Chasing the White Lion by James Hannibal (best free e book reader .TXT) 📗

to answer, but Darcy cut him off, squeezing between his knees and the table to take the window seat. “Russian hotels do not meet Valkyrie’s standards.” She sat down and breathed on the window, drawing shapes in the fog.

“What she means is, Val had a previous engagement.”

Darcy joined a pair of circles to a triangle. “But our Val has a lot of these previous engagements, yes?”

Valkyrie, the team’s grifter, had missed several of Tyler’s outings, and the darkness in Darcy’s tone told Talia it had become a sticking point. To be fair, Talia had missed a lot as well. Her promotion to the Russian Operations desk in the Directorate’s Russian Eastern European Division—REED for short—had come with a mountain of new work and plenty of travel.

In Talia’s first six months, Mary Jordan had sent her out on no less than eight high-visibility assignments—Estonia, Siberia, Rostov, Kirov. Tyler’s little off-the-books charity projects, like undercutting a corrupt banker in Zambia or removing a drug lord from the Chilean parliament, had taken a back seat to Talia’s day job.

“So,” Finn said. “Oleg got the drop on you. Do all CIA officers take such a slapdash and devil-may-care approach to the job?”

“I didn’t need rescuing.” Talia felt a snide remark brimming on Tyler’s lips and shifted her glare his way, cutting him off with a preemptive denial. “I didn’t.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“And I don’t need babysitting.”

“Of course you don’t. I never thought you did. Volgograd was an anomaly, an intersection of operations. It was a onetime thing.”

“Except for Moscow,” Finn said. “Don’t forget Moscow.”

“And what about Minsk?” Darcy had fogged up the window again and was drawing what Talia took to be a dollhouse blowing apart. “Talia was in the embassy across from our hotel, yes?”

Tyler pulled a finger across his throat in the international Please shut up sign. “Thank you, Darcy. Thank you very much.” He tilted his head, motioning for Talia to join him in the next set of seats.

As Talia followed, Darcy raised her drawing finger. “And Vladivostok. Was not Talia the woman you were watching at the port authority building in Vladivostok?”

“Yes,” Tyler said without looking back. “Yes she was. Again, thank you. So helpful.”

When they came to the rear table, he stepped aside and offered Talia the forward-facing chair, a thoughtful gesture implying he knew she always preferred to face forward while flying. Yet somehow it irked her. Tyler knew so much about her. Too much.

Before they’d met on Talia’s first mission for the CIA, Tyler had spent fifteen years watching her from the shadows. A guardian angel. Except this guardian angel had assassinated her father. She’d forgiven him, and with his help, she had returned to the God her father loved. But those fifteen years of watching made her uneasy. Now it seemed he hadn’t given up the habit.

Talia crossed her arms. “Shouldn’t you be flying the plane?”

“Over Mac’s dead body. I’m a hobbyist. He’s a professional. I know when to step back.”

“Do you?”

A spark in his green eyes acknowledged he had walked right into that one. “Okay, so I picked a few jobs with locations near your assignments. Let’s call it operational overlap. Can you blame me?”

She let her hard stare do the talking.

“I get it. You’re trying to leave the past behind, and that’s good. But the fact is, your past is still a big part of your present.”

The two had covered the same ground time and again. Tyler and Frank Brennan, Talia’s first section chief at the Agency, believed a spy known as Archangel had ordered her father’s death nearly sixteen years earlier. And they believed this spy was still haunting the CIA. But Tyler had no more proof than a cryptic name on a fifteen-year-old slip of paper.

Talia wanted—needed—Archangel to be a figment of the past so she could put her father’s death and Tyler’s part in it behind her. She tried pushing the conversation in a different direction. “Let’s talk about how you lied to me a moment ago. You said Volgograd was an intersection of operations when you know full well you were just shadowing me.”

“You’re wrong. I didn’t lie.”

Up to that point, the exchange had been something of a tennis match. Despite Talia’s attempts at gravity, Tyler had been playing a game. The quiet court jester who could kill you but probably won’t thing was part of his DNA. Talia had gotten used to it. But in that instant, the commander inside him took full control, like someone had flipped a switch.

Tyler laid his hands on the table. “We knew Oleg was on to you, Talia. That’s why I brought the team to Volgograd. That’s why Finn and I were in the bar.” He lowered his chin, keeping those green eyes locked on hers. “Someone at the Agency sold you out.”

CHAPTER

SIX

GULFSTREAM 650

SOUTHERN RUSSIA

THIRTY-SEVEN THOUSAND FEET

TALIAKNEWHERATTEMPT to turn Oleg had gone horribly wrong, but Tyler had jumped to an extreme conclusion. “You’re overreacting. Oleg was vermin, but he was connected. Maybe one of those connections broke through the curtain.”

“You’re not listening. We knew Oleg broke through the curtain.”

He let the statement hang. Talia had learned the same technique at the Farm. Create unacceptable silence. Force the target to engage. Was Tyler aware he was working her like a mark? “Okay. I’ll bite. How did you know?”

“Livingston Boyd.”

“The young investment mogul whose penthouse we broke into before the Gryphon heist?”

“Correct.”

Dozens of constellations sparkled in the panoramic window beside the table, so high above the Russian cloud deck. A million lights, all fixed in place no matter how fast the Gulfstream flew—as inescapable as her past.

Tyler pressed on with his explanation. “We broke into Boyd’s London penthouse to catch up with Finn on the Fabergé carriage job, but I had an ulterior purpose. I had Finn steal a thumb drive from Boyd’s desk.”

“The thumb drive I found in your laptop,” she said, turning her gaze to the panoramic view, “with the list of buyers for Ivanov’s hypersonic missiles.”

“Correct. Boyd isn’t