Limbo Man (13 page)

Agent Grimes stuck his head around the kitchen door. “Everything okay in here?”

“Vee expects Tingley to charge in like a wounded bull,” Nick offered in an easy manner, as if he and Grimes were long-time colleagues. “We must protect her, I think.”

Not until Nick said her name did Vee realize she hadn’t heard him use it since . . . since they first settled in their seats on the Gulfstream. Odd. As was the look she’d seen on his face when one of the guards called to her as she brought the pizza from the kitchen. He couldn’t have forgotten. Could he?

Who knew? Nick’s mind seemed to be jumping around faster than his accent.
Call me Seryozha
. And as they got off the plane, he’d been slow to answer to Nick
.

Not now. Tingley’s coming. Not now
. But something was screwy, she knew it.
Tingley.
Vee steepled her fingers in front of her face and reminded herself she was a professional. She could take it.

A peremptory knock sent Steve rushing to unbolt the double doors of carved wood. Agent Grimes broke off a low-voiced conversation with Nick to welcome the new top dog from DHS. After a brief introduction to Stan Kessel, Tingley fixed on Nick, inflicting a slow, deliberately insulting inspection from head to toe before he turned to Vee. “Agent Frost,” he snapped, “a moment in private. Lead the way.”

Vee had already figured that one out. The small computer room for guests off the main lobby was close enough to the others that she wouldn’t feel isolated with Tingley. Not that he looked the way she expected. Instead of raging bull, he was more like a great menacing iceberg. It almost seemed as if his short gray-flecked hair was standing up in icy spikes.

He followed her into the computer room, closing the door behind them with exaggerated care.

In addition to pizza and groceries, the men who went to town had brought back a newspaper. Sergei snagged it before settling into an overstuffed chair in the lounge area, not more than eight feet from the computer room door. He unfolded the paper. Surprise. They were in Wyoming. He settled down to catch up on the news he’d missed while he was some mindless nobody called Nick.

Tingley’s voice rose, the words indistinguishable, the tone as lashing as cat-o’-nine tails. Sergei’s fingers tightened on the edges of the newspaper. He stopped reading. Behind him, conversations faded as the other men in the room shamelessly eavesdropped. The only sound was the hiss and snap of logs in the lobby’s great stone fireplace. And Agent Tingley’s words, carrying clearly into the silent room.

“You weren’t hired to
investigate
, girl. I didn’t ask you to
think
. I sure as hell didn’t tell you to run to papa at the first sign of trouble. You’re bait, Frost. Nothing but juicy blonde bait. Your job is to make nice, find out what he knows,
no matter how you do it
. Is that cl—”

The door slammed open with a satisfying thud. Sergei left it open. Let them all watch if they wanted to. Tingley was on his feet, looking remarkably like the cross between a boxer and a pit bull that Vee had described. She was sitting on one of the computer chairs, and he thought he caught a distinct flash of relief in her blue eyes before he turned his attention back to the boss creep from Homeland Security.

“Never lose your temper, Tingley,” Sergei advised kindly. “It makes you vulnerable. Not one of us missed you abusing the agent who saved my life when
your
arrangements failed—”

“Three of my men died!”

“Because there was a leak, very likely in your office. No wonder Agent Frost cut you out. I would have asked Daddy to quarantine the lot of you. I don’t give a damn if you’re the rah-rah superpatriot of all times or maybe Father Frost’s best friend. I wouldn’t have let you come within a thousand miles of either of us.”

When Tingley started to open his mouth, Sergei bared his teeth and held up his hand in the universal “stop” gesture. “Let’s remember that I’m the guy with vital information locked in his head. It’s not just
Ms
Frost
who has to make nice with me. It’s all of you. I guarantee—repeat,
guarantee
—you will not get one crumb of information from me unless you treat Special Agent Frost with the respect she deserves. I’m only alive because of her. Do. You. Understand?”

