Wiser Than Serpents Read online

  And two seconds before she’d lost her heart forever to a six-foot-two, blond-haired, blue-eyed American boy with a soft spot for the oppressed.

  No, it couldn’t be. But under all that dark hair, the flashy California attire and the painful Mandarin she plainly recognized the guy on the other end of her e-mail dreams, Preach, aka David Curtiss. She stared up at him, and shock turned her pale. This was his big undercover assignment? The truth flashed across his face.

  He recognized her, too.

  “You like her?” Kwan asked, finding his feet.

  Yanna looked away, not wanting to see David’s expression when he answered.

  “I do,” he said, and something inside her turned warm at his words. Even though she knew it was an act, tears of relief filled her eyes. Yes, let Kwan give her to David. Together they’d find Elena and—

  “She’s not for sale.”

  Yanna closed her eyes.

  Kwan came around the desk, leaned against it.

  “Why not?” David said, his voice low. “I want her.”

  And then, Yanna realized exactly how Elena might have felt. Cheap. A commodity. A sickness welled inside that had nothing to do with the sea.

  “She’s not who you think. She’s a Russian agent.” Kwan nodded to Fu, who clamped her around the back of the neck and forced her face up. She kept it averted from David’s, fearing the look of derision in his eyes. Whatever undercover plot he had strung together, her appearance might just be unraveling it, and fast.

  “An agent?” David repeated. “Then why do you want her?”

  Kwan was silent. He drummed his fingers on his arms, staring at her. She winced as Fu’s grip dug into her neck.

  “I don’t,” Kwan finally said. “We’re done with her.” He reached across his desk, behind him.

  “Then let me—”

  “No.”

  Yanna recognized the lipstick tube and her blood drained from her body as Kwan opened it and twisted out the blade. He glanced at Fu, who let her go and it was all she could do not to collapse. But she wouldn’t do that. Not in front of David.

  Never in front of David.

  Out of her periphery, she saw Fu pull out a small silver Makarov pistol that looked painfully like the one she had back home. He leveled it at David.

  Yanna’s eyes widened as Kwan stepped up to her and smiled at David. The man she loved.

  “I’m going to kill her,” Kwan said softly. “And then maybe we’ll do business.”

  Chapter One

  One week earlier

  Y anna Andrevka hadn’t spent the past ten years of her life putting her kid sister through college to watch her throw it away on some pudgy, bald American named Bob.

  Then again, she wouldn’t be doing cartwheels if Elena were marrying a hip, urban Russian named Sergey or Ivan, either. The very fact that her bright, beautiful sister put any man before finishing her law degree had Yanna turning the beet she was chopping into a blood-colored mash.

  “About finished with the salad, Yanna?” Katya asked as she drained off the water from the mashed potatoes into the sink. Steam rose, cooking the already stifling galley kitchen. The tourists who thought that Siberia in summer still meant glaciers and bitter winds should spend a day in her apartment in August. The Gobi Desert was probably cooler; certainly it was less humid. Yanna scraped the beets into a bowl along with onions, pickles, diced cooked potatoes and cooked carrots. She picked up a wooden spoon and began to stir.

  “Where’s Elena? She’s supposed to be back by now.” The fact that her sister had lifted nary a finger for the goodbye send-off she’d planned gave Yanna sufficient ammunition to let her anger simmer. It felt better than facing the fact that in twenty-four hours, she’d be alone in their two-room flat, no one to greet her when she stayed too late at volleyball practice, or harass her about having no social life.

  She had a social life. Namely, Elena. Especially now that Yanna’s other friends—Vicktor and Roman—had ladies who took up their free time. Ever since Elena had moved back to Khabarovsk two years ago, after getting her undergrad degree in Saint Petersburg, Yanna’s life had taken on new vibrancy. Maybe it was watching Elena come into her own and blossom into a beauty like their mother. Or maybe it was living vicariously through her soap-opera romances, or listening to her dreams of life after school. Until two years ago, Yanna had seen her kid sister as a nuisance, a leech, just another price Yanna had to pay for her mother’s foolishness.

  Now, she wasn’t sure just how she’d survive without Elena snuggling up to her when she arrived home from a date, or a class, regaling her with her latest drama.

