Second Chances (Athena Group Novel Book 1) (18 page)

Patricia was sitting at the desk waiting on Douglas. He was in the back with Natasha Sokolov. She had arrived that morning to talk to him about Aleksei Yakov. Aleksei was Douglas’ boss in Russia. She didn’t know what the connection was now, but she didn’t care as long as it didn’t interfere with her getting paid. She had been sent in to infiltrate his operation, but it didn’t take long for her to get caught up in the business.

These girls were coming to America for a better life. They just had to pay a small price before they were able to continue on to living in the land of the free. All she had to do was turn a blind eye to what was really happening and she'd made more in one year than she would have her entire lifetime at the bureau. She would be able to retire whenever she wanted to. 

She was getting impatient with them though. Douglas was supposed to finish up with Natasha so they could move forward with their next shipment. When Douglas had first spotted Ivan several nights before in the club he was sure that he wouldn’t live to see the next day. But nothing had happened and now Natasha was here.

She strained to listen as Douglas and Natasha talked in the back room. She heard a thud on the floor and got up to go check on him, but didn’t have a chance before Natasha walked out. Patricia would never be able to hear, speak or breathe again.

###

Shelby watched in horror as Natasha walked up to Patricia and shot her point blank in the head.

“Jo, she just shot Patricia and I’m guessing Oleg is probably in the hidden room. You need to get out of there. She is coming your way.” Shelby yelled!

They watched as John motioned for Max and Ross to retreat, but as they were backing out Ivan Petrovsky walked in. Tabby broke away from Jo as she was backing out of the rear entrance and ran towards Ivan as he entered the lounge.

“Tabby! Abort! Now” Liz demanded.

Tabby crouched and dove towards him and fired her Sig at Petrovsky. She saw something roll from his hand just as a loud explosion ripped through the club and the screens went black.

Liz screamed at the monitors, “NO!”

Shelby’s blood ran cold. She had never seen Liz lose her control. The screens had all gone dark which meant only one thing. A bomb had gone off in the building. Shelby turned to her console and tried pulling up the camera from the parking lot across the back alley. It was still on, but the screen had snow across it. She could make out the building and some movement, but she couldn’t tell what the movement was from and by whom.

Liz’s phone was ringing and Shelby picked it up. “Hello?” She answered and put the call on speaker.

“Shelby? It’s John, where’s Liz?” His voice was rough.

“I’m here, what happened?” she said a little too harsh.

“As we were backing out of the club, Ivan walked into the lounge and threw an MK3 grenade. Natasha was coming out of the office when he threw the grenade and Tabby was able to get a few shots off at him before he threw the explosive. If Shelby hadn’t told us about Natasha we would have been in that blast. As it is we are just scraped and fairly pissed off.” He bit out. “Actually Tabby is more than fairly pissed off.”

“I can only imagine. Put her on the phone.” Liz told him.

“Hey Liz, that mother fucker got away. Oh hell no! Liz, please don’t tell me to walk away from this.” She yelled.

“Tabby, I’m not going to tell you to walk away. But I'm going to tell you that in all good time. You get my meaning, right?” Liz asked her.

There was a long pause of silence before she relented. “Yes Liz I do.”

“Good. We'll talk about you disobeying orders later. Now, let me talk to Jo.” She told her.

“Liz, she is pissed, but we all seem to be alright. I think everyone’s just shaken that we didn’t see this one.” She told Liz.

“We should have taken the sighting of Petrovsky a little more serious. Natasha is never far behind Petrovsky whenever he has a job to do. But we can discuss him when we do our debriefing later. I’m glad that everyone is alright. Finish up there and call us if you need anything.” She murmured and hung up the phone. Liz paused for a moment to get her bearings around her. She stood straight and let out a deep breath. “Shelby, I’m going back to my office, if anything else develops, please call me as soon as possible.”

“Of course I will Liz.” She told her as she watched her walk out of the office.

Shelby sank down into her chair and bowed her head into her hands. She looked at her phone hoping that Max would call. She didn’t want to think about what would have if they hadn't been a part of this operation. They would have walked right into the grenade and just like that they would have been gone. Max had been within feet of being blown up. The one man who made her feel alive. He had brought her body to life and made her step out of her comfort zone on so many occasions. He allowed her to be spontaneous. Now she had to move forward and what was she going to do without him in her life? She didn’t want to think about it.

She switched all of the monitors back to Rogers’s businesses and homes. She pulled the virus up on the main screen and just sat there watching it as it worked its way through the network.

Chapter Twenty Four

Several days later they were all gathered around the conference room outside of Liz’s office. In front of them were several files, photos and the thumb drives that Shelby had processed. She pulled up photos of Natasha Sokolov.

Shelby began. “Natasha is twenty nine years old and grew up in the Ukraine. She previously worked for the Federal Security Services in Russia. That was before she decided to go rogue and work for the highest bidder. It would appear that honor now belongs to Aleksei Yakov.” She pulled up additional photos.  “Natasha is now one of his assassins. We thought Ivan Petrovsky was the assassin, but it appears that he is something altogether different.” She paused.

Liz asked. “What do you mean?”

“We know Ivan Petrovsky as an assassin and an eraser. He has been making people disappear for many years, but he has been tailing Aleksei Yakov.” She paused.

Tabby interjected. “What else do we know about Petrovsky?”

“From what I can gather by tracking his activity over the past year he doesn't work for Aleksei. Who he works for is something I’m trying to figure out. Every time he shows up it’s usually to cover up an incident. My gut instinct is that he works for the SVR Foreign Intelligence Agency.” Shelby paused. “If he’s not SVR Foreign Intelligence, then he’s a Spetznas MVD. I’d bet my life on it. There’s a unit of the Spetznas that it is almost impossible to obtain information on them.” She stopped. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service is responsible for intelligence and espionage activities outside of the Russian Federation. The Spetznas are the special forces for the Russian military.

