Limbo Man (38 page)

Vee could see it coming. She should have known the bomb hunt was personal. Here then was the explanation. At last.

“Using my brother’s connections to the
Organizatsiya
, Ivan arranged to sell the bombs. Buyers came from everywhere. Not that I knew anything about it until much later . . .” Colonel Andropova’s lashes rested against her cheeks. She seemed to sink into her chair. “Only later, when I realized we had become wealthy, able to travel the world while our country disintegrated, our economy plunged into chaos—only then did I understand. And by that time it was too late. My brother’s success created a criminal organization that made the Italian mafia look like pussy cats, while my husband’s guilt turned him into a broken old man before my eyes.” Andropova paused, obviously seeing into the past and her family’s personal involvement in the battle of good versus evil.

“Ivan was never again the man I married,” she said at last. “Day by day, he diminished, fading away until he was nothing more than a ghost haunted by a crime he could not take back. My older children are pragmatic, like me,” she added, returning briskly from her brief foray into emotion. “Shame might grip us, but we survive, we try harder. We become better people than we might have been without this shame.

“But Seryozha could not accept it. He said nothing—we had no idea—until after college when he set out on his mad adventure. Always keeping his eye on his obsession, never looking back, never settling down. No family, no proper job. Shame consumed him, and we could not turn him from it.”

“And you think I can?”

“I think you have.”

“Ma’am?” If Nataliya Andropova believed that, then she wasn’t as hard-headed as Vee thought she was. What on earth had Misha told her?

Shoulders stiff, eyes downcast, the GRU colonel examined her desk as if she’d never seen it before. This was the moment, Vee thought. The reason she was here. If Seryozha’s mother wanted to think Vee had power over her errant son, so be it. She wasn’t going to disillusion her.

When the older woman faced Vee once again, her green eyes looked out from a face that had softened into something close to a smile. “As you know,” she said, “there are unofficial means of communication between your country and ours. Quiet little one-on-one meetings in out-of-the-way places. Feelers put out, responses, negotiation. Baby steps that take time . . . and delicate maneuvering. It seems your Homeland Security believes Sergei could be useful to them, and as far as we are concerned”—the colonel flipped her fingers in a rueful wave—“he has become an embarrassment, a constant reminder of our family’s shame. Like my brother Arkadi, we all breath easier when he is several thousand miles away.”

“You would
exile
him?” Vee protested.

“No.” Nataliya Andropova shook her head. “We would not keep him from Mother Russia. It is in his blood. But for living, working . . .” This time she allowed herself a true smile. “I raised him to be an American. He has lived there for more than a decade. For him it will be like going home.”

Seryozha. Homeland Security
. They were actually going to let him go. Vee had begun to think this was all one big run-around. The implications were staggering. Her whirling brain finally realized Nataliya Andropova was still speaking.
Attention, idiot! It’s not over yet.

“ . . . conditions. First—”

“I beg your pardon, colonel. Would you please repeat that.”

“There are conditions to my son’s release, Ms Frost. Important ones. Perhaps you would be kind enough to pay attention.”

Yes, ma’am
. Underneath the gruff reproof Vee thought she caught a gleam of understanding. This was, after all, the woman who had fallen so much in love with an army officer that she had turned her back on a commitment to her country.

“Firstly,” Andropova decreed, “no more bombs. Sergei’s hunting days are over.”

“He has agreed to this?” Vee asked, more than a little surprised.

“He has agreed if our final condition is met.”

“And that is?”

Holding up a second finger, Nataliya Andropova ignored Vee’s question. “Secondly, Sergei will never again work for Arkadi Petrovski.”

“Not a problem, colonel. Officially, Sergei Tokarev died in a courtyard in Brighton Beach.”

“There will be no miraculous resurrections,” Andropova snapped.

“Yes, ma’am,” Vee responded meekly.

