Ian felt the tiniest smile curl his lips up. He was glad he’d gotten Charlie out of there because Ten would have been all over her. Then he would have strangled his second man of the day. And he considered Ten a friend. “No, Ten doesn’t play those games. He’s what the Agency likes to call a maverick. Tennessee Smith. Southern born and bred. He’s a good guy.”
If Ian even knew what that meant anymore.
“He’s a flirtatious asshole,” Alex shot back.
Eve grinned. “Hey, sometimes a girl needs to know she still has it. Of course, he wasn’t attractive or anything.”
Liar. Ten was six foot four, two hundred twenty pounds of pure muscle. He was known for being able to get a woman to tell him anything. If Ian had been the hardass, then Ten had been the lover. He gave new meaning to the term “close cover.”
There was a knock on the door, and Grace poked her head in. “I have two things. First, some flowers came for you. Yellow roses. Really pretty. No card.”
Very likely it was Charlie. She’d sent him flowers before. “I don’t want them. You keep them. Or you could give them to Phoebe.”
That way Charlie would get the message. He wasn’t a flowers and hearts kind of guy.
“All right,” Grace agreed. “And Damon Knight and Basil Champion are here to see you. They said you promised to cut them in on anything you learned.”
He nodded. He’d made some spectacularly shitty deals to keep Charlie with him, and now he just wanted to get away from her.
Knight walked in followed by his partner. There was a frown on the agent’s face. “I thought we were supposed to be in on this meeting.”
“I thought you would be on your way to DC.” He’d been counting on them to follow Zhukov.
“No such luck for you, mate,” Champion said, tossing himself into a chair. “We have another agent on his way. We’ve been assigned to work with you. Such fun.”
Well, if they were working together, maybe the Brits had some information he didn’t. “Zhukov was talking about Nelson possibly working for the syndicate. Have you had any luck tracking him?”
“A little.” Knight pulled out a tablet, his fingers finding the files he needed. MI6 had finally gone high tech, it seemed. “There are reports of a man matching Nelson’s description traveling to Novokuibyshevsk three times in the last year.”
“That’s in the Samara Oblast.” There was a nice-sized pipeline there.
Knight nodded. “Yes, it’s a city located on the western bank of the Volga. It’s a refinery town. Have you heard the word
Indeitsy
?”
Ian let out a long sigh. He needed more Russian mob shit in his life. “It’s a mafia term. It means Indians. They use it to refer to an organization that functions a little like the raiding parties of the Old West.”
“It’s not a secret that
Indeitsy
has its fingers in the oil industry rackets,” Knight said.
“They don’t have their fingers in it,” Baz interrupted with a roll of his eyes. “They run the whole damn thing. Give them credit, mate.”
Jake sat forward, his face serious. “What exactly do you mean by racket? How does it function?”
“They traffic in stolen crude,” Simon explained. “They literally tap into the pipelines and steal the shit. I know about this because of my family. My uncle runs Malone Oil. They’ve had an enormous amount of trouble in the region. All the American companies have. The mob has to have a man on the inside. The pipelines are guarded.”
Baz stared at Simon. “Really? So you just happen to be connected to one of the biggest oil companies in the world? Aren’t they headquartered here?”
Ian knew about Simon’s connections, knew damn well it was one of the reasons he’d been willing to come to Dallas. He had an uncle and aunt and two cousins in Fort Worth, and they were loaded. But he said nothing, allowing Simon to give away what he wanted.
“Yes. I haven’t tried to hide my connections. Malones and Westons have been connected for years. I spent some summers here with my cousins. Why do you ask?” Simon stared at Baz.
“I just find it interesting,” Baz replied.
“Could we get back to the topic at hand?” Ian requested.
“So someone who works for the rightful oil company takes a cut for tipping off the mob. They come in, steal the crude, and get out.” Alex summed up the situation nicely. “What does that have to do with Nelson? Somehow I don’t see him working a pipe cutter.”
“Who’s the head of
Indeitsy
in the region?” Ian was pretty sure who it would come back to.
Knight turned his tablet around. “A man named Dusan Denisovitch. Mikhail’s son, so that makes him your wife’s cousin. He gave Dusan the territory a couple of years back.”