Alex spoke. “Do we have any information on Aleksei?”

“Aleksei has been elusive to say the least. There are no pictures of him anywhere.” Shelby told her.

“So why would Petrovsky cover up for Aleksei if he works for the SVR?” Alex asked.

“I believe that he was there to retrieve Natasha and to cover up anything she may have done. After spotting him in the club the other night we should have known that Natasha was in the area. He would retrieve her and put Douglas Oleg out of business.” Liz said.

“Right. Oleg has been a thorn in their side ever since he left four years ago. He was the reason that one of Aleksei’s men was arrested and clearly he wasn't going to go underground as they had hoped. So they sent someone to get rid of him and Petrovsky was there to intervene. Natasha just happened to get there first.” Shelby said.

“Do we have any additional information on the girls in the files that Jo was able to retrieve?” Alex asked.

“As of right now, I haven't been able to locate them. It’s like they don’t exist. I ran their information through the databases with no hits, and without pictures I can’t run their images through the facial recognition software. I'll go through the thumb drives and extract each one into a photo still that will allow me to scan for those images, but that will take some time.” Shelby said.

“Ok, Shelby get started on that and let us know as soon as you have anything.” Liz told her.

“Certainly” Shelby gathered all of the information and started shutting down the multimedia equipment.

“Tabby, I want to see you in my office.” Liz spoke before turning to Shelby. “Are you alright? I know you haven’t been feeling well, and I don’t want you making yourself sick. Please take care of yourself. You don’t need to work into the middle of the night and early into the morning to try to solve this. It'll still be there in the morning.” Liz looked her over.

“I’m fine Liz, really. Just an upset stomach, and it’s probably a bug of some kind.” She told her.

“Alright” Liz turned and walked out. Tabby followed her. Jo and Alex were looking at her.

“What?” she asked them.

“Oh. Nothing” They both just grinned at her. She gathered all files and walked out. Walking into her office, she laid the files onto her desk. No matter what she did or how long she worked, her thoughts of Max always seeped into her days. At night, he tormented her in her dreams. She wanted to call him, but she figured if he wanted to talk to her, he would have called. He had called the night that he left, but she hadn't been ready talk to him. What if that had been her only chance? She couldn’t think about that right now. She had plenty to occupy her at the moment.

She pulled up the information from the first thumb drive that Jo had retrieved and began to extract the images from the file into individual pictures. She had a total of twenty three images. She scanned the faces into the facial recognition program and began the scanning. Who were these lonely looking faces?

She spent the next six hours going through each thumb drive extracting images and feeding them in to be scanned. She rubbed the back of her neck and realized how tired she was. Her back had ceased to hurt several hours ago, and her stomach decided she was never going to eat again. She got up and closed up the console. The programs would work over the next several hours and send her a notification if it came upon a match. She went upstairs to try to get some rest. A nice long hot bath might be a good thing too.

She walked into her apartment, and Amanda was lying on the couch watching TV. “Hey Manda.” She sat down next to her daughter. Amanda paused the show she was watching.

“Hey Mom. You're working late.”

“Yeah, I got caught up in doing some research.” She hugged Amanda and got up to go into the kitchen. “I have a sudden craving for ice cream.” She called out to her daughter. Amanda came bounding into the kitchen.

“We have everything we need to make sundaes.” Amanda chimed as she opened the freezer and pulled the ice cream out. She pulled out the whip cream, chocolate syrup and cherries, while Shelby got the nuts out of the pantry.

Shelby took the whip cream can. “Manda turn around and open your mouth.” Her daughter turned and looked at her with suspicion. When she saw the can, she opened her mouth and Shelby squirted whip cream into it. She couldn’t help but laugh at her. She hadn’t done that since Amanda had been little. Then she squirted it into her mouth, and they couldn’t help but let out the giggles. No matter how tired she was Amanda could always lift her spirits. They finished up their sundaes and cleaned up the kitchen.

Amanda went off to bed, and Shelby decided it was time for her long hot bath. She went into her bedroom and took off her clothes. She walked into the bathroom and started running the water into the tub. She sprinkled some bath salts into the water. Lighting candles around the bathroom, she turned the lights off. Pulling her hair up into a clip, she sank into the warm water resting her head on the back of the tub she was able to relax and let the scent of peppermint and vanilla swirl around her. The warmth seeping into her made her think of Max. She closed her eyes and enjoyed the warm feeling.

Chapter Twenty Five

A month had gone by since the explosion at The Entropic Club and she still hadn't heard from Max. Liz had told her that they were able to find more evidence despite the explosion. They found Douglas Oleg and Patricia Young’s bodies inside the club. Douglas had been shot in the head execution style just like Patricia. There was no sign that Natasha or Ivan had even been there. They were still not sure where they had escaped too.

Shelby decided to track down and figure out what Roger had been using the $25,000 for each month. Her virus was working its way through his network and as long as there were no problems there she could concentrate on the money trail. She pulled up the information that she retrieved from Oleg’s thumb drives. There was a list of names and dates. The names didn’t mean anything to her so she fed them into their database. There were a few hits. The girls appeared to be inpats from other countries working for Hawk Enterprises. She looked into his corporations but didn't see any records for any of the women in his global employment services. All the girls were the same age and she had a sinking feeling.

Corporations all over the world contracted with different companies to provide expat/inpat services. These services allow foreign nationals to live in another country for a period of time and work. For all intents and purposes Hawk wanted it to look like these girls were inpats, but there was no paper trail. For tax purposes there must be extensive documentation of all expatriate services.