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“ P izdets!” Fuck!

Anatoli Lagoshin winced as he heard his boss swear in a low vicious tone. Borodin usually had himself on a tight rein. His cold bloodedness was famous inside Intergaz. In the five years Anatoli had worked for Borodin as part of Borodin’s personal staff, he’d never even heard the oligarch raise his voice.

It was moments like this that Anatoli remembered that Vladimir Borodin had not always been an oligarch. He’d once been in the KGB.

Anatoli had been eight years old when the KGB was disbanded, but the Committee for State Security still elicited shudders of terror, a generation later. Antoli had lost two uncles to the gulag, one uncle for publishing something funny about the Politburo because he’d taken the promises of glasnost seriously and the other uncle because he’d refused to send his men into an ambush in Afghanistan that the KGB said was nonexistent. His uncle had lost his men to the ambush and his life to a firing squad.

His parents had lived under the iron sky of the KGB all their lives, and their parents and their parents and their parents before them. For seventy long years the KGB had cast its brutal shadow over the country and Anatoli was always so happy at his good luck that he grew up after it had finally been dismantled.

But it had been terrifying in its day and Vladimir Borodin had been a part of it. The man he considered a brilliant businessman had been forged in iron and steel.

Borodin’s voice was glacial. “How did that happen? You knew the plane she was on, you had a photograph. How the fuck could you lose her?”

“She pulled a bomb alert at the airport. She got away.” Anatoli tried to keep the sullenness out of his voice. Damn it, this is not what he had studied so long and so hard to do. He wasn’t a thug. He was a modern businessman with two majors in business administration and accounting, who spoke excellent English, pretty good French and German and passable Chinese. He wanted with all his heart to be a leader in the new Russia, built on business not bones.

His father and his father’s best friend had gone on a pilgrimage to the M56 highway from Magadan to Yakutsk. The famous ‘road of bones’ built by prisoners of Stalin’s most infamous prison camp, Kolyma. Thousands of bodies thrown onto the highway as building material. His father didn’t speak for a month after coming back.

That was the Soviet Union, a country of unspeakable barbarity. That wasn’t his country. His country was Russia and it was modernizing, buzzing with business opportunities. He hadn’t spent years perfecting English, studying business management till his eyes bled, to whack people like some KGB thug.

Though he couldn’t say that, of course.

“ How did she pull a bomb alert?” Borodin sounded enraged but also bewildered. In many ways, though a canny businessman, Borodin was a dinosaur. Anatoli was sure he was imagining this Felicity Ward going up to a wall, breaking a glass pane and pulling down a handle.

The man was a dinosaur but a big dangerous one, with claws and teeth. Dinosaurs had ruled the earth for millions of years and it took an asteroid to kill them off.

“She hacked into the airport security system and initiated a bomb alert. Not before I wounded her, though. She got away but she was bleeding.”

Silence. Anatoli knew Borodin was scrolling through reactions.

Anatoli had been given strict instructions to capture the woman but also not to harm her in any way. Contradictory instructions, of course. And he’d managed to hurt her and let her get away.

Borodin let the hacking issue go. Anatoli knew he didn’t really understand that. But he understood the other part of his comment just fine. “Wounded her?” he asked.

“I used a knife, easier to hide.” The instant they discovered that the woman they were after had booked a flight to Portland, Oregon, Borodin had directed his pilot to pick Anatoli up and fly directly across the continental United States. Anatoli had landed two hours before Ward’s flight, since she’d had two connecting flights.

He’d waited in Borodin’s luxurious A318 Elite jet until they checked the flight status of her flight and saw that it had landed. The pilot, who looked like he ate steel for breakfast and shat nails, and who was undoubtedly ex military, had showed him a secret compartment with enough firepower to start a small war. Anatoli knew how to shoot but wasn’t comfortable with firearms. The pilot looked on with contempt as Anatoli chose a ceramic knife, capable of passing a metal detector. Going into an airport, that seemed like a good idea.

The plan had been for Anatoli to grab Darinova when she exited through the arrivals doors. The airplane was in an isolated position with very few people around. The pilot would fuel up in the meantime and the moment Anatoli got back with Darinova in tow, they’d take off.

That had gone to hell. Now, the pilot would wait in the plane in a private hangar for as long as it took for Anatoli to find the woman.

“She was wounded, you moron,” Borodin said coldly. “She would seek medical attention.”

Anatoli ground his teeth. “Yes. I rented a car with my alternate ID and made the rounds of the hospitals. There are four hospitals in the greater metropolitan area and I did not find her anywhere. Nothing in her record showed that she’d ever even been to Portland, but if she has a private doctor friend, then there is no way I can track her down.”

“Is her cell phone still off?”

That he could answer. “Yes.”

“What are you doing now, besides sitting around with your thumb up your ass?”

To speak like this, Borodin was beyond furious. Anatoli had no idea why this woman was so important but apparently she was. And if he was to keep his job—and he was beginning to suspect more than his job might be at stake—he was going to have to find this woman soon.

“I am going to gain access to the airport footage and see whether there is any information of use to us.”

Damn Borodin for putting him in this position! He tried to inject some authority into his voice. Thank God Borodin wasn’t comfortable with Zoom or video calls. If this conversation were on a video feed Borodin would see the sweat pouring down Anatoli’s face. As it was, the pilot was looking on with contempt.

“In the meantime, I need more information. I was sent in blind.” Not to mention the fact that no one told him the woman had lightning reflexes. “The more information I have the easier I can track her down. You’re the one with the resources, so contact me when you have something I can use.”

He closed the connection with a sweaty finger and pulled in his first deep breath in minutes.

The pilot clapped slowly a couple of times. “Found your balls, eh? That’s always dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing. So either you find this woman and get a promotion or if you don’t—” His face was a cruel mask, one corner of his mouth turned up in a cynical smile. “If you don’t, well Borodin, as you know, is ex KGB. They showed their displeasure with a bullet to the back of the neck. And they’d dock the bullet from your last paycheck. Those old guys didn’t fuck around.”