The Russian Seduction (16 page)

“No.” Putting on her game face, she straightened her shoulders and faced her boss. “But I do need to give you new information from Kostenko on the Ukraine situation. Right now.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Church bells were chiming over the city’s Sunday hush when Alexis exited the concrete monolith that housed the Tretyakov Gallery’s modern art collection. Clamped in the painful vise of cold, she hurried through the bleak expanse of the sculpture garden, past the grim jumble of crumbling Lenins and Stalins that usually piqued her interest.

Today, though, her mind was definitely not on Soviet art, and the museum visit had done nothing to distract her. Sixteen hours from now, she’d be in her office, filing a contact report on her little sexual indiscretion. And then, she supposed, her unforgivable lapse of control would be part of her personnel file forever.

Burrowing into her shearling coat, Alexis angled her course along the ice-locked embankment of the Moscow River. As if she could outpace her worries.

During this dangerous cold snap, the television was broadcasting nightly images of those unfortunates who passed out in the city streets, their bodies frozen stiff as cordwood by the time they were discovered. Under these conditions, the ramshackle stalls housing the outdoor artists’ market were nearly deserted.

She hurried through the somber gray twilight, past splashes of colorful paint in a hodgepodge of styles, vendors hunched over steaming cups of tea and trying not to freeze. The best art bargains in town were here, if you had a good eye and could barter in the local lingo, but she wasn’t really in a buying mood.

Hard to focus on art when she couldn’t shed the itchy feeling of being watched. Probably just a phobia after two years of living and working in this fishbowl, never mind the guy who’d maybe been following her and Kostenko on Friday. She wasn’t trained to spot surveillance, and if someone was following now, they weren’t being obvious about it.

Pausing between stalls, she snuck a glance over her shoulder and scanned the river’s frozen expanse. Shivered to see a lone fisherman with his rod, squatted patiently over his dark hole, sipping vodka to keep warm.

A footstep scraped on the ice behind her, and adrenaline spurted through her. She sucked in a breath, and picked up the spine-tingling hint of a familiar fragrance. The frisson of surprised anticipation—damn it—rushed over her skin like gooseflesh.

“
Privyet
, Alexis,” Victor Kostenko murmured in her ear. “Don’t turn around. We’re not alone.”

The warning hit her system like a jolt of caffeine on an empty stomach. Her hands knotted in her pockets as she stared doggedly at the icy river, through the fog of her quickened breath.

“Why the hell are you following me, captain?” She fought a surge of anger. She’d screwed her career for this guy, and he’d screwed
her
for the SVR…the foreign intelligence service.

“If you need to make an appointment,” she clipped out, “I’d suggest you call the Embassy during business hours. There’s no need to stalk me through the streets.”

“The phones are not advisable.” Abruptly he stopped, uttered a curt dismissal to a hopeful vendor who was sidling up on them.

Angling to see past her hood, she caught a searing glimpse of Kostenko. Out of uniform for once, but still an utterly commanding presence in dark civilian threads. This was a guy who’d never look anonymous. Even with a fur hat pulled over his brow and a muffler wound around his face so only his eyes were visible.

But she’d recognize those icy blue eyes anywhere. He stood only a step away, turned with apparent interest toward an assortment of crudely-executed odalisques.

“We need to talk.” Low and urgent, he addressed the painted nude before him. “Someplace private. Can you go to the Fili metro station, on the blue line?”

“I don’t think so, captain.” Her voice was brittle, sharp as broken glass, honed by two days of smoldering fury over how well he’d played her. “Unfortunately, I don’t feel I can trust you.”

Sharply, his eyes sliced toward her. Behind him, the polyglot murmur of dispirited vendors rose and fell on the wind.

“I’m not asking you to trust me,” the captain said levelly. “But I need for you to listen.”

Marooned somewhere between utter disbelief and a diplomat’s ingrained reflex to encourage dialogue, Alexis said nothing. Through his muffler, Kostenko puffed out a harsh breath.

“Goddamn it, Alexis. You trusted me enough to sleep with me.”

“Well, that was before I knew,” she hissed, infuriated all over again, “that my own government expelled you from the country! Did you think I’d never learn why? That I wasn’t going to research the living daylights out of you and your affiliations, down to your kindergarten teacher?”

“I was not expelled.” His clipped diction hinted at a degree of agitation, and a trickle of satisfaction coursed through her. At last she’d gotten a hit through that impermeable armor he wore like a Kevlar vest.

“Bloody hell, we can’t talk here,” he muttered. “Where can you meet me?”

“You can schedule an appointment through my secretary, like everyone else.” She turned toward the river, refused to weaken for one second.

She’d be damned if she ceded control to him again. Despite a perverse stirring of curiosity to hear whatever he wanted to tell her. Despite the fact that he tempted her—God, how he tempted her—to imagine what might happen if she agreed to another illicit rendezvous. But this time, she wasn’t going to give in.

Beneath the distant roar of traffic from the Art Deco suspension bridge, Kostenko uttered a curse in Russian. She supposed it was a new experience for a despot like him, having to tolerate someone who didn’t salute when he started firing orders.

Shoving her hands deeper in her pockets, she steeled herself to brush past him and get out of there. Time to seek shelter, before she froze to death like those poor homeless stiffs.

Ice crunched behind her as he edged in closer, right up against her back, and breathed the words against her raised hood.

“Don’t you want to know who’s following you?”

