The Blood Code (23 page)

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Ryan came awake with a start, heart pounding, and a riotous blaring noise going off next to his head.

The computer.

Shit.

Anya was on top of him, so when he tried to bolt upright, he didn’t go far. At some point after their lovemaking, he’d shifted them both around so he was lying under her. And then, like a true idiot, he’d fallen asleep.

But, damn, he’d felt so blissed out, and combined with the past week of little sleep, and an overload of stress, he hadn’t been able to keep his eyes open. Holding Anya after sex had been the best sleep aid in the world.

A red light was flashing in the far corner of the room. The noise—still blaring like a fire alarm—echoed off the glass and stone walls. Anya eyes flew open, confusion and fear on her face. Forget the warning blare of the alarm. The look on her face was all it took to get his brain cells firing. It wasn’t a computer raising a fuss.

Every computer in the room was going off. Every alarm in the bunker.

Which only meant one thing.

Nuclear attack.

That’s not possible.

But as Ryan and Anya untangled their limbs and went for their clothes, still scattered around the floor, Ryan’s logic argued with him.
Possible, not probable
.

That particular argument didn’t make him feel better.

“Have they found us?” Anya yelled over the alarm. Her fingers trembled as she tried to zip up her pants.

Ryan shook his head, shoving his legs into his jeans. “Something’s set off an attack alert. As if an attack is in progress.” He had a good idea what that something—or someones,
thank you Conrad and Del
—might have been. “My guess, it’s a false alarm, a distraction we can use, so we need to get out of here. Now.”

Anya pulled his sweater over her head. “What about my grandmother?”

Cad that he was, he’d been so caught up in making Anya’s first sexual experience the best it could be under the circumstances, he’d forgotten all about the old woman. “Right. Okay.”

Brilliant. Just brilliant
. Tossing on his shirt, he slipped his feet into his shoes and scanned his memory for possible options. The gun went into the waistline at the small of his back. “Come with me.” Grabbing Anya’s hand, he tugged her after him.

Just off the communications room was a weapons room. Most of the inventory had been stripped, but there were still a few handguns, AK47s, and a ton of hand grenades. What the hell would you use a hand grenade for in an underground bunker?

He led Anya past the walls and crates, around a corner, and pointed to a room filled with rows of lockers. During the height of Stalin’s paranoia, those lockers had held clothes for thousands of military personnel.

If he’d taken the time to scout deeper into the tunnels instead of having sex with Anya, Ryan might have found the actual barracks. As it was, he’d have to work with what he had. “Ivanov’s probably stripped your grandmother of most of her clothes, so try to find a sweater, a coat, anything that’ll cover her against the elements. There should be some items in those lockers. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Where are you going?”

“We need supplies. Food, weapons, money.”

“There’s money down here?”

Not per se, but he was sure he could sell a gun or two topside and make enough to get them traveling funds. “Do you have your passport?”

Her face took on that
oh, shit
look. “I left it in my room.”

He kissed her before she could bite her bottom lip, and added another weapon to sell to his mental checklist of supplies.

“All that stuff, and more, is in Ivanov’s new bunker. Why can’t we grab some from there?”

“It’s probably guarded, especially with the terrorist attack. And he may even be in there, so our best bet is to find what we can here.”

She nodded, and he took off for the kitchen.

There, he found a military rucksack shoved behind the shelving unit stocked with more MREs. It was filthy, so he shook it out, dust and dirt filling the air. He swiftly cleared an entire shelf with his arm, guiding the canned meat and silver bags into the rucksack. There was no portable water, which sucked, but at least they’d have some food.

Gathering up a few guns and a couple of hand grenades was easy. Locating ammunition, more of a challenge. A few
9x19mm armor-piercing bullets lay scattered behind a garbage can. No doubt a guard had been reloading his gun clip and dropped them. Ryan pocketed the bullets, since they’d work in his GSh-18, but that was it. No clips, no other bullets, nothing.

He rubbed his forehead where a headache was setting up, thanks to the blaring alarms and the tension hardening every muscle in his body in a fight-or-flight condition. The cold, hard fact of the matter was, guns were easy to come by anywhere in Europe. Ammunition was the real gold. Sure, he could still get a few rubles for the weapons, but not enough to buy fake IDs and new passports. Not good ones anyway.

Conrad, you better still have Josh and Del waiting for me on the other side of this godforsaken hole.

The trick was, while Del and Josh could both forge documents, it would take time and proper supplies. And did he really want to involve them in this going-down-in-flames project?

No. He wouldn’t do that to either man. This was his mess. He would clean it up.