Charlie’s family was everywhere, it seemed. So Nelson was regularly visiting the same region that man controlled. Coincidence? Not likely.
“So can we absolutely connect Nelson to Mikhail?”
“I’ve placed Mikhail Denisovitch in Saint Petersburg.” Adam had that kind of constipated look on his face that he always got when he was about to tell him something he wouldn’t like.
“Spit it out, Adam.” It wasn’t like he’d punched Adam for delivering bad news. Much. There was really just that one time. Adam had totally punched back. It had tickled.
He slammed a photo down. It was grainy and shot from long range. “Interpol keeps tabs on Denisovitch. I have a friend there. He sent this over.”
Nelson. There he was plain as day, standing with Denisovitch in what looked to be a park overlooking a river. Saint Petersburg. He recognized the baroque buildings and canals of the famous city.
He stared at the picture for a moment, a cold hate in his gut. In all his years as an operative, his years in the Green Berets fighting some of the worst dictators and terrorists imaginable, he had never really hated anyone. He’d killed them, sure, but it had been a job done with the efficiency of a pure professional. Emotion was where Nelson tripped him up. Emotion and ego. He was honest enough to admit that to himself.
He had to think instead of react. His first instinct was to get on a plane to Russia, track down Denisovitch, and throttle the man until he told him where Nelson was. He was running on emotion and not logic. He had been since that moment when Charlie had shown up on his doorstep. Hell, maybe he’d been running on emotion where it came to Eli Nelson for much longer than that. He could still remember watching the fucker put bullets into Sean while Ian maneuvered into position. He could still hear the man taunting his brother, telling Sean all of Ian’s secrets.
And he remembered feeling like he was sixteen years old all over again.
Take care of your brother.
The last words his father had said to him before he’d walked out of their lives.
You take care of your brother and your mother. I can’t anymore.
Yep. He wasn’t capable of thinking logically at this point. He needed a clear head.
He stared at the picture for a moment. “Adam, I need to talk to the whole team. Liam’s not here, but could you bring the rest of them in? Including my sister-in-law.”
This affected Grace as well. He couldn’t leave her out. If he was going to put everyone in danger in order to find out the truth, they needed to have a say.
He was a long way from the Agency. He wondered if Nelson was counting on that. He wondered if his family connections would bring him down.
Adam let out a long breath as though truly happy he hadn’t gotten his ass kicked. “All right then.”
He turned and walked out.
“Damon, could we have a moment? This is a family matter.”
Baz frowned. “We made a deal.”
Knight stood up, putting a hand on his partner’s shoulder to bring him up. “Of course. We’ll wait in your office.”
Baz was arguing his case as they walked out of the room.
Jesse walked in, looking back at the bickering agents. “What happened to them?”
“They don’t ever like being left out of the loop,” Ian replied.
“What are you thinking, boss?” Simon asked in that crisp accent of his.
He was thinking that it was time to finish everything, to bring down Nelson and figure out what he was going to do with his wife. “I’m wondering why we got this. The last time he surfaced, it was a coordinated effort to get us exactly where he needed us to be.”
There were another couple of photos Adam had left on the table, and Jesse took one in his hand, looking down on it. “This is that rogue dude thing?”
God, he needed to put new employees through a test to make sure they didn’t sound like idiots when they talked. “We prefer to use the term rogue operative, though he’s been disavowed by now. Now he’s just a traitor.”
“He’s hanging out with Kris’s…Charlotte’s uncle? The mob dude?” Jesse yelped a little as Simon slapped him upside the head. It was a move Ian had perfected on Adam. He knew there was a reason he liked the Brit.
“I’ll do it every time you sound like a stoned surfer,” Simon drawled. “You’re not in the Army anymore. You have to sound like you have a brain in your head. You’re not simply here to follow commands. You have to think on your feet.”
Jesse frowned at his mentor and rubbed the back of his skull. “I need to learn to duck more because this really does kind of seem like another version of the Army. So your enemy is becoming friendly with Charlotte’s enemy?”
“They want me to think so.” But Ian’s brain was working. Something didn’t add up, and he wasn’t sure which way to go. He could go the route that took him down logic road, or he could…find another way.
“The mob du…the Russian mob gentleman and the rogue operative traitor?” Jesse asked.
