Spy Games

Spy Games

Chapter 10

Monaco. Fifteen years later.

It was one of those damn formal costume balls the European elite still thought were fashionable. Not that I minded. Hiding behind a mask made it all that more unlikely security would discover my invitation was a forgery.

While The Company had known of Alek Popov for many years, the Russian politician's recent contacts with organized crime had brought him to the top of the "watch list". When a reliable source indicated that crashing the party would give us an opportunity to look inside his personal safe, my partner and I were selected for the assignment.

For the sake of clarity, let's call my partner "Foxtrot" and me "Alpha". Yes, we had real names. But even though Foxtrot and I had been friends since childhood, we hadn't called each other by our given names for years. Why? Because names can be traced to family. Something we did not want to happen in our line of work.

Our intel wasn't as good as I would have liked, but the gain was supposedly worth the extra risk. Our contact was described as "the woman of the house". We didn't have a name or a picture but assumed she would either be Natasha, Popov's second wife, or Kira, the daughter of his first ... both of whom were supposed to be at the party.

My money was on Kira, the daughter. My first view of the twenty something young lady was from the back. Platinum blonde hair piled high atop her head exposed a long neck and completely bare back, unblemished by tan lines. Thigh high slits on both sides of her skirt displayed runway model worthy legs with each step she took.

I followed her up a staircase from a distance. She stopped on a balcony which overlooked the grand ball room to speak to a friend. I continued some thirty feet past her, pausing at one of many bars set up for the guests. After ordering a Vodka Collins, I casually turned towards her last known position only to find ocean blue eyes looking directly at me from behind a silver mask. She continued to stare for several seconds before temporarily returning her attention to the person she was with.

Only when her eyes left mine did I allow my gaze to take in the rest of her beauty. High cheek bones, pouty lips and a perfect complexion belonged on the cover of Vogue. Her gown's neckline plunged to the belly button ... the remaining material barely covered a medium sized bust. When she broke off her conversation and walked towards me, I marveled at how the inadequate dress managed to contain her unrestrained breasts.

"I'm bored," she said to me in Russian while taking my drink from my hand.

She looked me over, took a sip of my vodka and motioned to a staircase at the far end of the balcony. "Fifteen minutes. Top of the stairs. Third room on the right. Make sure nobody sees you."

She walked away, taking my drink with her.

"You have got to be shitting me." Foxtrot's voice in my earpiece didn't sound happy. "I'm freezing my ass off out here and you're going to get laid ... again."

The two of us had been doing this for over a decade. I was the inside man. He was my backup. I infiltrated some of the most secure buildings in the world while he rested on a nearby hilltop with a sniper rifle. Sure, it was twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit outside and threatening to snow, but if he wanted to be the guy wearing a tux in a warm room, he should have learned Russian.

"Not necessarily," I answered into my cufflink. "If she's our contact, she just told me where the safe is. Good chance she won't even be there."

"Yeah, right. When was the last time a woman invited you to her bedroom and didn't show? Let me guess ... how about never."

"Are you saying she's the wrong woman? Should I hang out here for a while longer and wait for the wife? So far, I haven't seen her or her husband."

"No," he answered. "Go grab the bird in hand. But do me a favor, when you screw her, leave your mask on. I want to see what I'm missing."

Besides being a crack shot, Foxtrot was also the master of gadgets. My mask not only included a radio receiver, but he had somehow managed to incorporate a miniature video camera which was assessable on his cell phone. He claimed it was for my safety however -- if his hunch about Miss Kira Popov's intentions were correct -- this wouldn't be the first time his electronic wizardry gave him a voyeuristic view of my bedroom activities.

I waited another twenty minutes. When neither Alek Popov nor his wife made an appearance, I snuck up the stairs and let myself into the third door on the right.

"I'm not used to waiting," a familiar voice said from the darkened room.

"Good things come to those that do."

"I'll be the judge of how good you are."

I closed the door behind me and flipped on the lights to reveal my target for the night. No, not the blonde stretched seductively on the bed. I was referring to the wall safe not five feet behind her. It looked like I would have to pillage Miss Popov before I did the same to the safe.

