Her Risk To Take (11 page)

The thought of what she was about to do crowded out the pleasure of meeting a guy who had gorgeous eyes and a keen sense of humor. “I suppose I better hurry up and get back to Angel.”

He pulled a face, obviously as keen to return to the party as she was.

“Why did you come tonight?” Scarlett asked, suddenly curious.

“A direct order from my boss. What about you?” He stood with his legs braced apart, watching her as if he had all the time in the world.

She didn’t have all the time in the world—she had this one brief moment to try and right a terrible wrong. Even then it might not be enough. “My parents made me,” she told him.

It wasn’t a lie.

They stood there staring into each other’s eyes, and Scarlett forgot to breathe. It was one of those rare moments when you met someone and wanted to spend the whole night getting to know them better. She finally broke the connection. It could never be. She turned and walked to the entrance of the ladies’ room, and when she glanced back, Matt Lazlo had disappeared.

Matt Lazlo was not the man for her, no matter how much she might want him to be. His uniform should have served as warning enough.

Scarlett’s father’s favorite quote had been, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” but he’d still ended up in a supermax prison serving multiple life sentences for treason. Now Scarlett was about to take the concept of vigilance to a whole new level and God help her if she got caught.

Inside the restroom, she held the door for a woman who was just leaving. From her position half-hidden behind the large oak door, she spotted the Russian Ambassador coming out of a room across the hall, a room her research suggested was his office. She recognized his face from official photographs—shaggy blond hair and craggy forehead. Short, stocky, but good looking in a blunt, powerful way. Fourteen years ago he’d been the diplomatic attaché here in Washington. He’d returned to Moscow shortly before her father had been arrested.

Coincidence? Scarlett didn’t think so.

Her father had always been suspicious of Andrei Dorokhov, but he hadn’t found any concrete evidence of espionage. He must have gotten too close, and somehow the Russian had figured out a way to frame him—Scarlett was hoping to discover exactly how and exonerate her father.

The ambassador straightened his fancy white jacket and strode along the hallway in firm strides. Another man left after him, moving in the opposite direction. Scarlett eyed the slowly closing door to the office. Her plan had been to plant her device inside a cleaning supply closet around the corner that shared an inner wall with Dorokhov’s office. The technology should be good enough to pick up conversations, but it wasn’t ideal. Taking a chance, she dashed across the hall, caught the door just before it latched and darted into the office, closing it gently behind her.

It was dark and she flicked on the overhead light to make sure no one else was in the room. Easier to plead ignorance at the start than to snoop around and find someone sitting in the dark, watching her commit a crime. The room was beautiful in its old-fashioned opulence. A marble fireplace with a large gold-framed mirror above it formed the focal point of the room, and heavy red, velvet curtains shut out the rest of the world. A massive desk made of some dark wood with a satin finish sat to her right.

If she was caught here she didn’t know what they’d do to her, but it wouldn’t be good.

An ornate brass lamp on the desk was perfect for her needs. She hitched up her skirt and reached inside her panties, removed a small plastic bag. Carefully she laid the lamp on the desk and removed her tiny expandable screwdriver from the bag. It was fiddly, but after only a few seconds she’d removed the base of the lamp and peered inside.

A wave of icy horror swept over her bare shoulders and down her spine. Inside the lamp was another electronic listening device. A sophisticated one. Not a remnant of the Cold War.
Crappity crap.
She wanted to scream but clamped her lips shut. Sweat bloomed on her skin and her palms grew damp. Someone was already spying on Andrei Dorokhov, or his predecessor. And that someone might right now have her under surveillance.

This isn’t happening.

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Then pulled herself together. It was happening and she needed to get out of there. Fast.

Quickly, she reassembled the lamp and wiped off her prints. There was every chance whoever was spying on the Russians had just witnessed her attempting to do the same thing. Or maybe they only had audio…
Please, only have audio
.

She stuffed the small plastic bag of equipment down her bodice, turned off the light before opening the door a few millimeters. No one was in the corridor so she slipped quickly across the hall into the bathroom. She flushed the transmitter down the toilet and dropped the screwdriver in the garbage.

