Sands of Time Read online

  “Hold on, hero,” she said, her voice shaky, as she backed away. Roman held on to the rope, his gaze in hers. Dark eyes that she couldn’t read.

  She backed onto solid ice, sat up and began to pull.

  He moved toward the edge. But she couldn’t move him onto the ice. Lord, please help me! She dug in her feet, wrapped the webbing around her hands, leaned back.

  Roman inched up, then fell back as her strength ebbed.

  No. He couldn’t die because she didn’t have the strength to pull him out. No!

  “Dye Menye.” A shadow over her shoulder reached for the webbing. Mafia Man sat next to her and heaved.

  Roman slid onto the ice, half in, half out. Sarai got up to go to him.

  “Nyet.” Mafia Man put his hand out to stop her. Then he pulled again and dragged Roman across the snow.

  Roman’s eyes were closed, his body unmoving.

  Please, Lord, no. Sarai ran to him, checked his pulse. Slow. But still alive. “Help me!” She rolled him over, slapped his cheeks. “Stay awake, Roman!”

  He blinked, groaned. “Sarai…” His eyes closed again.

  He’d die of hypothermia before they got back to the nuclear plant.

  She looked at the two mafia boys, now heading in her direction, then behind her at the woods and…the house!

  “Let’s take him there.” She pointed to the pink painted home. Hopefully, it had blankets, or furniture she could use to start a fire.

  If she had to, she’d warm him up with her own body heat.

  Thankfully, Mafia One and Two didn’t argue with her, a feat she attributed to her doctor tone. So much for their not knowing she spoke Russian.

  Unfortunately, she’d have to make good on her promise to tell them everything. That wasn’t much, and if Roman lived, he might not be thanking her.

  If Roman lived.

  She sandwiched him between herself and Mafia One as they drove around the lake to the home. Then, the two men grabbed Roman’s rag-doll body and dragged him by the armpits into the house. She heard him groan, a sound that had her rejoicing.

  The door had a dead bolt lock, but to her shock, one of the two dug out a key.

  They opened the door and dropped Roman inside.

  “We need to get him someplace warm,” she said.

  They looked at each other. Then they picked up Roman and dragged him through an entryway and into a family room with a stone fireplace.

  A nice family room. With black leather seating and leopard skin pillows and a thick Kazakhstani rug on the floor. They dropped Roman onto it. Then they turned to Sarai. “Don’t try anything. We’re watching you,” Mafia One said.

  She ignored him and dropped to her knees beside Roman. He looked pasty, with gray lips and ice in his hair. And when she removed his only boot, he barely roused.

  He did, however, react when she reached for his belt.

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Not on your life. You need to get out of these wet clothes and dry off.” She unbuckled his belt, but his hands came to life and caught hers. His eyes were still closed, but she heard a heartbeat in his voice. “No, Sarai. Find me something else to put on. A blanket or something.” His hands trembled as he let her go.

  Fine. She ran out of the room, brushed past the mafia duo and pounded up the stairs. She heard feet behind her, but didn’t stop.

  Three bedrooms. She yanked a bedspread off one of the beds, rolled it into a ball and raced back downstairs, passing the man who’d followed her.

  Roman was sitting up, his eyes open but not focusing well because he blinked at her, as if he might not know her.

  Yeah, well, he might wish that after she got done with him. Anger felt like an easier emotion to deal with than the relief flooding her veins. “Let me help you!”

  “I can take care of myself.” He reached out for the bedspread and she tucked it around him. “I’m going to take off these clothes, so you’d better turn around.”

  “I’m a doctor. I’ve seen men undressed.”

  “That I didn’t need to know.” Still, his voice felt stronger. “Just turn around.”

  She shook her head, turned and decided to build a fire before she clocked him. She ignored his groans as she layered the logs, the kindling, and found the matches. In moments she had fire chewing up the pine logs.

  “Where are the guys who brought us here?”

  Apparently he hadn’t been completely out of it.

