Dangerous Secrets

One

Krasnoyarsk Nuclear Power Plant

Russia

Ten days earlier

November 18

At first light, as agreed, the pilot was waiting, alone, at the bottom of the rolling stairs. It was an undeclared flight with a plane that didn’t officially exist and no copilot would be welcome. The fewer people involved, the better.

They were on a runway on the far side of the military airport, which had been decommissioned when the Soviets lost power. A pilot and a nuclear engineer.

They had only been told first names, Lyosha and Edik. Both names were false, but it didn’t matter.

The nuclear engineer, whose real name was Arkady Sergeyevitch Andreyev, knew the only thing about the pilot that was necessary—that he was a zek, a former guest of the Russian Gulag. They were members of that very exclusive club—men who didn’t die in the Russian Bear’s cruel embrace.

The two men didn’t shake hands. But when the pilot stretched out his hand to help Arkady maneuver the hand truck to shift the heavy container from the van to a loading pallet, Arkady saw what he expected to see—a barbed-wire tattoo around the pilot’s wrist.

Former prisoners had their experience in hell etched into their skins, not just their souls. Arkady was covered in tattoos, from the stars on his knees that meant he bowed to no man, to the crosses that were a symbol of the years in the Gulag. He wore them proudly.

The only part of his skin that was clear was a large, shiny scarred patch over his heart where once had been the tattoo of the distinctive, goateed Tatar features of Lenin. Soviet prison guards were a superstitious lot and would never shoot the holy image of Lenin.

The day the camp fell, he’d stolen a soldering iron from the deserted guards’ barracks and burned the head of Lenin off himself. He hadn’t even felt the pain, he had been so happy to rid his body of that monstrous image.

The two men, Arkady and the pilot, silently noted each other’s tattoos. Nothing more had to be said. They were members of the Bratva, the Brotherhood. That was all they had to know.

The heavy lead container was lifted into the cargo bay of the Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft, where the pilot carefully strapped it to the bulkhead. Inside the lead container was a large lead-lined canister filled with cesium 137, enough for a very powerful dirty bomb. Enough material to close down the city center of London, or New York, or Paris, or Rome, or Berlin, or Washington, D.C. Wipe it off the face of the earth as a viable city, turn it into deserted concrete canyons forbidden to humans or any other life-form for ten thousand years.

The pilot closed the cargo bay door and entered the small cabin where Arkady had observed the stowage of the container.

“Is everything all right?” the pilot asked quietly.

Arkady knew exactly what he meant. He wasn’t offended. This was a dangerous business.

Though he was a superbly well-trained and careful nuclear engineer, and had taken all the necessary precautions, the pilot couldn’t know that.

Instead of answering, Arkady opened his briefcase and extracted a small Geiger counter. He switched it on, walked to the cargo bay, and waved it over the container. They both listened to the welcome sound of soft, gentle ticking. The Geiger counter was picking up on the ambient radiation, higher than normal in the area surrounding a nuclear power plant, but nothing more than that.

The pilot nodded, satisfied, and without a word made his way to the cockpit. Arkady walked down the steps onto the tarmac. There was one thing more to take care of before takeoff.

Telling the Vor that the first stage was successful.

If this trip proved successful, there were many more such trips in the future. His Vor, an already powerful and rich man, would become one of the most powerful men in the history of the world.

Arkady opened the green cell phone. He had three of them, one for each stage of his long journey. Three brand-new cell phones, onetime use only. He dialed a long number, connecting to a remote mansion in the northern state of Vermont, in the United States.

The cell phone was unencrypted. If there was one thing guaranteed to catch the attention of America’s frighteningly powerful electronic surveillance agency, the NSA, it was an encrypted cell phone message to the United States. So there was no encryption and no nonsense about packages on their way or delivery times.

The NSA’s endless banks of supercomputers, trolling daily and tirelessly through a terabyte of data spanning the globe, was trip wired with a number of key words, package and delivery being two of them, that would have immediately picked up on those words.

The Vor’s money had bought the services of one of the junior NSA officers and the Vor had the list of words. The Vor thought of everything.

No packages, no deliveries. Their code was the weather.

The cell phone at the other end was picked up immediately. It, too, was a one-off, to be destroyed after the message. Arkady had memorized each of the Vor’s one-off cell phone numbers, though they were twelve digits each.

