Page 8 of France Face-Off (Brotherhood Protectors International #6)

Alex took a circuitous route back to her room on the third floor of the hotel, going up first to the seventh floor and back down to the third in case anyone was watching or following her.

Having traveled and worked alone for the past two years, she’d learned various tricks for maintaining her anonymity and guarding her own safety.

Using her various passports, she’d bounced back and forth between the United States and Russia.

In the US, she’d taken the time and invested in lessons in Israeli self-defense techniques, and she’d contracted several survivalist former special forces groups who trained civilians in combat skills.

She had learned to fire a number of different guns and knives and had strategically placed a variety of weapons in multiple locations in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Russia.

Her parents had left her a significant amount of money, making it unnecessary for her to get a job after their deaths. They had invested well and had Swiss bank accounts only she could access in the event of their demise.

All the information she’d needed had been on an encrypted file on the cloud, backed up on a flash drive stored in a safe along with her passports and the money.

They’d understood the risks of raising a child where both parents worked with the CIA.

Though she’d long been out on her own, working as an interpreter, using their home as her base when she had to travel, her association with them had put her at risk.

If their cover was ever blown, she would be in danger.

They’d taken care of their only daughter financially, if not emotionally.

Fortunately, they’d insisted she learn a number of different languages.

Not only was she fluent in Russian and English, but she also spoke German, French and Italian.

They had left her with connections to people who could provide her with passports, as well as computer gurus who were fluent in navigating information databases and hacking into just about any government or mafia computer system.

Although the pain of loss had faded over the two years, she still missed her parents and wished she had spent more time with them and paid more attention to the people with whom they’d worked.

When she arrived at the door to her room, she waved the keycard in front of the lock, pushed the door open and looked inside before stepping in.

Her father had taught her to always look before she stepped into any situation.

She’d only barely understood the importance of that advice upon their deaths.

The house where they’d lived in Moscow had been designed with an escape route built into the kitchen pantry.

The night her parents had died, she’d gotten home from her job well before her mother and father. She’d been in the kitchen making a pot of tea when she’d heard the front door crash open.

Alex had hurried to the living room to see what was wrong.

Her father slammed the door shut and pushed a table in front of it.

“What’s wrong?” she’d asked.

Her father reached into the desk beside the door and pulled out his pistol, dropped the magazine from the handle, checked it and pushed it back into the weapon.

Standing in the living room, her mother turned to face Alex. “Ally,” she said, “go to the pantry.” When Alex had hesitated, her mother spoke more urgently.

Alex hadn’t moved, a rush of apprehension rippling through her body. “If something’s happening, I want to be with you.”

“Go, now,” her mother insisted. “Get to the pantry, there’s a flash drive and a laptop in the safe. Take them and get out of here.”

“But—”

“We’ve been over this many times when you were a child. You can’t stay. We need you to get that flash drive and the laptop and get out of here.” Her mother crossed to her, cupped her cheek with her hand and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “We love you. Now, go!”

“Hurry,” her father said. “They’re coming.”

“Who’s coming?” Alex asked.

Something crashed against the door. The door frame splintered but held.

“Ally, go!” her mother said, her tone stern, her eyes filling with tears as she took another gun out of the desk drawer and aimed it at their front door.

In the next moment, the door to their home crashed open. Alex turned and ran to the pantry. The sound of gunfire reached her ears through the thick paneling of the pantry door.

Every instinct in her body had told her to go back out and fight for her parents. But what could she have done? She hadn’t had a gun. Though her father had taken her out into the country and taught her how to fire his 9 mm Glock, she hadn’t been comfortable with it.

The gunfire had sounded more like automatic weapons, machine guns. Though it tore her heart apart, she’d pulled hard on the pantry shelf that worked as a hidden doorway. Opening it quickly, she’d stepped inside a dark and narrow stone-lined passageway.

Behind her, the gunfire had ceased. The sound of furniture crashing and glass breaking led Alex to believe that they were looking throughout the house for any others who might be hidden.

They must have known to look for her. The safe containing the flash drive, laptop, passports and money had been stored in that passageway.

She’d grabbed the flashlight hanging on a hook on the wall and spun the safe’s tumbler.

Her fingers had trembled so much that she hadn’t gotten the safe open on the first try.

As she’d worked the numbers again, smoke had filtered through the cracks in the wall of the pantry.

Before too long, the smoke got too thick. She’d had to leave.

She’d been down that passage many times with her father as he’d schooled her on where to go in the case of someone storming their home.

When she’d been younger, it had been a game, like hide and seek.

As she’d grown older, it became a way for her to sneak out to meet her friends.

It hadn’t mattered how stealthy she’d been, her parents had always known when she’d gone out and had been waiting for her when she returned.

They’d never chastised her but hadn’t slept until she was safely back home.

The night they were murdered, she’d run down that passageway that led beneath the street and angled upward through a drainage grate into the garden of a Russian Orthodox church.

From there, she’d crawled up onto a wall and watched as flames filled the night sky from the home she’d known for fifteen years, knowing deep down her parents had not made it out alive.

If they had, they would have followed her along the passageway.

The fire had burned through the night until there was nothing left of the house but rubble.

The smoke had cleared before sunrise. Alex had covered her mouth and nose with her shirt and felt her way along that passageway back to the safe.

By the beam of the flashlight she’d carried with her, she’d rolled the combination lock right then left then right again and opened the safe.

Her parents had always left a backpack beside the safe. That night she’d learned why. She’d filled the backpack with the contents of the safe, zipped it hurriedly, left through the passageway and emerged into the garden.

She’d wandered the streets of Moscow for days, wearing a knit cap, her hair tucked inside, her face down, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. If the people who’d killed her parents had known she was alive, they’d have come after her to finish the job.

Alex had found an abandoned warehouse and set up camp.

She’d used internet cafés to catch up on the news.

Her parents’ death had been nothing more than a blip on a newscast. Family perishes in a house fire.

She’d also used the laptop to tap into the flash drive her mother had been so insistent she safeguard.

Through the flash drive, she’d found data stored in the cloud.

At one point, she had thought she should notify the CIA of her parents’ deaths, but if she had then they would’ve known she was still alive.

If the CIA knew she hadn’t perished in the house fire, whoever had put the hit out on her family might find out as well.

She’d decided it was best that she had died in the fire, for all intents and purposes.

She’d gone through all the information in the backpack. She’d found a US passport with her image on it and set up a plan to get back to the United States. With enough Russian rubles to get her out, she’d caught a train and headed for a port where cruise ships disembarked.

At the port, Alex had found her way into a warehouse containing pallets with supplies for the cruise ships.

In the wee hours of the morning, she’d hollowed out one of the pallets to make sufficient room for her to fit inside.

The pallet had been staged the night before to go on the next cruise ship.

In the morning, a forklift had lifted the pallet and driven it onboard the ship.

The tricky part had been getting out with nobody seeing her.

Fortunately, the receiving area had been somewhat chaotic with a multitude of pallets being driven onto the ship, offloaded and set aside.

The cruise ship had left Moscow with her on it.

Eventually, she’d made it back to the States, bought a used car with cash, stolen a license plate and had driven to the hills of Idaho where she’d begun her training.

She never again wanted to feel as helpless as she had the night her parents had died, and she’d vowed to make the people who’d killed them pay.