth floor of a building in Paris… Ross’s heart squeezed at the memory. Unadulterated hatred strengthened his resolve.
The victims of the blast in Minsk were mostly innocent bystanders, in the wrong place at the wrong time. How many in the team had been hurt or killed? Macknight should be safe, as he’d been in the bar. Lucy, however, had sat in the center of the kill zone. She wouldn’t have survived if she’d remained at the table. That was a huge loss. Beautiful, brilliant, and fearless. A little like his daughter Emma, only Emma was alive and safe in New Hampshire. Ross took a deep breath, swallowing all the fears, imaginary and real, a father carried for his child, and refocused on his current indignity.
“You’ve become a liability.” Maslov made a face at the mess on the bed.
“Because I ate lunch?”
“Because your ties to the U.K. make you do questionable things.”
Ross pulled at his restraints, causing Maslov to take one step toward the door. “You sent me to England. You trained me. I have nothing to hide from you.”
“You think we haven’t followed you for years? We know everything about you, right down to how often you shit each day. If you went after Panin, you went after others as well.”
“Panin came to me. I warned him off, but he wanted money and didn’t care about the consequences.”
“Why you?”
“I met him at a conference once. He approached me. Once he told me what he wanted, I would have contacted you. You blew him up before anything occurred.”
“Liar. You’re a recruiter. For the wrong team.” He strolled across the room, the heels of his boots scraping on the wood floor. “We need to rework our collaboration.”
“You know everything I know,” he lied.
“We didn’t know about Panin.”
Ross took in a quick, deep breath before Maslov kicked him in the stomach. The air rushed from his lungs. He smothered the pain with sheer determination. They wouldn’t kill him. Not yet, anyway.
Chapter Three
This meeting sucked. Pretty much everything sucked at the moment. Macknight leaned against the wall, as far from Derek’s mahogany desk as possible without standing in the hall. His heart ached as though a dagger had been plunged into the area where Lucy had once resided.
Derek droned on about the importance of protocol and responsibility. He could screw off. Lucy was dead. The complete obliteration of his best friend corrupted every one of his current thoughts. Without an actual family to call his own, he had filled the void with Lucy and Owen.
“We have every available resource trying to locate Ross. That wouldn’t be necessary if either of you had kept him on your radar as proper procedure dictates.” Derek continued staring between Macknight and Owen, throwing blame to both of them.
Derek’s attack hit a nerve. “Owen alerted me to follow him, but the bomb altered our priorities,” Macknight said.
“Your priorities were Panin and Ross.”
“I was a bit out of me head at that moment, what with the fekkin’ bomb going off in my ear and my comrade being blown to bits.” With the addition of pain medication, Owen’s Irish brogue came out stronger than usual. He looked a mess and was wearing a frown that seemed as painful as the stitches on his ear.
Derek tapped his fingers over some bullshit document on his desk. “Ross is a walking contact list of assets in Russia, Turkey, and a dozen other countries. If so
meone takes that information from him, we’ll lose twenty-five years of work.”
“I followed protocol. I checked on Panin and Lucy and carried Owen out of there. My priority was the team. Besides, how do we know it wasn’t Ross who had ordered the hit? Damn convenient to be away from the bomb when it detonated.” Macknight swallowed some of his rage. The idea that Ross would betray them had seeped into his thoughts slowly, altering memories and destroying any respect he’d ever held for the man.
“I don’t believe it.” Derek shook his head. “Ross was a part of the team as well—the most important part of the team.”
“You have far more faith in the spy recruiter than I do. He was a wee bit too comfortable with the Russians on his last visit to Moscow, disappearing into back rooms where the radio contact became conveniently spotty.” Not that Derek listened to Macknight the first time—or the second—he’d brought up these concerns.
“Either way, you should have kept an eye on him and searched for him after he disappeared. Lucy was already dead. There was nothing you could have done for her. You screwed up.” Derek tugged at his tie as though it was choking him.
“Do we know who set the blast?” Owen asked.
“With Panin leading us into that plaza, and the timing of the detonation, it seems the work of the GRU.”
Macknight had suspected as much.
Instead of sleeping the night before, he’d replayed the entire operation over and over again. The what-ifs went around in his head without a second of peace. “Someone betrayed us, and my money is on the person who wasn’t blown into smithereens. It had to be Ross. Panin’s dead.”
“If it was Ross,” Derek said, “we have bigger issues to worry about. He holds far too many secrets for us to let him disappear. We should have had better safeguards. Once we locate him, if we locate him, we need to know if his recruits are secure. I have a few teams on standby to make sure affected assets have an exit strategy if their covers are broken. You two should review our protocol. This loss was preventable.”
An icy wind pushed Macknight to the edge of Derek’s desk. “Preventable? You don’t have a bloody clue about anything outside of these four walls. At least I was there, risking my life. What the hell have you done of use to anyone but yourself lately?”
Derek leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I handle my job. You handle yours. Until we locate Ross, you’re grounded.”
“What?” Rage whipped through Macknight, lodging in his gut. He leaned forward, his fists clenched.
“Don’t ever threaten me, or I’ll have you sitting out the next two years on desk duty,” the wanker replied.
“Go ahead and try. No one will dive into the muck like I will, and you know it.”
Owen placed his hand on Macknight’s arm. “Don’t. The little prince will never understand what it takes to survive.”
Not much older than Macknight or Owen, Derek remained wrinkle-free in his bulletproof box on the eighth floor of Vauxhall Cross. From what Owen had dug up on him, he had blue blood and an uncle in the House of Lords. Instead of facing death on a regular basis, he remained protected from any real threats while criticizing their team’s attempts at handling the impossible.
