Snowbound with the Secret Agent Page 13

  “Yes, ma’am.” He never got used to calling her by her first name, no matter that the work environment demanded it. There wasn’t the hardline ranking in Trail Hikers like he’d experienced in the military. They were all colleagues, agents all working together for a common cause. Of course there were ranks and definite leaders here, but to minimize the chances of exposure, they didn’t refer to one another with anything other than their first names.

  “You’ve got Portia settled at the Olsen house.” A statement. Claudia came as close to an omniscient presence as anyone he’d ever met.

  “Yes. I’ll go back at night to check on her, when I’m not working.”

  Claudia swiveled in her chair and rapidly typed on her keyboard. He couldn’t see her computer display but knew from other times he’d worked a case with her that her monstrous monitor would reflect Claudia’s comprehensive assessment of the case.

  “It looks pretty tight, security-wise.” Cool eyes peered around the monitor at him. “Does she know how to use a weapon?”

  “I didn’t ask her, but I’d doubt it.”

  “Why? You’re in Pennsylvania. She doesn’t have a license to carry in the background check we ran, but she may have hunted before, or gone to a firing range. Find out. I’d like to equip her and you with a few extra firearms, just in case.”

  “Portia’s not a Trail Hiker.” He was, and he’d be doing any firing of weapons as needed.

  “No, but she knows enough about the case, and of course she’s the one Markova’s targeting. Have you told Portia anything about her adversary?”

  “No. All Portia knows is that ROC is in place in Silver Valley and refusing to leave, and she knows Markova’s name. She knows I’m here to help bring the heroin operation down, break up their logistics.”

  Claudia nodded. “I’m not sure what you pulled up on Portia when you did your background check, but in the profile I have here, it talks about one of her high school friends succumbing to heroin. Annie knew the woman, too.”

  He hadn’t read that part in his file, and he’d been too busy the last week to reread Portia’s dossier. He was living with her—that was all he needed. And it made him more aware of Portia as a human being than he had been. Portia had a fire in her belly for charity work. No doubt her high school friend’s overdose only further motivated her.

  “I do know from her file that she was involved with a local politician. It didn’t work out.”

  Claudia snorted. “Because she ended it, which was a good move on her part. Robert Donovan is a slickster. He’s even accepted donations from out of state donors to include a Mr. D. Ivanov.” She met Kyle’s gaze again and he registered the same level of disgust.

  Dima Ivanov was the head of East Coast ROC, the big kahuna of ROC criminals. He’d alluded capture, even though he’d been in Silver Valley at least a half dozen times in the past eighteen months. Problem was, no one reported him when he was in town. The locals would only see him as a tourist passing through, and frightened anyone who thought they recognized him into keeping quiet. Ivanov knew well enough to keep up a disguise from the local LEAs.

  “Is Donovan in with ROC for this operation?” He referred to the heroin distribution chain. It wasn’t beyond politicians to convince or at least try to convince LEAs to look the other way when it preserved a solid donor.

  “No, not from what we’ve seen, but nothing would surprise me.” Claudia frowned. “You and I have seen so much destruction around the globe caused by greed. I hate that it’s come to Silver Valley.”

  “We’re on it, boss.”

  “We are. So after you find out if Portia can fire a weapon, and train her if she can’t, take some extra arms out to the house. Feel free to use our firing range.”

  “We don’t involve civilians in our cases.” No way was he training Portia how to fire a weapon. She was a librarian, the town’s Mother Theresa of the homeless. Not an undercover agent.

  You’re getting in too deep.

  Maybe he already was.

  “Portia’s already involved, Kyle.” She peered at him from her desk. “Are your emotions becoming involved, Kyle?” Her astute query was underscored by the blaze of comprehension in her blue eyes.

  “No. Maybe. Yeah.”

  “There’s no harm in caring for someone, but it can’t affect your mission. It would be rough to reassign you this deep in, but I can make it happen if you’d like.”

  “No, I’m going to finish this.”

  “Good.” She nodded. “Are you still considering the move to California?”

  “As long as the offer to launch the West Coast Trail Hiker office still stands.” And even if it didn’t, he still wanted to go back to his native state. Didn’t he?

  He’d thought of it, planned for it for the last year or two. It was as much a part of his everyday awareness as his job. But he hadn’t thought about California lately.

  Not since he’d held a certain Silver Valley librarian in his arms as he knocked her off the train tracks.

  * * *

  It’d come close for Markova last week at the homeless shelter. So the librarian had a protector—no matter. At some point, the woman would have to go back to work, and then she’d make her move, more exactingly this time. Following her from the library had been foolish, the action of an amateur.

  She was not a rookie, as Americans liked to say. FSB training was for only the very best, and when she’d joined them, she’d been young, strong and full of idealistic Russian dreams.

  Now she knew they were all lies, but in America with Ivanov, she’d found her place, found a way to use her abilities while still helping her fellow nationals who’d come here looking for a way out. All of them were misfits as far as the Russian government was concerned, all FSB or other government agency throwaways.

