Risk of Exposure (Alpha Ops Book 6) (4 page)

A
bby woke up with a warm feeling of calm and relaxation. All stress seemed to have wafted out the open window in her bedroom, like a reverse Peter Pan. She stretched and remembered the previous night. “Malone.” She tested the name out as if were an exotic foreign sound. “Malone.” She giggled. She’d been so bad, so wanton, and it had been so good. Shame she wouldn’t see him again. She wondered what he would be like in a bed, with all the time in the world. Instinctively her fingers fluttered down, pressing against her clit as she recalled the culmination of the previous night.

And then she remembered what day it was. Battery-change day. She sighed. Imagined how changing batteries turned out to be a major day of excitement for her. True, they weren’t just any batteries, and true, she’d have to illegally cross an international border to do it, but still. Battery-changing day.

She’d been distracted by the scent of Malone still lingering in her car when she hopped in that morning, and her mind kept flickering back to the previous night—the way he’d spoken to her, the humor in his eyes, then the roof…It wasn’t until she’d gotten firm with herself and opened the window to let the eau de Malone go that she got her head back in the game. By the time she arrived at the orphanage, she’d actually figured out a plan to change the batteries without getting caught: It was a wonderful day to play with the kids in the adjacent field. Brigda would be suspicious, but she wouldn’t be able to see them.

Under Brigda’s disapproving eye, Abby maneuvered all the children into their tiny coats and led them single file into the fields just beyond sight of the farmhouse. They looked adorable all holding hands following one after the other, all bundled up against the crisp morning.

She taught them “I’m a Little Teapot” in English while she turned on the handheld locator that would help her find the ground sensors that needed their batteries changed. The display showed three in the vicinity.

“Keep going,” she told the children as they giggled each time they bent over to pour the tea. She had to roll Lana onto her stomach so she could get back on her feet with the bulk of her puffy coat.

Within ten minutes, she’d located and dug for the three ground sensors, then changed their batteries. She’d been told that they lasted for twelve months, but one of her colleagues had warned her before she left for the Ukraine that the cold sometimes made the batteries less effective. It hadn’t been that cold since she’d arrived, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

The sensors would alert her, and Langley, to anyone crossing the border—which was just a hedge in this part of the country. And then it was her job, and her job alone, to ascertain who had breached the border. Cows, a farmer, or the tanks of the Russian army. And if it was the latter and Abby could officially identify them, then NATO forces would take over. No one wanted World War III, but if it was going to happen, Abby was damned sure it wouldn’t be because of an old battery.

With three more to find, she put her bag down and played for a while, letting the children run and jump over her while she was getting her butt wet in the morning dew. Dmitri and Karlov were big enough now to make her “oomph” when they jumped on her, which of course made them want to do it over and over. She laughed, wishing for the simplicity of being a child. Although that wasn’t to say these children had had it particularly good in their short lives, but they were luckier than most to have Tanoff and Brigda looking after them.

She lay back with two of the children weaving long, thin reeds through her hair and wondered if Brigda was a threat. Abby had no idea why the woman was so against her being there, except for the perceived threat of having an American so close to the Russian border. But Abby would only be a threat if Brigda ratted her out…

She moved the boys and girls on to the next field, still out of view of the farmhouse, and switched the locator back on. The last three of these sensors abutted the hedge in a V shape. There were still others lining the fields that shared an open border with Russia, but those batteries had been changed when she had first arrived.

After having taught the kids “Oranges and Lemons”—a rather brutal nursery rhyme that one of her stepmothers had taught her that involved two kids forming an arch while the others tried to walk through fast enough to not get caught as the arch’s arms came down at the last line of the song—she went to find the other sensors.

Mal was sure he was hallucinating and for a split second wondered if the previous night had been a part of it. He hadn’t heard that British nursery rhyme since he was five or six, and there was certainly no good reason for him to be hearing it in the Ukrainian countryside, when all the people here were either natives or American. He thought about Hans. Maybe Swiss.

It was a fairly gruesome song—one that could certainly play a big part in some cheap horror movie, and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t slightly spooked by hearing it. Through his binoculars, he could see Abby digging in the field and playing with some kind of handheld machine. Then he caught one of the kids jumping up and down, really just the top of his head, and realized that she must have taken the kids down there too. What was she doing? He couldn’t get any closer because she’d see him. But whatever it was, it seemed to have little to do with the orphanage…unless they had some security features out there? Maybe that was it.

He really had no idea. But as long as he had eyes on Abby, he was good. She looked happy today, at least probably the happiest he’d seen her since he started watching her. He wondered if he’d had anything to do with that. His mind had been running over the previous night on and off all day. In all his years, he’d never just shagged a girl—on a roof, no less—and had her disappear with no explanation. He at least asked them out, explored their needs, made sure they weren’t looking for a boyfriend or any kind of long-term friendship before closing the deal. He even balked at friends with benefits—he never believed the women who claimed to want that.