From the locker room, he heard banging and swearing over the alarm siren. He yanked a couple of mean-looking daggers from a display, and tossed them in his rucksack. Then he went to find Anya.

What a crappy interruption to his best laid plans to tell her the truth. About him, about his feelings for her. He didn’t want to be in love with her—wasn’t even sure this was love, but it sure felt better than anything he’d ever had with a woman—and maybe he wasn’t. Maybe this was all a stress-fueled infatuation. Didn’t matter. Whatever it was, he wanted more. He wanted it to last forever. If it didn’t—and it probably wouldn’t—he still wanted every second with her he could get.

Dozens of lockers stood open. Here and there, clothing and shoes dotted the benches and floor. “Anya?” he called over the noise.

“Here!”

In the back corner at the last row of lockers, he found her.

She was wearing his coat, but had added an ushanka hat, the type with fur lining and earflaps that buttoned on top when the wearer wanted them out of the way. She tossed a woolen military jacket, complete with two rows of gold buttons down the front, at him, and then another ushanka. Soviet leftovers, like the computers in the other room.

Grabbing a pile of clothes from the bench behind her, she showed him her bounty. “These should keep us all warm.”

The hat was too big for her and canted to one side. She had the earflaps down to try and drown out the alarm. Ryan put on the hat she’d given him, cinched up the rucksack, and hefted it over his shoulder. “Let’s go find Grams.”

According to his mental map, there were only the three main tunnels under Kremlin Palace. They mirrored the public subway tunnels on the northeastern side of Moscow.

But what they hadn’t seen nagged at him. All the stuff Anya had told him about. The lab Ivanov had built, his personal quarters, a high-tech communication center filled with equipment. Where was all that?

Ryan heaved the massive door to Stalin’s room open. Once the place had been decadent. Now it was a sad relic, containing a sitting area, bathroom, and office, the once expensive furnishings covered in dirt and mold. The prison cells were reportedly somewhere nearby, and if Ryan was thinking straight, he figured Ivanov’s presidential bunker was, too.

He shifted the rucksack farther up on his shoulder. “Look for a secret panel,” he told Anya, already feeling along the doorjamb. “Like in the Palace.”

Without hesitation, she went to work, sliding her hands over every surface she could reach.

Come on, come on.
Time was running out, and they still had to locate Natasha and break her out of whatever cell she was in. With all the alarms going off, it wouldn’t be long before Ivanov’s guards came to investigate, even if they had their hands full in the Palace.

Anya disappeared into the bathroom while Ryan went into the walk-in closet. He was shoving empty hangers and leftover clothes out of the way when he heard her call his name. Her voice held a definite strain, pinging his shit meter. Had she found something?

God, he hoped she hadn’t stumbled onto her dead grandmother.

She called again. “Ryan! I need you.”

And indeed, she did.

The moment he rounded the corner and ran into the bathroom, he knew something was wrong. She stood in front of a floor-to-ceiling armoire. One door was open, and Ryan could see it led to another room, Anya blocking the view. Her hat now sat perfectly centered on her head, but her eyes were wide as saucers, and her face was even paler than normal.

The underground alarm stopped without warning, and in the sudden silence, Ryan’s ears rang with a blaring echo. “Anya? What is it?”

“Not what.” She swallowed visibly. “Who.”

Ryan reached for the gun in the hollow of his back, but a familiar, sadistic voice halted his movement.

“Mr. Jones.” Ivanov pushed Anya forward and she staggered before righting herself. Ivanov followed, stepping out of the fake armoire and pointing a fat, black gun at the base of her skull. “Did you think I would let a common American take my property and destroy my plans for the future?”

Ryan’s shit meter blew.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Anya drew a shaky breath, locking her knees, and forcing her eyes to convey to Ryan that she was okay.

She was not okay. Not when Ivanov,
the bastard
, was jamming a gun into the back of her head. Not when they were so close to finally finding Grams and escaping.

And not when she felt a small trickle of warm blood under her shirt.

I’m fine
, she conveyed to Ryan with her eyes, swallowing past the tightness in her throat. Whatever she did, she had to make him believe she was not freaking out like a girl.

Which was exactly what she was doing.

Ryan’s gaze was as steady as always. A glint of anger, but no fear. No hesitation. Not even the slightest flicker of anxiety. Mr. Calm, Cool, and Drop Dead Dangerous was still in control.

He won’t let Ivanov hurt me.