  She turned around. Roman had the blanket clutched around him, shivering violently. “I’ll get you another blanket.” She ran back upstairs, past the guards, found the same bedroom and stripped the blanket from the bed.

  As she turned, a picture caught her eye. A painting of a woman. A beautiful woman with mink-colored hair and piercing dark eyes. Eyes she’d seen before.

  Eyes she’d seen broken with grief.

  Julia Bednova.

  Sarai went back downstairs and passed one of their guards-rescuers. He stood at the entrance, arms folded. The other stood in the kitchen, his ear to a cell phone.

  They reminded her of her brother, David, when he’d served temporary detail in the Secret Service.

  Roman leaned back against the sofa, his eyes closed. He shook violently. “Wow, I have to admit, I never thought it would hurt this much to be warm.”

  Sarai draped another blanket around him. “The pain is a good thing. It means you’re alive.”

  He kept his eyes closed. “That’s a new way to look at it.”

  She suppressed the urge to put her arms around him and merely sat back, pulling her knees to herself. The fire crackled, and she wondered how long the men outside the door would wait before they demanded answers.

  Hopefully, until Roman stopped shivering. And until she stopped shaking.

  He looked terrible. She couldn’t hold in her emotions for another moment and tears filled her eyes, spilling down her cheeks.

  Roman had nearly died.

  Her sobs leaked out and she put a hand over her mouth to squelch the sound. Roman opened his eyes.

  “Sarai…” His voice softened. “Sarai, come here.”

  He held one arm open. He still wore his jeans and she wanted to yell at him for that, but how could she when he looked so sweetly gallant?

  She scooted over next to him before she let her brain engage.

  He pulled the blanket around them and she sank close. His skin felt clammy, and she took the edge of the blanket, pulling it closer, wrapping her arm across him.

  “Roman, I’m scared. I had to get help, but now the two men who helped pull you out are standing guard, right outside the door. They’re going to question you.”

  Roman’s teeth chattered as he nodded, and pulled her tighter.

  “And you almost died.” She put her hands over her face, trying to wipe out the image of him sliding under the ice.

  See, he was going to get killed and it would shatter her.

  I was shattered when you left, he’d said at Anya’s dacha.

  So he knew the feeling. Only, that made her feel worse, and more tears filled her eyes. She clenched her jaw, but a whimper shuddered out.

  “Sar..” he groaned. “Don’t…c-c-cry.” He cupped her face with his hand, still wrinkled from the water. It felt like ice on her face. She didn’t recoil, instead met his hazel eyes, seeing something inside them she’d seen long ago.

  Something that had reached right through her layers, to the fears inside and calmed them. The look that told her that they could be soaking wet and in the clutches of a couple of Russian thugs, with her life spiraling out of control, and he’d do anything to keep her safe.

  Run through gunfire, or maybe go AWOL and follow her to Siberia.

  And, while she probably wouldn’t be in this mess if he hadn’t talked her into an unauthorized visit to a nuclear reactor, she also wouldn’t feel the one-hundred-percent certainty that she wasn’t alone. Maybe she did need a hero. Someone who would die for her. Despite Roman’s charisma, his antic
s, even the way he drove her to her last nerve, Roman was precisely that hero.

  So, why, exactly, had she left him?

  His thumb caressed her cheek, and his gaze traced her face, her eyes, her nose.

  Her mouth.

  He moved slowly, as if caught in time, or slowed by fear, and she helped by meeting him halfway.

  Roman.

  He kissed her softly, his hand holding her jaw, then moving around behind her neck. Strong. Purposed. He pulled her closer and deepened the kiss.

  Sarai let him. Roman. Her Roman. She felt something inside breaking free, something she’d kept locked for so very, very long.

  She could admit that her rejection of him might be less about her disappointment about his career choice and more about sheer fear—after all, he did show up bloodied, the materialization of her worst nightmares, in Red Square, and he hadn’t flinched at risking his neck, ever, in the ten-plus years since.

  All the same, being in his wavelength again had scraped away the denial.

  She still loved him. Heartbreakingly so.

