The Dangerous Boxed Set Page 4

  Put it back on a light, impersonal footing.

  “Well then, I propose a toast of my own.” Again, their glasses clinked, with a clear ring of crystal. “To…to Nick Ames.”

  And may he stay awhile in Parker’s Ridge.

  Three

  Surveillance van

  A mile from Vassily Worontzoff’s mansion

  November 18

  John Di Stefano held up a bottle of Coke and wished with all his heart that it was a beer. But this was a job, and alcohol and work didn’t mix, to his regret. A beer sounded great right now, to wash the taste of frustration out of his mouth.

  To an impossible job. He held the Coke bottle up long enough to make the silent toast, then chugged its contents down.

  He’d been holed up with Nick Ireland, aka Iceman, and Alexei Nestrenko in a surveillance van for the past week now and the inside of the van looked it and smelled it. Stale pizza lay in boxes piled on top of takeout cartons and ramen noodle containers, and the stench of unwashed male permeated the closed space. It was goddamned cold, too, since turning on the engine for heat too often would leave a telltale plume of exhaust.

  The surveillance van was painted a mottled green that blended well with the pine trees surrounding them. They were a mile from Vassily Worontzoff’s mansion, high up in the hills, with a direct line of sight that allowed the laser-microwave beam to pick up vibrations off the French windows of Worontzoff’s study and digitally transform them into sound.

  There were taps on the phones, but Worontzoff used the landline sparingly. Iceman had wanted ten dishes in an array around the mansion. He’d pounded desks, which usually worked—a Delta operator was like a lion in the geeky Tech section of the Unit—but this time the brass stood firm. One listening device. One. Larry down in Tech said it was the best way to keep surveillance from a distance.

  Anything Worontzoff said in his study could be heard. They heard all conversations Worontzoff had in his study and landline conversations. Nothing specific had been said yet, but according to Alexei, something was brewing.

  There had been chatter, a lot of chatter in the past months. The NSA had intercepted a message between two tangos in Islamabad about “the Russian in Vermont.” A mole in a Mafiya network in Bulgaria operated by Worontzoff’s organization had said that something big was in the pipeline. But it was all bits and pieces with no smoking gun.

  Alexei was their smartest analyst and could speak Russian, Georgian, Bulgarian, Polish, and Ukrainian. He’d been sitting with heavy earphones on for over a week, listening to Worontzoff and his staff basically pick the lint out of their bellybuttons. And listening to music.

  There were probably three thousand people of Russian extraction in Vermont, but only one Russian. The big man himself. Vassily Worontzoff wasn’t the grand old man of literature everyone thought he was, but rather the head of the Russian Mafiya in America, come to straighten out the assorted and disorganized scumbags in Brighton Beach, making mere millions off gas tax fraud and girls when there were billions to be made off counterfeit medicines and organ transplants and arms, the bigger the better.

  Di Stefano almost choked on the mouthful of stale nachos as sounds came from his partner’s headset. Something going down! At last!

  “What? What did he say?” Di Stefano rounded on Alexei and fought the urge to grab the smaller man’s grubby sweatshirt and shake the words out of him.

  Slowly, deliberately, Alexei lifted one earphone away from his ear. The other he kept covered with the foam rubber earpiece. Alexei had been offered earbuds and even a sleek, pricey Bang & Olufsen headset that conducted sound through the ear bone, but he’d refused them all. He wanted to hear everything, he said, and for that he needed the big old-fashioned foam rubber pads that covered his ears.

  They couldn’t operate the laser beam at night. The light beam became visible in the dark. But from first light to last, Alexei was on duty, eating and drinking and pissing and crapping with at least one ear covered at all times, listening.

  This was what the Unit was all about—a secret government agency tasked with studying the growing contacts between terrorism and international organized crime, bringing together military operatives and law enforcement officers to combat this unholy alliance.

  Alexei blinked as if coming out of a trance. “Not much. He picked up the phone and said hello, listened, then said excellent, then listened some more, then said have a safe journey, my friend. That’s all I heard him say.”