“Thirdly . . .” Colonel Andropova folded her hands on top of her desk, reverting to the stern face of a high-ranking member of the GRU. “Thirdly, we are all agreed that the only way we can be sure these conditions will stay in effect is marriage. To you.”

Silence. Vee felt the thudding of her heart, the rasping breaths she couldn’t quite control. “You’re serious,” she choked out.

“Completely.”

“He has agreed?” Seryozha give up his quest? Impossible. This was some kind of GRU manipulation. A fantasy. But why—

“Yes.”

Vee returned the colonel’s bland stare with something close to fascination. “You are aware,” she pronounced with great care, “that no one can really control him. He is his own man and a very powerful one.”

“If you agree to our conditions, he becomes your responsibility. May you have joy in taming him.”

Not possible. But an amusing thought. “I can only give you an answer after I’ve talked to him,” Vee said. “
Now
, please.”

Colonel Nataliya Andropova stood, held out her hand. “It has been a pleasure, Ms Frost. Valentina. I hope to see you again at your wedding.”

Vee shook hands with . . .
her prospective mother-in-law
?

This wasn’t happening.

Well, damn. Seryozha was back in a Psych Ward.

The message had been clear after a meandering drive through a forest of slim white birch trees interspersed with evergreens, revealed a mansion obviously constructed in Tsarist days before Stalin turned utilitarian into an architectural dirty word. Seryozha was in a funny farm for agents who needed more R & R than a couple of weeks at a Black Sea resort.

Poor misunderstood Limbo Man. He couldn’t get away from being a head case. No matter the state of his sanity when he’d been incarcerated here, the inactivity had probably turned him into a raving maniac by now.

Vee followed a nurse up the graceful, curving staircase of the eighteenth century mansion whose ambiance had been destroyed by ugly modern furnishings. “The furniture was burned during the revolution,” the receptionist
had
told her with an apologetic smile when she noticed Vee’s shocked perusal of the foyer whose only remaining traces of elegance were its black and white marble floor, pale green walls, and empty niches where statues once stood.

The nurse knocked on a door near the end of a long corridor. A corner room, Vee noticed, in spite of her pounding heart and faltering feet. Royal accommodations. Yet surely Colonel Andropova couldn’t really have meant what she said. That the government would release Seryozha only if she married him. If she took him out of the country . . .

“Come.”

The nurse cracked open the door, stood back, and waved Vee inside. Suddenly, surprisingly, the woman flashed a broad smile before retracing her steps along the corridor.

Vee stepped through the door. Every word she’d planned to say, every emotion she’d thought of expressing flew out of her head.
This
was Seryozha? This ruggedly handsome man with a full, perfectly trimmed head of brown hair. Clear green eyes with no dark and deadly depths. A mouth that was sensuous instead of grim. A body that somehow stood straighter, taller, a few pounds heavier. A body that looked fit and confident, but not as if prepared to throw a punch or dodge a bullet at any second.

Well, thank you, funny farm. Maybe mama knew best, after all.

“Valentina?” He stood ramrod stiff, not moving a muscle.

She had to play it cool. Not fall all over him, crying a river of tears. If they were going to be married, it damn well wasn’t going to be because mama said so.

The room was large, with a double-sided view of extensive gardens, now nothing more than clumps of frosted plants beneath a blanket of snow. Vee moved forward, stopping just short of touching distance. “So you’re so desperate to get out of here, you’re willing to marry me,” she challenged.

“It seemed”—he gave an infinitesimal shrug—“not a bad idea.”

Right.
Men!
“Were you thinking temporary?” Vee inquired sweetly. “Just long enough to get you out of the country?”

One brown brow—the one over his scarred right cheek—shot up. “Well, actually . . . I was thinking of fulfilling my mother’s old assignment. House in the suburbs, kids, maybe even the white picket fence. Happily ever after without the call to fight.”

Vee bit back tears, sticking doggedly to her planned agenda. “Jack Frost won’t let you get away with that. You’ll be leaping from one frying pan into another.”

