Chapter Twenty-Two
Dave drove the van across the tarmac and brought it to a stop near a sleek Gulfstream G280 parked on the isolated airstrip one hundred kilometers outside Saint Petersburg. The jet’s open hatch and deployed stairs reminded Quinn of a scene in the novel The Hidden Scepter. In it, Francesca Marucci, an unfathomably wealthy heiress, emerges from her stretch limo resplendent in oversized sunglasses and designer clothes. With a jewel-encrusted purse hooked over one arm and a fluffy Pomeranian tucked under the other, she glides up the steps and wings her way to Malta and the awaiting Brick Cobalt.
The three youngest passengers of the van may not have been fabulously wealthy, but they were indeed precious cargo. Their status as such was cemented by Aldous Meyers’s response to Quinn’s request to get the Semenovs out of Russia immediately. In the intervening eighteen hours, the man had moved heaven and earth to make exactly that happen.
Now, the seemingly impossible dream of three young, vulnerable souls was becoming a reality.
Quinn yanked on the inside handle, slid the van door open, and stepped out onto the concrete. The kids tumbled out behind her. As their gazes traveled around the wide-open landscape dotted with crumbling, Soviet-era buildings, their faces displayed equal parts excitement and trepidation.
Their anxiety was understandable. In less than thirty-six hours, they had gone from slavery to freedom, and witnessed one of their captors take a wooden stool to the head and another bleed out in front of them with a knife impaled in his chest. Quinn counted on the many hours of flying time to help calm their frayed nerves.
Dave jerked open the back door, hauled out James’s and Quinn’s suitcases and briefcases, and set them on the ground. He placed the three small sacks that held the kids’ scant belongings next to them. Sasha and Ilya had been able to gather their and Mila’s things before being whisked away to the safe house. Sadly, it didn’t amount to much. Mila currently wore a pair of shorts and a top excavated from Quinn’s luggage. Quinn was already planning on buying all three new clothes once they were back in the States.
A figure emerged from the airplane’s hatch, hopped down the steps, and strode toward them. As the woman neared, she grinned at James and opened her arms. “James. It’s so good to see you again.”
“You, too, Lauren,” he said and gave her a quick hug. “It made my day when Meyers told me you’d be my copilot.”
“When I heard the legendary Buckshot was a mover and shaker behind this, I knew it was important. I volunteered immediately.”
Quinn smiled when she heard Lauren utter the name. Buckshot was her grandfather’s code name within the CIA. Of course he was involved in clearing the way for the Semenov kids to get home, even if Quinn hadn’t directly asked for his help.
Lauren’s eyes darted to the three and then returned to James. “I’m honored to be a part of it.”
James rested his hand at the small of Quinn’s back. “This is my wife—”
“Quinn,” Lauren said. The two women shook hands. “It’s nice to meet you.” Lauren was taller and a little older than Quinn, with green eyes that were as sharp as a knife. “I feel like I know you.” At the bemused look on Quinn’s face, Lauren added, “James and I worked together in Moscow. When he came back after your adventures together, you were all he talked about.”
Quinn was relieved to hear humor in her tone rather than annoyance. Still, she felt heat rise in her cheeks. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be,” Lauren said. “We miss him in Moscow, but we’re glad he found you and is so happy.”
Quinn smiled, secretly thrilled by Lauren’s comments.
Dave stepped forward and extended a hand. “Dave Flores.” After a brief greeting, he turned toward the Semenovs. “And these three are your esteemed passengers.” They lifted their hands in unsure waves as Dave said their names.
Lauren acknowledged each with a head bob. “What do you say, ladies and gentleman? Ready to get out of here?”
“Yes,” they murmured in unison.
“Then let’s roll,” Lauren said in a way that was both kind and authoritative.
Dave smiled at the kids. “Take care.”
Mila took a half step toward him. Her voice was filled with quiet dignity when she said, “Thank you for rescuing us.”
A lump knotted in Quinn’s throat when she saw the tears glisten in Dave’s eyes. The muscles in his jaw pulsed twice before he rasped, “You’re welcome.” He swiped a hand over his eyes and cleared his throat. “Maybe when y’all are ready, you can come on down to Texas and visit me and my family. Have your folks bring you. We’ll have barbecue.”
Mila’s smile lit up her face. “We will.”
Quinn and James shared hasty farewells with Dave and promised to stay in touch. As the group walked toward the plane, Dave returned to the van and drove off with a final wave through the window.
“Is our flight plan all set?” James asked Lauren.
Ilya went up the steps first, followed by Sasha, then Mila.
With the kids’ bags in her arms, Lauren’s eyes followed each as they boarded. “Affirmative. You know how it is around here. Had to grease a few palms, but we’re all good.”
“I know exactly how it is,” James replied.
