Dangerous Secrets by Lisa Marie Rice Read Free Book Online Page A

Stalin’s camps, where the prisoners were used as slave labor in the gold mines. Where so many died that the road to Kolyma was called the Road of Bones. Where it was said every ounce of gold mined cost a human life. It certainly cost Katya’s.
    Nick could almost feel sorry for the poor fuck, except for the fact that in the prison camp he joined the vory v zukone , the thieves-in-law. A criminal underclass sworn to revenge against society. The vory rejected everything about society—its mores, its laws, its affections.
    After the fall of the Soviet Union, the vory roared to power, an engine that had been idling, waiting for the brakes to come off. Post–Soviet Russia was a giant that had been felled, its prone body ripe for gutting. And gut it they did.
    The Russian Mafiya exploded. In a little over a decade anda half, it had become more powerful than the state. It owned factories and railroads and telcos and oil wells. It held the power of life and death over something like two hundred million citizens. It signed contracts and treaties, with almost the dignity of a separate country.
    Powerful Vors—Mafia dons—arose from the ashes of the Soviet Union, the stuff of legend. The thieves-in-law weren’t talking, but Chechens and Azeris weren’t sworn to secrecy, and slowly intel leaked out. The greatest Vor of all was a kulturny chelovek —a man of culture. He’d been a zek, had survived the Gulag. His hands were useless, scarred beyond repair.
    There was only one possible man who fit that description, Vassily Worontzoff, a man revered inside Russia, a legend throughout the world. The writer whose Dry Your Tears in Moscow was considered one of the classic novels of the twentieth century. After the Gulag, he never wrote another word for public consumption. Many speculated why this was so, but Nick knew why. The thieves-in-law swore they would never again toil at legal work. So Worontzoff’s legend grew while he pulled the strings of an increasingly powerful Mafiya network.
    As his power and reach expanded, so did the legend. His name was spoken only in whispers on street corners. He was insulated by layers and layers of lawyers and flunkies. Few knew his real identity.
    One of them had been a Russian former Special Forces operator Nick had worked with trying to run down Khan’s nuclear network in Uzbekistan, Sergei Petrov. Brother-in-arms. Straight-up guy who was handy with his GSh-18, was a good man to have at your back and who liked his vodka just a little too much.
    They’d been on a mission in Waziristan, tracking down possible al Qaeda nests when Sergei stumbled onto a drug operation his contact in Peshawar said was run by the Russian Mafiya. Sergei had sniffed around a little, was given Worontzoff’s name, which he passed on to Nick. One more sniff, and it turned lethal. Forty minutes after giving Nick the name over a cell phone, his throat had been slashed so deeply the knife nicked Sergei’s spinal column. His penis had been sliced off and stuffed in his mouth—the universal symbol for keeping your mouth shut.
    The memory of kneeling in Sergei’s blood helped get Nick’s dick down.
    There are two ways to be a bad guy and Worontzoff covered both. You could do bad things to things or to people. Nick didn’t really give a shit about crime against property, though Worontzoff was in the hit list of top ten men doing damage to the world economy. Thanks to him, the Russian economy was starved of cash, several banks had crashed, and a couple of third world economies had gone bankrupt while their presidents for life played with their dicks and their money in Geneva.
    Bootleg gas scams, laundering billions, reselling stolen Mercedes—it was all bad stuff, sure, but Nick could live with it. What he couldn’t live with—what he’d dedicated his life to fighting—was people being hurt.
    As far as Nick could tell from the file, Worontzoff had gone into prison camp a writer and had come out a monster. Over the