“This I accept. I never said I wished to retire. A man must work. And the world’s underbelly is what I know.” He broke his grim stance with a flashing Tokarev grin. “We have both, no? Job with Jack and house in suburbs? In America anything is possible.”

He held out his arms, and Vee plunged into his embrace. Five thousand miles from the U S of A, and she was home at last.

             
Epilogue

Eight days later.

The wedding in Moscow was a civil ceremony, made solemn and binding by the attendance of Sergei’s extended family—his mother Nataliya, Misha and his wife and children, their sister Irina, her husband and children. And the ghost of Ivan Sergeievich Zhukov.

The wedding at a beachfront resort on St. John’s was more elaborate, complete with a genuine black-robed minister, a long white gown, elaborate flower arrangements, and the Frost family, together for the first time in many years. Jack, Elena, Jilian, and Jason.

Sergei endured it all. As grooms were supposed to do. Then, finally, all was quiet. He and Vee were alone, just the two of them. As newlyweds were supposed to be.

Sergei looked around the large, elegant room, out the broad expanse of windows at the magnificent panorama of palm trees, sand, and ocean, then back to the closed bathroom door. Until now, nothing had seemed real. Not the balmy breezes of a tropical island, not the long, long flight from Moscow. Not the last fourteen years since he’d graduated from college. Limbo wasn’t solely the place he’d been trapped in when he woke up in Bellvue, a man with no name and no past. A man, he eventually discovered, he didn’t really like.

Limbo
. The realm next door to Hell. He’d been living in it since his death-bed promise to his father. His vow to find and destroy each and every bomb. To atone for the only dishonorable stain on General Ivan Zhukov’s outstanding military career.

Yet hadn’t his father already paid for that sin? His ebullient personality fading to sullen, his giant frame wasting to skin and bones, dying while still wrapped in an agony of guilt?

Retrieving the bombs was his father’s obsession, the shrinks had told him. Passing the quest to his younger son, an unfair burden. The maundering fantasy of a dying man.

He’d resisted their words every time. Dug in his heels and hung on to his illusions.

Until this last time, when he knew he could never have Valentina if he didn’t let go.

The bathroom door opened.
Vee
was wearing the nightgown he’d bought in Atlantic City. The one so sheer even lace and embroidery couldn’t cover the goodies underneath.

But he was even more exposed. In his eagerness to officially inaugurate a long and happy marriage, he wasn’t wearing anything at all.

Vee sauntered across the room, stopping a foot away. “That’s quite a barricade you’ve got there. Planning on using that as a lethal weapon?” She wrapped her hand around his jutting penis.

Seryozha gulped, jerked her toward him. “The only weapon I have left.” he breathed into her ear. “Is good, no?”

Heaven help her, at this moment even his reversion to Sergei couldn’t deflate her desire. Good boy, bad boy, he was hers, whatever was to come.

The moon cut a path across the water, sparks twinkling with each lap of the waves. Palms rustled. Night creatures scuttled through the sand.

Inside, improved Russian-American relations took on a whole new meaning.

~ ***
~

Author’s Note: 

For any nuclear physicists among my readers: although I did a staggering amount of research for this book, I’m sure I got the mechanics all wrong - and, given the topic, that’s probably just as well. The bombs, however, are real. Ten nuclear bombs did go missing during the chaos after the fall of the Soviet Union. At the time I heard the story, three had been found, providing the nucleus of this story.

About the Author:

Believing variety is the spice of life, I also write traditional Regency, Romantic Suspense, Mystery, and Futuristic. (Below is a list of books currently available.) Others, including my first steampunk,
Airborne - The Hanover Restoration
, will be coming soon. The Golden Beach books are not a classic series. Some have connected characters; others, only a connected setting, a very real Florida Gulf Coast resort and retirement community whose name has been changed because the residents would like to keep its uniqueness a deep, dark secret.