“Catch up, mate. He’s moved past both of them, and he’s right back to wondering if his wife isn’t working him over.” Simon neatly summed up what was running through his head. “It’s awfully coincidental that she would show up and then suddenly Nelson is hanging out with her family. If it’s really all that sudden.”
“Unless he’s kept an eye on her and now she’s out in the open,” Jesse argued. “I’m really finding it hard to believe that she would work for five years to get into a position where she could help Alex and Eve so she could get back into Ian’s good graces, take a bullet to the chest from me, and it was all so maybe she could trick you again.”
A flash of her still body whispered across his brain, blood staining her chest. Blood on his hands, his shirt, his everything. “Oh, but she took a bullet to trick me before.”
“Yeah, she took a bullet from a man who didn’t want her dead. I wasn’t in on that plot. I was aiming for Alex’s heart.” Jesse ducked Simon’s swinging hand. “Asshole. I thought he was the bad guy. Every single member of this team has smacked me for shooting my brother, but he wasn’t my brother at the time and I didn’t even get him. I got Charlotte. Which is kind of my point. Do you think she’s madly in love with Nelson and is willing to sacrifice her life?”
It was a little bit of a conundrum. He couldn’t imagine Nelson and Charlie together.
“I think Charlotte is damn good at her job. If she thought the risk was worth the reward, she would take it.” But Jesse’s words were worming into his head. It was a different situation. She could easily have just shown up at his place without the song and dance routine in St. Augustine. She’d put a good two years into that operation. What did she really get out of it?
“If it means anything, I believe her,” Simon said. “I think she’s done just about everything to protect that sister of hers. Her sister admitted that she was the one who wrote to Nelson.”
Of course she would if they had gotten their stories straight. Ian had lost the opportunity to question them separately since he’d been far too angry to think rationally.
There was logic to what Charlie did to him.
He went through the photos Adam had left. Four pictures of two men Ian would deeply like to murder, and in a horribly visceral way.
How much of Charlie’s story had been complete bullshit? The scars on her body were real. He’d seen the pictures of her mother’s murdered body.
Was Charlotte so cold that she would work with the same syndicate that murdered her mother and tortured her for years?
Logically, he knew it could happen. She could have been indoctrinated. It had happened many times before. She could be a deeply good actress.
“What’s he doing? He looks like he’s going to kill someone,” Jesse whispered.
Fuck.
Jesse was turning into Adam 2.0. He had to shut that shit down. He narrowed his eyes and gave the new guy his most intimidating stare. “Are you volunteering? It’s been a couple of hours since I killed someone and I’m starting to get the itch.”
Jesse grunted a little. “See. Just like the damn Army.”
“I’m bringing Sean into this. He was in Florida with Charlie and this affects him, too.” Ian found the phone and dialed his brother’s cell.
“This is Sean. Hans, are you trying to cook the duck or make it your bitch?”
He hated interrupting his brother at work, but he needed advice. Actually he really hated needing fucking advice. What was he? A “Dear Abby” fan? God, Charlotte had taken his dick. “Sean, it’s Ian. I need to conference you in on something.”
The sounds of a busy kitchen came over the line. “Sure. Give me a sec. Don’t you stop stirring that sauce. I swear to god I’ll murder you if it scorches.”
The door opened and Adam escorted Grace inside, each taking empty seats.
“Doesn’t this affect Charlotte, too?” Alex asked. “Shouldn’t she be in on this?”
“She’s taking a time out.”
“Hey, Sean,” Adam said, leaning toward the speaker phone. “You missed out yesterday. Big Tag made a porno with his wife.”
Grace gasped. “Adam, you are not supposed to talk about that.”
“Shut up, everyone.” He was going to stop this soap opera in its tracks. “We have something serious to talk about. Sean, can you talk?”
“Yep. Adam kind of had my attention at porno,” Sean’s voice said over the speaker phone. “Grace, love, you don’t need to be looking at big brother’s junk, though I’m sure it took up most of the screen.”
“He wasn’t naked, Sean. Charlotte was,” Grace said.
“Oh, well, that’s totally different.”
Ian took firm control of his temper. “Eli Nelson is working with the Denisovitch syndicate.”