His phone vibrated. Baston.

“Garrett here,” he said.

“What man did she go to dinner with?” his boss asked with no preamble.

Shit, as soon as he’d woken up, he’d regretted the sitrep he’d sent the night before. He didn’t know why he hadn’t just sent a same-old, same-old report. He should have seen this coming.

“No one I’d seen before.” He flipped onto his back in the grass and closed his eyes and lied through his teeth. “I was with her the whole time. I wouldn’t have let anything happen to her.”

There was a pause. “Okay, keep me updated. If she sees him again, I want a full background on him. Do you copy?” Baston barked down the phone line.

“Copy that.”
She won’t see him again.

His boss hung up. Mal looked at the phone and groaned. Well at least that settled that. He wouldn’t be seeing her again, so no need to make up a background investigation.

He rolled back onto his front and aimed his binoculars at Abby again. For a second he couldn’t see her, until she came into stark focus—through the lenses she looked as if she were almost on top of him. He pulled his elbows down and lay flat in the grass, hoping she wouldn’t see him from the path that led back to the farmhouse.

He held his breath as she walked past him, maybe ten feet from where he was lying. When she passed, he looked up. Her eyes were on the ground, and her hands had children hanging off them. Cute. And then one of the kids turned his head and looked him straight in the eye. He was paralyzed. Why had he looked up? He could have just stayed lying down until she was back inside.

The little boy blinked his light blue eyes at him and grinned a huge, toothless smile and then turned back to keep step with Abby.

He flopped back down. That served him right for trying to cop a look. Jesus. He should have just stuck to the routine. He was here to keep her safe, not discover her every secret. An annoying voice in his head told him that if he knew all her secrets, he’d be better at keeping her safe, but he knew better than to listen to that voice. It had been leading him astray since he’d been fourteen and bunking off school on the streets of London.

He lay in the damp grass again, binoculars held on his chest, and sighed. Was he going to listen to that voice again? Did it have an ulterior motive? Or was he going to value his job and his relationship with his boss—seemingly the only man who could bear to be around him—and leave well enough alone?

The back door to the farmhouse slammed as they went in, and Mal jumped up. From where he stood, he could only see the roof of the house, so it was safe to go back to his car. The wind had suddenly picked up, and the temperature must have dropped at least ten degrees in the hour he’d been in the grass. It was bitter. Tiny flakes of snow drifted past him, and he couldn’t believe the abrupt change in weather. He shivered as he got to the car. And then he laughed at himself.

He’d become a right pussy since he left the SAS—the British black-ops special forces that the United States Delta Force was modeled on. While he’d been on the job, he’d lived in a forest in the middle of a snowstorm—for a week. Now
that
had been cold. He’d heated water every day so he could dip his fingers into it to keep them warm enough to operate his weapons. He wondered just how hard-core he still was after the two years of private work he’d done for Baston, since he was honorably discharged after ten years.

Baston knew Mal wasn’t easy to like and had an inscrutable past, but one of Mal’s old commanders had told him that a bunch of people had quit the SAS to return to the conventional army after Mal had been discharged, just because they didn’t fancy their chances going back on a mission without Mal having their back. And that was the only reason Baston had brought him on. And that was the reason, he’d said, that he’d chosen Mal to protect his daughter. He still didn’t know if he believed him.

Mal felt a twinge of regret about the previous night and wondered how Baston would feel about Mal if he knew that the only protection he’d shown his daughter so far was a condom. Jesus. What was wrong with him?

He’d never found it hard to stay away from women before; he’d been trained to walk away and not look back. It had always been imperative to the mission to be able to compartmentalize—and that meant never getting attached. But Abby. She was so contrary to appearances. Her life had seemed boring, and she was anything but boring.

Maybe she wouldn’t want to see him again anyway, so the mental discussion with himself was moot. To be fair, most normal people—men
and
women—never wanted to see him again. Professionally and privately he fulfilled a need. A specific need that mostly no one wanted to be reminded of afterward. But Abby
wasn’t
normal, though.

Or was that his little voice leading him astray again?

A
bby couldn’t help slowing down that evening as she passed the bend in the road where she’d picked up Malone the previous night. His car was gone, which meant, she guessed, he’d gotten help and managed to move it. She had wondered, briefly, what she would have done if he was there again, and she’d come to the only right conclusion—drive right past him.

Probably, anyway. It was the right thing to do. The correct CIA field officer procedure for intimate relations: If they were more than casual, they had to be reported. And she’d never, ever had a relationship that she needed to report. She wanted to keep it that way.