Tingley’s face had gone from overheated red to a green-tinged pallor. He managed a nod.

“From now on, she doesn’t see you alone. You want to talk with her, you talk with both of us. Is that clear?” Again, the Homeland Security agent nodded.

“Vee?” Sergei held out his hand.
She
shot out of her chair and grasped it. And to think that until someone had called out “Vee” when she brought in the pizza, he hadn’t even known her name. He was almost as surprised by his rush to her rescue as Tingley was.

Silently, the crowd outside the door, with Agent Grimes at the forefront, parted to let them through. The men looked nearly as stunned as Tingley. Had they thought him an invalid with no teeth? A prisoner who wouldn’t dare?

Well, hell. Surprise, surprise.

When the door to their private sitting room clicked shut behind them, Vee withdrew her hand from his. She sank down on the burgundy leather couch and waved him to a seat beside her. “Okay,” she declared, her eyes holding his in as penetrating a stare as she’d ever turned on him, “what just happened in there?”

Sergei summoned his innocent look. “I told Agent Tingley to mind his manners?”

“And quite magnificently.” Vee sighed. “I’m eternally grateful, but that’s not what I meant. “You certainly weren’t Nick, the beating victim, and you were a great deal more than Sergei, the arms dealer. You sounded more like my father in his better moments. You assumed command like an experienced general. You were the man in charge.”

Sergei shrugged. “Tokarev operates independently most of the time. The
Organizatsiya
leaves him alone.”

Vee leaped on his words. “And you know that how?”

“I just know.” He’d done it again. She dazzled him, and he’d been careless.

Vee shook her head. “You didn’t sound like a wiseguy, even a boss wiseguy.”

“And how would you know what a wiseguy sounds like, my little Feeb from Florida? You have great experience with the mob, yes?”

“Leave Sergei out of this,” Vee snapped. “He annoys me.”

“But he also is me.”

“Don’t remind me,” Vee muttered. Her shoulders stiffened, eyes sharpening as she switched back to interrogation mode.

Mentally, Sergei applauded
. Good girl.

“When you were telling off Tingley,” Vee asked, “did you notice that even Agent Grimes didn’t interfere? Everybody froze, like you were the President or Vladimir Putin. Or an Avenging Angel from on High.” Vee gave him a look aimed straight for his soul. “What aren’t you telling me, Nick? You’re holding back, I can feel it.”

He was tempted to say it.
Hell, woman, don’t call me that. I’m not Nick the nice guy. I’m Sergei, the arms dealer
, even if he’s
only an act
. But she already knew that. Not hard to figure out when he’d started babbling perfect English. And none of it mattered, except those lost moments of the meeting in New York. And getting Vee to trust him, to help him get away from this mountain prison.

Only w
hen he was out of here, he could track down the answers.

At least he thought he could. With Vee’s help, physical and financial.
Sure, h
e could take the money she was carrying and leave her behind, but he wasn’t going to. He’d been alone too long, and somehow
, without remembering how it happened, t
he two of them had become a team.

“You have a pile of cash on you, right?”

“Right.” Her piercing stare turned wary.

“We have to get out of here. Tonight. I have a bad feeling about this place—maybe it’s just Tingley, maybe not. But the info in my head isn’t surfacing, and it’s not going to while I’m here. Out there”—Sergei waved a hand toward the windows—“I think I’ll remember enough to track down what I need to know. And I could use your help. Will you come with me?”

“Nick—”

“Not Nick. Nick is the guy in the hospital. He
i
s no longer with us. And not Sergei of the
Organizatsiya
. You’ll be running with the Sergei who just went toe to toe with Tingley. From now on, you will call me Sergei or Seryozha.” Vee ducked her head, hiding her expression.
Govnó!
He should have been more subtle, but Vee Frost seemed to have scrambled his wits more thoroughly than the beating.