He didn’t elaborate, but Quinn knew he was referring to the disposition of Anatoly’s remains after he’d assumed ambient temperature the night before. They had immediately called in Reem, who had then contacted her most trusted ally within the local police. Wads of cash had been freely distributed from the top police brass to the guys who hauled the tarp-wrapped body out of the back of the van. The inquiry into the unlamented departure of Anatoly Volodin from this earthly plane was opened and closed in record time.
A briefcase in each hand, Quinn followed Mila up the steps and ducked through the hatch into the interior of the jet. Its eight large leather seats, tables, monitors, and satellite phone screamed, “High-ranking intelligence officials use this aircraft.” Her grandfather had ensured they traveled in style.
The kids had already chosen their seats, so Quinn took an open one in front of Mila and stashed the briefcases. Ilya literally bounced, excitement shining on his face. Sasha, on the other hand, was clearly tense and chewed on her lower lip.
Lauren boarded and stood in the space between the entrance of the cockpit and the rest of the cabin. With a tip of her head, she indicated the three passports sitting atop a shiny wood tabletop. “Compliments of the Unites States Department of State. They’re already stamped with the same date you and James arrived in Saint Petersburg. If anyone asks when we stop in Reykjavik, the kids are your cousins and you’re all on your way home from holiday.” She opened the forward closet door to reveal three small suitcases. “We didn’t want you young people returning to the U. S. without some new clothes and toiletries.”
“I got a suitcase full of clothes from the same people once,” Quinn said to a gaping Sasha across the narrow aisle. “They’re like shopping ninjas. You’ll love everything.” She should have known the agency would supply clothes for the kids. That wouldn’t stop her from buying more for them, though.
Lauren closed the closet door and slid into one of the two seats in the cockpit. After strapping in, she put on her headset. Seconds later, the engines began to hum.
James brought up the rear. He walked through the compartment and stowed his and Quinn’s luggage in the aft closet. Then he returned to the front, pulled up the hatch, and secured it. He turned and faced them as Lauren had a moment before. James flashed a cheesy smile and said in a sonorous tone, “Welcome aboard. My name is James. I’ll be your flight attendant and copilot as we wing our way across the globe. If the Rocky Mountain Regional Airport in beautiful Broomfield, Colorado, is not your final destination, too bad because that’s where we’re going.”
Ilya clamped both hands over his mouth and giggled.
James shot Quinn a wink. He continued. “Our flight time is approximately thirteen hours, not counting fuel stops in Reykjavik and . . .”
He paused and his eyes widened to comic proportions. He spun around and ducked his front half into the cockpit. A few seconds later, he backed out and faced them again. He picked up his narration as if he’d never stopped. “Teterboro, New Jersey. I have no idea what time we’ll be landing in Colorado because with all the flying and time changes and everything, the math is just too hard.”
Side-eyed, Quinn peeked over at Sasha. The shoulders that had been scrunched up to her ears lowered, and her face relaxed into a genuine smile. Quinn breathed out a silent sigh of relief.
He pointed at the back of the cabin with both hands. “The lavatory is located at the back. For those of you who may not know, that’s just a fancy word for bathroom. Also, I’ll be coming through the cabin later to take your dinner orders.” James waited a beat before barking a laugh and dropping his affectations. “Just kidding. You’re on your own for dinner.” He gestured at the counter to his left. “There’s a little galley here, so feel free to pillage. There might be stuff to make a sandwich or something.” Slipping back into his flight attendant voice, he finished with, “Sit back, relax, and enjoy your flight.”
James dipped his head in acknowledgement of their rousing applause. “Thank you. Thank you. Now, please fasten your seat belts in preparation for takeoff.”
Once all four passengers were clipped in, he took his place in the cockpit.
God, I love that man, Quinn thought as she watched him punch buttons and confer with Lauren.
The plane taxied into position, roared down the runway, jumped from the deck, and rocketed into the sky.
Other than the whine of the jet engines, the cabin was quiet as everyone stared out their windows. As Quinn watched the ground below race away, her thoughts were with those left behind. The good-byes with Klara and Pyotr had been particularly heart-wrenching. Klara’s chin had quivered and giant tears had spilled out and traced down her cheeks. Pyotr had smiled, but his eyes were bright as they said good-bye. Quinn was sure they would never forgive her for leaving them, but the bone-crushing hugs they each gave her assured her she would always be in their hearts, just as they would always be in hers.
When they reached cruising altitude, Quinn got up and rummaged in the drawers until she found a deck of cards. They took turns playing game after game of Go Fish, Crazy Eights, Speed, gin rummy, and every game Quinn could think of. She considered teaching them Texas Hold’em, but when she noted their enthusiasm waning and fatigue setting in, she put the cards away and suggested sleep. All three curled up in their seats and used their teddy bears as pillows. They conked out in less than five minutes.
