Multiple Exposure A Sophie Medina Mystery (32 page)

I did.

“You were right. They are from my stepfather. He and my mother sent them as a housewarming gift. Thank you so much for taking them in.”

“No trouble at all.” India looked nonplussed. “Why didn’t he bring them last night instead of going to the expense and trouble of having them delivered when the florist is closed?”

“Oh, my parents are like that. They wanted to surprise me.”

I walked back to my apartment fairly certain India guessed I was lying. My parents would have sent their daughter pink, yellow, or peach roses, but probably not red, the color of love and passion.

I didn’t need a card to know who sent them.

The roses were from Nick.

21

Nick was
here.
He was in Washington and he had come, as Duval and Baz predicted, straight to me. It felt as though the world had suddenly tilted on its axis, spinning faster and leaving me so breathless I could scarcely keep up.

For the next hour I paced the apartment and tried to avoid looking out the bay window too often, because somewhere out there people were watching me and waiting for Nick. As risky and dangerous as it was, he was going to find a way to be with me. That’s why he sent the roses: He wanted me to know.

Just after six o’clock the skies turned dark and the rains finally came. Along S Street, lights appeared inside homes and the sodium vapor streetlamps flickered on earlier than usual. By now I knew what I was going to do. The only thing left was the interminable wait.

At eleven, I turned off all the lights in my apartment as though I were going to bed and made my way downstairs in the dark to the front vestibule. Earlier I had swiped the doorjamb key to Max Katzer’s apartment and left a basket with a bottle of Montgomery Estate Cabernet Sauvignon, some homemade sandwiches, and a couple of chocolate bars inside his front door. I let myself into Max’s place, got the basket, and walked out the back door to his garden. India’s lights were still on, shining like friendly beacons in the darkness. If she happened to look out her windows at the wrong moment, she would have a clear view of me in Max’s garden and she would know I could only have gotten there by breaking into his apartment. I didn’t look up, as though some magnetic pull would bring her to the window if I did. The gate creaked when I opened it—I’d been afraid it might—but it was too late to do anything now. I closed it and sprinted across the alley, unlocking the door to Max’s carriage house office. Before I went inside I scattered half a dozen rose petals in front of the door, just like Nick used to do on the staircase in our cottage when a bottle of champagne was chilling, to be drunk in bed by candlelight.

There was one windowless room at the back of the carriage house and it was stacked with furniture in need of repair. I had covered the beam of my flashlight with a red gel filter from my flash equipment, so I turned on the muted light and searched until I found a coffee table, which I dragged in front of a humpbacked velveteen sofa. Then I turned off the light and sat in the darkness as the rain pounded the metal roof like hundreds of ball-peen hammers.

He arrived at midnight.

The front door opened and closed with a faint click and someone began moving stealthily around Max’s office, a tiny floorboard creak, little whispering sounds barely audible above the steady drumming of the rain. A moment later, the red beam of a proper night vision flashlight picked out the piled-up furniture surrounding me.

“Sophie?” His voice was a hoarse whisper.

“Nick!”

I flew across the room, nearly knocking him over as we fell into each other’s arms. He was soaking wet as if he’d just been swimming, crushing me to him in a fierce embrace, stroking my hair and whispering my name over and over. Then his mouth was on mine and we were like a couple of desperate teenagers, kissing and ripping at each other’s clothes as we undressed each other.

Somewhere in my brain a warning bell went off. He had changed. My husband hadn’t exactly become a stranger, but something was different, alien. Not just the physical changes—the beard, the longer hair, a different color, and his deeply bronzed skin—but even his clothes seemed foreign and his kiss tasted and smelled of an exotic scent I couldn’t define: traces of wind, dust, spices with unpronounceable names, some faint fragrance that belonged to a life I didn’t know.

“I’m so sorry,” he said into my hair. “I’ve put you through hell.”

“Shh.” I pushed back my own fears about what this ordeal had done to him, how it would change us. “Don’t talk about it now . . . how long do we have?”

I heard his sharp intake of breath and he said against my ear, “Two hours at most.”

