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

“No. But there is news on that front.” He was silent for a moment, his face troubled, as if he wasn’t sure how she’d take whatever he had to tell her.

“It is bad?” she asked. “Bad news?” Her eyes widened and her breath caught in her throat. “Caterina. She is dead. That is what you do not want to tell me.”

He put his plate down on the bedside table, roughly pushing the lamp to one side. “No, that’s not it. We don’t think she’s dead.” He took the jar of pickled beets from her, placed it beside his plate and then held both her hands in his. “We think we might have a line on her,” he explained.

“A line? What is that?”

He laughed briefly at himself. “It just means... Oh, hell, it’s not something that translates easily. Literally it has to do with fishing, but figuratively it means we think we might know where she is. We’re not sure it’s even the same person, but...we think it might be.”

“We? You mean you and Princess Mara’s husband?”

“Yeah. Remember what I told you, that McKinnon was checking out your cousin for me?” She nodded. “McKinnon asked my sister, who works at his agency, to run a check on your cousin. Visas, travel records, anything and everything she could find. Keira found something else. On a totally different case. And she made the connection—easy, she says, because the name is so unusual. Caterina Mateja. Neither Caterina nor Mateja is common in the US.” He paused, and she knew he was trying to find a way to tell her something he really didn’t want to tell her. Because he knew it would hurt her.

“It is best to just say it, straight out,” she told him. “Whatever it is, I can handle it.”

He took a deep breath. “If your cousin is the Caterina Mateja that Keira tracked down, she’s still alive. But how long is anyone’s guess, because someone ordered a hit. And the going price is a million dollars.”

“Who?” Angelina whispered. “Who wants her dead?”

Alec’s face formed into grim lines. “His name is Vishenko. Aleksandrov Vishenko. McKinnon’s encountered him before, and it’s all bad. Really bad. Vishenko is the head of a branch of—”

“The Bratva,” she said, cutting him off, her eyes growing huge as she made the connection. “The Russian mob. Operating in the US and now in Zakhar. I know.”

He stared at her. “How do you know that?”

“That was why I called you today,” she told him. “To tell you I interrogated the surviving cameraman. To tell you he finally gave us names. Not only the other cameraman—a Russian, Yuri Ivanovitch—but the man who was really behind the assassination attempt on the crown prince. Another Russian. Alexei Vishenko.”

Chapter 13

“Son of a bitch!” Alec whispered under his breath. Just that quickly he saw everything plain. It all finally made sense. Incredible, unbelievable sense.

Vishenko and the Bratva, involved in trafficking Zakharian women into the United States—a highly profitable, illegal enterprise. Zakhar’s king, whose focus was on stopping it, who’d maneuvered to bring Alec in as RSO for that very reason. Vishenko wanting the king distracted. Not dead. No, not that. What had McKinnon said about Vishenko? “He’s plowed his money into legitimate enterprises... Not as profitable, but profitable enough. And completely aboveboard...”

Stable governments equaled stable economies. Stable economies equaled steady profits for legitimate businesses. So if Vishenko had money invested in legitimate enterprises here in Zakhar—which seemed likely—of course he wouldn’t want to destabilize the economy by assassinating the king. Killing the crown prince would put a bobble in the economy, true, but it wouldn’t have the same destabilizing effect as killing the king. But it would turn the king’s attention away from the human-trafficking ring. Hadn’t it already done so to a certain extent? Hadn’t Angelina told him the king had diverted focus to investigate the backgrounds of every person on the security details guarding the royal family?

Sowing suspicion within the ranks. Not exactly divide and conquer, but close enough. Alec was a student of political history, and he’d often wondered why governments never seemed to learn the harsh lessons history taught. Why it seemed as if every generation or so, the same things came to pass, and the men and women in uniform paid the price again and again. He didn’t exempt his own country from that severe judgment—the United States was often the worst offender when it came to forgetting history.

Wasn’t that one of the main reasons he and Liam had joined the Diplomatic Security Service when they got out of the Marine Corps? Because diplomacy, no matter how futile it sometimes seemed, was often better than all-out war?