Hazardous Duty (Presidential Agent 8)

“What did the guy she married have that you didn’t?”

“Evgeny Alekseev was an SVR polkovnik.”

“A what?”

“A colonel in the SVR, which is sort of like your Department of Homeland Security.”

“I know what the SVR is,” Agrafina said. “So you’re confessing that you’re not really the coach of the Greater Sverdlovsk Table Tennis Association?”

“I was going to get to that, my precious,” Murov said. “I want no secrets between us. I am General Sergei Murov of the SVR. At the time my beloved Svetlana married Evgeny Alekseev, I was a junior captain. He was a colonel, and she was a lieutenant colonel, so what chance did a lowly junior captain have?”

“Wait just a minute! I find this insulting, Sergei. You’re telling me I bear a remarkable resemblance to some short-haired two-hundred-and-fifty-pound female with stainless steel teeth?”

“I’m saying you bear a remarkable resemblance to an astonishingly beautiful female.”

“I thought you said she was an SVR lieutenant colonel?”

“She is. Or was when she married Evgeny. Oh, I see where you’re coming from. Let us say that my beloved Svetlana is the rare exception to that rule vis-à-vis female SVR lieutenant colonels.”

“Well, if you put it that way, Sergei, darling. So, what happened to her after she married Colonel Whatsisname?”

“The marriage didn’t last long, and then she defected. Evgeny chased her to Argentina, where he got himself whacked by some Irish cop.”

“So she’s a widow?”

“Yes, she is. The Widow Alekseeva. That’s what I’m really doing here, my love. I’m supposed to get my darling Svetlana, her brother, former SVR Polkovnik Dmitri Berezovsky, and this goddamned American, Colonel C. G. Castillo, onto an airplane and fly them to Moscow.”

“I have to tell you, my darling, that I’m tempted to break both your legs for profanely referring to an American officer like that, but my female curiosity seems to have overwhelmed me. Why do you want to take these people to Moscow?”

“Well, I think Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin wants to start by turning them into ice statues.”

“You want to help Putin turn them into ice statues? How’s he going to do that?”

General Murov explained the process to her.

“I’m shocked,” Agrafina said, “as I got the distinct impression you still have feelings about this lady.”

“Yes, my love, I do. Not as much, of course, as I did before you came into my life, my precious. But I will love her to my dying day—or hers, whichever comes first—and the thought of turning her into an ice statue, immediately before—or immediately after, whichever comes first—she marries is giving me a good deal of personal pain.”

“Who is she going to marry?”

“The godd— the American gentleman.”

“At the Grand Cozumel Beach and Golf Resort, down the beach?”

“Yes. But how could you possibly know that?”

“They told me when I was there earlier.”

She handed him the liter bottle of Stolichnaya.

“Tell me, Sergei, are we to be just two ships that passed in the night, or would you like to see how this relationship develops?”

“I realized about an hour or so ago, my precious, that I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

“Well, there are several problems that I can see with that. Starting with I have my career to think of.”

“I can understand that.”