"I've got movement out here," Foxtrot said. "Three vehicles coming up the road towards your location. Looks like two SUVs escorting a limo. I'm guessing Popov is finally coming to his own party. You might want to hurry things up a bit."

Some people will say seduction is an art and not a science. There is no two, three or twelve step process that will consistently remove a woman's clothes and inhibitions. The same could be said for cracking safes. I respectfully disagree. Given the right tools and sufficient time, I believe a properly trained and equipped man could gain access to all but the most obstinate women and safes. In this particular case, I had the tools and the training, but didn't have a lot of time. Still, I didn't foresee much of a challenge from either the woman or safe in front of me.

"They're pulling through the gate," Foxtrot said as I dropped Miss Popov's dress to the floor.

Decision time. Do I give Miss Popov a quick poke and make my escape, or do I bind and gag her and crack the safe?

I was just about to stuff her panties into her mouth when I thought of a third option. Without any pretense of foreplay, I lifted the thin woman off the bed and carried her towards the safe. While she gave me the Russian version of "what the fuck are you doing" I pinned her against the wall and silenced her protests with a forceful kiss. Her legs naturally wrapped around my waist as her tongue battled mine.

"They're getting out of the car. It's definitely Popov. And a shit load of bodyguards."

I needed both hands to do what I had in mind, so I planted my pole at the entrance to her furrow, let go of her ass and let gravity take over.

"No, it's too big." Her legs tightened around my waist and her arms pulled against my neck in a desperate attempt to keep from descending further down my length.

"You can't imagine how tired I get of hearing women tell you that," Foxtrot whispered into my headset. "But if you don't get your ass out of there, like right now, I may never hear it again."

A mass of blonde hair obscured my view of the safe. I thrust upwards with my hips which forced Miss Popov down the few inches I needed to see what I was doing.

"What the hell are you doing to that girl? I could hear her scream out here."

It was a three-number combination lock. One of the easiest safes in the world to crack ... if you had plenty of time ... and somebody wasn't constantly talking into your ear ... and you didn't have a hundred-twenty-pound blonde bouncing on your cock.

I tuned out all the external distractions and got to work. I twisted the dial three turns left until I felt the first tumbler fall into place at 35. Two turns to the right landed on 24. A turn and a half back to the left stopped at 36 and a satisfying click. I twisted the handle, pulled the safe door open and reached in to find ... absolutely nothing. No secret documents. No falsified passports. Not even a random piece of jewelry.

Shit.

By the time I realized we were in the wrong place, Miss Popov's constant barrage of "nyet, nyet, nyet" had changed to "da, da, da." I closed the safe as she continued to pleasure herself on my cock and was just about to unplug when I heard the door open.

With Miss Popov still attached, I spun around to find a middle-aged woman in a maid's uniform standing in the open doorway. She did not seem a bit surprised to see the mistress of the house impaled on a stranger's dick.

"Your father is downstairs," she said in Russian. "He would like to see you."

"Thank you, Margarite," Miss Popov answered while continuing to ride my erection. "Tell him I'm freshening my makeup and will be down in a few minutes."

Margarite nodded, gave me a look of disgust and left.

Knowing that Popov wasn't about to burst through the door at any minute, I relished the idea of keeping one of the most formidable men in the Russian mafia waiting. I dumped his daughter on the bed, raised her ankles to my shoulders and guided her through two small and one extremely powerful orgasm.

At her suggestion, I used a servant's elevator to return to the main level, where I collected my topcoat and joined a few other guests who were leaving the party early. The added security seemed intent on keeping unwanted people from entering the building but didn't give me a second look as I strolled out the gate.

"Turn right and go about a half mile. I'll meet you at the overlook," Foxtrot said into my earpiece.

The temperature was still dropping, and my shoes weren't made for cross country hikes. But I wasn't about to complain considering Foxtrot had just spent the last two hours on an exposed hill listening to me bone the luscious Miss Popov. So, I shoved my hands into the warm coat pockets and wondered what went wrong as I walked.