  Using her best teenage boy disguise, she’d hung out in the local comic book store since three thirty, the time when high school students liked to relax, she’d noticed. Certain that the man she’d encountered on the train tracks, and again in the homeless shelter, was nowhere in the vicinity, she left the store, entered the library and headed to the classic fiction shelves. There, on the Russian translation shelf, somewhere between The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina, she surreptitiously placed the USB stick on which she’d copied the most detailed instructions from the site on the dark net. She put the memory device behind the aged volumes, out of sight of a browser. The Russian novels were so obvious a place they would be discounted by SVPD or FBI. They’d had another drop place closer to the front entrance but she’d changed it after the day the librarian chased her onto the train tracks.

  Her immediate subordinate in ROC, in charge of the individual dealer logistics for the area, would come and get the stick in the next fifteen minutes.

  Not wanting to appear obvious on any security footage that could be analyzed by the local police, and still wanting to drop off the laptop whose hard drive she’d wiped, she went back upstairs and spent the next several minutes browsing the periodicals. She wasn’t to know who her handoff was, nor was it her concern. All that mattered was that he or she got the information she’d left.

  A group of school-age children, along with a few parents, entered the library, and she used the crowd to her advantage. She pulled the laptop out of the bag and carefully left it on the circulation desk as she exited the library. She couldn’t keep the grin off her face. The man who was tracking her would be in for a big surprise, and no doubt infuriated. Ludmila loved aggravating her tails. It was part of her job description as far as she was concerned.

  The only thing she hadn’t figured out was where Portia DiNapoli was. She hadn’t been back in the library, from what Ludmila saw, since the very day she’d almost been flattened by the train.

  Outside the library, the air froze the hairs in her nostrils, not unlike Moscow or Saint Petersburg. While she was prepared to work i
n any climate, anywhere, she had to admit that the cold was her friend, the constant companion of her youth in the block-style apartment building, a holdover from the Soviet era. She’d missed out on it, the glory days of her country. But here in America, she had a chance to see how the system could really work, when ROC’s plan to take over the domestic economy came to fruition. At its core was fortifying the influx, distribution and sale of heroin. She was determined to see it work out.

  A homeless man sat inside a threshold and she stepped over his feet. And thought about it. She turned back.

  “There’s a homeless place for you, next block up.”

  The man shrugged and huddled more deeply into his ragged coat. Ludmila answered with her own shrug and continued walking.

  She lit up a cigarette as she walked in the frozen winter twilight of Silver Valley. The smoke fit her disguise perfectly, but also calmed the adrenaline that annoyingly surged through her system. Portia DiNapoli had to go, the sooner the better. Ludmila needed one chance, one straight line of sight, and she’d take the woman out.

  Ludmila never left a witness behind, even when what they’d actually seen and could recall for the authorities was questionable. She worked on a zero-risk belief system. It was what had earned her top rankings in the FSB, and ensured her spot as a trusted agent for Ivanov in ROC. And this skill she’d developed so carefully, so thoroughly, was what would allow her to disappear from the face of the earth, take a new identity and leave this life behind for good. All she had left to do was kill Portia DiNapoli.

  It was so delicious to think of finally taking out the town librarian she wondered for a fleeting moment if she’d ever be able to stop it—the killing. There was power in taking life, and Ludmila loved having power over people.

  * * *

  Kyle remotely snapped several photos with the miniature camera he’d placed in his ski cap, positioned so that the torn material appeared as any other hole in the fabric and not sporting a lens. The activation button was the crown on the cheap-looking watch he wore.

  He’d immediately known it was Markova by the way she tried just a little too hard to appear like an American teen. Markova was good, but not perfect. First, she’d missed him sitting by the front door of the library on her way in. And just now, he was certain she hadn’t known it was him. If she had, he’d be fighting for his life or have had to kill her to keep his.

  Markova was all about her mission, her survival. He got it, because he was, too, except his efforts benefited society. Unlike ROC.

  He’d called in to another TH agent working the case inside the building to check out the library—everywhere that Markova had walked. All they’d discovered was that the laptop had been left on the circulation desk. It was already on its way to TH headquarters for analysis, but there wouldn’t be anything on it. A professional like Markova didn’t make those kinds of mistakes, and besides, he knew she’d meant it as a slap.

  The question was if she’d left something else somewhere else in the library. He’d change out of his disguise and go in during after-hours to search the place.

  As night fell early and snow began to fall, he faced his other conundrum. How was he going to keep his hands off Portia when all he’d wanted, all he craved, since they’d been together, was to be with her again?

  * * *

  Portia didn’t go stir-crazy during the first full week of her imposed exile at the mountain home, but by the end of week two, she was beyond antsy. She promised Kyle she’d stay in the house, but surely that had to extend to the immediate property. It was close to nightfall, but she had at least another twenty minutes of sufficient daylight to take a break from the gala planning.

