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The boy’s mother was smart, but she was currently beset by vultures she didn’t have the resources to deal with. She was out of her league.
It was time to do something.
Rowan sighed and reached for the phone.
She waited until the man that she and all the other directors answered to picked up. She needed to cover all bases with this one—her own base included.
‘Sir, I have the latest report on Celik Antonov in front of me. I’d like permission to bring Jared West back in on the case in an advisory capacity. He knows the child and he understands the situation. I’d like to run certain scenarios on relocation for the child past him.’
Her request was reasonable. She was just doing her job. But there was more to her request than that.
‘I also think Jared would want to be notified of this. It was his case. His fallout.’
And Jared would see it as his problem to fix.
There was silence on the other end, and then that dry, deep voice spoke. ‘Jared, eh?’
‘Yes, sir.’ She’d known that the use of Jared’s first name wouldn’t go unnoticed. She wanted full disclosure on this. ‘I’m intimate with him. This is the one case within my portfolio that I would share with him—with your permission.’
Rowan’s palms were sweaty. Not only was a child’s wellbeing at stake, so too was her fledgling romantic relationship. It wouldn’t sit well with Jared that she had fresh information on Celik that she hadn’t passed on to him. She needed a yes from Management on this.
‘Sir …?’
Could be there had been a whole lot of pleading in that one little prompt. Could be she’d just altered the course of her own career irrevocably.
‘Do it,’ he said, and hung up.
Rowan slumped back in her chair and ran a clammy palm down over her face in relief.
One down. One to go.
Rowan put a call through to Jared next, knowing full well that he wasn’t going to like hearing that the child’s situation needed a rethink.
But all she got was an answering machine.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JARED ARRIVED IN Amsterdam and made the city his own. Bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly, creatively organised and full of water, the city appealed to him. The watercraft weren’t like the ones he’d grown up with, and the canals were a rats’ maze, but the place was beautiful and free-wheeling and it appealed to him on a visceral level.
He’d have liked to see Celik grow up here in safety, but that wouldn’t happen so long as Antonov’s parasites kept after him. Celik’s perceived inheritance was the magnet, but the authorities had frozen it. No one could get to it. Not Celik’s mother—bless her non-maternal soul—not Antonov’s debtors, nor his creditors. That money wasn’t going anywhere.
Two years ago he wouldn’t have hesitated to go in and take the child, with no one any the wiser. These days his world was not nearly so black and white.
Undercover work had shown him the many facets of every situation. Likewise, Rowan’s approach to problem-solving took into account and tried to balance many different needs. Celik had a mother—a woman who had taken him in—and before Jared put any plan for the boy in motion he needed to talk to her and take her needs into consideration.
Jared wasn’t going into this guns blazing.
He thought Rowan would approve.
Getting to see Celik’s mother was easy.
Damon invented an obscenely wealthy, fully verified background for him and booked him an appointment. Two hours, four-thirty to six-thirty p.m., cash only.
Damon’s wicked sense of humour at work, but it gave him a cover persona and a trail leading nowhere should anyone decide to investigate.
Damon had invented another persona for Jared as well. In this one he was a highly skilled government operative, specialising in witness protection. It was this second persona that Jared had to sell to Celik’s mother in order for any of their plans to work.
He was here to lie, scheme, to light a fire and destroy a little property, and kidnap a child and possibly the child’s mother as well.
Every one of those activities should have given him pause.
And they didn’t.
Needs must.
He had a plan, finessed by Damon, and he was running with it.
At four-thirty p.m. exactly Jared entered a narrow street paved with cobblestones and walked towards house number twenty-three. The entrance door was flanked by flowerpots filled with colourful blooms. An ornate wrought-iron railing guided visitors up the three steps to the deep red door with its brass lion knocker. The house itself stood three storeys tall—one of Amsterdam’s historic ‘Gentleman’s Houses’, abutting one of Amsterdam’s oldest canals. Prime real estate, carefully tended and exclusive.