Her chance was gone. Maybe it had never truly existed—just another fragile hope to keep the illusion alive. She leaned her forehead against the wooden stall door as her heart slammed into her ribs. Adrenaline made her dizzy. Skin clammy. Her body alternated between hot then cold as her reaction shifted from panic to despair. She needed to get out of here. She couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid and naïve as to think she could pull this off, but maybe that’s how her father had been framed in the first place. Stupid and naïve must run in the family, along with gullible and unlucky.

See all the Cold Justice Series books on
Toni Anderson’s website
.

THE KILLING GAME

©Toni Anderson

I
t looked and
felt like the dominion of Gods.

Special Air Service trooper Ty Dempsey had been catapulted from a rural English market town into the heart of a colossal mountain range full of pristine snow-capped peaks which glowed against a glassy blue sky. Many of the summits in the Hindu Kush were over five miles high. The utter peace and tranquility of this region was an illusion that hid death, danger and uncertainty beneath every elegant precipice. No place on earth was more treacherous or more beautiful than the high mountains.

He was an anomaly here.

Life was an anomaly here.

Thin sharp needles pierced his lungs every time he took a breath. But his prey was as hampered by the landscape as they were, and Ty Dempsey wasn’t going to let a former Russian Special Forces operative-turned-terrorist get the better of an elite modern-day military force. Especially a man who’d shockingly betrayed not only his country, but humanity itself.

They needed to find him. They needed to stop the bastard from killing again.

The only noise in this arena was boots punching through the crust of frozen snow, and the harshness of puny human lungs struggling to draw oxygen out of the fragile atmosphere. The shriek of a golden eagle pierced the vastness overhead, warning the world that there were strangers here and to beware. Dempsey raised his sunglasses to peer back over his shoulder at the snaking trail he and his squad had laid down. Any fool could follow that trail, but only a real fool would track them across the Roof of the World to a place so remote not even war lingered.

But the world was full of fools.

As part of the British SAS’s Sabre Squadron A’s Mountain Troop, Dempsey was familiar with the terrain. He knew the perils of mountains and altitude, understood the raw omnipotent power of nature. This was what he trained for. This was his job. This was his life. He’d climbed Everest and K2, though the latter had nearly killed him. He understood that there were places on earth that were blisteringly hostile, that could obliterate you in a split second, but they held no malice, no evil. Unlike people…

He relaxed his grip on his carbine and adjusted the weight of his bergen. None of the men said a word as they climbed ever higher, one by one disappearing over the crest of the ridge and dropping down into the snowy wilderness beyond. With an icy breath Dempsey followed his men on the next impossible mission. Hunting a ghost.

*     *     *

The small plane
taxied down the runway at Kurut in the Wakhan Corridor, a tiny panhandle of land in the far northeast of Afghanistan. Thankfully the runway was clear of snow—a miracle in itself.

Dr. Axelle Dehn stared out of the plane window and tried to relax her grip on the seat in front of her. She’d been traveling for thirty hours straight, leveraging every contact she’d ever made to get flights and temporary visas for her and her graduate student. Something was going on with her leopards and she was determined to find out what.

Last fall, they’d attached satellite radio collars to ten highly-endangered snow leopards here in the Wakhan. This past week, in the space of a few days, they’d lost one signal completely, and another signal was now coming from a talus-riddled slope where no shelter existed. This latter signal was from a collar that had been attached to a leopard called Sheba, one of only two female snow leopards they’d caught. Just ten days ago, for the first time ever, they’d captured photos from one of their remote camera traps of the same leopard moving two newborn cubs. If Sheba had been killed, the cubs were out there, hungry and defenseless. Emotion tried to crowd her mind but she thrust it aside.

The cats might be fine.

The collar might have malfunctioned and dropped off before it was programmed to. Or maybe she hadn’t fastened it tight enough when they’d trapped Sheba, and the leopard had somehow slipped it off.

But two collars in two days…?

