Then the clothes came off, and Layla became his again.
Afterwards in bed, Lourds lay on his back and wondered at how being with her made him feel. There was a completeness that he had never experienced before and a calm that fell over him. He thought about the ring in his pants pocket, but he knew he didn’t want to have that discussion now. Having it on Valentine’s Day was apparently out of the question. With everything Layla had planned, he didn’t want to disrupt everything she was balancing.
She lay at his side with an arm across his chest, holding him tightly.
“I am sorry that I cannot be there for you on Valentine’s Day.” She spoke softly.
“It’ll be all right.”
“Yes, it will. I will have some time this weekend, I think.”
“Good.”
“Tina said you will be returning to the university next week?”
“That’s right.”
Layla sighed. “Timing is such a problem.”
“We knew that going into this. We’re both busy people. A relationship like this, you have to work at it.”
“I know. The fact that you’re willing to do so means a lot to me.”
Lourds kissed her tender lips. “You mean a lot to me.”
She smiled and snuggled against him. “As you do to me.” She yawned. “Excuse me. I have been really tired of late.”
“That long drive probably didn’t help.”
“No, and I have to make it again in the morning.”
“I could drive you. Let you sleep on the way back.”
“No. That would cause complications if we were seen. It would be better if you found something to do until we can be together again. I’m afraid I won’t be able to see you until the weekend.”
“All right.”
“I’m sorry, Thomas, that your Valentine’s Day is not going to be as perfect as you had planned.”
“It’s fine. It’ll be fine. I’m sure I can find something to do. I’m in a city that’s thousands of years old. I’m sure there’s some part of it I haven’t seen.”
“I do wish things were different, but they are not.”
“I understand.” Lourds did understand, but he didn’t like the situation either. Perhaps once they were married, things would be different. He looked forward to that. For a moment, he thought about getting the ring, showing it to her, and asking her to marry him right then and there.
But he didn’t. Instead, he felt her soft breath against his bare chest and knew that she was asleep. He closed his eyes and just held her.
13
“You do not look like you are having a good time.”
Blearily, through a vodka-fueled haze, Colonel Sergay Linko stared at the young woman before him. She was beautiful in the way that young women always were when they took care of themselves. She exercised and kept her body fit, but her hair was too brunette, with a blue and white streak on the right side. The artificial green of her eyes told him she was wearing cosmetic contact lenses. She wore a dark red dress, almost the color of blood. She spoke English with a Russian accent. Evidently, she’d thought he was American.
She believed that because his suit was too good to be a Russian suit. In truth, he had gotten it from a black market dealer. The suit was dark, fashionable. Not like some of the colorful rags other men in the nightclub wore.
The crowd around them moved with the basso beat of the heavy metal rock music thundering through the speakers. Huge wallscreens showed snippets of video footage of the patrons. When the men and women saw themselves on the screens, they waved in triumph, like they had instantly become famous.
It was ludicrous. Linko only came to the bar to pick up women and to hate the New Russians even more than he already did.
“Are you shy?” The young woman smiled at him.
Linko knew he was an attractive man, but at thirty-six, he was almost twice her age. He was dark and virile, and he kept himself in tip-top shape with regular visits to the gym and to martial arts dojos. He was a soldier, but more than that, he was a survivor. He carried scars from Chechnya. He stood a little over six feet tall and was well built. He kept his black hair cut short and had a permanent five o’clock shadow that allowed him to look Middle Eastern when he needed to. As a colonel in the FSB, sometimes missions carried him into the satellite countries that had once been under Russian rule.
“No. I’m not shy.”
The woman came over to him and bit her lower lip. Perhaps she had seen this in an American movie and thought it was sexy. Perhaps she believed all American men loved women who bit their lower lips in such a way.
It was attractive, but Linko was no fool. The woman was here for a reason.
He had left enemies in Chechnya, and there were more in the Middle East and the satellite countries. People who knew him, who knew what he truly did under the cover of the FSB, feared him. He was a ghost, a man who could do the impossible, get into fortified places and kill those marked for death.
In the past eight years, he had slain forty-three targets. He kept count, and he remembered their faces, how they had been afraid and begged for their lives at the end.
Linko knew he’d gotten too good at the killing though. His superiors used him as a small, tactical nuclear device, but they were wary of him at the same time. It was regrettable because he had surely risen as far in rank as he could under the circumstances.
“That’s too bad.” The woman bit her lip again. “I like shy men.”
Scanning the crowd over the woman’s shoulder, Linko spotted the two men watching her. Both of them wore loose clothing and weren’t lost in the bar’s party atmosphere. They were working, hounds preparing to meet the fox.
Linko smiled. They were bearding no fox. They were on the trail of a true Russian bear.
“You have a nice smile. You should smile more often.” Boldly, she seized his glass and drank the rest of his vodka.
“Perhaps I will.”
“Come with me. I will put a smile on your face. I will teach you to love Moscow. You will come back again, even more excited than you were the first time.”
Linko gave a show of hesitation, but he knew he was going to go. The young woman and her friends were what he had been needing to break the restlessness that gripped him between missions. He was used to being in play, used to chasing or being chased. Downtime did not agree with him.
His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. When he checked the phone, the woman’s smile faltered a little. No doubt, she was thinking she was about to lose her prey. Nervously, she glanced back at the two men. She lacked professionalism, but the men did not appear to notice her. They were holding to their covers.
Linko’s estimation of them went up, and excitement climbed within him. He had thought they were merely street thugs. Evidently, they were more experienced than he’d thought. That was promising.
The caller ID on his phone showed NO DATA. That was curious because no one had this number.
He punched the button and held the phone to his face. “Yes.”
“Colonel Linko?”
“Yes.”
“This is Mikhail Nevsky.”
The world tilted crazily around Linko. In all his years with the FSB, a Russian president had never contacted him. He had acted on their orders several times, to be sure, but never direct contact.
Paranoia gripped him, and he at first believed he was being set up. But that was foolish. There was no reason to do such a thing.