Page 8

CHAPTER 8

D mitri pulled out his satellite phone as we reached unplowed Highway 441. I noted two tread tracks that hadn’t been there earlier. They ended where some sort of vehicle had pivoted and gone back the way it came. Which explained how Dmitri had gotten up here so quickly, although where the vehicle had gone was a mystery. The tracks from the two assassins were already gone, filled in by blowing snow.

Dmitri pressed the on button and waited to get a signal.

I retrieved my satphone.

“What are you doing?” Dmitri demanded.

“That dark-haired woman,” I said. “She texts every day.”

“Ah.” He nodded approvingly. “That is a good woman. Speaking of good women, how is Betty Baumgarten? She has taken the years well, it appears.”

“She’s fine.”

Of course he knew Betty; the old spy network wasn’t that big. I wondered if he knew knew her, in the biblical sense. Rose had said she’d had an affair with Melissa, one of Rocky Start’s funeral directors, but I’d never gotten to know either Melissa or Betty well enough to hazard a guess. Betty looked like a sweet little old lady, but Rose said she was fierce. She’d have to be fierce if she’d tangled with Dmitri.

But the pressing question was, how did he know she was looking good now? “When did you see her last?”

“The past week,” Dmitri said, smugly. “I have had the town and surrounding area under surveillance. She goes for a walk every day. With her llama.” He smiled.

That was creepy. “If you’ve been watching the town, stalking Betty, how did you know where I was? And how did you get here?” I pointed down. “The only road is snowed out.”

He ignored me as he got his signal first and typed into his phone, then turned it off and stuffed it into a pocket on his thick coat. “Transportation is coming.”

I got a signal, too. The Ferrells (Rocky Start’s postal service and surveillance experts) had insisted that I only text via the satellite link they gave me because the device condensed it into a microburst that they claimed they could hide from prying eyes, aka Herc. It would have been nice these past couple of days to have heard Rose’s voice or done real-time texting, but not if Herc was listening/reading in.

There was a message waiting from Rose. I felt my pulse pick up, not in a good way.

CORAL ATTACKED

COME BACK

WE NEED YOU

And then a final text:

I NEED YOU

The impact of that must have shown on my face because Dmitri asked, “What is wrong?”

“There’s trouble in Rocky Start.” I removed my gloves to text back.

“Wait!” Dmitri snapped. “What are you doing?”

“Telling my woman I’m on my way back.” I’d called Rose “my woman” without conscious thought.

“No, no,” Dmitri said. “How do you think they”—he nodded back up the trail—“and I tracked you? The Ferrells are good, but they are not current on the latest cryptography. The method they are using was broken by the FSB last year and now anyone who is anyone has capability.”

“I don’t give a damn,” I told him. “She needs to know I’m coming back.”

“Oh,” he said. “So it is like that. What has happened?”

I was grateful to Dmitri for saving my ass from the Cauldron, but he was ex-KGB. Trust him? Hell, no. But according to him, the FSB—aka the new KGB—was reading our messages. The possibility was troubling.

I frowned at him. “Are you still with the FSB?”

Dmitri scoffed. “I was out long before there was an FSB. Things now are chaos.” He smiled, proud of himself. “But I have access to some of my proteges who have risen in the ranks. They help as needed in a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

So I was stranded in a blizzard with a former Russian secret service agent. Who had a friend on the way. With another snowstorm rolling in. The entity controlling my life must have been laughing out loud at this point.

On the other hand, if Dmitri wanted me dead, he could have just let the Cauldron have me.

“Max Reddy,” Dmitri said, probably reading my frown. “You will have to trust me. What other choice do you have?”

I started typing and he protested again and I said, “It’s a little late to worry about being tracked right now, isn’t it?”

He considered that, then shrugged.

I sent my text to Rose:

ON MY WAY

I frowned at what I’d written, not sure if I should add something personal, a term of endearment. I wanted to say a lot more but, given Dmitri’s latest information, decided against it. I turned off the messenger.

“What is the trouble in the town?” Dmitri asked when I was done.

“Someone was attacked.”

He began to ask more, but then the sound of an engine purred in the distance, getting closer.

A boxy snowcat rumbled up the center of the road, treads effortlessly churning through the snow. It stopped right next to us and Dmitri gestured for me to get in. I opened the back door and slid in on the bench while Dmitri took the front passenger seat.

The driver was a hulking figure hunched over the steering controls, well over six feet with muscle distributed over his massive frame, his salt and pepper hair cropped short. I thought he might be even bigger than my buddy Luke, and Luke was huge. The giant didn’t bother to look back at me, just pivoted the vehicle, treads in opposite directions, then accelerated us back the way he had come. We were covering as much distance in ten minutes as had taken me a day trudging through the mountains.

“This is my friend, Tanke,” Dmitri said, gesturing to the hulk. “He is deaf, but he is not dumb. Do not underestimate him, please.”

Yeah, his size alone pretty much ensured that.

Tanke remained uninterested in anything but the road, so I put my mind back on Rocky Start and tried to think of who would attack Coral. It made no sense. Coral was no longer a threat to anybody. No one in Rocky Start was active anymore.

As far as I knew.

But I hadn’t known that Serena Stafford was a danger until she showed up in town and kidnapped Rose’s daughter, Poppy. I hadn’t known that Geoffrey Nice was a serial killer until he’d taken out four people, including Rose’s much-loved boss, Oz. And now I had a feeling there was a lot more that I didn’t know, and Rose was in the middle of it.

And Rocky Start was still many miles away.