Limbo Man (26 page)

“May I take my mushrooms?” the old man asked.

They met Gosha and enjoyed a quick lunch at the hotel before piling into the plane, mushrooms and all, for the flight back to Irkutsk. Sergei stared out the window, eyes focused inward rather than on the infinite forest below. At last things were going well. Without Mikoyan, Leonov and the terrorists would have to scramble to find someone to arm the bomb. And perhaps, just perhaps—if he’d held out during that beating in New York—they didn’t have the U-236. Which left the antique nuke no more dangerous than a stick of dynamite. Finding another source of the isotope would entail a big delay. Hopefully as long as the twenty years since the bombs went missing.

So . . . at the moment they were making progress—slow and painful—but optimism was beginning to peek out of the gloom. When he’d waked up on that flight to Wyoming with all the Feds and realized he’d lost two vital weeks . . .

He’d seen the mushroom cloud. Seen the bodies . . .

Experienced the horror of catastrophic failure.

And known, when he discovered the new 9/11 hadn’t happened yet, that the reprieve he’d been granted would be short-lived.

Unless he undid what he had set in motion.

So not to despair. He had the little old bomb maker in hand, and he’d probably hidden the U-236. Two out of three was good. More than enough. He had maneuvering room to find the bomb.

Sure he did. Leonov could still unearth a bomb expert among the bright and greedy young physicists who were in diapers when the ten nuclear bombs were made. And Leonov might well be holding the lead container with the U-236 that had already begun its decay.

Lead container
.
Containers
. Small, round.
Two
of them. Enough for more than one bomb.
Govnó!
They emerged out of the mist of his mind as clearly as if he held them in his hands.

Two bombs. And big time terrorists, like Al-Quaida, loved coordinated attacks.

He must have known there were two bombs. Sergei Tokarev had given Robey his orders. And yet, somehow he’d shut it out—overwhelmed by waking on a U. S. Government airplane to find he’d gone from international arms dealer and bomb hunter to a federal prisoner, his body damaged, his mind a chaotic mess with great gaps among the rush of memory. His only seeming friend a gorgeous blonde who was a perfect stranger, a female agent set to spy on him. Seduce him. Do anything to get him to play the Americans’ game.

Hell, he wouldn’t even play the
Russians
’ game most of the time . . .

Since then, he’d been moving far and fast, while trying to cope with the Feds, Leonov’s bad guys, his supposed friends, like Uncle Arkadi and a blonde named Valentina. No wonder he hadn’t quite wrapped his head around the concept of Bomb Number Two.

Sergei swore under his breath, a soft sibilance of Russian profanity.

“What?” Vee asked. “I thought you were pleased that we found Mikoyan.”

“I just thought of another problem,” Sergei muttered. “Believe me, you don’t want to know.”

“I do want to know!” Vee snapped. “I’m really, really tired of being shut out.”

And she really, really wasn’t going to like his news bulletin either. Might as well get it over with in one breath. “There may be more than one bomb, and they’ve had time to scare up another expert. There’s always a nuclear hotshot somewhere who’d like to supplement his income.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Vee declared flatly.

“I wish I were.”

Naturally, she poked and prodded him almost all the way back to Irkutsk, scolding, challenging, “Are you sure, sure, sure?” Sergei finally told her if she kept up the interrogation, he was going to open the door and drop her out.

Smoking silence enveloped them the rest of the flight. Dusk was approaching as they went wheels down and began to taxi back to the modest terminal building, but not enough to obscure the official-looking black vehicles waiting at the edge of the runway. Even Sergei’s broad range of profanity deserted him. Just when it looked as if their hunt was making progress, he’d been betrayed.

