The Seven Year Itch by S D Skye Read Free Book Online Page B

outstretched.
    “Sir?” the guard called out.
    “Me?” Plotnikov replied. He was oblivious, just as J.J.
needed him to be. His reaction must be genuine if anyone from the embassy asked
about him.
    “Yes, you,” the guard said. He gripped the corner of Viktor’s
bag. “I’ll need to check this, please.”
    Plotnikov’s brow crinkled. A three-hole Jenna Jameson blow-up
sex doll? His jaw dropped.
    “That’s not mine!” Plotnikov insisted.
    “Sir, I’ll need you to come with me.”
    “But...but...” Plotnikov said.
    The officer tugged his arm at the elbow and led him outside.
The nearest security checkpoint was roughly the distance equivalent to a city
block away.
    J.J. waited in front of the neighboring tennis shoe outlet
until they passed her. Plotnikov appeared embarrassed. She glimpsed the package
in the guard’s hand. Collateral damage. She did what she needed to do. Getting
him to a safe place was more important than a few strangers believing he had a
perversion for latex dolls.
    J.J. arrived in the small holding area and found Viktor
seated and sipping on a Coke. Now, he and she could have a tête-à-tête before
Vorobyev, the embassy security officer, suspected Viktor had uttered so much as
a cordial hello to an FBI special agent. Otherwise, he’d have been scuttled
back to Moscow on the first thing smoking to spend the rest of his career
serving cabbage soup in the SVR cafeteria. That is, if he managed to avoid
Golikov’s wrath.
    “Agent McCall. An inflatable doll?” Plotnikov asked, half
humored, half annoyed. “I’m a diplomat for goodness sakes.”
    “Sorry about that. I grabbed it without paying attention.”
She occupied the seat opposite him. “The security officer is on his way to tell
Vorobyev you’ve been detained. We’ll tell him this was all a big misunderstanding
once you’re released.”
    He nodded and smiled.
    To J.J.’s surprise, they fell into easy conversation. The SVR
gave Plotnikov shit work. Stuck him in a low-level position, assumed he’d never
do any harm. But Viktor was sharp. Smarter than they gave him credit for. And
he had loyal friends in the right places. The more they conversed, the more the
deep-seated pain from his past bubbled to the surface. Plotnikov’s eyes flooded
and he crumbled with emotion.
    “My Papa,” he said, his voice trembling, “was a former KGB
Colonel who’d been falsely accused of working with the CIA and committing
treason in the 1970s. Golikov’s father orchestrated his execution, tortured
him, shot him in the back of the head with a high-caliber pistol. The
penetration so powerful it blew off his face, so I’m told.”
    J.J. gasped as she choked down her own tears. With her own mother’s
death still looming heavily on in the fabric of her life, she could relate to
the pain spilling from his eyes.
    “Dear Papa. We never got a chance to say goodbye or visit his
burial place. Golikov’s father and his thugs threw my father into an unmarked
grave, face down, so his soul would go straight to hell. Our family was
shunned, stripped of everything we owned, isolated from everyone we loved,
betrayed by everyone we trusted. From a very young age, I vowed to one day make
the KGB pay, avenge our destitution.”
    His eyes tightened with contempt. He was a Predator drone,
pre-programmed to strike in perfect time.
    “Twenty years later, the report was released. An American
mole, one of the senior FBI or CIA officers controlled by our service, passed
information that would set me on course to exact my revenge. Although, one
source was executed as a result of the intelligence, my father was exonerated,
cleared of all charges.”
    “So you decided to work for the Russian intelligence?”
    “Yes, it was still the KGB at the time, in 1993, just before
the break-up of the Soviet Union. They recruited me and a colleague from the
Foreign Language Institute, gave me a dead-end government job with a promise of
foreign travel to assuage my wounds. It was