  Bob had better be worth it. Or Yanna would cross the ocean in a single bound and spike his head across his two-story beach house. The pictures did look nice, however.

  “She’s picking up her wedding dress,” Katya said. “I told her they have dresses in Seattle, but she says she wants a Russian dress. You can take the girl out of Russia, but you can’t take Russia out of the girl.” Katya looked up from the potatoes she was mashing. Skinny as a sixties-era model and wearing a pair of jeans and a sheer white blouse, Katya looked like she hadn’t the strength to mash a pea. With long, bottle-bleached hair and brown eyes, the twenty-two-year-old English teacher had a ticket to Seattle with Elena. She’d continue on to Jersey to meet her prospective groom. She poured more milk into the potatoes. “I’m getting my dress from a store in New York. I already told Mario that.”

  Yanna swallowed a remark and turned back to her salad. She added oil, salt, pepper, and tried not to let her cynicism leak out. She should be happy for the two girls. They’d won the lottery, according to too many Russian women. American husbands. Life in the promised land. True, most women in Russia today struggled to find jobs and, when they did, pulled in less than eighty percent of the salary men did. Yanna had to be twice as good at her profession to get half the respect a man did. Still, after seeing what loving the wrong man—too many times—and living with a permanently shattered heart had done to their mother, well, Yanna wasn’t about to mess with the good thing she had going. Decent friends, a solid job, an apartment to come home to…she had more than most women could hope for.

  Besides, she had already found her true love. And, even if he never knew it, their e-mail relationship was enough for her. Actually, it was probably safer, even more rewarding her way. If he never knew how she felt, he could never reject her, could he?

  Yanna poured the salad into a glass bowl then, lifting it above her head, squeezed past skinny Katya and out into the family room. She’d set up her dining-room table, pulling it out from the wall and placing it in front of the sofa. Three chairs were set opposite the sofa, and with an end table added from her bedroom, she’d made seating for at least eight. The rearrangement left little room to maneuver, what with her shelving unit running across one end of the room and her television on the other. Khrushchev forgot to leave room for breathing when he designed the tiny single-family flats.

  The doorbell buzzed. Yanna grabbed her key from the latch by the door and peered out the peephole. Elena smiled broadly. Her teeth looked huge in the domed view.

  Yanna pulled open the inner door, then unlocked the outer door. Her fellow FSB pal Vicktor had installed the vaultlike steel barrier during the reign of a serial killer a few years back. It squealed on its hinges as it opened.

  Elena squeezed past Yanna into the narrow entry hall. She toed off her sandals, setting a bag down beside her. “Guess what I got?”

  “Your wedding dress?” Yanna closed the door.

  Elena’s face fell. “Katya, you rat!”

  “Oh, please,” Yanna said as she brushed past her sister. “I spy on people for a living. If you think I didn’t know what you were up to, you haven’t lived with me since you were a kid.”

  “Oh, I have no doubt you have my computer and my cell phone bugged, as well as listening devices planted throughout the flat and in my schoolbag.” Elena placed a kiss on her sister and scooted into the
kitchen as Yanna finished setting the table.

  Sometimes, she seemed so much like Yanna, it was difficult to believe not only their fifteen-year age difference, but that they had different fathers. Long, mink-brown hair, flashing dark eyes, a reserved smile—these things Yanna recognized of herself. But Elena’s willingness to embrace new ideas—like Internet dating—or even her belief that she could make marriage work with a man she’d never met, these were from her father, their mother’s youngest and most outspoken boyfriend. Her mother had been wildly happy with Genye, the dreamer. Until he’d been arrested for drunk driving and beaten to death in his holding cell.

  After that, something had died inside their mother, as well. About then, Yanna had graduated from college, stepped in and taken over the raising of Elena. Perhaps this was why Yanna couldn’t forgive Elena for abandoning her for a man. This, too, felt like a legacy from their mother.

  In a few days, the only thing she’d have left of Elena would be her hand-me-down jeans and one of the matching silver lockets they’d exchanged last year for Christmas.

