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Ares chafes at my order, his body tensing. But he and Eros both fall silent at once. This is exactly the reason we have a chain of command. At this exact moment, we are arms dealers first, family second.
Looking at the screen again, I watch as the policeman dispatches his associates to look in the container. Few things have the power to enthrall me. But we have spent months putting this deal together. Tens of millions of dollars are riding on this moment.
And the people involved in the deal? They are not the kind of clients that I want to let down. I crack my knuckles as a trickle of sweat slips down the side of my face.
This must go well.
A few seconds later, there is a shout that comes from one of the men.
My whole body tenses up, my eyes narrow, and my jaw juts out. Here it comes.
That’s the moment that Mateen straightens his tie pin, a signal. Mateen is saying that he plans to abort.
“Fuck,” I mutter. I watch, brooding.
Even though I already know what’s going to happen.
The main policeman waves the sheaf of paper in Mateen’s face again and shouts something. A lot of it sounds like gibberish to me. I speak a little Farsi, I’m fairly well-versed in a stilted form of Arabic, and I’m almost conversational in Hebrew. But Turkmenistan has its own language, Turkmen. And I’ll be damned if I can make heads or tails of it.
Out of that, I can make out one two-word name. Clear as a bell, I hear it.
Henri Constantine.
My heart starts to beat double time.
“Nae!” I snap, clenching my fists.
As if I, from the safe distance that I’ve chosen to watch, can affect what is about to happen.
The interpreter goes white as a sheet.
“He says that he knows that the men are not legitimate. He says he can tell that their papers are forged. Says that the person they got them from was very sloppy. And now he is going to?— “
He’s cut off by a gunshot. The policeman flails and falls backward. It takes me a second to realize that the shot came from Mateen.
That’s when shit really starts going sideways. Granted, the second I heard that name — Constantine — I saw this outcome clearly. He’s been trying to fuck me over from the jump.
Several more shots are fired from the police and my two agents. The straw men are excitedly good shots because they take down the other cops while sustaining no damage themselves.
“Hades!” Ares grabs my arm, shaking me. “The deal is buggered. We must move. We have to start tying up loose ends.”
There is a moment in which the tension in the air escalates. The interpreter suddenly turns to flee the room. Eros pulls out his gun, silencer already attached, and shoots him in the back of the head.
“Jesus,” I curse, looking at the interpreter’s body, and yank my arm from Ares’s grip. “Let me think for a minute.”
He hisses. “The gunshots will draw more police. If we contain this now?— “
I point at the screen. As Ares turns to watch, the straw men go down in a hail of bullets. The police swarm in and they are alerted by their associates that they should take a look inside the shipping containers.
I take a breath, the gears in my head clanking to life. “Eros, blow up the cargo. If the client can’t have it, neither can anyone else.”
Eros fishes his phone from his jacket pocket, still gripping his gun. “On it.”
I turn to Ares. His look is eager, the look in his pale green eyes hungry.
“Is that a kill order?”
I nod. “Kill everyone that isn’t dead from the bombs we have planted in the shipping containers.”
