Limbo Man by Blair Bancroft Page B

island for nearly twenty-four hours. Even half dead, you could have taken her any time. So why didn’t you? And don’t try to tell me you didn’t know about the cruiser in the boat house.”
    Good question. Why hadn’t he made a run for it? “Maybe,” Nick responded after careful consideration, “because I’m not quite as much of a bad guy as you think? Maybe because I believe I have a better chance of getting my memory back with Vee’s help than without. Maybe because I don’t want to be responsible for the death of thousands. Maybe I actually want to help.
    “And maybe,” he added softly, “I like Vee far too much to consider running away from her, let alone snapping her neck.”
    Frost sank into a chair opposite the sofa, deflating like a hot air balloon with the gas turned off. “Who. Are. You?”
    “Now that’s the problem, isn’t it.” Nick grinned, thoroughly enjoying the older man’s discomfort.
    Frost took a deep breath, shook his head, then raised his voice to call his daughter. Although it took a full thirty seconds for Vee to appear, Nick suspected she’d been lurking in the hallway, listening to every word. Her father motioned her to a seat on the sofa next to Nick. “It seemed sensible to save your briefing for the safe house,” he said. “It never occurred to anyone that something could go wrong. I’m sorry about that. We’re still working on tracking down the leak. As for you, Vee”—he regarded his daughter with a mix of apology and pride—“you did well. You saved the day—”
    “The agents with us?”
    “They didn’t make it, but they did their jobs. Slowed pursuit.”
    Vee nodded, but her face had gone ashen. The deaths weren’t a surprise, but it wasn’t easy to accept that three men had sacrificed themselves so they could escape.
    Frost returned to his briefing. “This all goes back a long way. The two of you would have been little more than children. When the Soviet Union fell, there was chaos. Soviet armaments disappeared into the hands of the boldest and greediest. Military men who had defended their country through all its years of power suddenly ran scared, figuring they had to get theirs before somebody got them. You could call it a rush to grab the Old Soldiers’ Pension Fund.”
    Nick nodded. He knew this. It was all familiar.
    “Among the things that went missing,” Frost continued, “were ten old-style nuclear bombs. Old, but way more powerful than the ones that took out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the years the CIA tracked down three of them. The other seven are still missing.”
    “Surely inactive,” Vee said, “or some terrorist nut case would have used them by now.”
    “The bombs require the isotope U-236 to set them off,” Frost explained. “That’s man-made, not found in nature. And even if you can create it, the rate of decay is rapid. The bombs lose their teeth, so to speak. But recently there’ve been rumors. Strong rumors. The Russian Mafia supposedly helped spirit the bombs away, and now it’s said they may have found a source for U-236.”
    “After all this time?” Vee asked.
    “Frost nodded. “Seven dirty nukes, each one capable of killing a hundred thousand people outright and contaminating an entire city.”
    “ Govnó ,” Nick breathed. He couldn’t be involved in this. Impossible. Every instinct said he wasn’t one of the bad guys. And yet . . .
    “And who more likely to know about the bombs than the Organizatsiya ’s prime weapons smuggler, Sergei Tokarev?” Frost added, rubbing in the obvious.
    Nick decided he must play a good game of poker, or maybe his damaged face made excellent camouflage. His outer shell remained frozen, while his soul screamed No! Somehow he kept it together. “Sure explains how I got thrown off a bridge,” he drawled. “Maybe someone figured out I’d didn’t like the idea. Smuggling arms to a Third World country is a far cry from nuking New York.”
    “What the hell,” Frost muttered.