Page 10 of Smoke and Shadows

A click and her seatbelt was released. She found herself being dragged against Viktor’s chest, his lips crushing hers. The hand on her nape moved to the back of her head and gripped her hair as his tongue forced its way into her mouth in a way she felt straight to her core. Viktor’s hand that was gripping her ass shifted to cup the heated neediness between herlegs. He groaned and kissed her harder as his fingers rubbed her through the soft fabric of her clothes.

Marissa’s hands found their way to his crotch. Knowing she was the reason for the hard ridge bulging through his pants, excited her, yet when Viktor began to lower the zipper of her pant suit, sanity returned and she tore her lips away.

“We need to stop,” she hissed.

“Fuck, you’re right,” Viktor muttered. “I don’t have a condom with me.”

“How does kissing lead straight to sex?” Marissa said indignantly. “Don’t you think you’re being a tad overconfident?”

Viktor chuckled. “I’ll get my way eventually. I never liked using a condom with you and I’m not about to start.”

“What?”

“Get yourself tested, sweetheart. I’m clean, by the way.”

“What?”

“You like repeating yourself,” Viktor chided, setting her back into place and fastening her seatbelt.

“There’s a briefing tomorrow with McCord and some of the Guardians.” Viktor switched back to all business. “I want you there to fill in the gaps on our intel. I’ll let you know the time.”

As usual, no requests—he dictated—expecting everyone to fall in line like lemmings. He opened the door and exited the car, but he ducked his head back in.

“I mean it, Marissa. Get yourself tested. We’re happening.”

And with that, Viktor Baran shut her door and sauntered back to his Charger.

Viktor eyedthe group of people gathered in the AGS war room. Jack, Derek, and Marissa sat at the end of the conferencetable on the right. Manning, Edmunds, and Nathan were seated on the left. Tim and Holly were seated next to Viktor.

“I guess we’re all here,” Viktor said in opening. “We’ve got reason to believe that recent attacks on our agents are a part of a vendetta determined to bring down AGS.” He looked at Marissa. “Ms. Cole and I have been piecing some intel together from weeks before the attack on Nasir’s convoy. Six weeks ago, CIA agents in Syria broke into a chemical weapons warehouse which was also the last known location of Rafiq Shadid—a freelance assassin.”

Viktor turned his eyes on Jack. “They found a slew of newspaper clippings. Most of them were from news coverage of past AGS ops. All of them have pictures of Guardians mixed in with the crowd of spectators in the aftermath of a mission. None of them were marked, but we don’t believe in coincidences.”

Almost everyone’s face changed to anger, but Jack’s features contorted with rage. He stood up from his chair, hands clenched into fists; he snarled, “You knew. You knew Maia was in danger.”

“Sit down, Jack. We didn’t know for sure.” Viktor passed around a folder and jerked his chin. “Those are the clippings. The photos are grainy. But what we could discern from some of them are pictures of Manning, Edmunds and Maia. None of them were missions you were on, Derek.”

He went on to tell them about the circumstances behind the deaths of the two agents. “They’re after the CIA, too?” Nathan asked.

Viktor nodded. “Jack, can you tell us anything more about the people who abducted you? You said there were two unaccounted for.”

“Yes. The other two wore masks and were rarely present. One of them has a slight accent, almost British whenever he spoke English, but they’ve communicated in Arabic as well,” Jack answered.

A mumble of speculations went around the room.

“What aren’t you telling us, Viktor?” Derek asked.

“There was an op eight years ago involving the two agents, myself and Marissa,” Viktor said slowly. “A chemical weapon was about to be deployed in a very populated area near Damascus. We had Mustafa Shadid in custody. He knew the location of the chemical weapon, but he was dedicated to his cause. He was willing to die rather than tell us where the VX nerve gas was going to be released.”

Viktor fell silent. He had made many hard decisions in his life, but this remained to be one of the toughest, because only he knew all the facts and Marissa had been kept in the dark.

“So, what did you do, Viktor?” Jack asked, a hint of challenge in his voice.

Viktor looked at Marissa. Her head was bowed because she had vilified him for what he had done that day, and he had never told her the truth. He couldn’t, not then.

“We lined up his wife and son,” Viktor said. “Gave him a choice. We’d take out his family one by one if he continued to stonewall us with the location.”

“And did it come to that?” Edmunds asked.

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