She hesitated, hooked by the one line she couldn’t have ignored, the one morsel of bait she just had to nibble. Even as she scoffed at her own gullibility, her dangerous weakness toward this sexy-as-hell Russian, she gave a grudging inch of ground.

“Show me where he is.”

“Wait until I move before you look,” he cautioned. “Over your right shoulder, talking to that peddler of cheap Vrubel reproductions. Two big guys. They’re Chechens.”

“Chechens? What the hell?” Despite his warning, Alexis could barely refrain from spinning around to stare.

Now that made no goddamn sense. No way she’d be getting heat from a repressed ethnic minority the Russians were doing their level best to eradicate. She monitored those ethnic tensions for Washington as part of her job, and she’d always felt a none-too-subtle sympathy for the underdogs.

Not only had she given the Chechens no reason to hate her. She was one of the few voices getting their story out.

“That seems unlikely, captain,” she murmured. “Why would your government hire its own enemies to tail me?”

“We wouldn’t,” he said curtly. “I ran the query through my channels yesterday, and the reply came back an hour ago. We’re not running them.”

“Then
who
—?”

He cut her short, brusque and to-the-point. “Two nights ago you were tailed by an off-duty U.S. Embassy security guard. One of the locally-based expats with a gambling habit which your Embassy inexplicably continues to hire.”

“Wait a minute—”

“In this case,” he continued flatly, “the guard’s girlfriend is Chechen. And now you have two suspected terrorists on your tail. Damn it, Alexis! I need to know what kind of bloody mess you’ve gotten yourself into.”

_____________________________________

On Monday, Alexis was still trying to extract herself from the bloody mess she’d gotten herself into. She’d filed a contact report on Kostenko with the security office first thing. Made her
mea culpas
and confessed, in strictly factual terms, to losing control and sleeping with the guy. And hoped the sucking noise in her head wasn’t the sound of her future being flushed down the toilet.

Of course she’d also reported her suspicions about being followed. But with several hundred people living and working on compound, she could hardly search every post herself for the guy who’d tailed her. And the security officer was out scouting terrain for the fast-approaching presidential visit.

Which meant she hadn’t yet run the gauntlet of his excruciating follow-up. And she still had no clue who was tailing her or why.

She was sorting through the daily deluge of email, doing triage on the emergencies, when her new secretary hesitated in her doorway. The diligent young redhead still didn’t seem comfortable enough to address Alexis by her first name, despite several invitations to do so.

“The Marines at the South Gate called, Ms. Castle,” the secretary reported, adjusting her fashionable spectacles. “Apparently there’s a delivery for you down there.”

“That’s peculiar. I’m not expecting anything.” Reflexively, Alexis glanced at her watch. Among other pressing issues, she was in the middle of clearing a scene-setter cable for President Cartwright’s visit. And the text required substantial edits if she wanted it in Washington by their start-of-business.

“Do you mind going down for the package, Candace?” she asked. “I really need to get this cable out.”

Candace bustled off, and Alexis returned to work.

God, this Ukraine situation was going right down the tubes. As she’d feared, Kiev’s threat to expel its Russian tenants from the naval base at Sevastopol had only made Moscow more belligerent. They’d tightened their blockade, and no ships were getting through under any flag. Today, the reformist Ukrainian president had officially requested U.S. intervention to get the Russians out.

But the prime minister from Ukraine’s opposition party was still telling the press it was a joint training exercise. That Russia and Ukraine, like Frog and Toad, were friends.

That meant the pot would be boiling when the new U.S. president walked into her first meeting with her Russian counterpart. President Cartwright would need to underscore the U.S. commitment to a free Ukraine, without jeopardizing the many strategic issues where the U.S. and Russia were in accord.

A polite rap on her door derailed Alexis’s train of thought for the second time. She glanced up with irritation bubbling on her lips, but choked back the words when she recognized her visitor: a tall, distinguished man whose tailored charcoal suit set off his silver hair and caramel-colored skin.

Ambassador Stuart Malvaux, the U.S. government’s senior representative in Russia. But he’d been just Stu to her father, and to her for many years—until she came to work for him in Moscow.

“Mind if I steal a moment of your time, Alexis?”

Taking for granted her concurrence, the Ambassador stepped in and quietly closed the door. Alertness prickled through her as he placed a document on her desk.

“This arrived from Washington last night,” he murmured, in the Louisiana drawl that twenty years in the Foreign Service still hadn’t smoothed away. “I’d like you to take a look.”

“Very well.” She skimmed the blocky text, all in caps with a cumbersome chunk of headings, dense with obscure abbreviations. A “no distribution” message, intended only for the Ambassador’s eyes and Geoff’s as his deputy. But Stu had just instructed her to read it.

Swiftly she absorbed the substance, her alarm mounting as she read. When she’d finished, she stared up at the Ambassador in dismay.

“Jesus. These instructions—this message we’re supposed to deliver. Why don’t they just start launching missiles?” She struggled against her growing misgivings. “Any chance this is a knee-jerk reaction based on, ah, Victor Kostenko’s comments?”

“His message about ethnic tensions in Ukraine was taken extremely seriously.” Stu’s amber eyes were canny as he assessed her reaction. “But Washington seems to have decided that was a smokescreen, to cover up these military maneuvers. They believe something more is going on, something that might jeopardize the elections and the future of democracy in Ukraine. President Cartwright wants the Russians out of there, Alexis—and before her visit.”