He lifted me up and I wrapped my arms and legs tight around him as he carried me to the sofa and laid me down. I think I was shivering from the cold, but all I remember was pulling him on top of me and closing my eyes, ignoring the rough velveteen fabric abrading my skin as we moved back and forth in the old rhythm. Two hours . . . at most.

We needed to make it last a lifetime.

*

The sofa was barely the width of a twin bed but we made it work. Afterward, we got dressed because it was chilly and, though neither of us mentioned it, because we might need to move fast, get out of there quickly. Nick had a gun, a small revolver, which he placed on the coffee table.

I tried not to wonder if he’d used it.

I unpacked the picnic basket and took out two votive candles and a book of matches. “There aren’t any windows in this room. I think we’ll be okay to light these . . . I want to see you, Nick.”

His smile was a quick flash of white teeth in the darkness. “Wait a minute.” He got up and found a couple of pillows on another sofa in the corner of the room, propping them against the doorjamb. “In case the jamb’s not flush with the threshold.”

He pulled my rose petals, now bruised and soggy, out of his pocket as the flare of a match lit up his handsome face. In the sharp golden light he looked exhausted, and I already knew when we made love that he’d lost a lot of weight. I wanted to ask about his health, what he ate, was he sleeping, but we were running out of time.

“I found these outside by the door.” He set the crushed petals on the coffee table. “Better safe than sorry.”

“The roses were beautiful. I left the petals so you’d know where to find me.”

“You’re my true north,” he said. “I always know where to find you.”

I blinked back tears as he opened the wine and set the cork faceup on the table, a familiar little quirk of his. For a split second we were back in London and this was one of the indoor picnics we used to have in front of a winter fire in the sitting room, lying on the wedding ring quilt from our bed. But those days were gone and he was on the run, a wanted man. And this was no romantic evening by the fire: It was a dangerous clandestine meeting, our own little council of war.

We touched glasses and he brushed my cheek with the back of his hand. “I love you, Sophie. I’ve missed you terribly.”

“I love you and I’ve missed you terribly, too,” I said. “Nick, there are people in the CIA who think you had something to do with Colin’s death and the death of your contact in Abadistan. They have a picture of you at a riot in Iskar on the day your CIA contact was murdered. And someone sent me a photo of you standing in the exact spot where they found Colin’s body in the Danube.”

His eyes grew dark. At first I thought it was shock, but then I realized he was angry. “It’s a setup,” he said. “Colin and I met in Vienna right before he was killed—he gave me the well logs—so it’s true I was there. But I wasn’t at any riot in Iskar the day Dani was murdered. The pictures must have been doctored. What do you call it . . . a multiple exposure?”

“With the right computer software it’s not hard to do. Sometimes it’s as easy as swapping your head for someone else’s.”

He stared into his wineglass. “I’m sorry you got dragged into this. The agency must have given you a contact. Is that how you saw the Iskar photo?”

“Yes. His name is Napoleon Duval. He used to be CIA, but now he’s with something called the National Counterterrorism Task Force. Do you know him?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said. “And you don’t ever ‘leave’ the CIA, darling. What’s he like?”

“If you crossed a superhero with Dirty Harry, that’s Duval. I think bullets bounce off his chest,” I said. “Unless he catches them between his teeth.”

He flashed the ghost of a smile. “A hard-ass. Is he giving you grief about me?”

“I don’t think he trusts me,” I said. “Though I’m not sure I trust him, either. He says the longer you stay out, the guiltier you look. What happened, Nick? How did this start? Why did you have to fake your own kidnapping?”

He rubbed his thumb back and forth across the pulse point on my wrist and I caught my breath. His touch was warm and sure.

“I wish I’d been able to warn you, baby. Colin called me that night you were flying home from Istanbul and told me to get the hell out. He said they were coming for me. I’m pretty sure Dani set me up.”

“Your CIA contact?”

He drank some wine. “Yeah, the guy I supposedly murdered in Iskar.” He said it casually.

It hung in the air between us, and my eyes went automatically to the gun. We had never, ever talked about whether he’d used it before, but this time was different. I needed to know.

“You didn’t kill him, did you?” I asked.

“What do you think?” he asked in a calm voice.

The rain had let up and the sound of it beating on the metal roof had become a muted, steady thrumming, white noise that shut out the rest of the world. Nick kept secrets from me all the time, but I knew if he’d killed a man this would not be one of them. He sat there and waited for my answer.