Just as she was approaching the outskirts of town, her satellite phone rang. She looked up out of habit to see the stars visible in the sky. The phone they’d given her wasn’t exactly top of the line. Unlike in movies and TV shows, they mostly had to make do with any kind of technology that held a reasonable charge. Her satellite phone only really worked when the skies were clear and there wasn’t any inclement weather. She’d always been a bit leery of the lack of up-to-date equipment, like the field operatives weren’t worth the good stuff.

“This is Baston,” she said as she pulled over to the side of the road.

“Hey, chickie,” a familiar voice said. It was her partner in crime, Kate. Kate sat on the Russia desk at Langley and kept all the CIA officers up-to-date with intel when she had it. Sometimes her intel had more to do with her own dating life.

“Kate. What’s going on?” she asked, smiling to herself.

“I’m dating a Combat Weather guy. I just met him. He told me you had a pocket of clear weather over your location, before the storm cometh, so I thought I’d check in.”

“Tell me you didn’t reveal my location to your new boyfriend,” she said, mock sternly.

“Eh, he has higher clearance than me, so…” Her voice trailed off as she was, no doubt, distracted by something shiny walking past her desk. Abby had witnessed it happen more than once.

“Don’t tell me, someone in a sharp uniform just walked by,” she deadpanned.

“Man, it’s like you’re a spy or something.” Kate laughed. “Hey, anyway, looks like you have the mother of all storms heading your way, and I wanted to be sure you had everything you needed.”

“Sure. I’m okay.”

“Look, you haven’t been there in the winter. It’s hard to keep track of troop movements when the ground is covered in snow and the troops and their carriers are camouflaged in white. Our heat-detecting satellites are pretty crap in sub-Siberia temperatures.”

“It defies belief.” She and Kate had spoken at length about the shoddy 1980s instruments they had to deal with. Nevertheless, Abby peered through the darkness, feeling excitement spike. “You think we’ll see troop movements? What have you heard?”

“Nothing. No need to go to DEFCON 1 or anything. You’re just going to be alone and out of range for a while. Keep your eyes open, and stay safe, okay? Check in when you can. Even if it’s via email.” A couple years back, they’d set up a back-channel protocol in case the encrypted system didn’t work or couldn’t be accessed. Kate had a slightly different protocol for everyone in the region as a backup. Not terribly legal but also well appreciated when alone in the field with shit tools.

“Copy that,” she said.

“And if you have any snowball fights with anyone delicious, I need photos or it didn’t happen.”

Abby rolled her eyes. “Copy that too.” Static crackled over the phone line.

“I’m going to lose you—” Kate said before the phone went dead.

Abby hung up and wondered, not for the first time, if she should just bite the bullet and buy her own freaking sat phone. Not that it would be encrypted and not that the CIA paid her enough to buy one without feeling the pinch financially, but as the clouds rolled in, presumably bringing snow with them, she started to feel a little angry at the shit state of the equipment she had to trust her life to. And at being alone.

It was an argument she’d had with herself many times before. And with Kate. And with her boss.

She started the motor again and made a turn before her street to stock up on food, just in case the snow hit bad. The store was about to close up, but she persuaded the storekeeper to give her five minutes in the aisles. When she’d gathered enough things she could eat with no electricity, she loaded her bags into her car and found a spot to park in the road outside her building. She wondered briefly how her car would hold up in the snow, but with no garage, there wasn’t much she could do about it. She swung her bags onto her forearm and locked the door.

A few snowflakes fell on her face, and she looked up to the sky. Having spent some of her childhood in upstate New York, she knew very well that this second, the moment that the snow started, was the prettiest. Silver flakes drifting slowly to earth made her think about her family’s first home for a brief second. She breathed in and felt the stir of wind that she knew would bring the snow down in droves.

Suddenly she longed to be inside her apartment, old and creaky as it was, setting her meticulously dried logs and tinder ablaze in her decidedly ’70s-inspired fireplace. She scurried down the alleyway to the main entrance to the apartment building.

Mal watched her turn her face up to the sky, and in that second he saw a different side to Abby Baston. Her face lit up as she took in the falling snow, and he wished that he weren’t watching through an SLR lens but was standing next to her, maybe brushing the snow from her shoulders.

He sighed. He was kidding himself. He didn’t want that. That was what a normal man would want. Not one who travels light and free. Not one who had killed more people than he wished to remember, although remember them he did. Not one who found himself in danger most weeks. Not one who enjoyed the danger he found himself in. But sometimes he liked to pretend he was normal to see how it felt. Like trying on a coat. An awkward, ill-fitting coat.