She was examining him as minutely, if not as insultingly, as Tingley had, her gaze gradually rising from his sneakered toes to his crotch, his chest, his battered face. He could find no sign that she liked what she saw. Idiot! He was asking her to run away with a monster, and it was taking too damn long for her respond. He kept forgetting how he looked.

Her eyes finally fixed on his. Unaccountably, the blue warmed to the shine of a summer sky. Deep inside him, some remnant of the civilized world he used to know stirred to life. “This is the real you, isn’t it?” she asked. “Tell me, Sergei Somebody, do you want to stop this disaster as much as I do?”

“More. It is my responsibility.”

“And you are mine.” Vee heaved a sigh as he took her hand. “My family will disown me, I’ll lose my job, and be on the run for the rest of my life.”

“Not if we win.”

“You’ll leave here, even without me.” It wasn’t a question.

“I must. Here, I can accomplish nothing.”

Vee’s breath hitched. “Your memory came back. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why you’re different?”

Sergei sank down on the couch beside her. It didn’t take much acting to look chagrined. This woman was supposed to protect him, and he hadn’t played fair. She’d needed to know, and he’d ignored her. To Sergei Ivanovich Zhukov she was a means to an end, nothing more. His way out. And yet . . .

If only he could remember what they’d been to each other while on the run.

Time to choose his words carefully, not bite the hand that, quite literally, fed him. “I don’t remember the most important part,” Sergei admitted. “The part you all want to know. From what I’ve heard about traumatic head injuries, I think it’s likely I never will. I have to go out there and work with what I do remember.”

“But why alone? One word, and you’ll have all of Homeland Security at your service.”

“I’ll have a bunch of bulls in a china shop, ramming around and spooking both the bomb guys and the trigger guys. They’ll plunge so far underground, it will be like the twenty years since the bombs were lost. Silence. A vast nothing. No hope of getting the bombs back.”

Plainly unconvinced, Vee scowled at him.

“When we’ve found out what we need to know, we will need help,” Sergei conceded. “Then you may call Daddy.”

Her frown deepened. Obviously, the charm that had extricated him from many a tricky situation had grown thin.

“And now,” he said, ignoring her doubts, “there is the problem of getting out of here. “I should not have shown my teeth. I needed to stay poor battered Nick who was about as much of a menace as my dear old Aunt Marina.”

“Alas for you, chivalry called.”

“So . . .” Sergei allowed his lips to curl into an anticipatory smile. His hand closed over hers. “We must convince your friends that I am still harmless. A wounded man with nothing on my mind but chasing women and getting back to running guns.”

Ah. She was so quick. A true delight, as her eyes turned stormy and she pulled her hand from his. “You just . . .”  Vee uttered a sound that came close to a growl. “You ride to my rescue like some knight on a white charger, and then you turn right around and try to finagle me onto my back—”

Sergei’s tongue clicked in a double
Tsk
. “Never finagled. I am merely stating the obvious. Since they all think we’re sleeping together, there is little point in your playing the outraged virgin. Let us take advantage of their dirty minds. Let them think we are in bed, lost in each other, while we are sneaking out the window. Later, you can call your papa and tell him what we’re doing, but, trusting no one, I must do this thing my way.”

“No one?”

Sergei allowed his lips to quirk into a near smile. “You I almost trust. Enough to take you with me. Your contacts could be useful.”

“No kidding.”

“Is compliment. I always work alone.”

“Let’s get something straight. If you want to work with me, lose the Sergei accent. And the attitude.”

“Agreed.” He shouldn’t be so damned relieved. He
never
worked with a partner. As far as his mind was concerned, he’d met her only a few hours ago. And yet . . .

She was staring at him, wide-eyed. “You don’t remember, do you? Look at me, dammit.” She grabbed his arm, while continuing to examine his face. “You don’t remember the time after the accident, the run from New York, our time on the island? That’s why you had me tell you about it. That’s why you don’t answer to Nick.”