“I told Duval you didn’t murder anybody,” I said.

He nodded and relief flooded through me. “What did he say to that?”

“He said if you didn’t kill him, you probably know who did.”

Nick snorted. “I wonder if Duval’s ever been anyplace more dangerous than a desk in Langley. Jesus, Lord. That’s what I’m trying to find out before whoever it is finds me.”

“You don’t know who you’re looking for?”

He refilled our glasses. “Not yet. But I do know this: If I hadn’t told Dani what we discovered when we drilled that test well, I’m pretty sure Colin would still be alive. Colin was killed because of what he knew. I’m next on the list.”

I shuddered. “Whose list? The Shaika?”

“Those guys will shoot you just to see if their gun works. Arkady Vasiliev is a buddy with the
pakhan,
their big boss. I’m guessing it’s a joint venture.”

“Vasiliev wants your well logs, Nick.”

“I’ll bet he does. I’m pretty sure he wants what’s left of Crowne Energy, too,” he said. “And unless I can stop him, he’s probably going to get it. With his money and political connections he could steal the iconostases from every one of the Kremlin churches and get away with it.”

“How are you going to stop someone like Vasiliev? He’s on one of his ocean liners in the middle of nowhere, according to Duval. Didn’t I read that there’s a submarine on board in case he needs to make a quick getaway and surface-to-air missiles in case of an attack by God knows who?”

“He can’t stay in the middle of nowhere forever. First I need to find out who sold out Colin and me.”

I frowned. “I thought you said it was Dani. Do you think he was working for both sides? The CIA and the Shaika?”

“I’m sure of it. But there’s one more traitor, one more Judas in the bunch. Someone’s setting me up to take the rap for Colin and Dani . . . whoever faked those pictures, the one Duval showed you and the one someone sent you.”

I passed Nick a sandwich and he devoured it. “I don’t understand. The reason Colin and Dani were killed, and now someone’s after you, is that you discovered oil in Abadistan?”

He wiped his mouth on a napkin and said, “It’s more than that, Soph. We drilled a rank wildcat and guess what we found? Light, sweet crude. It doesn’t get any better than that.” He grinned at my wide-eyed look of shock. “Yup. The real deal.”

Light, sweet crude was the best, most expensive oil in the world, on par with Saudi Arabian oil. And a rank wildcat was the riskiest well you could drill because it meant you were looking for oil far from where anyone expected to find it. The combination of the two was the equivalent of hitting the biggest megamillions lottery jackpot ever, two days in a row.

I had guessed that Crowne Energy discovered oil, but nothing like that. “My God, Nick. Are you serious?”

He took another sandwich. “If there’s as much oil as we think there is, that region will go from abject poverty to unimaginable wealth. You have no idea how much money we’re talking about, the fortunes that will be made.”

Yes, I did. Enough to kill for.

“Vasiliev knows you found oil, or at least he’s got a pretty good idea,” I said. “And somehow he knows you’re alive. Why is he doing this? Why is he trying to destroy Crowne Energy? He already owns the biggest oil production company in Russia.”

I rummaged through the picnic basket for the chocolate bars and handed one to him.

“Because it’s the Russian way.” He unwrapped the chocolate, broke off a piece and gave it to me, and took another for himself. “In America, if a man has one cow and his neighbor has two cows, the guy with one cow aspires to be like the richer neighbor. In Russia, the guy with one cow kills one of the neighbor’s two cows, so now they both have only one cow and they’re equal. It’s a completely different mentality.”

I licked my fingers. “That’s crazy.”

“Welcome to Russia.”

“What about the well logs?” I asked. “Everyone’s searching for them like they’re the Holy Grail.”

“They’re in a safe place,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

“Vasiliev told me to tell you he’d pay good money for them.”

“Vasiliev can go to hell,” Nick said. “One way or the other he’s responsible for Colin’s death. I don’t want his blood money. It’s bad enough I have to live with my own guilt for what happened to Colin.”

“It’s not your fault. You shouldn’t blame yourself—” I stopped.

He didn’t miss a beat. “What happened, baby? What’s wrong?”