Derek’s expression remained arrogant and in need of a split lip. “We all have our jobs to do. For now, you two are taking a time-out in the countryside to decompress.”
Owen shook his head. “Oh no. You’re not putting us out to pasture.”
“Your assignment is already on her way. Protection detail. This should be a piece of cake after some of the larger profile assets you’ve handled.”
Derek’s phone rang. He ignored Macknight and Owen and answered. “Yes… Good, show her in.”
The door opened, and in walked Rose, Derek’s secretary, and another woman, maybe mid-twenties, and taller than average. She carried herself like a person ripped from sleep three hours too early. Her dark brown hair, the same color as her leather jacket, needed a good brushing, and her gait contained a slight limp in her left foot.
Macknight didn’t have a good view of her face as she hobbled past him and Owen to Derek. When she reached his desk, she rested her hands on the edge of the wood in the exact spot Macknight had been a moment before.
“Mr. Barlow?” she asked in an American accent.
“Speaking.”
“I’d like a word alone with you.”
“These men are currently assigned to your case. The one on the chair is Owen Knox, and the bloke guarding the door is Liam Macknight. Anything you say to me can be said to them.”
“Where’s my father?” She spoke with a level of authority that lifted Derek’s brows almost to his receding hairline.
Derek getting his ass handed to him by someone other than himself or Owen cheered Macknight considerably. Rose disappeared, probably waiting for them all to leave so she could have the rest of the Sunday at home like most of the office support staff.
“Ms. Ross, please sit down,” Derek replied. “The situation’s a bit complicated.”
“A bit? You told me he’d been in an accident. You insisted I fly to London immediately. I expected to see him in the hospital or, God forbid, the morgue. Instead, I spent four hours stuck in security at the airport because my name came up on a watch list, only to be couriered to MI6 with not even an I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Now your secretary informs me there is no hospital to visit because you don’t actually know what happened to my father. You better have some answers, or I’ll be heading over to the U.S. embassy to ask the CIA for assistance.”
Macknight didn’t have to see her face to know she was the progeny of Ross. Like her father, she seemed to be a person who controlled her world, or at least attempted to control it. They both stood taller than most people around them, and her brown hair matched his, although his was peppered with gray and was cut above his collar, while hers tumbled over her shoulders.
Her existence, however, complicated everything. Ross was radioactive with intel. What was her connection to his disappearance? Innocent bystander or his assistant? It wasn’t uncommon for children to follow their parents into espionage.
She didn’t seem too traumatized that her father was missing—she seemed more peeved that she had to fly to Europe. If she had any part in Lucy’s death, though, she’d wish she never stepped foot onto British soil.
A particularly strong ache hit him in the chest when he thought about Lucy annihilated while the traitor’s daughter seemed in perfect health. There was no damn way he was babysitting her.
Derek pointed her to a chair next to Owen. “Please, have a seat, Ms. Ross. We can explain.”
“Call me Emma. I want information, not comfort or sympathy.” She stood military-straight and swiveled around. She stared at Owen’s ear and then glanced over at Macknight. The darkness of her eyes, both color and mood, could melt the defenses of a weaker guy. Macknight held her gaze, pretending to provide some support while weighing whether she was capable of conspiracy to murder. If her father had arranged for Lucy to die, nothing would generate even a smidgeon of sympathy for Emma when Ross paid the price.
“Your father’s life is in jeopardy. At this time, we’re unable to tell you more than that.”
Emma sat down next to Owen and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “That’s not specific enough.”
Chapter Four
Emma had arrived at Heathrow on the first available flight from Boston, at Derek Barlow’s insistence. After too many delays and roadblocks, they were now telling her that her father’s location was unknown. They could have told her that over the phone. A curtain of fatigue pressed down on her, adding more discomfort to the gnawing inside her stomach. There was no crying in her world. Her father never acknowledged her tears, so she swallowed any pain or fear that appeared in her life, especially after her mother’s death.
She glanced between the men around her. Owen sat next to her with a bandaged ear covering part of what might have been an edgy
haircut before the injury. His calculating eyes watched Derek more than her.
Macknight remained by the door, one part of him in the conversation, another part thinking of something else, something like a bad memory that wouldn’t leave his mind. The only word to describe him was elegant, from the loose, black waves of hair that fell over his ears to the leather wingtips he wore with his creased black pants. When his full focus returned to the room, he appeared to take in every part of her, head to toe. Not in some admiring manner, though. More analytical, as though she were a piece of a puzzle.
Derek Barlow, the man responsible for her arrival in London, sat all imperious across the desk from her. Knox seemed unpredictable, Macknight acted impenetrable, but Barlow? He had a false confidence, the sort that most new police officers wore before the job smacked them into reality.
He seemed like an easier target—a pretty boy with great genes and an expensive wardrobe. He had the prep-school aura where the world caved to his needs. He wouldn’t bend to her will unless his job or reputation were at risk. And she was more than willing to damage either for the sake of her father. He’d been her rock and was now lost in a black hole of questions.
Despite years of traveling with BP, he’d always shown up when he’d said he would—to every lacrosse game when he’d promised to be there and every event that mattered to Emma. Now MI6 claimed he was missing. The hold on her heart squeezed tighter, the pain unbearable. Without him, she was alone.
She should have headed to BP headquarters instead. That company had more inroads across the world than most European countries.
Her lack of sleep made the situation more difficult to bear. After taking three soothing breaths, she held back the panic streaming through her and proceeded as though she were playing the bad cop in an interrogation room.
She rose from her chair. “If you can’t tell me what happened to my father, I’m grabbing a cab to the embassy. Someone there might have answers for me.”
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