Quinn considered reading, but the cabin lights had been dimmed and she didn’t want to wake their sleeping charges. Deciding to do some work, she retrieved her laptop from her briefcase as stealthily as possible and opened it. Thanks to onboard secure Wi-Fi, she checked her various email accounts. Among the messages from her parents, the library, Nicole, her brother Monroe, and her new sister-in-law Kelsey, there was one from James, including an attachment.
Curious as to why he would email her something, she clicked it open. Hey, Sexy. Thought you might like to check this out. She blinked. Was he sending her X-rated pictures of himself through their secure agency email accounts? That didn’t seem like a very professional thing to do. Plus, why would he do that when she caught the live show every day? She peeked at the kids. Their eyes were still shut.
She faced forward again and, before she could change her mind, clicked on the link. A quiet chuckle escaped. To her simultaneous relief and disappointment, no racy photo of James appeared on her screen. He had forwarded the data he’d downloaded from Grigori Yefimov’s cell phone. Events had unfolded at such lightning speed, they hadn’t had a moment free to examine it.
Now that she had hours to kill and nothing to do, she decided to see exactly what kind of shenanigans Yefimov had been involved in. And if she uncovered any new information regarding the ever-elusive kingpin Konstantin Borovsky, all the better.
Her Russian had improved immensely during her time in Saint Petersburg, but she was in no way fluent. To make things easier on herself, she used an agency program to translate everything into English.
She opened the photos file first. Given the fact that Yefimov had run a strip club, his pictures had the potential to be more than a little awkward. It seemed prudent to go through those while the kids slept.
Her nose wrinkled at the many pictures of Yefimov with his scantily clad employees inside the Bronze Monkey. Whenever she ran across photos that featured Yefimov posing with non-employees, she took extra time to scrutinize each face. One with Rhys Townsend and/or Gibson Honeycutt might help to bust them someday in connection with either drug or human trafficking.
When she reached the end of the photos, she slumped back in her seat and huffed a breath in disappointment. She hadn’t seen Rhys or Gibson, although there was a well-known CEO of an American tech company who would be getting scrutiny from the FBI in the very near future. Another face was vaguely familiar to her, but at that moment, she couldn’t put her finger on who he was.
She rubbed her forehead with her fingertips and grappled with the fact she may have stared directly into the face of Konstantin Borovsky and not known it. The only pictures of him were grainy and taken from awkward angles. Undeterred, she sat forward and went back to work. She dumped every photo that included someone with Yefimov into a folder and flagged it for agency analysts to run each through facial recognition.
Next, she tackled Yefimov’s email. Like with the photos, he had kept hundreds of messages from people she assumed were drug clients, most expressing their eagerness to visit the Bronze Monkey or thanking him afterward. Such innocuous-sounding messages were in no way incriminating. But now that there was proof he’d been running a drug ring and using child laborers, they turned much more sinister. The fact he’d kept them made her think he’d done so either for blackmail purposes or to guarantee his own protection.
Her breath caught when the name of a sender leapt at her from the screen: Dieter Ziegler. It was the same name as the doctor in Frankfurt from whom she and James had stolen the formula and prototype for a psychotropic drug.
“Wait a minute,” she whispered aloud. She opened the folder marked for facial recognition and searched for the face that had niggled her earlier. When she found it, she pulled up an agency file and compared the two faces. They were the same. Ziegler and Yefimov had met.
She returned to Yefimov’s email and read through the thread with Ziegler from several months earlier. The content was unremarkable, in that Ziegler informed Yefimov of his impending visit to Saint Petersburg to attend a pharmaceutical conference. While in town, Ziegler looked forward to visiting the Bronze Monkey. Yefimov’s email to Ziegler in response was predictably solicitous.
It was the contemporaneous emails between Yefimov and someone only known as KB that had the hairs on the back of Quinn’s neck prickling. Yefimov had informed KB, whom she assumed to be Konstantin Borovsky, of Ziegler’s upcoming visit. Borovsky had told Yefimov to cater to the doctor’s every whim in order to curry favor.
There was no reason for Ziegler to go to Yefimov and Borovsky to buy drugs. The guy had worked for a pharmaceutical company. The only thing that made sense was that Borovsky wanted to buy drugs from Ziegler. And while it was never expressly indicated in the messages, Quinn surmised Borovsky’s goal was to get his hands on the drug she and James had liberated from Ziegler’s office. She wondered if the agency had already uncovered the link.
She searched Yefimov’s emails and retrieved only those between he and Borovsky. Most were about business at the Bronze Monkey. The one where Borovsky asked Yefimov to send some product, along with several kids, to his yacht for incoming guests was intriguing. She would ask Mila if she knew anything about a yacht. Given how little the agency knew about Borovsky, acquiring any firsthand knowledge would be akin to unearthing a gold nugget.