  John’s mind raced. “Okay, okay. He’s happy about something. He’s happy about something that’s moving. Or rather someone that’s moving.” Di Stefano closed his eyes at the thought of all the bad people who could be moving around. “So now all we have to do is find out what it is that he’s so happy about, if it’s coming here and when.”

  Alexei, who was a 36-level Doom player, grinned and lifted his can of diet Coke. “Piece a cake.”

  Four

  Parker’s Ridge

  Da Emilio’s

  To Nick Ames.

  Nick lifted his glass and drank to himself. Or rather to Nicholas Ames, jolly retired stockbroker, nonexistent though he might be.

  Ames had a pretty good deal, sitting here in this elegant restaurant across the table from one of the prettiest women he’d ever seen in his life.

  It sure as hell beat his last undercover job, as Seamus Haley, former PIRA fighter who was hiring himself out to the highest bidder as an enforcer after peace broke out in Belfast. Nick did a very credible Northern Irish accent—it was probably in his DNA—even if Guillermo Gonzalez couldn’t tell the difference between an Irishman and a Frenchman. As far as Gonzalez was concerned, Nick was one more corrupt gringo he paid to break legs and deliver packages.

  Nick had spent twelve very long months rising through the ranks in Gonzalez’s organization, step by step. Living and breathing and acting the part of a scumbag.

  He’d even had to fuck Consuelo, Gonzalez’s sister. Christ, that had been hard. Not because she was ugly—no, Consuelo was a looker. Worked at it, too. She spent more than the education budget of some third world countries on clothes, jewelry, and cosmetic surgery.

  The instant she’d laid eyes on him, she’d staked her claim. Guillermo found it funny. He’d once walked in on Consuelo giving head and had stayed to watch, critiquing her style.

  Nick had had more sex in that twelve-month period than a teen pop star and every second of it had been sheer, unadulterated vomit-inducing hell. Consuelo was heavily into pain—her pain, not his, thank God. He drew the line at that.

  Still, her pain had been bad enough. She was into bondage and whips, with a hellish range of sex toys and sex paraphernalia she kept in a big red chest. She liked her sex so rough he sometimes spent the rest of the night driving the porcelain bus when he finally crawled back into his small, spare bedroom.

  Nick never got used to it, never found it got easier. When he fucked her hard, knowing he was hurting her, her face got red, her eyes glassy, grunting then screaming while she came, urging him to hurt her even more.

  It had been the hardest thing he’d ever done in a hard lifetime.

  He’d seen quite enough pain during his childhood. Stopping people from hurting others was what he was all about. Being forced to hurt a woman made his gut clench, turned him inside out.

  He was seriously contemplating quitting when all of a sudden, in a flurry of activity, Gonzalez put together a guns-for-cocaine deal that was the biggest Nick had ever seen. Two tons of cocaine for enough firepower to keep an African civil war going for years, which had been the point.

  They had a system in place for Nick to get the word out and Gonzalez had gone down in the raid, caught in a crossfire so vicious the only thing left of him on the warehouse floor had been human hamburger.

  The cocaine had gone into a warehouse instead of up yuppie noses, the arsenal had been destroyed, and fifty-seven people slapped in jail. Enough work to keep an army of DAs busy for the next ten years. Not bad for h
is first mission in the Unit in terms of results. It had been hell, though. The mission had lasted a year, but it had felt like a century.

  This was a better mission. Way better.

  The waiter rolled a cart to their table and started plating the food. It smelled otherworldly. Nick took in a deep sniff and Charity smiled at him. “You’re in for a treat.”

  “Smells like it.”

  He waited until she picked up her fork, then dug into what looked like a plump ravioli that the menu called a fagottino. When he brought the fork to his mouth, he nearly moaned. Cream, mushrooms, and truffle shavings in featherlight pasta. God.

  Charity had her eyes closed, too, chewing delicately. She’d chosen a mushroom risotto.

  Charity had the daintiest manners he’d ever seen. She enjoyed her food and didn’t treat it as if it were radioactive like other women did. But though her pleasure was visible, every movement was delicate.