  Katya emerged with the potatoes as the doorbell rang again. Yanna opened it to three of Elena’s group-mates from school. They charged into the flat, dumping their sandals and book bags, and turned up Valery Meladze on the stereo. Yanna felt young again as the music found her heartbeat. The bell rang a second time, and Vicktor, Roman and Sarai stood just outside the metal door. Yanna’s contingency.

  Sarai gave her a quick hug. “How are you holding up?” She had to nearly shout.

  Yanna shrugged. Although she and Sarai had only met for a summer years ago, and hadn’t seen each other until this past winter when Roman rescued Sarai from becoming a political prisoner, Yanna felt as if she had known the blond American doctor all her life. Or maybe she simply reminded Yanna of Sarai’s brother, David. Probably another good reason Yanna enjoyed having Sarai around.

  Roman handed her a bouquet of flowers. “For the bridesmaid.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek and Yanna was touched by his kindness. The Cobra captain with the tawny-brown hair and hazel-green eyes seemed so much happier with Sarai around, and the wounds he’d received in gulag had healed nicely, especially under Sarai’s care.

  Walking in right behind them, Vicktor caught her before Yanna could follow Roman and Sarai into the flat. Vicktor had an intensity about him, from his dark hair to his toned frame that scared away most women. But Yanna and, most of all, Gracie, his fiancée, knew that underneath that take-no-prisoners exterior resided a man who would give his life for his friends.

  “Gracie said she’d meet Elena in Seattle. She’s there working with a new project, so she said she could sneak away. I sent her the flight information.”

  Yanna nodded, hating the sudden prick of tears his words caused. His blue eyes softened, and he reached out and gave her a one-armed squeeze.

  “Thanks, Vita,” she said. She’d planned on asking her friend Mae—a national guard pilot who’d recently moved to Seattle—or even David to keep tabs on Elena, and the fact that Vicktor had suggested his fiancée, well, all at once Yanna felt that maybe Elena would be okay, after all.

  Yanna followed him into the family room, where everyone crammed around the table. Some merciful soul had opened the windows to her flat, and when Katya switched off the music, street traffic three stories below drifted up, adding an early evening ambience. The smell of hydrangeas and dahlias lifted from the bouquet on the table, now covered with bowls of salads, cutlets, mashed potatoes, and glasses of prune sok.

  Elena emerged from the kitchen, carrying her masterpiece, a tall Napoleon cake of thin layers and abundant cream. Yanna couldn’t help but notice how she glowed, just like a bride should. She’d pulled her dark brown hair back, and it cascaded in curls along the neckline of her sleeveless tank. With a hint of tan on her arms and nose, she looked about sixteen. Yanna could hardly believe this was what Elena really wanted. But then again, if Yanna were to look deeply, perhaps her dreams weren’t so very different. Not really.

  Someone to love her? To count on? No, that wasn’t so foreign a desire.

  Yanna picked up her glass of sok, raised it to the group. “To Katya and Elena. Cheslivaya Vechnaya!”

  “Happily ever after,” they all chorused as they touched their glasses for a toast.

  He’d never eaten deep fried frog on a stick, but David Curtiss was a patriot, and he’d do just about anything for his country.

  “Shei-shei,” he said as he took the delicacy from the vendor, fished out a New Taiwan dollar and dropped it into the vendor’s hand.

  He wondered what might leave a worse taste in his mouth, fried frog, or meeting a man who had beheaded the two undercover agents who had tried this trick before David. But if all went as planned, his culinary sacrifice would lead him to the identity of Kwan-Li, leader of the Twin Serpents, the largest organized crime syndicate in eastern Asia.

  The smells of night market were enough to turn even his iron gut to mush—body odor, eggs boiled in soy sauce, fresh fish and the redolence of oil from the nearby shipyard. Even worse, the fare offered in the busy open market sounded like something from a house of horrors menu: Grilled chicken feet, boiled snails, breaded salamander, poached pigeon eggs, and the specialty of the day—carp-head soup.

  “What did you get me into, Chet?” he whispered, wondering if Chet Stryker, his cohort for his unfortunate op, was grinning at the other end of his transmitter. “Squid or even snails, okay, but a frog?” Chet had set up this meet—and the frog signal. “Next time, you’re going to be drinking asparagus juice, buddy.” He hoped Chet’s silence meant he still had his eyes on him. David hadn’t seen his partner in the forty-five minutes he’d been walking around the market—a sign of Chet’s skill, no doubt.