A thrill of satisfaction buzzed through her when she saw Yefimov had sent a follow-up email after Ziegler’s visit to the Bronze Monkey asking if Borovsky had successfully secured the doctor’s product. The curt response from Borovsky had informed him the drug was no longer available.
She knew why. After she and James had broken into Ziegler’s office, an anonymous tip—from James—had been called in to German authorities alerting them to Ziegler’s illegal drug peddling. He had been arrested soon thereafter. His computer, along with the formula, had been seized.
She looked up when James emerged from the cockpit and walked toward her. He braced a hand on the top of her seat back and bent forward.
She closed her computer, lifted her face, and received his warm kiss. “How’s it going?” she asked quietly.
He didn’t move. Instead, he hovered over her, the gap between their noses mere millimeters. “Good.” He kissed her again. “Better.”
She smiled up at him when he still didn’t move away.
The heat behind the next kiss had her melting into her seat.
“Much better.” He gave her one of those crooked smiles that caused her heart to bounce inside her chest like a rubber ball. After one final kiss, he dropped into the seat across the table from her and stretched his long legs down the aisle. “We’ll be landing in Reykjavik in about thirty minutes. How are you?”
“Good. I’ve been going through Yefimov’s phone.” One corner of her mouth lifted. “I must confess I thought the email attachment might be something of a more personal nature.”
His smile was slow and sexy. “Sorry to disappoint. Maybe next time.”
His smolder completely derailed her. Her mind careened into dangerous territory with visions of her and James doing all kinds of things to each other in the tiny lavatory. She bounced an eyebrow. “Since our joining the Mile High Club would be wildly inappropriate under the circumstances, why don’t I tell you what I found on Yefimov’s phone instead?”
His voice rumbled from deep in his chest. “That’s probably a good idea.”
She battled the increasingly vivid thoughts of her and James together by raking her fingers through her hair and saying, “I think Borovsky wanted to buy Dieter Ziegler’s psychotropic drug.”
His interest clearly piqued, he cocked his head and said, “Really.” James seemed to hang on her every word as she relayed the contents of the correspondence on the matter.
When she finished, James said, “There’s a list of names that downloaded along with Ziegler’s formula. We assumed they were potential buyers.”
She sank back, deflated. “So this isn’t new intel at all. You already knew Borovsky wanted to buy Ziegler’s drug.” She frowned and asked, “And why don’t I know about this list?”
“Well, when the files were first analyzed, you were busy getting married and going on your honeymoon with this stud.” He jerked his thumb at his chest.
She smirked and rolled her eyes.
“And I only found out about it while you were neck deep in learning Russian.”
“Fine. I get why I didn’t hear about it, but what’s the hold-up on using the list to set up a sting to draw them out or something?”
“Ziegler gave all the buyers code names. We have no idea who they are. In this case, the names are of dead national heroes. We can guess at their nationalities, but don’t have any actual names. There’s Qin Shi Huang for China and Mohammed Ali Jinnah for Pakistan and Omar Mukhtar for Libya.” He shot her a knowing look. “Guess the name he used for his Russian buyer.”
One name immediately popped into her head. “Alexander Nevsky.”
“Ding, ding, ding.”
“Okay, so finding out Borovsky wanted to buy the drug is a big deal after all.” Growing excited, she sat up higher in her seat. “We can use the formula as bait to draw him out. Maybe we can’t bust him for his drug and forced labor racket,” she said, snapping her head toward the slumbering Semenovs, “but we can nab him when he tries to buy Ziegler’s drug.”
James slouched and rested his head on the back of his seat. With fingers laced and resting on his chest, he considered her. The pressure behind her sternum built as she waited, watching the gears turn in his head. “You and I stole the prototype. We’re right there on the security cameras.”
“Exactly,” she said as softly as her eagerness would allow. She pitched forward, her words coming in a torrent. “We could come out now and say after we swiped the formula, we called the cops on Ziegler to get him out of the picture. With him in custody, he couldn’t reconstruct it.”
He pushed himself up, leaned on his elbows, and tilted in until their foreheads nearly touched. “Giving us exclusive control. No competition.”
“With your contacts in Moscow, I bet we can get a message to Borovsky informing him the formula is for sale again.”
“We’d have to meet in person. Given his penchant for staying hidden, he might not agree.”
“We’ll figure something out. If he wants Ziegler’s drug as much as it seems he does, we don’t give him a choice. No meet, no sale.”
“We need to meet with Meyers about all this as soon as we get back to Langley.” Even in the faint light of the cabin, his eyes gleamed bright blue. “You ready for another adventure, Mrs. Anderson?”
“With you, Mr. Anderson?” She rolled forward until their lips met in a tender kiss. “Always.”