Her gaze dropped to his butt.“How do I know if something’s hot?”
“Assume everything’s hot.”
“Uh, wheredoI put my hands? I don’t see any handholds.”
He twisted slightly, grabbed her right hand and planted it on his waist, right about the point his hip bone met his jeans pocket. “Hold as tight as you like, but don’t put your arms all the way around me, okay?” He lifted her fingers and tapped them onto his jeans, making a dull thud. “Tap once, hard, with your right hand if you need to stop, three times if it’s urgent. If you’refeeling uncomfortable and just want me to slow down, tap your left hand. Got that?”
She nodded, running through it in her head. “It’s not like we’ll be going on the open road or anything, anyway.” They’d simply get the laptop from her house and either sort the whole mess out there and then or she’d escape and somehow get to the police station.
He pulled his visor down. “We’ll play things by ear. Shuffle in a bit—mold right to my back. Don’t worry,” he added as she hesitated, “not making a move here. One entity, remember?”
“What do you mean ‘play things by ear’? I thought we were just going to get the computer?” But he’d kicked the bike into action, smothering her words. A rumble vibrated up from the seat. She slid closer to him, stopping just short of flattening her jacket against the back of his. They wouldn’t be riding fast, so there was no need to getthatintimate, right? He idled the bike over to a wall, reached out and pressed a switch. Another rumble, higher pitched—the roll-up door opening. She rested her left hand on his left hip, mirroring her right. Through her gloves, it wasn’t the most intimate of touches but her imagination generously filled in the gaps. She’d always had a good imagination. It had saved her from doing silly things like deep-sea diving—what was the point when she could simply read about someone else’s experience and feel the same terror? But here she was, riding on the back of a motorcycle with an actual former spy and SEAL, evading the FBI, the CIA, and Russian spies. Good God, it was someone else’s life.
As the door cranked open, a white vehicle pulled into the loading bay. The Daisy Sparkles van.
Chapter 6
Carter
Restaurant Fyodor, Moscow
Eighteen months earlier
Once the One Percent were toileted, relieved of their heavy coats, dusted of snow, re-lipsticked, re-coiffed, settled into leather banquettes in Restaurant Fyodor off Tverskoy Boulevard and dosed with their first vodkas of the night, Carter caught Nika’s eye and indicated he was headed for the men’s room.
She gave an indifferent nod without pausing in her explanation of the menu: the most expensive potato pie, borscht, bone marrow and dumplings in all of Russia. She knew what Carter’s withdrawal meant, whom he’d be meeting, and what they’d be discussing. Nika being Nika, if she were nervous about the outcome, not even a polygraph could pick it. True, her cheeks were rosy and her eyes watery, but so were everyone’s after their brief walk from the limousines. Behind her, outside the Palladian windows, fairy lights illuminated drifting flakes of snow.
Carter passed a string quartet dressed in satin and velvet gowns, and jogged down a marble staircase, pulling on the collar of his tuxedo. The building, and everything in it, was a facade, like nearly everything his tour groups saw. A brand-new “authentic” Baroque palace. “The oligarch theme park,” Nika secretly called it. A lot of coin went into making tourists feel like they were having a genuine Russian experience. He nodded at the guy at the coat check and pushed open a set of double doors toward the bathrooms.
The illusion dropped away. The bathroom wing was bland and modern, shared with several businesses that backed onto the restaurant: a vodka bar, boutiques, a barbershop. But it did have other attractive qualities: multiple entrances and exits, no security cameras, and no bathroom attendant.
Carter held a door open for one of his tour group—the husband of the birthday girl, coming the other way. “Restrooms aren’t up to standard, are they?” the man said as he passed. Carter let the door close behind him, in lieu of responding.
On every trip, the One Percent wondered aloud why such an atmospheric place had a secret so dark as a bathroom without gilt faucets and rolled towels. But then, they paid handsomely to never see behind the facades. Five-star hotels, first-class travel, luxury shopping, private after-hours tours… They pretended not to notice the housekeeping staff, believing instead their shit didn’t leave skid marks—until they couldn’t find their emerald and diamond earrings, at which time the maid ceased being invisible, when really they’d left them in their third-best Cartier purse. (True story. St. Petersburg, four long days ago.) They accepted without question that musicians wore ball gowns and tour guides wore tuxedos on any old day. And Moscow knew just how to treat the wealthy—and how to relieve them of money. The Russian government was fond of oligarchs, even American ones.
Randolph was already in the men’s bathroom, dusting tiny crescents of snipped hair from his shoulders. Carter raised his eyebrows in a question. Randolph would already have swept for cameras and bugs.
“We’re good,” Randolph responded. “What’s up?”
“Elena thinks she’s been compromised,” Carter said, using Nika’s code name. “She wants an exfil.”
Randolph arched a perfectly shaped eyebrow. The skin between his eyebrows was red—he’d had it waxed? But then, he needed a pretense to meet up regularly. A mid-level commercial attaché at the embassy, as he supposedly was, could get only so many haircuts. “You think there’s something in it?”
“I don’t know.” Carter quickly relayed Nika’s suspicions. Even to him, they sounded flimsy.
“Paranoia?” Randolph said, when he’d finished.
The door opened. Silently, they each shut themselves into stalls, as if they were already headed that way. Carter took a leak. When the intruder had finished and the bathroom door whooshed close behind him, Carter stepped out of his stall, just as Randolph left his. Carter checked the other stalls were still empty.
“She thinks someone’s searched her apartment.”
“If they were pros doing a sneak and peek, she’d never have known they were there. She didn’t have counter-intel equipment?”
Carter began washing his hands. “No, a neighbor saw them. I’ve known her four years—it’s not paranoia, it’s instinct.”
Randolph looked in the mirror and scratched bristles from his sideburns. “It’s normal for an asset to get jittery at some point. Sometimes you gotta push through.”
“After this long? She’s never been worried before. She’s always cautious, but this…”