  Once outside, her head cleared and the open air immediately soothed her jagged edges. Kyle had checked in on her each day, about midday, then at night, where he’d dutifully slept in a guest room, while she slept in another. He’d not made a move to touch her since their cataclysmic sex the first day she’d been brought here.

  And she’d refrained from touching him, too. It was a silent agreement, as they didn’t discuss it. She wondered if his reason was the same as hers, though. Kyle made it clear he was going back to California, which made a relationship with him a nonstarter. Her home was Silver Valley.

  Although, in a moment of sheer boredom, she’d looked up open library positions in the northern part of the state, where he’d mentioned he was from. And just as quickly shut the screen down, because in the fantasy of a life with Kyle lay madness.

  As she walked off the expansive back deck and onto the concrete patio below, she saw the large cover over a pool, and the surrounding woods appeared frosted with the snow that had begun to fall about an hour ago. According to the weather reports, a flat-out blizzard was headed into the Susquehanna and Cumberland Valley areas. Since Silver Valley was smack-dab in the middle of them, they expected up to three feet, maybe more, in less than twenty-four hours.

  She knew it could get ugly outside, but right now it was perfect. The wind hadn’t picked up yet and the snowflakes pinged off her parka. Holding out her mittened hands to capture them, she saw that they were tiny ice particles. Standing under the deck, watching nature sprinkle the sparkling snowflakes all about her, it was difficult to imagine she was here because her life was threatened.

  Thank God for Annie, who’d talked to her endlessly on the phone these past two weeks. Otherwise being a shut-in would lead to insanity, at the least.

  Footsteps sounded on the ground near her and she froze. Kyle always came in through the front door, which was upstairs, on the house’s main living area. He hadn’t been on the deck over her head or she would have heard his firm, steady steps.

  She shrank back against the house, forcing her breathing to still and her thoughts to focus. Who was here with her?

  Chapter 12

  Kyle spoke to Josh as he drove up to the house. In a few minutes, he’d be near Portia again. It was at once torture and relief. Relief to see her beautiful smile, know she was safe and unharmed. Torture to be as turned on as a man possibly could be and unable to do a darn thing about it.

  “I just talked to Claudia, Kyle. The laptop was wiped, as you expected.”

  “Yup. It’s Markova’s way of letting us know she’s a step ahead.”

  “But she’s not. You saw her in the library, and the security footage verifies what you described.” Josh’s laugh sounded throughout the inside of the car, as Kyle used the hands-free phone. “You were spot-on about everything.”

  Kyle silently thanked Claudia for making sure the library’s security feed had been linked to SVPD early in the surveillance operation. It exponentially cut their analysis time down.

  “What about the other places she went? Tell me what you saw. I’m going back as soon as I check in on Portia, after the library closes.” He couldn’t inspect every inch of it as needed with patrons present.

  “She walked by the literary fiction section, appeared to linger for a brief moment by the Russian books.”

  “Aren’t you glad I told you where those were?” He poked at Josh, who’d been convinced ROC wasn’t so nuanced. But he hadn’t had to work against Russian FSB agents before. Kyle had.

  “It just seems too obvious.”

  “And therefore classic. What did you see? Could you see her hands?”

  “No, that’s the problem. I see her reach up for maybe three seconds, that’s it. If she put a piece of paper or a USB of any kind in there, it could be gone by now.”

  “Go over it again, and go through the next several minutes of footage for me. If you see someone go there, we have our transfer point.” And the Silver Valley point of contact for ROC, besides Markova.

  “Will do. Also, we just found out that there’s definitely a large heroin shipment en route,” Josh said with a sigh, which expressed his frustration. “It’s the largest sent to the East Coast yet, and it’s coming here, to Si
lver Valley.”

  They had to stop it. Neither man had to verbalize it.

  “We’re going to. Keep me posted and I’ll check back with you after I get through the library.”

  “You know about the storm coming in, right?”

  “I saw some messages on my phone.” He had, but he’d been too busy, first working undercover at the library and then preoccupied with getting back here to check on Portia. He looked at his windshield wiper blades as he turned them off, pulling to a stop in the circular driveway.

  “It’s not just a storm, Kyle. They’re expecting blizzard conditions by midnight, and it won’t let up for as much as two days.”

  “So we need the information Markova left in the library tonight.”

  “Definitely.”

  “I’m on it.” He disconnected as he killed the engine. It was six o’clock. The library closed in two hours. Enough time to grab a quick meal with Portia and get to the library and back in time for the storm. He did not want her alone at all, but especially during weather that Markova functioned exceptionally well in.

  He pulled the couple of bags of groceries he’d brought out of the back and realized that they’d need more provisions to survive a few days, maybe even a week. This wasn’t far enough north that they had snowplows standing by to promptly clear rural routes like the one that led to the mountain house. He’d make sure the snowmobile in the garage had enough fuel, and that there was propane for the backup generator.

  As he stomped up to the front door, he sent up a thought of gratitude. One nice thing about such a fancy place was that it was set for any kind of weather.

  “Hello!”