Page 3 of Dangerous Secrets

“Excellent,” the Vor replied. “Stay safe, my friend.”

Content that this enormously important project was off to a good start, Arkady removed the cellphone’s SIM card, threw it into the woods where it disappeared into the dense undergrowth with a whisper of rustling leaves, and crushed the plastic casing of the cellphone beneath his heavy boot.

Arkady trotted back up the steps, sat down in the leather seat, buckled up and made himself comfortable. This was the first stage of what was going to be a long journey.

The cabin was quiet and comfortable. The pilot had chosen well. The Tu-154 could take off from the gravel runway of the abandoned military airfield and could fly above the rest of Russian air traffic.

They were in the lower reaches of Siberia, the largest uninhabited land mass in the world. They would reach their destination—a remote airfield near Budva in Montenegro—in about twelve hours, stopping only once to refuel near Odessa. From there, a ship would be waiting to take him and his cargo to Canada. The final leg would be a truck crossing into the United States, into Vermont.

The pilot quietly announced that they would be taking off in one minute. Exactly sixty seconds later, the sleek plane taxied then lifted, heading south.

Parker’s Ridge, Vermont

November 18

The manwith the shattered hands and the shattered soul used his stylus to punch the off button on his cell phone. He still had the use of his index finger and thumb, but only as a pincer. Thezealous prison guards who had taken a hammer to his hands had been thorough. He could use the stylus to tap out letters on a keyboard or a number pad. He could feed himself. He could pick up a glass of vodka.

It was enough.

Vassily Worontzoff glanced outside the big picture window of his study, noting the wind whipping the big leafless oak tree’s branches into a frenzy. Though it was only early afternoon, the sky was almost black. The forecast was for snow during the night and for the temperatures to dip well below zero. The forecaster had stated all of this in the somber tones of a man announcing certain disaster.

Vassily would have laughed if he had still been capable of laughter. How weak the Americans were! How easily they despaired! He was a survivor of Kolyma, the Soviet Union’s cruelest prison camp, where the prisoners had to work the gold mines in temperatures as low as -40°.

It had been so cold tears froze on the cheeks. They fell with a merry tinkle to the hard frozen earth in crystals which belied the hell the prisoners lived in. The zeks called this ‘the whisper of the stars’.

How many tears he’d shed when he’d lost his beloved Katya. How the stars had whispered.

He’d written a poem about it, in boot black on a piece of intact shirt, donated by a zek who, improbably, was being released. It had been published back in Moscow. When word filtered back from five thousand miles away that the zek Vassily Worontzoff had written a poem about Kolyma, the guards had gone into a frenzy of cruelty. They’d shattered his hands, thinking a writer without hands couldn’t write.

Foolish, foolish men.

So much had changed since then.

If the guards who’d tormented him weren’t dead of vodka poisoning, they were long retired, living on the equivalent of fifty dollars a month in some rat hole back in Russia. And he—he was already rich beyond their comprehension and about to become one of the most powerful men on earth, able to switch great cities off like a light.

Able to be with his beloved Katya.

He’d lost her in Kolyma but he’d found her again in this small, pretty American backwater, with its birch trees and larches, so like the woods around the dascha they’d had outside Moscow.

Charity, she was called now. Charity Prewitt. Absurd Yankee name. He hated calling her Charity. She was Katya. His Katya, though she didn’t realize it yet.

But soon this charade would be over and she would be with him again.

He was the Vor. Immensely powerful.

So powerful he could bring his Katya back from the dead.

Parker’s Ridge County Library

“Read any good books lately?”

The pretty young woman stacking books and sorting papers in the Parker’s Ridge County Library turned around in surprise. It was closing time and the library wasn’t overwhelmed with people at the best of times. By closing time it was always deserted. Nick Ireland should know. He’d been staking it out for a week.

“Oh! Hello, Mr. Ames.” Her cheeks pinked with pleasure at seeing him. “Did you need something else?” She checked the bigold-fashioned clock on the wall. “We’re closing up, but I can stay on for another quarter of an hour if you need anything.”

He’d been in that morning and she’d been charmingly helpful to him. Or, rather, to Nicholas Ames, stockbroker, retired from the Wall Street rat race after several years of very lucky investments paid off big, now looking to start his own investment firm. Son of Keith and Amanda Ames, investment banker and family lawyer, respectively, both tragically dead at a young age. Nicholas Ames was thirty-four years old, a Capricorn, divorced after a short-lived starter marriage in his twenties, collector of vintage wine, affable, harmless, all-round good guy.

Not a word of that was true. Not one word.

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