The last few days had been the worst of her life. Almost paralyzing fear, vexing guilt, harrowing revelations. Never had she imagined how bad things could get, and it was an experience she never wanted to repeat. For years, she’d wished she could erase the genes in her blood that made her an heir to Russian royalty. The genes that made her blood not clot properly. All of it. The genes, the name, and all her imperfections. If she could just erase them all, life would never have taken this horrendous turn of events.

But she couldn’t erase any of it. She was a Romanov. She was a Russian princess. She had imperfections—some visible, others not—and Ryan had looked past every one of them. He was her rock. She wouldn’t let him down.

Show no weakness. No cowardice. This was her life, and she would meet it head-on.

For Ryan. For Grams. For my parents.

Calling up her grand duchess façade, Anya whirled around and faced Ivanov, straightening her spine and arching a brow. “What the hell are you doing, Maxim?”

The barrel of the gun was now a breath away from her mouth. She heard Ryan’s sharp intake of breath.

Ivanov reared back in surprise, but kept the gun trained on her face. His eyes narrowed. “How dare you lower yourself to run off with an American spy.” At her look of surprise, he sneered. “You think I do not know a spy when I see one? Your grandmother claimed someone from the CIA would come for you. I had my suspicions he was already here. Andreev confirmed it after he saw the man coming out of your room earlier this afternoon. Another reason I wanted you inside the bunker.”

He knew who Ryan really was. Time for a big fat lie. “I wasn’t running off with him, you idiot. I was playing him.” She took a fortifying breath, and scrambled to come up with a convincing story. Which wasn’t easy with a loaded gun pointed at her mouth, especially when she could smell liquor on Ivanov’s breath, and see his hand tremble ever so slightly. “He’s not just any spy. He’s one who could cause a huge international incident. I brought him down here to keep him from leaving the Kremlin with all of our secrets. He knows everything. About you. About your cabinet. About the people you’ve had murdered in order to secure your place as president.”

So lame, but it was the best she could do, and mentioning Ivanov’s Achilles heel made him take a step back. All she needed was to throw off his suspicion of her for a moment and make him think she was on his side. She’d done it before, she could do it again.

Even with an evil-looking gun aimed at her face.

“Do you really think I would give up becoming first lady of Russia for…” Anya glanced back at Ryan and gave a dismissive snort. “Him?”

A frown creased Ivanov’s brow. “You’re lying.”

Bluffing wasn’t her strongest suit. However, the gun lowered to her chin, and his voice held less certainty.

“What can I do to prove it to you?” She held her ground, this time trying to convey sincerity with her eyes. “I know what my grandmother did during the Cold War. Why you brought her here and won’t let me see her. I know my parents were also traitors, and you had to deal with them. I want to make amends for my family’s deceptions and betrayals. Tell me what I can do to prove my loyalty to you and my country.”

Ivanov’s gaze cut to Ryan, back to her, seeming to ponder her offer.

She said the first thing that came to her. “Give me the gun, and I’ll shoot him for you.”

Ivanov smiled a slow, malicious smile, and pointed the gun at her forehead.

Okay, maybe she’d pushed her bluffing skills a bit far. “Fine.” She threw her hands up in the air as if in surrender. “We could have it all, Maxim. We could rule Russia and bring it back to a state of purity. We could make our country the greatest nation in the world from the inside out. But if you want to kill me here and now and throw all of that away?” She glared at him. “You’re the ultimate fool, and I’m ashamed I gave you so much credit.”

Ivanov didn’t speak, only searched her face as if reading her mind. Then he lowered the gun and motioned for her to come toward him. He held out his empty hand to her.

He believes me!
Anya flashed him her biggest smile yet and reached for his hand. She had to cross in front of him to grab it.
Now, Ryan
.

But as Ivanov tucked her into his side, and his alcohol and sweat scent filled her nostrils, she turned to find Ryan still standing nonchalantly in front of them, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

His gaze stayed on Ivanov, hard as stone now. He wouldn’t look at her. Her heart slipped around inside her chest as if it had come unhinged. He didn’t really believe her lies, did he?

She wanted desperately to go to him. To say his name. Anything to get him to look at her so she could wink at him. Let him know she was lying in order to buy both of them time and confuse Ivanov. He’d lowered the gun. If she could just get it away from him…

Ivanov’s hand closed over her upper arm, tightening into a vise grip. He hugged her forcibly against his side. “You will prove your loyalty, Czarevna, by doing everything I say.” He raised the gun once more. This time, the black barrel pointed at Ryan’s chest. “But I will be the one to shoot this spy.”

Her body moved before her brain registered Ivanov pressing the trigger. She grabbed his hand, but it was too late.

The gun fired. Ryan’s body jerked and spun to the right.

As Anya screamed his name, he went down.