A laughable exercise. Child’s play. In Kolyma, numbers had kept him sane. He’d memorized pi to the thirteenth decimal, prime numbers up to the first five hundred, and had perfected in his head a risk calculation method the Vor used to this day.

The Vor himself, a literary genius, had memorized every word of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades. Vassily Worontzoff, the greatest man in the world. The man who’d saved his life and, perhaps more important, his sanity in Kolyma. His Vor.

“Slushayu.” I’m listening. The Vor’s deep voice, with its cultivated Muscovite accent, reassured Arkady at the deepest possible level that all was right in his world.

“Greetings,” he replied, looking up at the black clouds roiling in the sky. A fierce Siberian wind was blowing, and the temperature was well below freezing. He huddled more deeply into the sheepskin jacket the Vor had bought him. “I just thought you might like to know that the weather here is perfect. Sunny skies. Very warm weather.”

“Excellent,” the Vor replied. “Stay safe, my friend.”

Content that this enormously important project was off to a good start, Arkady removed the cell phone’s SIM card, threw it into the woods, where it disappeared into the dense undergrowth with a whisper of rustling leaves, and crushed the plastic casing of the phone beneath his heavy boot.

Arkady trotted back up the steps, sat down in the leather seat, buckled up, and made himself comfortable. This was the first stage of what was going to be a long journey.

The cabin was quiet and comfortable. The pilot had chosen well. The Tu-154 could take off from the gravel runway of the abandoned military airfield and could fly above the rest of Russian air traffic.

They were in the lower reaches of Siberia, the largest uninhabited land mass in the world. They would reach their destination—a remote airfield near Odessa—in about twelve hours, stopping only once to refuel. Then, to Budva, in Montenegro, by bus. From there, a ship would be waiting to take him and his cargo to Canada. The final leg would be a truck crossing into the United States, into Vermont.

The pilot quietly announced that they would be taking off in one minute. Exactly sixty seconds later, the sleek plane taxied, then lifted, heading west.

Parker’s Ridge, Vermont

November 18

The man with the shattered hands and the shattered soul used his stylus to punch the Off button on his cell phone. He still had the use of his index finger and thumb, but only as a pincer. The zealous prison guards who had taken a hammer to his hands had been thorough. He could use the stylus to tap out letters on a keyboard or a number pad. He could feed himself. He could pick up a glass of vodka.

It was enough.

Vassily Worontzoff glanced outside the big picture window of his study, noting the wind whipping the big leafless oak tree’s branches into a frenzy. Though it was only early afternoon, the sky was almost black. The forecast was for snow during the night and for the temperatures to dip well below zero. The forecaster had stated all of this in the somber tones of a man announcing certain disaster.

Vassily would have laughed if he had still been capable of laughter. How weak the Americans were! How easily they despaired! He was a survivor of Kolyma, the Soviet Union’s cruelest prison camp, where the prisoners had to work the gold mines in temperatures as low as minus ninety degrees Fahrenheit.

It had been so cold that tears froze on the cheeks. They fell with a merry tinkle to the hard frozen earth in crystals which belied the hell the prisoners lived in. The zeks called this “the whisper of the stars.”

How many tears he’d shed when he’d lost his beloved Katya. How the stars had whispered.

He’d written a poem about it, in ink made from burnt shoe leather on a piece of intact shirt, donated by a zek who, improbably, was being released. It had been published back in Moscow. When word filtered back from five thousand miles away that the zek Vassily Worontzoff had written a poem about Kolyma, the guards had gone into a frenzy of cruelty. They’d shattered his hands, thinking a writer without hands couldn’t write.

Foolish, foolish men.

So much had changed since then.

If the guards who’d tormented him weren’t dead of vodka poisoning, they were living on the equivalent of fifty dollars a month in some rathole back in Russia. And he—he was already rich beyond their comprehension and about to become one of the most powerful men on earth, able to switch great cities off like a light.

Able to be with his beloved Katya.

He’d lost her in Kolyma but he’d found her again in this small, pretty American backwater, with its birch trees and larches, so like the woods around the dacha they’d had outside Moscow.

Charity, she was called now. Charity Prewitt. Absurd Yankee name. He hated calling her Charity. She was Katya. His Katya, though she didn’t realize it yet.

