legends surrounding them. It was a means to an end and right now one that came in very handy when she considered the sword’s influence on her life.
She explained how she felt about the show as best she could, then said, “Enough with the twenty questions. What about you?”
“Me? Not much to tell, really. Born and raised outside of Milan with my two brothers. One became a doctor, the other an architect. The pride of my parents’ eyes.”
“And you?”
He grinned. “A painter. Annoyed them even more than I thought it would.”
Annja laughed, but it was more from a sense that it was the kind of response he was expecting. She’d worked hard and done what the nuns had expected of her so that she could get out of there at the earliest opportunity. Why anyone would intentionally choose a path that wasn’t what they wanted to do just to annoy another person, especially their parents, was beyond her.
“What do you paint?”
Gianni shrugged. “This and that. Landscapes, mostly. A few portraits now and then.” He studied her, a mischievous gleam in his eye. “You should let me paint you. You would look beautiful in the light of an Italian sunset.”
An image flashed through Annja’s mind, the two of them in a Tuscan farmhouse, the orange-red light of the setting sun streaming in through a nearby window, splashing across her supine form, warming her bare skin as Gianni looked on from a painter’s stool a few feet away, close enough to reach out and touch…
Down, girl. It had been too long since she’d spent any time with the opposite sex.
Not wanting him to guess at her line of thought, Annja assumed an indignant expression. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked archly. “I need Italian sunlight to bring me up to your standards?”
For a moment, he just gaped at her. “Wait…that’s not what I meant,” he stammered, trying to recover. “I mean, of course you’re beautiful, but the sunlight—”
Gianni sat and stared at her. “Very funny,” he finally said. Their laughter served to bring them out of that awkward get-to-know-you stage and they spent the rest of the time before dinner chatting comfortably on topics ranging from the art of the Italian Renaissance to the Yankees’ chance at another World Series. Once the flight attendant had cleared the dinner dishes, Annja decided to catch some sleep to help her adjust to the time change once they arrived in Moscow. Wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, she curled up with a pillow against the window and drifted off to sleep with the hum of the engines in her ears.
* * *
THE REST OF THE FLIGHT passed without difficulty and the pilot brought them in for a bumpy but otherwise uneventful landing just before midnight local time. Neither of them had checked their bags, so they were able to bypass baggage claim and reached the immigration processing area ahead of most of the other passengers. Annja handed their passports to a blonde woman in the blue uniform of the Federal Migration Service.
“What is the reason for your visit?” the officer asked, looking up at them as she compared their faces to their photos.
“Vacation.”
It wasn’t exactly true, but telling the officer that they were here to hunt for the long-lost library of Ivan the Terrible, one of Mother Russia’s most feared despots, didn’t seem the wisest move.
The officer scanned Annja’s passport and then waited for her computer to process the information. Once it had, she picked up a rubber entry stamp and raised it over an open page of the passport only to hesitate at the last moment after glancing at what came up on her computer screen.
She lowered her hand without using the stamp.
Annja didn’t like that, didn’t like it at all.
A sense of unease slowly unfurled itself in her gut.
“You are together, yes?” the officer asked Annja, while inclining her head toward Gianni.
For a moment Annja thought the other woman was asking if the two of them were a couple. She opened her mouth to say no, but then realized what she was really being asked.
“That’s right,” she replied. “We are traveling together.” She smiled, hoping to get one in return.
She didn’t.
The officer picked up Annja’s passport a second time and gave it closer scrutiny, which only increased Annja’s growing unease.
“Is there a problem?” she asked.
The officer ignored her. She dialed a number on her phone, waited for it to be answered and then said a few short phrases in Russian, glancing only once at Annja in the process.
Annja knew a handful of languages, but unfortunately Russian wasn’t one of them.
She desperately wanted to know what the officer was saying.
The officer hung up, got up from behind her desk and disappeared through a door in the back behind her station, all without saying a word to Annja or Gianni.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
Annja just shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
She glanced over the counter, trying to read whatever was on the officer’s computer monitor, but it was angled too far to the left for her to get a clear look. She thought she could see the edge of a photo, a head shot perhaps, maybe even her own, but the reflection of the overhead lights on the screen kept her from being certain. Their passports were no longer on the counter, which could only mean the officer had taken them with her.
That wasn’t a good sign.
“You’re not an international fugitive by any chance, are you?”
She knew Gianni was joking, but the remark sent a shiver down her spine just the same. She’d had more than her fair share of police encounters since taking up the sword. More than once she’d had to employ creative storytelling when it came to explaining away the bodies she’d been forced to leave in her wake. She’d always acted in self-defense, but proper explanations would have required revealing the sword’s existence and that was something she simply hadn’t been prepared to do.
Had something she’d done in the past finally caught up with her?
Chapter 6
The sound of a door closing caught her attention and Annja looked up to see the blond officer walking back toward her, with two other immigration agents in tow. Both were large men, with wide shoulders and several inches on Annja. If they weren’t imposing enough, the sight of the handguns holstered on their belts clearly indicated they meant business.
The blonde opened the low gate separating the passengers from the immigration officials and waved Annja and Gianni through.
“This way.”
It was voiced as a request, but Annja knew they had little choice. Something must have set off a red flag somewhere, leaving them with the option of either following orders or trying to make a break for