She passed out of sight, and he waited, eyes on her apartment window for the light to come on. She was on the twenty-second floor, so it mostly depended on how quickly the lift got to her.

He was distracted by two guys walking behind her into the alleyway. One looked behind him as he walked. Mal angled himself to see what he’d been looking at. All he could see from his vantage point were puffs of exhaust coming from a car. An uneasy feeling prickled his skin, and he didn’t wait a fraction of a second to act on it.

He grabbed his keys and slammed his door shut behind him. He didn’t wait for the lift but ran to the stairwell. Jumping down the stairs four or five at a time and swinging over the railings, he knew he would get to the ground floor faster than waiting for a lift.

He ran across the empty street, getting a good look at the waiting car. It was just one guy looking in his rearview mirror at the entrance to the alleyway. His apprehension kicked up a notch. Barely feeling the cold, even though he was in a thin T-shirt and jeans, he rounded the corner to her apartment complex’s entry.

He skidded to a halt. The two men were down. He panted visible puffs of air as he stood over them. Thankfully for the cold, he could also see a tiny waft of air coming from one of them. Not the other. He felt for a pulse. Nada.

Shit. Now what? He found a tin of soup on the ground. Abby had been carrying groceries. Had she killed this guy? Had someone else? Was she upstairs? Had someone taken her? He went into the unmanned lobby. The one lift was ascending. He paused to watch. It stopped at 22. Was she alone now?

Regardless, he couldn’t leave these guys here for the police to find. He didn’t know what the fuck was going on. He pushed the up button for the lift and pulled out his phone, hitting speed dial number 2.

“Randall Products,” a friendly female voice said.

“Three zero zero, please,” Mal said.

In less than a second, Randall’s voice came over the line. “How can I help?”

“Clean up on aisle three…no four.” Dammit, it had been so long since he’d used Randall’s services he’d forgotten the protocol.

“Garrett? Is that you?”

“I don’t have time—”

“Sure. Address?”

Mal gave him the address of Abby’s apartment building.

“It’s five k per, and someone will be there in twenty minutes. Can you secure…”

Dammit. “Sure. Give me a second.” He shoved his phone into his pants pocket and went back outside. After checking the scene was clear, he took off his T-shirt and grabbed one of the guy’s feet, ensuring he didn’t leave prints on the man’s boots. He dragged him to the far side of a Dumpster and then repeated the process with the other one. He pulled his shirt back on and looked up to see the getaway man standing at the entrance to the alley.
Shit
.

Mal took a step toward him, but the guy whimpered and ran off. Was this just a mugging gone wrong? They certainly didn’t seem like hard-core criminals. He remembered Randall and yanked his phone out again. “Look behind the Dumpster for your package,” he said. “And what the fuck, man? When did your prices go up to five grand per person?”

“Location, location, location, mate. No one wants to be sent to the gulag.”

“Jesus.” He wondered if Baston would cover the expense or if it’d have to come out of his savings. Shit, Abby had better be involved somehow or he’d never get his money back. And, yeah, that was cold and he was a-okay with it.

“No worries, mate. Eh. You know I love to double-dip, but someone already called this in. I’ll bill them.”

“What? Who called it in?”

“Come on, Garrett. Would you want me to tell anyone that you called it in?”

He had a point. Secrecy was the linchpin of his slightly-to-very illegal operation. “Okay. Fair enough,” he said, going back into the building. He hit the lift button again.

“How have you been? It’s been a long time since I heard from you. Good to hear you’re still in the business.” Randall had been loosely funded by the dark money in the UK government, and Garrett had often been the sharp end of the dark parts of the government. Their paths had crossed more than once.

“Private now, though,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”

“Call me sometime when you don’t need something, okay?” Randall said. “Let’s catch up.”

“Sure.” He hung up and got on the lift. They both kind of knew the chance of that happening was remote, but it was good to know he still had an ace in the hole if he needed it.

So who had called in the cleaners already? He was already fighting a suspicion that Abby was in some way mixed up with this. But really there was no evidence that she’d been there at all. Except the soup. Maybe she’d already been on the lift when all that went down. Maybe they tried to mug some guy and he fought back.

There was only one way to find out. He stepped out on the twenty-second floor and paused. A half-wrecked plastic grocery bag full of food was strewn across the landing in front of her door. Shit. Was someone in there with her? Had the fight extended to her apartment?

Before he’d even finished the thought, he kicked in her door. It was dark. He took one step—actually barely even a suggestion of a step—and a big frying pan swung at his face. He ducked and swiveled, kicking the legs out from under his assailant.

Whoever it was fell but scrambled away. He grabbed the leg nearest him and pulled. It kicked back in his face until he let them go. He sprung up and hit the lights. No more fighting in the dark. What the fuck?

It was Abby.