  Nick watched her smooth, slim white throat work as she swallowed and swallowed heavily himself. He caught himself watching her next bite avidly. His eyes were riveted on her fork as the tines speared the morsel of mushroom and followed it every inch of the way into her mouth. That lovely, delectable, soft pink mouth.

  He flashed suddenly on a vision of Charity opening that pretty mouth over his cock. It was a disturbingly intense vision and very, very detailed. He could see it, as clearly as if it were happening right now. Right in front of his eyes.

  They were naked, stretched out on a carpet in front of a fire, exactly like the one in the big dining room. Nick was stretched out on his back and Charity was bent over him, the smooth shiny bell of her hair tickling his thighs, watching him out of her witchy, upturned light cat’s eyes. That soft mouth opened. He could feel the heat of her breath against the sensitized skin of his cock. She licked him once and…

  Goddamn! What the hell am I doing?

  Nick shook himself out of his fantasy—a fantasy so lush and enticing his cock had twitched in his pants, hard. Jesus. Of all the places and times…getting a woody in a fancy restaurant while dining with a woman he needed to pump for information.

  And fuck. The instant his mind thought the word pump, his head was filled with another vision. This time it was a picture of Charity stretched out under him while he pumped in and out of her.

  It was like he was on the ceiling, looking down. He saw everything. Her slim thighs twined around his hips, slender arms around his neck, his butt working as he moved in and out of her….

  He swelled fully erect.

  Right there, in Emilio’s elegant dining room, in the middle of at least fifty other patrons happily eating and drinking, unknowing that there was a woody in the room. How fucking lame was that? Luckily his lap was covered by the peach linen tablecloth, but he didn’t dare move.

  If he’d had on his stiff jeans, maybe he could have hidden it, but he had on very expensive lightweight pure virgin wool pants that outlined him completely.

  If someone yelled fire! he was a dead man.

  This was unheard of. His cock obeyed him at all times. When he said go, it went. When he said stop, it stopped. When he said down, it went down and stayed down.

  And Christ, he wasn’t hurting for sex. True, he hadn’t had a woman for a couple of weeks, except for one girl who’d picked him up in a bar the night after the takedown, when he was still pumped full of adrenaline. Four whiskeys and he was more than ready for the brunette who’d sidled up to him and told him exactly what she wanted. Waking up next to her had been depressing, though, particularly since he couldn’t remember her name.

  All the sex he’d had in the past year had been depressing, come to think of it.

  Sex with Consuelo had been creepier’n hell and with what’s-her-name had been completely unsatisfactory, like being given wax food when you’re hungry.

  Sex with Consuelo had felt like one of those sexual perversions in psychiatric manuals, like fucking dead people or something. It took a lot to put Nick off sex, but Consuelo had done it. The memory of sex with her made him nauseous.

  The thought of sex with Charity Prewitt, now that was something else entirely. Another activity altogether.

  Everything about Charity was delightful—her skin, her voice, her manner, her smell. Feminine and elegant. Totally enticing.

  No wonder his dick was standing to attention, like a divining rod that had finally found a cool, fresh spring after panning over mud flats for a year.

  “You’re staring,” Charity said dryly. He met those amazing eyes—like looking directly into a pale summer sky at noon.

  “Yes, I am,” he confessed. “But then that’s what men do—stare at pretty women. It’s what makes us different from, say, trees.”

  She smiled. Charity didn’t seem to have the coy gene most beautiful women were born with. She didn’t simper, she didn’t flutter her eyelashes—though they were so long she could probably blow candles out at twenty paces just by batting her eyes—she didn’t breathe deeply to showcase her breasts. Nick had been on the receiving end of every single one of those ploys and could write the script.

  Charity simply kept on eating serenely.

  Nick had to get his head out of his ass and start pumping—no, don’t think of that word!—for intel. There was a reason he was here, and it wasn’t to stare into Charity Prewitt’s beautiful eyes and fantasize about being inside her. And he sure as hell wasn’t here to eat Emilio’s delicious fagottini, though that was a lucky fringe benefit, too.