Nothing came to me during the ten minutes it took to stroll the cliffside road. We followed our instructions. I contacted the woman of the house. I opened the safe. And yet I had nothing to show for our efforts. Yes, it was a hastily organized operation based on questionable intelligence. But Control rarely sent his agents after wild geese. Was I missing something?

I slid into the passenger seat of our getaway car, glad to get back into a warm place. Foxtrot immediately pulled away, wanting to put as much distance between us and Popov as possible. As I struggled to get out of my heavy overcoat, I discovered a small piece of paper in a breast pocket.

I laughed out loud when I read the hand scrawled note. "Wrong woman. Wrong safe. Will send more instructions later."

***

Six weeks later:

Foxtrot and I were drinking beer on the fantail of a rusty cargo ship in the South China Sea. We were waiting for the opportunity to take out a notoriously nasty terrorist, when we got word that a higher priority mission had come up. Less than twenty-four hours later, we're freezing our asses off in the back of a commercial cargo aircraft.

Our less than stellar source of intelligence on Alek Popov now said that the documents we failed to get from his house on the Mediterranean would be ripe for the picking in his Western Russian dacha, but only for one night.

I'm convinced that Foxtrot and I weren't the only two operatives in the Company that could have pulled off the mission, but Control (the leader of The Company) thought otherwise ... or he thought this was an appropriate punishment for screwing it up the first time.

Regardless, we're in the ass end of a German registered cargo jet, thirty-thousand feet in the air, with the back door open. No, we didn't fly all the way from the Philippines to Russia in negative thirty-degree conditions, but once we got close to the drop zone, they had to depressurize the cargo compartment so we could jump out. Parachuting was the only way to get there in time without being noticed. There was a runway not ten miles from Popov's billion Ruble vacation home, but only authorized aircraft were allowed to use it.

"Five minutes to the drop zone," the pilot told me via my headset.

"Weather on the surface?" I asked.

"A balmy fifteen Fahrenheit."

"Cloud cover?"

"Several broken layers below twenty thousand. Nobody on the ground will be able to see you until you get below the three-thousand-foot ceiling."

"Any other air traffic in the area?"

"There're several airliners above us and a couple of targets in the local traffic pattern. The fast movers are obviously not a factor, and the guys below are all too far away to either identify you or present a collision concern."

"Looks like it's a go. Give me a one-minute warning and then turn on the green light over the release point."

Foxtrot and I rechecked each other's parachutes, equipment packs and oxygen tanks. Due to the extreme cold, every inch of our bodies was covered with at least two layers of insulation. Even with the added padding, jumping out of an airplane doing well over three hundred knots was going to hurt.

"One minute," the pilot said.

I gave Foxtrot a thumbs up. He flipped me the bird. We duck walked to the edge of the cargo plane's lowered rear ramp and, when the red light changed to green, dove headfirst into enemy territory.

We were doing a HALO jump ... High Altitude, Low Opening. To mingle with the commercial traffic overflying Russian airspace, we deployed at 30,000 feet ... the lower end of where most airliners cruised. To avoid other aircraft or people on the ground seeing our parachutes as we descended, we would wait until the last second to open them. Which meant we would free fall for nearly three minutes.

I took a couple of tumbles when first exiting as I fought the wake of the airplane. Once stable in the freefall position -- arms spread, knees bent -- I looked for Foxtrot. He should have been no more than a few yards from me but, looking left, right and above, he was nowhere to be seen.

Impossible, I thought. We both jumped at the same time. Where the hell could he have gone to?

Unless he didn't jump.

No way. I saw him exit the airplane.

Did he get tangled up in something? Like a loose tie-down strap hanging from the ramp?

Shit. If he's dangling by his feet at thirty thousand, he'll be dead in less than a minute.

My thoughts were bouncing between how to break the dreadful news to his parents and what I'd say at his memorial service when something tugged at my leg. I flipped over onto my back to see Foxtrot's ugly mug laughing at me. He was perfectly positioned a foot above and two feet behind me ... the only place I couldn't see from the normal freefall position.

Resisting the urge to kick him in the nuts, I pointed down, indicating that I should increase my descent rate. It was okay to screw around when we were in the clear, but once we descended into the clouds, we wanted some separation so we wouldn't run into each other. He gave me a thumbs up. I rolled once again, laid my arms against my sides, pointed my head down and accelerated away from my practical joking teammate.

