Alec's Royal Assignment (Man on a Mission 3)

She forced understanding onto her face, nodding as if she believed him. “And yet, Mr. Tabor, I think perhaps you know more than you are saying—not that I think you are lying. No, not that. Not you. But sometimes we may hear things that do not make sense to us...until the right question is asked. Is that not true?”

Obviously mollified that Angelina had admitted he wasn’t lying, he agreed, although reluctantly. “Yes, that is true sometimes.”

“Then will you just bear with me as I ask my questions?” She put a little submissiveness into her voice, playing up to him, and indicated her list attached to a clipboard, as if she—a mere woman—was just following orders.

After a moment, he nodded slowly. “Ask your questions, Miss Mateja. I know nothing more than I have said, but...ask your questions.”

“Thank you.” She smiled gently. “First, Mr. Tabor, will you tell me in your own words how a man like you came to be involved? Someone must have approached you. It could not have been Prince Nikolai—he is in prison.” She wasn’t about to reveal that Prince Nikolai was dead...under suspicious circumstances. She didn’t want to alarm this man.

“It was Tcholek. Sasha Tcholek. He...”

Angelina looked up from her clipboard. “Yes?”

Boris Tabor licked his dry lips. “May I have a glass of water?”

“Of course.” She got up from her chair, deliberately leaving her clipboard on the table, and walked out. While Captain Zale fetched a pitcher of water and a glass, she stood silently with Majors Kostya and Branko, watching as Boris Tabor quickly, furtively, read the questions on her list. It was a made-up list of innocuous questions, not the questions she intended to ask. But he would not know that until it was too late.

When Captain Zale returned with the water, Angelina took the pitcher and the glass from him, waited for him to open the door for her and backed into the room. “Here you are, Mr. Tabor,” she said, placing the glass on the table and serving him from the pitcher rather than letting him do it himself, putting herself into a subservient role. As he drank, she reseated herself at the table.

“Sasha Tcholek,” she prompted, making a meaningless notation on her clipboard, as if she was ticking off another question.

“I have said this before. Many times.”

“Humor me?” She smiled at him. “I do not want to be reprimanded for not asking my list of questions.”

He sighed deeply but did as she asked. “Tcholek supplied the badges and the guns. He even told us where to secret the guns in the cathedral, and he is the one who retrieved them for us. He said Prince Nikolai would pay a fortune to be revenged on his cousin.”

When he stopped, Angelina raised her eyebrows, innocently curious. “A fortune?”

“Yes,” he said curtly. “A fortune.” He didn’t say anything more, and Angelina waited patiently. Finally he added in a rough voice, “I...I lost my job two years ago. I could not find another.”

“And a man has his pride,” she said softly, nodding her comprehension of the quandary he’d been in. “You could not take charity, not a man like you.”

“Yes,” he agreed quickly. “I am glad you understand.”

A half hour came and went. Then an hour. And still they danced around and around the edges of knowledge. After establishing a rapport, with Boris Tabor seemingly in command, Angelina finally asked, “Tell me about the other man. He was not a professional cameraman like you, yes?” Admiration was in her voice, as if she was impressed by his former job as a professional cameraman in the television industry.

“He was not,” Tabor said with a little huff of superiority. “I had to show him what to do. How to handle the camera. Something as simple as panning in and out, how to control the steering ring, how to lock the wheels—everything! He knew nothing about television cameras. He did not even know how to turn one on!”

“If he was not a cameraman, then what was he? What was his profession?”

Tabor hesitated. “He never said.”

“But a smart man like you...you guessed. Yes?”

“He and Tcholek talked together alone sometimes, you understand. Almost in whispers. I did not always hear them.”

“But you knew.”

“I...suspected. I did not know.”

Angelina propped an elbow on the table and leaned her chin on her hand, as if the story fascinated her. “What did you suspect?”

The long silence that followed Angelina’s question was finally broken when Boris Tabor admitted, “Some kind of criminal activity. Drugs, perhaps. Perhaps women. I did not really want to know.”