  By all rights, Nick should be with his partners in a freezing cold surveillance van, washing his socks and briefs out in a bucket of cold water, pissing in a jar, shitting in the woods, just like the bears. The reason he wasn’t was because he was acknowledged as being good with the ladies.

  And, of course, because he was a really, really good liar.

  Tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

  However, having all the blood rush down from his head straight into his blue steeler was not good news. He needed that blood above his neck so he could pry information out of her. Hard to do that with a hard-on that hurt.

  Think Worontzoff, he told himself. Think what a scumbag the man is.

  Vassily Worontzoff. Man of letters, novelist, the last of the Russian intellectuals sent to the Gulag. The Soviet Union was dying, but like a scorpion that still has a sting in its dying tail, it lashed, sweeping Worontzoff away.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like that. The air had been full of perestroika and glasnost. Newspapers blossomed, the Berlin Wall came down. Intellectuals were the flavor of the month.

  But something went wrong somewhere and Worontzoff and his lover Katya were sent to the place humanity forgot—Kolyma. The most notorious of Stalin’s camps, where the prisoners were used as slave labor in the gold mines. Where so many died that the road to Kolyma was called the Road of Bones. Where it was said every ounce of gold mined cost a human life. It certainly cost Katya’s.

  Nick could almost feel sorry for the poor fuck, except for the fact that in the prison camp he joined the vory v zukone, the thieves-in-law. A criminal underclass sworn to revenge against society. The vory rejected everything about society—its mores, its laws, its affections.

  After the fall of the Soviet Union, the vory roared to power, an engine that had been idling, waiting for the brakes to come off. Post–Soviet Russia was a giant that had been felled, its prone body ripe for gutting. And gut it they did.

  The Russian Mafiya exploded. In a little over a decade and a half, it had become more powerful than the state. It owned factories and railroads and telcos and oil wells. It held the power of life and death over something like two hundred million citizens. It signed contracts and treaties, with almost the dignity of a separate country.

  Powerful Vors—Mafia dons—arose from the ashes of the Soviet Union, the stuff of legend. The thieves-in-law weren’t talking, but Chechens and Azeris weren’t sworn to secrecy, and slowly intel leaked out. The greatest Vor of all was a kulturny chelovek—a
man of culture. He’d been a zek, had survived the Gulag. His hands were useless, scarred beyond repair.

  There was only one possible man who fit that description, Vassily Worontzoff, a man revered inside Russia, a legend throughout the world. The writer whose Dry Your Tears in Moscow was considered one of the classic novels of the twentieth century. After the Gulag, he never wrote another word for public consumption. Many speculated why this was so, but Nick knew why. The thieves-in-law swore they would never again toil at legal work. So Worontzoff’s legend grew while he pulled the strings of an increasingly powerful Mafiya network.

  As his power and reach expanded, so did the legend. His name was spoken only in whispers on street corners. He was insulated by layers and layers of lawyers and flunkies. Few knew his real identity.

  One of them had been a Russian former Special Forces operator Nick had worked with trying to run down Khan’s nuclear network in Uzbekistan, Sergei Petrov. Brother-in-arms. Straight-up guy who was handy with his GSh-18, was a good man to have at your back and who liked his vodka just a little too much.

  They’d been on a mission in Waziristan, tracking down possible al Qaeda nests when Sergei stumbled onto a drug operation his contact in Peshawar said was run by the Russian Mafiya. Sergei had sniffed around a little, was given Worontzoff’s name, which he passed on to Nick. One more sniff, and it turned lethal. Forty minutes after giving Nick the name over a cell phone, his throat had been slashed so deeply the knife nicked Sergei’s spinal column. His penis had been sliced off and stuffed in his mouth—the universal symbol for keeping your mouth shut.

  The memory of kneeling in Sergei’s blood helped get Nick’s dick down.

  There are two ways to be a bad guy and Worontzoff covered both. You could do bad things to things or to people. Nick didn’t really give a shit about crime against property, though Worontzoff was in the hit list of top ten men doing damage to the world economy. Thanks to him, the Russian economy was starved of cash, several banks had crashed, and a couple of third world economies had gone bankrupt while their presidents for life played with their dicks and their money in Geneva.