I was a good hundred feet lower than Foxtrot by the time we entered the first cloud layer. The near zero visibility was good for stealth but crap for navigation. Our drop zone was a medium sized hopefully deserted, meadow located a couple of miles from Popov's dacha. I was a good enough sky diver to consistently hit a two-acre field ... when I could see it. But, due to the multiple layers of clouds, I relied on a small GPS screen, mounted on my forearm, to guide me to the meadow.

There were several ways this could go. If the pilot had positioned his airplane over the correct point and turned on the green "jump" light at the right time, I would end up smack dab in the middle of the drop zone without having to move a muscle. That was the best-case scenario ... which damn near never happened.

Next best case was being just a few hundred yards off course, something I could easily fix on the way down by simply pointing my body towards the DZ and lowering my head to get some forward speed.

If I was a mile or two off target, I would have to open my chute early and use the increased forward speed of the modified canopy to glide to the DZ. Two things wrong with that. It left me exposed to prying eyes in the air and on the ground plus, it was damn cold in those clouds. I certainly didn't relish a ten- or fifteen-minute descent through ice clouds.

And the last possibility, if the pilot really screwed up or wanted me dead, he would drop me in the wrong country.

Not sure if it was luck or skill, but when I glanced down at my GPS, my blue position dot was nearly on top of the green target square. I wouldn't hit the meadow dead center, but I wouldn't end up in the trees either.

I popped out of the clouds a couple of thousand feet above the ground with the meadow right below me. My instinct was to immediately pull the ripcord but, instead, I remembered what a grizzled old spec ops soldier told me years before.

"Nobody ever gets shot when freefalling. You're a sitting duck when under a canopy."

"So, I should wait until the last minute before opening my chute?" I had asked.

"No, the last minute will kill you. Don't pull the D-ring until the last second. Wait until the ground is coming up so fast that your balls climb inside your belly ... then wait four more seconds."

I didn't give it the entire four seconds, but I did set a new personal low for chute deployment. I yanked the ripcord, felt the satisfying jerk of the canopy opening and shortly thereafter, illegally planted my boots on Russian territory.

Foxtrot was several seconds behind me. He touched down closer to the middle of the meadow, did a textbook parachute landing fall, and was soon running in my direction.

We buried our chutes and harnesses under a large prickly bush a hundred yards into the woods and then started the two-mile trek towards Popov's dacha.

"If that's his summer home, I'd love to see his primary residence," Foxtrot said as we crested a ridgeline and got the first look at our objective.

"Looks like crime pays just as well in Russia as it does everywhere else," I commented.

What we thought might be a cottage turned out to be a modern, two-story house of at least six-thousand square feet. And that didn't include the detached four car garage or sizeable gardener's shed. It was hard to tell how much of the surrounding land was included in the estate. From our vantage point, their nearest neighbors were a good mile distant.

As planned, we arrived at the house just before sunset and used the remaining minutes of sunlight to spec out our approach and escape routes.

I would ingress down a wooded hill at the back of the house, make my way around to the south side, climb what looked to be a healthy oak tree and swing onto a second-floor balcony. While I accomplished this amazing feat of stealth, Foxtrot was to set up shop on a small knoll overlooking the front entrance. There were no guards posted outside and the security cameras we could see had obvious holes in their coverage.

Dressed completely in black, to include a wool knit balaclava covering everything except my eyes, nose and mouth, I made my way down the hill, over the fence, through the yard and up the tree. Using what looked like a substantial limb, I was just a foot or two from the balcony when I heard a loud crack and felt something hit my head ... like a sledgehammer.

***

"I think he's waking up."

"Should we call the guards?"

"Eventually. Let's see what he wants first."

"Isn't it obvious? He's dressed like a burglar."

"I know, but I think I've seen this man before?"

"Where?"

"Six weeks ago. At the costume ball in Monaco."

"Oh? Is he the one you fucked before your father and I came home?"

"Did Margarite tell you?"

"She didn't have to. You wore a 'I just had the best sex of my life' look on your face for the rest of the night."