  David looked at the brown and crispy frog and wondered if he was supposed to add condiments—he’d noticed a sort of ketchup and horseradish at the bar.

  A few more seconds and he’d have to take a bite. It wasn’t enough to just stand here and try to blend in with the crowd, not an easy task given that every man who brushed by him stood around chin height. Even with David’s long dyed-black hair, silk Asian shirt and designer jeans, he knew he looked like a walking American billboard. Thankfully, foreigners flocked to the novelty of night market in this part of Kaohsiung in Taiwan.

  He saw a couple of Americans stroll by, listened to their comments about the food, the smells. A short blonde, slightly pudgy, wearing a blue Taiwanese shirt and shorts set probably purchased in a local beach shop sucked on the straw of a jujube shake. Next to her, her husband was finishing off a grilled squid. Aid workers, probably. The island had a plethora of Americans working in relief and humanitarian aid agencies. Especially after the last earthquake.

  If only that shaker had dismantled Kwan’s organization. But unlike the hospitals and island utilities, organized crime kept their systems up and running without a hiccup, transporting heroin out of mainland China, and arms and munitions in, where they ended up in rogue countries like Afghanistan, or even Iran, and in the hands of rebel groups like Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, and countless crime syndicates from Thailand to Malaysia.

  But the disruption of services in Taiwan had given David what he needed to slip under Kwan’s radar and place himself on his doorstep. If he played this right, Kwan would agree to his offer of pistols, automatic rifles, rocket launchers, mortars, and the promise of a light howitzer, in exchange for 150 kilos of heroin. The exchange of weapons for drugs would accomplish two goals—intercept another shipment of heroin and trace the trail of arms.

  Most of all, David hoped to put a face to the boss of one of the largest drug and arms trafficking rings in Southeast Asia.

  Then maybe he could cut his hair, take a bath and get out of his sweaty duds and into his uniform, where he felt most comfortable.

  And he’d finally write back to Yanna, who by now probably wanted to strangle him. He’d never gone this long without corresponding and every day that passed without
hearing from her felt a little like a part of him had died.

  Sorry, Yanna.

  Perhaps, however, this time-out from their daily e-mails and instant messages had told him one thing—how much she meant to him.

  He checked his watch. Kwan’s man was late. Which meant he’d have to take a bite of froggie.

  He lifted the amphibian to his mouth.

  “Lipley?”

  He heard his alias on the lips of a small, bowed man. “I’m Ripley,” he said.

  The Asian man—David placed him at fifty—nodded once and moved past him. David ditched the frog and followed, dodging shoppers, keeping the man in his sights. “Contact,” he said softly into his transmitter. But probably Chet had already seen that.

  They left the press and smells of the market and crossed the street into the shipyards. The container yard of Kaohsiung Harbor—the third largest in the world—had been an easy place to mask their shipment of Remington M-24 Sniper rifles, Colt M-16s and Commandos, and way too many H & K MP5s. The CIA had also thrown in Smith & Wesson .45 caliber pistols. David had watched from the roof of a warehouse earlier today as Chet checked the supply with the head of CIA in Taiwan after sweeping the area beforehand. He’d heard Bruce okay the transaction, and even reiterate the agency’s agreement—and policy—to disavow should things go south. Figured.

  Then David had cleared Chet to lock the container tight and leave, alone.

  He hadn’t heard from his partner until they met over an hour ago outside the market. Until Chet had told him about the frog.

  The moan of ships moving out into the South China Sea, the smell of seaweed and oil, and the sound of seagulls calling brought David back to his last trip to Russia, only eight months ago. After helping his best friend Roman escape from a Siberian gulag, and making sure his stubborn-as-a-Russian sister, Sarai, was safe, David had accompanied Yanna to a volleyball match in Vladivostok. And afterward, they’d walked down to the wharf to watch the lights of the ships glimmer against the black sea and listen to the water lap against the massive steel hulls. Her long mink-brown hair blowing in the cold wind, and that mysterious smile on her face had nearly made him take her in his arms.