Donovans 01 - Amber Beach

lost him when he crossed over into Russia.”
    “That’s where we lost him,” she agreed.
    “And if I said I’d tracked him to Tallinn . . .?” Jake asked sarcastically.
    “I’d be on the phone right now. We’re being chewed up one side and down the other to get results. Did you?”
    “Track him to Estonia? No. He went east, not north. I lost him about three hundred kilometers inside the Russian border. Before I could find him again, I started running into bureaucratic walls and some nonbureaucratic types with nasty guns. Officially, I was invited to leave the country and not come back.”
    “And unofficially?”
    “I was offered permanent residence in a three-by-six-foot slice of Mother Russia.”
    She shook her head. “Whatever happened to Byzantine subtlety?”
    “Same thing that happened to Byzantium. It lost.”
    “So about ten days ago you came back here to lick your wounds. And maybe to have a late-night look around Kyle’s cottage?” Ellen asked.
    Jake shrugged and said nothing. It was close enough to the truth to be uncomfortable.
    “Then you noticed one of those cards tacked up all over Anacortes asking for a fishing guide and signed by H. Donovan,” Ellen continued.
    He waited, watching her.
    “And then you turned on that Jake Mallory slow grin and got hired,” she concluded.
    “Half right. I got hired, which was more than your man did.”
    “How did you know about—hell,” she said in disgust at falling into his trap.
    “No harm done. Duping someone in as her guide was an obvious move.”
    “Did you tell Honor that you’re looking for her brother?”
    “The subject didn’t come up.”
    “That’s what we thought,” Ellen said with cream-licking satisfaction. “The Donovans have stonewalled everyone overseas, including you. So you’re going to backdoor them, using the younger sister in America.”
    There was no disapproval in Ellen’s voice. If anything, there was a note of congratulations on finding an opening no one had before now. Jake would have preferred it if she had been shocked. But people with a low threshold for shock didn’t last long in a world without fairy dust.
    “We won’t get in your way,” she said quickly. “Just keep us informed.”
    “You’re in my way right now.”
    “Get used to it, or I’ll drop in on Little Miss Muffet and tell her who her fishing guide really is.”
    For a few moments Jake simply looked at Ellen. Then he shook his head slightly. “I don’t think so.”
    “What?”
    “Right now I’m all you have inside the Donovan clan walls. You’re not stupid enough to blow my cover until you’re certain you can’t use me at all.”
    Manicured nails tapped on black leather. A cool wind gusted and then gusted again, making a grove of slim, red-barked madrona trees shudder.
    Jake knew without looking up that the clouds to the southwest were slowly reclaiming the sky. It would probably rain before sunset. The forests hadn’t gotten green by accident.
    “All right,” she said. “What do we have that you want?”
    “Did Kyle come through SeaTac about two weeks ago?”
    “His passport came through. The Immigration guy we interviewed said he looked pretty much like his picture, given that he was coming off a two-week fishing trip on the Kamchatka Peninsula.”
    “What do you say?”
    “We’re betting if the man and the picture matched, neither was Kyle Donovan.”
    Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Bad news.”
    “For Donovan, certainly. He probably got that chunk of Mother Russia they offered you. But bad for us? We don’t know.”
    “Did—”
    “My turn,” she interrupted. “Have any of your Emerging Resources contacts heard rumors of prime Baltic amber for sale from shady sources?”
    “Raw or worked?”
    “Both.”
    “Just the usual. Petty smuggling and theft in the mines are commonplace and not part of any larger conspiracy. The big-time smugglers are all connected to government. Hell, half the time they are the government.”
    “Welcome to the former Soviet Union,” Ellen said sourly, “where a conflict of interest is your best hope of getting rich.”
    “When your currency is in freefall or you don’t even have a currency to call your own, you have to expect a little creative bartering by the natives.”
    “Creative bartering.” She smiled briefly. “That’s good. Have any of your people turned up anything having to do with Russian amber specifically?”
    “The usual small forgeries from Russian plastic