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What was going on that an honorable thug like that didn’t want to be present?
Uranium appeared at her elbow. “Fucking bastard’s about to open an auction. On our information.”
Our information?Suppressing a yawn, Arsenic turned her attention on him. “Well, hopefully he’ll get a good deal of money for us.”
“You don’t understand. Come on.” He took her hand and drew her through the crowd. They left the main ballroom, then followed the stairs down to a rather bland utilitarian hallway. A guard stood at the foot of the steps, but he didn’t impede their progress. Halfway down the hall, Uranium knocked on a door—a rather ordinary door, without any kind of electronic security that she could identify. It also had an old-fashioned key lock.
The door opened, and their host beamed at them. “Come on in. Watch this.” He pivoted, as excited as a schoolboy. A wall of monitors greeted her, presenting images from across the party. The equipment was performing facial recognition, but that wasn’t what their host wanted to show them. Instead, he held up a thumb drive.
“Everything we need to know about the big man’s right hand man.”
The big man’s right hand man? Does that mean…
“I thought we were meeting fucking Red Wolf tonight.” Uranium scowled. “You swore you were arranging a face-to-face with him, and he was going to give me my money personally. Son of a bitch owes me.”
“Temper, temper. I warned you this could take time. He knows your value, that’s all that matters. And, this?” He held up the thumb drive again. “This is our ticket. His organization has taken a lot of hits over the last month, and a good deal of the network is down. Those men upstairs are all ready to move up and take our operation to stage two.”
Translation: Uranium’s handler wanted to take over Red Wolf’s operation, to supplant the damaged organization weakened by their attacks.
Unacceptable.
She would, however, be taking the thumb drive.
“And whoever’s on that is going to do this for us?” Uranium sounded skeptical.
“Guaranteed. This guy? He controls everything. He’s the final gatekeeper. We take him out, and Red Wolf is truly screwed.” Ricky chortled. “I have to say, it’s been kind of a pleasure watching them flounder. We auction this off to the highest bidder, and we let them take him out. At that point, Red Wolf has no choice. He’ll need us. I simply move our pieces into place and take him in a bloodless coup. After that, it’s all ours.”
As plans went, his sounded about as solid as construction of a house of cards. Removing Red Wolf only to let his sick and twisted business fall into the hands of another? No. They weren’t cleaning out Red Wolf’s corruption only to let this scum fill the vacuum.
While she was doing this mission for her brother, it was also for her parents.
With a smile, she strolled around the room. The monitors told her a lot about the villa, the compounds, and the security. “I’m bored, gentlemen. Entertain me.” She needed time in that room, time to determine her best methods of assassination and extraction.
As for the thumb drive? It would be hers—even if she had to pry it out of their cold, dead fingers.
Chapter 2
The morning her message arrived, Sam Reese had still been drunk. So drunk, in fact, he was still nursing a whiskey when his phone buzzed, announcing the arrival of an email. Only one email on his phone had ever been programmed to buzz and alert him to new arrivals. A personal email, which remained devoid of contact in the years since he’d set up the account. It didn’t even receive spam. Peering blearily at the phone, Sam keyed in his code to unlock it, then opened the email. Shifting the phone back and forth didn’t help. His drunken vision didn’t allow for a lot of clarity. Which meant, though he was absolutely pissed at the moment, he had to make some coffee and sober his happy ass up.
Setting the phone down, he stared at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. His hair hung long and straggly to his shoulders, he sported a bit of a beard, while his eyes were bloodshot.
He lifted an arm and sniffed at his pit. While a sopping wreck, he didn’t stink. Shoving away from the bar, he stood, wavered a moment, then staggered around to the back, dropping the bottle of whiskey in the trash on his way. Pity, it had been a damn fine bottle of whiskey. It took him a good five minutes to sort out the coffee maker, and while it brewed, he stuck his nose in the bag of coffee beans and sucked in a deep breath. The scent helped to clear his nasal passages of whiskey, but he couldn’t get the taste off his breath.
Next, he drained three glasses of water while waiting for the coffee to brew. Setting another cup in to brew, he drank the first without bothering to wait for it to cool. He was drunk enough that the pain would actually help.
By the time he hit the third cup of coffee and had another glass of water, he really needed to take a leak, but his vision cleared. Retrieving his phone, he opened it again, then read the message.
She hadn’t written him for years. Ignored his existence. Then, when she finally did reach out, she sent him a message in a fucking code.
I’m going to kill her.
Fresh cup of coffee in hand, Sam carried his phone and the coffee up the stairs to the flat he kept above the bar. His life in Costa Rica didn’t require much. A bed, a pot to piss in, and of course, all the whiskey a man could drink. It didn’t matter how far he went across the globe or how much alcohol he poured down his gullet, the demons he carried with him wouldn’t be silenced. But he could mute their shrill intrusion enough to deal with his day. He took another long swallow of coffee as he walked into the bathroom. Setting the phone down, he stared at the message, then began working out the code in the back of his head. He wasn’t quite sober enough for code cracking, but at least she hadn’t sent him a bloody crossword puzzle. She used to love doing that to him. He hated the damn things, but she could write one up in short order. Then, not only did he have to solve the damn puzzle, he’d still have to decode the answer afterward.
Clever little minx figured any number of ways to encode her messages—having a brother for a code cracker inspired her. Particularly when she wanted to keep whatever she was saying to him a secret from everyone else.
Bladder empty, he turned on the shower and stepped under the icy spray. The bracing cold helped clear away more of the fog, and instead of moving away from the frigid spray, he stayed, hoping it would assuage the fires of rage fanning to life as his reality reasserted itself. He really did prefer the world through a haze of alcohol.
She was in trouble. Running alone. Needed backup. Possible extraction.