  “Roman.” She pulled away, her gaze on his mouth. He stilled, and she met his eyes.

  “I’m sorry. I…should have asked.” He wore apology in his frown. “I just… I missed you.”

  Her chest knotted, words that she longed to say, should have said ages ago, filling her throat. She’d always operated on the belief that he wanted to go out a hero, in a blaze of glory. In a shootout, taking down the outlaws in the world.

  But he’d been willing to sacrifice his life in the middle of Siberia, with no one watching so she might escape.

  The man shivering in her arms was exactly the man she’d once loved—a man of principle, of passion.

  A man who wanted to save lives, just like she did. Maybe he had become exactly the man God wanted him to be. Not Paul the Missionary, but David the Warrior.

  She should give him more credit for working out God’s call on his life.

  “Roman, I saw something upstairs…something strange.”

  “A whirlpool tub with a—”

  “No.” She gave him a playful smack, and he smiled as he closed his eyes.

  “A picture of Julia Bednov. The governor’s wife.”

  Roman frowned, still not opening his eyes. “Bednov owns shares in Alexander Oil. I’ll bet this place is on their property.”

  “Their son died of renal failure, remember?”

  Roman opened his eyes. Stared at her.

  “And Maxim, from the village, his mother was a cook in a local factory.”

  “Like a nuclear plant? Did she do some extra cooking for a certain governor-to-be and his wife?”

  Sarai glanced at the door, lowered her voice. “She might have even brought Maxim along, maybe to work, or even play with Sasha.”

  “So, how would they both get infected with nuclear waste? The plant is far enough away that—”

  “The lake.”

  His mouth opened, but no words came out. Then he closed it. And if he’d been white already, he paled even further. “Of course. It’s probably fed by underground streams. Russia’s standard practice is to submerge its used nuclear fuel in a pond to cool, but if any of the containers leaked, the waste would have been absorbed into the sand around the pond, and then into the underground streams and fed into the lake.”

  “Roman, I’m sure that you weren’t in there long enough—” She put a hand over her mouth to stop herself, but tears came again.

  Roman brushed one away with his thumb. “Don’t cry, Sarichka. I’ll be okay. I’m in God’s hands, remember?”

  At the moment, she didn’t want to go there. Didn’t want to talk about being in God’s hands. Although God had saved Roman this time, she didn’t know what was going to happen in the next hour, and she wasn’t putting her hopes up too far. A person could get skewered believing too much.

  Maybe, in fact, Roman had nailed the truth. She didn’t trust God. Not at all.

  “I always knew you’d die in the line of duty.”

  “That’s the risk of my job, Sarai. I’m a cop. That’s what I do. I always thought that’s what Jesus meant when he said to ‘take up our cross and follow Him.’ To accept our mission in life wherever it leads, even if it leads to death.”

  He gave her a sad smile.

  “I’ll get you home. Get you tested. You’ll be fine.” Her voice sounded like it had come through a vise.

  “Of course I will,” he said softly and ran his hand down her hair. He’d stopped trembling, but she felt a tremor start in her soul.

  “I always thought that taking up our cross meant that if we were going to die for something, let it be worthwhile,” she said.

  He leaned his forehead to hers. “Saving the world from nuclear terrorists seems pretty worthwhile.”

  Not if it meant she had to watch him die.

  “I don’t know what that verse means, Roman. I just know that I—”

  The door slammed open. Mafia One filled the door frame, and he didn’t look happy. “Gotov?” he asked.

  Ready? For what?

  Chapter Fourteen

  He might actually get some sleep this night. Alexei Bednov replaced the receiver and stood up from his desk. Stretched. Julia was in the next room, sprawled on the sofa, watching television. Sauced to the gills. He’d found her in a slump on the floor in the kitchen an hour ago, and it had taken his last shred of kindness not to leave her there.

  I’ll get you, Alexei. Julia’s voice rung in Bednov’s ears.

  Sure you will, sweetie, the governor thought. He smiled and poured himself a snifter of brandy. Now that the militia and FSB had restored order to the city, this day had been calmer. Curfew, certainly. But in time, he’d lift that. Restore government. Provisionally, of course.

