Golanov frowned. "What the hell—?"
"There's plenty of room here, Andrei love," she cut him off, pushing the cover down to reveal two full white breasts with erect pink nipples. "You're wasting precious time."
Golanov moved to the side of the bed and stared at the fullness of her body, naked from the waist up, then at the attractive, smiling face.
"This is most unprofessional, Captain Makarenko," he began, attempting to sound harsh, though not succeeding at all well.
"Oh, loosen up, Andrei. We can be professional later. We're thousands of miles from Moscow. In enemy territory, you might say. Play like a good soldier the night before heading for the front. Obey your impulses."
Golanov hesitated, but he made the mistake of sitting on the side of the bed. Katya grabbed one of his arms and pulled him toward her parted lips. She was well aware that with his superior strength, he could easily pull away. But she also knew it was too late for him to make a rational consideration of his options.
It didn't take Agent Alvarez long to realize that he had missed his man. Finding no one fitting the Russian's description near the A Terminal subway platform, he raced up the escalator and quickly swept the area with a searching gaze. Nothing. He collared every airport employee he could find and asked if they had seen the man in green. Finally, a maintenance worker said he thought he remembered someone like that going out toward the taxi stand.
He suddenly realized that Terry Packer was frantically calling him on the radio.
"This is Alvarez," he said, nearly out of breath.
"Do you still have him in sight? I just got word nobody officially knows he's in the country."
"Sorry, Terry," Alvarez said. "I missed him. He must have been on the train that had just left when I got down there. I've located an employee who thinks he saw him heading for the taxi stand."
"Damn, damn." Packer muttered the obscenity, then realized it was hardly proper procedure on the radio. "I'm supposed to be on a plane to Washington. I'm having a photo faxed to the office. Get some more men out here with pictures and hit every cab driver in the area. This is your case, Alvarez. Don't blow it. I'll be in touch as soon as I get to Headquarters."
Andrei Golanov lay on his back, eyes closed, breathing deeply.
"You are a witch, Katya," he said, turning toward her, the look of surrender on his placid face.
She buried an elbow in the pillow and propped her head up on her other hand, her attractive face wreathed with a smile of success. It was Andrei she had wanted all along. She had only gone to bed with his boss in Moscow in an attempt to coax some positive reaction out of Andrei. Reveling in the moment, she spoke softly. "Aha, I've got you under my spell."
He exhaled an audible sigh. "You'll get no argument from me on that." He reached over to gently draw a ring around a soft nipple. It went suddenly taut.
She moaned delightedly. "You were as fabulous as I knew you would be, Colonel Golanov."
He suddenly tensed. Instantly, she knew she had blundered, said the wrong thing.
Andrei Golanov's priorities were firmly fixed. In one swift, effortless move, he sprang up in the bed, almost like a soldier at attention, a stern look on his face.
"Thank you, Captain Makarenko, for reminding me that we have a duty to perform." His voice was cool and businesslike. He swung his legs over the side. "Go get your shower, comrade. When we're ready, we'll find a suitable restaurant, have dinner, and I'll brief you fully on the week's activites."
Duty be damned! His dedication could be maddening. She sat up and looked across longingly at the trim, muscular body. "Will you come back and spend the night with me, Andrei?" There was a plaintive quality to her voice.
He turned and smiled. "As the capitalists say, business before pleasure."
He made a lucky choice of restaurants, a rustic barn of a place that made up in food quality what it lacked in the fancy trappings of its more upscale competitors. Its chief feature was a mammoth open charcoal grill located between the dining area and the kitchen. As with most any eating place on a Friday night, it was crowded. The lights were so dim it seemed almost a gimmick to save on the power bill. They had difficulty reading the menu, but took this was as a plus, along with the fact that the tables were not jammed closely together. Theirs sat in a corner of the room, eliminating the possibility of anyone being seated to either side, or behind them. All in all, Golanov was rather pleased.
He needed only a cursory glance at the menu. He was ravenously hungry. The smoky aroma wafting across from the open grill heightened his appetite for food the way Katya's body had stimulated his appetite for sex. Add to that another week of Sarge Morris's army-style cooking, and he found himself in the mood for a thick prime rib floating in its juice, something he had cultivated a taste for during his previous years in the West.
Watching Katya as she studied the menu, he knew he could no longer deny the irresistible force that seemed to pull them together like a magnet. He was attracted by women with backbone. He liked the firm set of her jaw, the determination in her eyes. There was a sense of inner strength about her that contrasted sharply with the softness of her physical beauty.
She looked up and smiled. "I'll try the stuffed flounder," she said. "With white wine."
He could have predicted as much. Katerina Georgevna Makarenko was a native of Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea just north of Poland. She had been raised on seafood. But despite its Baltic roots, her home was not a part of the rebellious republics. Kaliningrad was the old East Prussian city of Konigsberg. It lay south of Lithuania in a small detached enclave of the former Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. Her father was a plant manager sent from Moscow, and she had been nurtured in an abiding love for a benevolent Mother Russia. The fact that she had been chosen to take part in Jabberwock attested to her commitment to a strong KGB and a traditionally communist Soviet state.
Though endowed with a strong sense of will, she was thoroughly feminine, and she knew how to flaunt it to her best advantage. Both in the line of duty and in pursuit of her personal goals. Virtually every move she made appeared sensual to Golanov. He had to remind himself that this occasion involved his duty to report to her, for relay back to Moscow, on the results of the week's preparation for Jabberwock.
"We had a miserable time the first half of the week," he said. "Storms drenched the island. The men were forced to sit around in their quarters, getting on each others' nerves. But when the sun finally came out again, we rolled out the truck and parked it in precise relation to a simulated reviewing stand."
"And the test? How did it go?"
"Whatever you think of the Americans, you have to admire their ingenuity. The shell performed perfectly. It detonated just above the reviewing stand. There wouldn't have been a single survivor. I'm almost certain of it."
Katya looked thoughtful. She had no qualms about the aims of Operation Jabberwock. Petrovsky had to be stopped at any cost. His policies were making a shambles of the country, of the Party. Another six months and her beloved Motherland could well be reduced to a hobbled derelict, an emaciated skeleton. Petrovsky deserved his fate. Perhaps the American president, too. His own people had decided his guilt. But how many others would be taken with them? She didn't condone indiscriminate slaughter, something she knew had been practiced by the KGB's predecessor, the NKVD, under Lavrenti Beria.