But soon this charade would be over and she would be with him again.

He was the Vor. Immensely powerful.

So powerful he could bring Katya back from the dead.

Parker’s Ridge

“Read any good books lately?”

The pretty young woman stacking books and sorting papers in the Parker’s Ridge County Library turned around in surprise. It was closing time and the library wasn’t overwhelmed with people at the best of times. By closing time it was always deserted. Nick Ireland should know. He’d been staking it out for a week.

“Oh! Hello, Mr. Ames.” Her cheeks pinked with pleasure at seeing him. “Did you need something else?” She checked the big old-fashioned clock on the wall. “We’re closing up, but I can stay on for another quarter of an hour if you need anything.”

He’d been in that morning and she’d been charmingly helpful to him. Or, rather, to Nicholas Ames, stockbroker, retired from the Wall Street rat race after several years of very lucky investments paid off big, now looking to start his own investment firm. Son of Keith and Amanda Ames, investment banker and family lawyer, respectively, both tragically dead at a young age. Nicholas Ames was thirty-four years old, a Capricorn, divorced after a short-lived starter marriage in his twenties, collector of vintage wines, affable, harmless, all-round good guy.

Not a word of that was true. Not one word.

They were alone in the library, which pleased him and annoyed him at the same time. It pleased him because he’d have Charity Prewitt’s undivided attention. It annoyed him because…because.

Because through the huge library windows she looked like a lovely little lamb staked out for the predators. It had been dark for an hour up here in this frozen northern state. In the well-lit library, Charity Prewitt had been showcased against the darkness of the evening. One very pretty young woman all alone in an enclosed space. It screamed out to any passing scumbag—come and get me!

Nothing scumbags liked better than to eat up lovely young women. If there was one thing Nick knew with every fiber of his being, it was that the world was full of scumbags. He’d been fighting them all his life.

She was smiling up at him, much, much prettier than the photographs in the file he’d studied.

“No, thank you, Miss Prewitt,” he answered, keeping his deep, naturally rough voice gentle. “I don’t need to do any more research. You were very helpful this morning.”

Her head tilted, the soft dark-blond hair brushing her right shoulder. “Did you have a good day, then?”

“Yes, I did, a very good day. Thank you for asking. I saw three factories, a promising new Web design start-up, and an old-economy sawmill that has some very innovative ideas about using recycled wood chips. All in all, very satisfactory.”

Actually, it had been a shitty day, just one of many shitty days on this mission. A total waste of time spent in the surveillance van with two smelly men and jack shit to show for it except for one cryptic call to Worontzoff about a friend staying safe.

Nick smiled the satisfaction he didn’t feel. “So. It’s closing time now, isn’t it?”

She smiled back. “Why, yes. We close at six. But as I said, if you need something—”

“Well, to tell you the truth…” Nick looked down at his shoes shyly, as if working up the courage to ask. Man, he loved looking down at those shoes. They were three-hundred-dollar Italian imports, worlds away from his usual comfortable but battered combat boots that dated back to his army days.

Being Nicholas Ames, very successful businessman, was great because he got to dress the part and Uncle Sam had to foot the bill. He had an entire wardrobe to fit those magnificent shoes. Who knew if he’d get to keep any of it? Maybe the two Armanis that had been specially tailored for his broad shoulders.

And even better was dealing with this librarian, Charity Prewitt, one of the prettiest women he’d ever seen. Small, curvy, classy with large eyes the color of the sea at dawn.

Nick looked up from contemplating his black shiny wingtips and smiled into her beautiful gray eyes. “Actually, I was hoping that I could invite you out to dinner to thank you for your help. If I hadn’t done this preliminary research here, with your able help, my day wouldn’t have been half as productive. Asking you out to dinner is the least I can do to show you my appreciation.”

She blinked. “Well…,” she began.

“You have nothing to fear from me,” he said hastily. “I’m a solid citizen—just ask my accountant and my physician. And I’m perfectly harmless.”

He wasn’t, of course, he was dangerous as hell. Ten years a Delta operator before joining the Unit. He’d spent the past decade in black ops, perfecting the art of killing people.

He was sure harmless to her, though.

Charity Prewitt had the most delicious skin he’d ever seen on a woman—pale ivory with a touch of rose underneath—so delicate it looked like it would bruise if he so much as breathed on it. That was skin meant for touching and stroking, not hurting.