  This could work. He’d seen it in the cards years ago, knew that one day he’d be poised to reclaim all Russia had lost. Disillusionment with the capitalist way caused society to demand change, just as he knew it would. A person couldn’t eat freedom. Of course, he understood the benefits of capitalism, and could live with the negatives, like Barry Riddle, and his two incarcerated investors.

  He’d try them for murder. And then execute them.

  If he could not execute them, he’d let them languish in a Siberian prison for a few years. That would keep their mouths closed.

  He sipped the brandy. It coated his throat with heat, loosening the knot of tension in his chest. He smiled at the image of one FSB agent being wrung out by Fyodor. He’d wanted Novik in his custody for too long now—from the first day the agent had met Gregori Smirnov. It wasn’t easy to find a courier who not only believed, but was willing to risk his health for the good of Mother Russia.

  Fyodor would know what to do to make him talk. Especially since Novik—and the American girl—had broken into the Khandaski nuclear plant. By morning, Bednov would know just how much Captain Novik and his girlfriend knew. Little, probably. But enough to raise noses in other parts of the country.

  Not everyone believed in a strong Russia. At least not in his definition of strong.

  But here, in the province of Irkutia, they did. Because Alexander Evgeyovich Bednov was their leader.

  He poured himself another snifter of brandy. His men had pulled the two from the ice. They could return them there when they finished. He smiled at that.

  How convenient. He wouldn’t ever swim in that lake anyway.

  Roman decided he had to still be in shock, or partially frozen because that last shot to his gut should have hurt more than it did. As it was, his brain felt fuzzy, his eyesight cutting in and out.

  Sadly, his eyesight cleared enough to see a guy who probably played the underground fight-club circuit backing up and rubbing his fist. Roman felt profoundly grateful that he’d kept his jeans on—even if they were heavy and cold on his legs. Imagine how fun it would be to be interrogated, his hands tied behind him as he sat in a chair in his skivvies. That thought followed with profound gratefulness that he co
uld feel his legs, that he was alive.

  At least, for now.

  He blinked, trying to clear his vision, and got a fix on the tall, scar-faced, bald interrogator who seemed to be getting a second wind.

  Joy to the world.

  Roman licked his lip, tasted blood and sensed that it might be thick, although that, too, had gone numb. Fight Club circled him like a hyena.

  “Irkutia is now under martial law. Your rights no longer apply, Mr. FSB. And—” he jerked his head toward the other room “—neither do hers.” Fight Club leaned close, breathed fish into Roman’s face. “We only want to know what you were looking for.”

  A hot sauna, some smoked salmon and some alone time with the girl in the next room.

  Roman said nothing. The longer he held out, the more time Sarai had for Vicktor to show up in Smolsk, get worried and come looking for them.

  Roman hung on to the hope that Vicktor had the sleuthing skills to guess Roman had paid a visit to the reactor. Too bad he’d lost his sat phone on the bottom of the lake. Or should he say, toxic pool?

  “You know we’ll ask her next. And believe me, she may be a doctor, but nothing is going to heal what we do to her.”

  Roman tried not to let the reaction out, past his gut, but he inadvertently clenched his jaw.

  Fight Club grabbed him by the hair. “I’m not kidding. It’s been a long time since I’ve been up close and personal with an American girl. Are they all the same?”

  Roman shook his head out of the man’s grip. “Leave her alone. And listen up. I’m an FSB agent, and if I don’t check in you can bet they’ll come looking for me.” He’d been repeating the same information for nearly an hour—was it an hour? It could be ten minutes and his befuddled brain wouldn’t know the difference.

  He heard a growl behind him. Braced himself. But the man only grabbed him by the hair again and hauled him to his feet. “Maybe you should rethink your answer while we talk to your girlfriend.”

  Panic spiked through him, conjuring up images. “Leave her alone. She doesn’t know anything. She’s a doctor—I kidnapped her.”