Dragon Scales by Margaret Ball

Author:Margaret Ball [Ball, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781947648227
Publisher: Galway Publishing
Published: 2019-09-01T22:00:00+00:00

15. Dragon bait

Sometimes Bogdan wondered why every move he and his confederates made had to be preceded by hours of bickering in whatever squalid room they had found for shelter. More often he wondered why, if their mission was so important to Mother Russia, their budget didn’t cover more than a couple of scoped rifles and the cheapest no-tell motel in town. Okay, staying under the Americans’ radar meant finding places that took cash and didn’t keep records, but did Zhenya have to keep putting them in rooms with suspicious stains on the carpet? He was willing to bet that when people like his boss, members of the nomenklatura, visited the degenerate capitalist countries, they didn’t stay in dingy rooms that smelled of sweet air freshener overlaying much worse things.

Tonight’s bickering had begun with all three of them blaming each other for missing this chance to catch up with the dragon. After a bit of whining, the positions became clear.

Kostya felt sure that the busty tramp in the torn red lace outfit had actually been the dragon they were looking for, because of the bar owner’s claim to have seen her breathe fire. The pictures of her and her accomplice were up on the TV station’s website now, and Kostya had downloaded them.

Zhenya wanted to know why a male dragon would change into the shape of a female human.

Bogdan himself thought the dragon might be female, which made more sense of the shape-shifting. But he also thought that a blurred photo of a disheveled female who might have been accompanying the (Not a) Lady in Red was not a clue that they had any chance of following up.

“Facial recognition algorithms?” Kostya suggested.

“Applied to what data base?”

“Easy.” He smirked. “I send the picture to the boss in Nizhny. The boss gets somebody to hack the Austin Police Department’s data base. That ditzy looking redhead is bound to have a record. All we need is a name and address to go with the face.”

“Fine,” Bogdan sighed, “but while we’re waiting for the hacker to get back to us, I plan to do something a little more proactive.”

“Like what?” Zhenya whined. “You determined to get us arrested?”

“Not planning anything risky,” Bogdan said.

“I don’t think you’ve got a plan.”

“Sure I do. Two words: Dragon. Bait.”

It took a few more words than that to convey his plan to the two idiots he’d been lumbered with, but once they got the idea they were all for it. Of course, that didn’t mean they quit bickering and whining. It just meant that the bickering shifted from “We can’t do anything,” to, “Why didn’t you do that this morning?”

Actually, it wasn’t all that easy to organize the bait for the next morning. Vodka was easy enough to come by, but the other item required them to do some shopping around in East Austin before they located a seller who could get them both the bait and a pickup truck to transport it.

They were in place before dawn, crouched behind the stone tables and benches behind the clearing on the top of the hill.

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