“Ms. Prewitt?” She hadn’t answered his question about going out. She simply stood there, head tilted to one side, watching him as if he were some kind of problem to be sorted out, but she needed more information before she could solve it.

In a way, he liked that. She didn’t jump at the invitation, which was a welcome relief from his last date—well, last fuck. Five minutes after “hello” in a bar, she’d had his dick in her hand. At least she hadn’t been into pain like Consuelo. God.

Charity Prewitt was assessing him quietly and he let her do it, understanding that smooth words weren’t going to do the trick. Stillness would, so he stood still. Special Forces soldiers have the gift of stillness. The ones who don’t, die young and badly.

Nick was engaging in a little assessment himself. This morning he’d been bowled over by little Miss Charity Prewitt. Christ, with a name like that, with her job as chief librarian of the library of a one-traffic-light town, single at twenty-eight, he’d been expecting a dried-up prune.

The photographs of her in his file had been fuzzy, taken with a telescopic lens, and just showed the generics—hair and skin color, general size and shape. A perfectly normal woman. A little on the small side, but other than that, ordinary.

But up close and personal, Jesus, she’d turned out to be a knockout. A quiet knockout. You had to look twice for the full impact of large light-gray eyes, porcelain skin, shiny dark-blond hair and a curvy slender figure to make itself felt. Coupled with a natural elegance and a soft, attractive voice—well.

Nick was used to being undercover, but most of his jobs involved scumbags, not beautiful young women.

Actually, this one did, too—a major scumbag called Vassily Worontzoff everyone on earth but the operatives in the Unit revered for being a great writer. Even nominated for the friggin’ Nobel, though, as the Unit knew well but couldn’t yet prove, the sick fuck was the head of a huge international OC syndicate. Nick was intent on bringing him down.

So on this op he was dealing with scumbags, yeah, but the mission also involved romancing this pretty woman—and on Uncle Sam’s dime, to boot.

Didn’t get much better than that.

“All right,” Charity said suddenly. Whatever her doubts had been, apparently they were now cleared up. “What time do you want to pick me up?”

Yes! Nick felt a surge of energy that had nothing to do with the mission and everything to do with the woman in front of him.

“Well…” Nick smiled, all affable, utterly safe, utterly reliable businessman, “I was wondering whether you wouldn’t mind going now. I found this fabulous Italian place near Rockville. It has a really nice bar area and I thought we might talk over a drink while waiting for our dinner.”

“Da Emilio’s,” Charity said. “It’s a very nice place and the food is excellent.” She looked down at herself, frowning. “But I’m not dressed for a dinner out. I should go home and change.”

She was wearing a light blue-gray sweater that exactly matched the color of her eyes and hugged round breasts and a narrow waist, a slim black skirt, shiny black stockings, and pretty ankle boots. Pearl necklace and pearl earrings. She was the classiest-looking dame he’d seen in a long while, even in her work clothes.

“You look—” Perfect. Sexy as hell. He bit his jaws closed on the words. Ireland, roughneck soldier that he was, could say something like that, but Ames, sophisticated businessman, sure as hell couldn’t. Even if it was God’s own truth. “Fine. You look just fine. You could go to dinner at the White House dressed like that.”

It made her smile, which was what he wanted. Her smile was like a secret weapon. She sighed. “Okay. I’ll just need to lock up here.”

Locking up entailed pulling the library door closed and turning a key once in the lock.

Nick waited. Charity looked up at him, a tiny frown between her brows when she saw his scowl. “Is something wrong?”

“That’s it? That’s locking up? Turning the key once in the lock?”

She smiled gently. “This isn’t the big bad city, Mr. Ames.”

“My friends call me Nick.”

“Okay, Nick. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to walk around town. This isn’t New York or even Burlington. The library, in case you haven’t noticed, is full of books and not much else besides some scuffed tables. What would there be to steal? And anyway, I don’t remember the last time a crime was committed in Parker’s Ridge.”

The elation Nick felt at the thought of an evening with Charity Prewitt dissipated.

Parker’s Ridge housed one of the world’s most dangerous criminals. An evil man. A man directly responsible for hundreds of lives lost, for untold misery and suffering.

And he was Charity Prewitt’s best friend.