As they rolled to a stop directly beside the two large black cars, Sergei charged the cockpit. Gosha had just opened the door, a two-step staircase was being rolled in place. Sergei swung so hard, the pilot stumbled backwards down the stairs, landing with a thud on the tarmac. “
Viblyadok!
” Sergei shouted after him. “
Bladskyi rot!
”

Vee’s grandmother never taught her those words, but she’d learned them in Novosibirsk. For some reason Seryozha had just called Gosha a bastard and a son of a bitch. She dashed to the front of the plane in time to see Sergei wrestled away by two men carrying AK-47s. They tossed him into the back of one of black vehicles.

Gosha was back on his feet, looking hangdog. He couldn’t meet Vee’s eyes. A tall sandy blond stood at the bottom of the stairs, fortyish and strikingly handsome in Russian uniform. A cop to the core. Probably GRU, the successor to the KGB.

“Miss Frost, welcome to Siberia,” he said in English. “Please join us.”

“I speak Russian.”

“So I’ve been told. You will, however, indulge me in showing off my English.” He held out his hand, graciously offering to assist her dow
n the stairs.

Startled, Vee accepted his hand automatically and found herself ushered into the back seat of a second black car, and soon joined by Kiril Mikoyan. Crumpled from vigorous outdoorsman to defeated old man, he was still clutching his basket of mushrooms.
Damn!
She was too soft for this game. No matter what he’d done, Vee had hoped the old man would mak
e it to his new life in Canada.

Even though she couldn’t see Seryozha, Vee had no difficulty picturing his state of mind. Just when
he’d begun to drag more facts out of the murk of his mind
, he’d been blindsided. There was no doubt the ambush was unexpected. He had put every ounce of his anguish into that blow to Gosha’s hairy jaw. Being swept up by the GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate, had thrown a major monkey wrench into their plans. Not to mention the personal hazard. Vee shivered, grateful to see that the GRU major, who had settled into the front passenger seat, wa
s not looking in her direction.

Where were they going? Some convenient
oubliette
in the Siberian forest where they’d be lost forever? Ah, no. No forest needed when Lake Baikal and its mile-deep depths were so close at hand.

Worse yet, were they to be interrogated instead of eradicated? Drugged and tortured until the whole story came out?

Vee hadn’t liked the way the GRU major looked at her either. Amused, appreciative, interested—take your pick.
Oh, shit!

It was fully dark by the time their two-car cavalcade arrived at its destination. All Vee could see was an unusually large
dacha,
its windows spilling light onto heavy forest in every direction. Not exactly the Lubyanka. Nor was the room the major indicated was hers. A holding cell it wasn’t. She was in a bedroom slightly larger than the one at Aunt Victoria’s island cottage. The decor wasn’t so far different either, a double bed with quilted spread in a country print, matching draperies at the window. Decent pine furniture, probably hand-crafted. A brush, comb, and mirror on the dresser. And some remarkably fine landscapes on the wall that looked like—Vee stepped closer, peered at an oil of Lake Baikal and a watercolor of a deer in the forest
.
O
riginals
,
n
ot prints.

Strange, very strange. Vee sat down on the side of the bed and didn’t move, while her thoughts circled each other, worried, frustrated, and confused. What was happening to Seryozha and the suddenly fragile old man? Was this the end of their quest? Did the recent hard-line attitude of the Russian government indicate that some of those in power wouldn’t mind if an American city—or two—
was blown off the map? Or . . .
?

A knock on the door. Vee looked up, expectantly, but the door didn’t open. A second knock, only slightly louder. Whoever was at the door was waiting politely for her to answer.
She controlled the door?
Come to think of it, she hadn’t heard the click of a lock when the major closed her in.

Vee opened the door, and a young man in uniform rolled her suitcase, the one that had been left at the hotel in Irkutsk, into the room. He gave her a shy sideways nod, and left. The carry-on bag she’d taken to Bratsk was draped over the pull-out handle of the suitcase Seryozha had insisted she buy on their shopping spree at the casino in Atlantic City. Obviously, he’d known they were about to go world-hopping. Now, grateful as she was for her possessions, Vee could only stare at them, her thoughts going round and round as she attempted to figure out what was going on.

