“Whenyougo out tomorrow?”Liam said, catching his eyes.
Josh was going to shake him off; he was good at it.But he’d promised.He’dpromised.“Six,” he said.
“Not good enough,” Liam said firmly, and when Josh felt the argument tripping on his tongue, Liam softened his voice.“You promised.”
Josh sighed.“Can we at least go out to eat?Do some errands?Sightsee a little?”He tried his most winning smile, and Liam shrugged.
“Nap in the afternoon, early bedtime,” he maintained, and Josh conceded.
Or, well, he yawned.Concession was sort of implied.
“Fine,” he said, digging in the pocket of his luggage.It was more than a zipper—everything about the luggage was specially made, including the hidden pockets in the regular pockets.After a moment he produced a stack of fifty holographic stickers wrapped in plastic and pulled out another that he showed to everybody and then stuffed back in the bag.
“Once we pulled the job in France, we figured Kadjic’d be on the alert for things.He won’t need the big gesture anymore—the small shit will catch his attention.So put these out tomorrow.Backs of traffic signs, park benches, that sort of thing.A couple in an area.Be subtle, don’t get caught.We picked Stuttgart because he’s got enterprises nearby—nothing big enough for him to be visiting, not after all the shit that went down two days ago—but big enough for his people to start talking about the logo popping up.And, I shouldn’t have to remind you….”
He paused with the stack of stickers extended to Carl.
“Don’t get caught on camera,” Carl said blandly.“Trust us, Josh, we’re not stupid.”
Josh handed the stickers over.“I know you’re not,” he admitted.“I’m just frustrated at not being able to go out and do it myself.”
“Well, here.”Carl pulled out a handful.“Trust me, I’ve helped Michael’s kids with stickers.That will feel like buzzenteentwelve.”
Josh grinned at him, because that number was sort of a family favorite, and Liam grunted.
“So,” he said, “how muchisa buzzenteen?Is it more or less than a googolplex?Is it smaller than infinity and bigger than a baker’s dozen?I feel like I need buzzenteen maths now that I’m road-tripping to perdition.”
“I figure,” Michael said complacently, reaching for another slice of schnitzel, “that a buzzenteen is the amount of minutes left in the workday when you woke up really wishing you could stay home and watch TV in your pajamas.”
“Times the percentage of your day you spent imagining you could squish your boss’s head,” Carl said, nodding sagely.
“Oh!I get it,” Liam said.“So buzzenteen is the number of meetings I have to have before I dodge out of the next one and go solve the case myself.”
“Or the number of heartbeats you have between when Grace goes early and you’re actually supposed to be sprinting through the Louvre,” Josh said with an exaggerated wipe of his brow.
“I get it now,” Liam said, tugging on Josh’s hand so he’d sit down.“Buzzenteen maths.I now have a new skill.”
There was some laughter, and then they went back to fine-tuning the plan.Tomorrow might be a rest day, but in four days, they were going to have to pull off the job and take the train to Prague.
Four days later, in a warehouse in Colombia
MOLLY GOTreallyangry when people didn’t know history.
“Did you know,” she whispered, setting the explosive charge in the corner of the warehouse, “that when the farmers in this country were offered a chance to grow food instead of cocaine, they jumped on it?Did more to cut down drug trafficking than any amount of policing or violence?”
“Yeah, darlin’,” Chuck said over comms from another warehouse, where he was doing, presumably, the same thing.“Do you know why they started growing coca in the first place?”
“Because the US paid them to in order to fund an unjust war in Nicaragua,” she grunted.
“I know all this,” Grace muttered from his own structure—there were three giant warehouses in Kadjic’s compound, which Leon had needed to bribe, hack, and in his words, slither, in order to pinpoint.Lucius was in the pontoon plane, hidden in a cove of the nearby lake, which was almost dead from the pollution of processing Kadjic’s cocaine, and he was, presumably, keeping an eye out for any more planes or transpo coming into the compound.
Hunter was… eliminating guards.Many of them were tied up and gagged—but not all.It was a bloody business.
“I’m just saying,” Molly continued, leaping lightly to the ground on the other side of a massive stack of packed drugs, “that our country has a lot to answer for, and that was before the mad orange king.”
“Darlin’,” Chuck muttered, “can we not talk politics when we’re trying to do some good along with the personal revenge?”
“Sure,” she said, trying not to tug at her breathing mask.None of the guards wore them, but then, a lot of the guards had that twitchy appearance of addicts.The drugs themselves were triple-wrapped and packed—they’d already eliminated the guards around the processing buildings and set the unwilling workers free.Molly, Chuck, and Hunter all spoke Spanish—and Chuck and Hunter spokeColombianSpanish, because like most dialects, a regional difference was like a whole other language.They’d shooed the workers far, far away from the processing plant and gotten promises that they wouldn’t return to their families or their villages until dawn.
