Secret Contract. Dana Marton

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      “What could I want? My successful son spoils me.”

      “You deserve it, Mamuska.”

      She made a small sound. “I almost forgot, I ran into your aunt Irina at the hospital this morning.”

      “Is she ill?”

      “She was visiting her neighbor, you know the one who used to repair bicycles? He broke a hip. Irina walked with me for a while. Her cousin, Anna, invited her to England and she’s thinking about going. You remember Anna’s boy, Calvin? He is a big businessman over there. Not as successful as you, but he’s made something of himself. He’s in trouble now, that’s why Irina mentioned him. The government is trying to get his money. They’re accusing him of something crazy, they say he traded inside. What does that even mean?”

      His mother went on for a while, lamenting the misfortune that had befallen Anna’s family.

      Insider trading. Tsernyakov understood the charge well, as he understood why Irina had told his mother, why Anna had told Irina. They all hoped that he would fix it.

      “Maybe with your shops in England, I thought you might know someone,” his mother finally said.

      “I’ll see, Mamuska.”

      “I knew you would. I told Irina not to worry, that son of mine can fix anything anywhere.”

      He promised a visit soon, said goodbye and hung up. Then he ran an Internet search on Spencer Holdings and Cal Spencer, a cousin so distant he’d only seen him once, when he’d been ten and Cal a newborn, visiting Russia with his parents to be baptized there.

      Looked like Cal had made something of himself. Seemed he’d been amassing a fortune in real estate. And, most interestingly, he was getting into warehousing. A handful of strategically placed warehouses throughout England. Maybe they could be mutually beneficial to each other.

      He sent off an e-mail and asked for a full background check on Cal from his trusted source. He never did business with anyone he hadn’t thoroughly investigated, family or otherwise.

      “Come in,” he answered to a knock on the door.

      Ivan, one of his secretaries, stopped on the threshold. “The School Board has contacted us to see if you would agree to deliver the requested amount of sugar, sir.”

      He clenched his jaw. “When I do, I’ll let them know.” They insulted him with their impatience.

      “I’m sorry, sir.” The man bowed his head. “They insist that it is urgent.”

      What were they going to do? Go to another source? No one could get what they wanted, in the amount they wanted. He wasn’t even sure if it was possible. If it was, he was the man to make it happen, and they knew it.

      The money they offered was substantial, but he wasn’t prepared to deal with them until he was one hundred percent sure that this wasn’t some kind of a trap. “The School Board” was the code name of a zealous new terrorist organization that specialized in training camps. They had ambitious intentions but barely a record. “Sugar” was code name for anything Tsernyakov sold these days, a necessary precaution in a world where surveillance had become an art form. No one had ever got anything on him, and he was determined to keep things that way.

      “They’ll get my answer when I’m ready.”

      A car pulled up outside and he looked at the familiar white SUV, then at Peter as the man got out. The passenger side door opened and his wife Sonya stepped to the gravel.

      “Thank you, sir.” Ivan left and closed the door behind him.

      His cell phone rang, and Tsernyakov picked it up as he watched Alexandra jump from the back. Peter’s daughter was a beauty at twenty. How fast time flew. He could remember her as a little girl, riding on his knee.

      “He’s here, sir.”

      “I can see,” he snapped into the phone. Peter had brought his family with him. Perhaps he’d thought he would not be punished then, that he could use them as a shield. He’d thought wrong. “Take them to the factory.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      He watched as his men pointed toward the back building and Peter balked, the women going forward without a second thought. Thousands of tons of sugar beets stood stacked by the conveyer belt that took them up to be cleaned then chopped to a juicy mush. Right now, they looked like small muddy balls. When he’d been a kid, he and his friends had sometimes played soccer with them in the back.

      Once he had found two human heads as he’d picked through the piles to find a beet that was rounder than the rest. The heads hadn’t looked much different from the beets, all caked with mud as they’d come up the conveyor belt eventually. His father had been an enforcer for the man who’d owned the factory at the time. Tsernyakov had grown up understanding the business.

      A good education was paramount to a man’s success. He believed in that. That was why his children, when they were grown, would attend the best universities of the west.

      He glanced at his calendar and considered his schedule, the machines’ incessant rumble providing a soothing background noise. The chopper was a fearsome piece of equipment that could grind anything to pulp in minutes.

      Peter shouldn’t have done business with Yokoff.

      Tsernyakov rubbed the bridge of his nose. He believed in Old Testament-style revenge. When someone betrayed you, you didn’t just kill him, you killed his family, his animals then burned his fields.

      He wanted his enemies to be crystal clear on this—nobody went against him and lived.

      Chapter Two

      Her mother was there, visiting.

      “I’m sorry, honey.” She wore her Easter hat. Seemed odd for September. Must have cut her hair short again—she did that from time to time on a whim—not a single chestnut curl showed.

      She was as slim as ever but her face had aged. Too much so, Carly thought. How long had it been since they’d seen each other?

      “It’s okay,” she told her. “I’m sorry, too.” I missed you. She didn’t say that or, Where have you been?

      “Visitation over. All inmates, please line up for exit inspection,” the overhead loudspeaker demanded.

      No. Not yet. She grabbed the edge of the table. She still had so much to say and no words to say it. She wasn’t good with words. Did her mother understand that?

      “Bomb in building! Sixty seconds to explosion!” A real person yelled that, not the loudspeaker this time.

      She turned back to the guards who watched over the visiting room, but they were disappearing into the darkness.

      The next second she was pulled awake, in the middle of the night, in her cell, alone. Her mother had been gone for years, lost to cancer, was the realization the first split second brought. But the emotions that came with the thought were abruptly interrupted when the door slammed open and banged against the wall.

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