Liam nodded, his hands still shaking.“But what you’re planning to do,” he said, keeping his voice down.“You’re going to make our boy atarget?”
Danny’s eyes lit wickedly.“Oh, ye of little faith.I get it, you know.I’ve seen you work.You go out into the field with a couple of operatives, chase down leads, get intel back, chase down more leads.Come on, Liam,think.How are we different?”
Liam’s mind flashed to the night before, when Josh had dislocated his shoulder by crashing into a wall.He hadn’t landed on the balcony alone—he’d had people tending his clothes, helping with his injury, keeping an eye on his cover.And himself, making sure Josh knew he wasn’t alone.
“I’ll be with him.”Liam wasn’t sure if he was begging or if it was a vow.He knew what he’d prefer, but he’d just had it driven home that he wasn’t in charge here.
“Did you hear the boy?”Felix asked, the lines at the corners of his eyes sexy and kind and oh so wise.“You two are in love.Far be it from us to get in the way of that.”
“I’d say they’re too young,” Danny began, but Felix laughed and stopped him with a kiss to the temple.
“Hush,” he murmured, and Danny winked at Liam and closed his eyes, obviously as content as he could possibly be.
And again Liam was yanked into the past, but this time it was Danny in the hospital, begging to be let out so he could wander the streets of Morocco and drink himself to death—or die of sepsis.
The man sitting across from him now, gazing fondly at the sister of his heart and her beau, was a man who had worked hard for this moment of peace and happiness.
Liam had to trust that he wouldn’t sacrifice his son for it any more than he’d sacrifice his lover.
“A plan, you say,” Liam prodded, but Felix shook his head.
“Hush,” he said.“They’ll calm down in a few more minutes.Look at her, Liam.She’s shining.”
They all were.Surreptitiously, Liam pulled out his phone and took a picture of Josh, smiling shyly at his uncle Leon while shaking his hand.
“Who you sending that to?”Danny asked.
“My mother,” Liam said softly.“She’s been begging me for a picture so she knows what he looks like.I think this one will do.”
Eventually peopledidsettle down, returning to their seats with napkinsfullof sweets—and, for most of them, extra napkins for happy tears.
And Felix picked up the dropped thread.
“Okay, then,” he said.“So you all know part of the plan.Josh and Liam are going to be our distraction, and they are going to be a moving target.Again, thanks to last night’s op, we know where his base of operations is for each of his major businesses.So what we propose is a two-pronged operation, one with plausible deniability baked right in.”
“There are a lot of us,” Danny said.“And we all have special skills and the ability to think on our feet, and several of us are quite adept at running the tech or masterminding an op.So we can quite probably have Josh and Liam—posing as Lightfingers or Lightfinger adjacent—running all over the globe to get Kadjic’s attention—”
“Wait!”Grace crowed.“I get it!I get it!Josh and Liam go to a place,beLightfingers, and Kadjic goes running to where he thinks Lightfingers is.And then, whiletheyskedaddle,wesneak into his operation and make it go boom!”
“Big, bad-a-boom!”Danny confirmed, quoting an old movie.“Exactly, Grace.But wait—we’ve got some other wrinkles.”
“Each team taking down a Kadjic operation,” Danny said, “needs to be seen in Liam and Josh’s company at the time of the operation.So if a big red-headed guy blows up a depot carrying illegal weapons in Kazakhstan….”
“I need to be seen chauffeuring Josh and Liam around at the same time,” Chuck supplied.“How do you aim to do that?”
“A number of different ways,” Felix said, “including airplanes, disguises, electronic signatures, and time delays.We need Kadjic to be closing in on Josh and Liam in London, get news of his gun depot in Barbados, run there, hear a description of Hunter and Chuck, say, and then have his surveillance on Josh and Liam pin Hunter and Chuck back in London.And by the time he gets a handle on that one disaster, Josh and Liam need to be in Prague with the two people who are going to, perhaps, lead the authorities to his sex-trafficking hubs coming out of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Serbia, all while Kadjic is watching them wander through the city to see the sights, steal a few paintings, and wander on.And then, just when he thinks he’s found Lightfingers again—”
“Somebody hits his next business,” Tor said.“Boom!”
“Exactly.”Danny and Felix glanced at each other and nodded, and Danny went on.“We need it planned, right down to the doubles, and we need to keep him hauling ass from one part of the globe to the other.We are going to make him absolutely insane, and while he’s staring at the people he thinks are going to lead him to me—”
“We’re dismantling his operations, one leg at a time,” Liam said.“But he’ll be kept so busy, he won’t have time to rebuild.”
“Exactly,” Felix said.“And in the end, he’ll run to the one place he thinks is safe.”
“And by then,” Danny added grimly, “we will hopefully have invaded that too.”
“Interpol?”Liam asked, suddenly afraid for his friends, all of his friends, who had worked hard not to kill, and to work as bloodlessly as possible, unless somebody was aiming a weapon atthem.