Another knock revealed a fresh-faced young woman who, evidently not realizing Vee spoke Russian, signaled for her to come out of the bedroom and shooed her toward a round table in what appeared to be a spacious living room. The table held a fine silver samovar, two tall glasses in intricately designed enameled-copper holders, containers of sugar, cream, delicately sliced lemon, and a plate of pastries. The girl smiled, obviously delighted to be able to offer such a fine display of hospitality, and disappeared down a corridor on the right.

Vee gaped, her eyes gradually rising from the tea table to the excellent, if not new, furnishings, the fire dancing in the stone fireplace, and finally to the array of windows on the opposite side of the
dacha
from the entryway. Leaving the tea to steep, Vee stepped up to one of the broad windows.
Oh. My. God
. She knew where she was. This had to be the Eisenhower
dacha
. It had been pointed out to her on her first trip to Baikal, back when she was a student. In the early summer of 1960, when Eisenhower was President, he’d planned a visit to the USSR in an effort to defuse some of the tensions of the Cold War. The Russians had gone so far as to build this
dacha
high on a hillside above Lake Baikal so the President might enjoy spectacular views of Russia’s greatest natural wonder. And then the Russians had shot down one of our U-2 spy planes that just happened to be 1200 miles into Russian airspace. The President’s visit was one of the casualties of the resulting international incident. The elegant log cabin had never been used. At least not by President Dwight Eisenhower.

“You are enjoying your dungeon, Ms Frost?” With only a small gasp of surprise, Vee swung
a
round to find the GRU major standing beside the tea table. “Shall we?” he said, waving a hand toward one of two small chairs. “You may pour.”

Vee wondered when the Mad Hatter was going to appear.
Cool, play it cool
. That was her name, after all. Stifling the many questions that demanded answers, she carefully filled the major’s teacup, added sugar, no cream, as requested, then prepared her own, adding nothing but a thin slice of lemon. She passed the plate of pastries, was amused as the major’s eyes lit with appreciation.

Eyes
. Vee took another quick look. The light in the room was far from bright, but she could almost swear his eyes were green. And the sculpted Slavic cheekbones also looked familiar.

Ridiculous. Tension had her mind skittering into the realm of the absurd. Enough! Time to stop playing the major’s game. “What have you done with them?” Vee demanded.

“I would tell you both men are in adjoining dungeons in the cellar, but I have already used that line.” Amusement clearly showed in eyes that were definitely green. “They are comfortable and being fed, as you are. We will dine together later, but first I wish to talk with you separately. To hear your version of Sergei’s wild tale.” The major offered an all-too-knowledgeable smile over the top of his tea glass.

Sergei. Not Tokarev
. They knew each other? Another oddity—the inflection of the major’s excellent American English was almost exactly like Seryozha’s. The timbre of his voic
e. The touch of dry humor . . .

Vee dismissed her musings—not important at the moment. The major had asked her a crucial question—something that might determine their fate. So how did she answer? Particularly when she had no idea what Seryozha had told him.

Vee nibbled a small pastry, chewing slowly. She’d swear the major’s lips twitched. Either the days of the KGB were truly long gone, or there was another factor at work here.

Vee swallowed, dusted crumbs off her finger onto her large white cloth napkin. “You can’t possibly expect me to babble on about our recent activities when I have absolutely no idea what Sergei told you.”

The major had a charming smile that Vee had also seen before, if from more uneven features. “But of course. I would expect no less from a Frost. Very well . . .” Firelight danced off the major’s straight sandy blond hair as he took a long swallow of tea before setting the holder back on the table. He steepled his fingers, thought for a few moments, obviously choosing his words with care. “We know Sergei chases old bombs. This is not a bad thing, so we allow him to do it. But it has become an obsession. I am only three years older than he, yet I have a good job, a wife and four children . . .”