The plane came to a stop and the pilot turned off the propellers. The glacier-fed river gushed silkily down the wide, flat valley. Goats grazed beside a couple of rough adobe houses where smoke drifted through the holes in the roof. Bactrian camels and small, sturdy horses were corralled nearby. A line of yaks packed with supplies waited patiently in a row. Yaks were the backbone of survival in this remote valley, especially once you headed east beyond the so-called
road
. People used them for everything from milk, food, transportation and even fuel in this frigid treeless moonscape.

It was early spring—the fields were being tilled in preparation to plant barley in the short but vital growing season. A group of children ran toward the plane, the girls dressed in red dresses with pink headscarves, the boys wearing jewel-bright green and blue sweaters over dusty pants. Hospitality was legendary in this savagely poor region, but with the possibility of only a few hundred snow leopards left in Afghanistan’s wilderness, Axelle didn’t have time to squander.

Her assistant, a Dane called Josef Vidler, gathered his things beside her. She adjusted her hat and scarf to cover her hair. The type of Islam practiced here was moderate and respectful.

“Hello, Dr. Dehn,” the children chimed as the pilot opened the door. A mix of different colored irises and features reflected the diverse genetic makeup of this ancient spit of land.

“
As-Salaam Alaikum
.” She gave them a tired smile. The children’s faces were gaunt but wreathed in happiness. Malnourishment was common in the Wakhan, and after a brutal winter most families were only a goat short of starvation.

Despite the worry for her cats, it humbled her. These people, who struggled with survival every single day, were doing their best to live in harmony with the snow leopard. And a large part of this change in attitude toward one of the region’s top predators was due to the work of the Conservation Trust. It was a privilege to work for them, a privilege she didn’t intend to screw up. She dug into her day pack and pulled out two canisters of children’s multi-vitamins she’d found in Frankfurt Airport. She rattled one of the canisters and they all jumped back in surprise. She pointed to Keeta, a teenage girl whose eyes were as blue as Josef’s and whose English was excellent thanks to some recent schooling. “These are
not
candy so only eat one a day.” She held up a single finger. Then handed them over and the children chorused a thank you before running back to their homes.

Anji Waheed, their local guide and wildlife ranger-in-training, rattled toward them in their sturdy Russian van.

“
As-Salaam Alaikum
, Mr. Josef, Doctor Axelle,” Anji called out as he pulled up beside them. The relief in the Wakhi man’s deep brown eyes reinforced the seriousness of the situation.

“
Wa-Alaikum Salaam
.” They could all do with a little peace. The men patted each other on the back, and they began hauling their belongings out of the plane and into the van.

Axelle took a deep breath. “Did you find any sign of the cubs?”

Anji shook his head. “No, but as soon as I heard you were on your way, I took some men up to base camp to set up the yurts, then came back to get you.” Although only a few miles up the side valley, it was two bone-rattling hours of travel on a barely-there gravel road to their encampment. During winter, they did their tracking online from back home at Montana State University. In summer, they took a more hands-on approach.

“Thanks.” Axelle stowed her frustration and smiled her gratitude. From their tracking data she had a good idea where Sheba might have denned up. Barring accidents or breakdowns they might get there before nightfall.

She was praying for a collar malfunction even though that would put their million-dollar project way behind schedule. The alternative meant the cubs and their mother were probably dead. Her instinct told her losing two cats in a couple of days wasn’t coincidence, nor was it a local herder protecting livestock. A professional poacher was going after her animals for their fur and bones to feed China’s ravenous appetite for traditional medicine. It was imperative to find out exactly what was going on, and with the continuing conflict in Afghanistan it wasn’t going to be easy.

“Do the elders know anything about what might be happening?” she asked. Only twelve miles wide in places, the Wakhan Valley was a tiny finger of flat fertile ground separating some of the tallest mountains in the world—the magnificent and treacherous Hindu Kush to the south and the impenetrable Pamir Range to the north. Harsh winters trapped locals inside for seven months of the year. Wildlife was scarce and the region mercilessly inaccessible, but these people knew the land better than a visitor ever could.