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“How are we gonna do that?” Archer asked.
“One of us takes his driver’s place, and we agree to meet somewhere right after we pick him up. A stop sign, even. The four of you get into the back seat, and bam, we have him.”
“That could work,” I said, even as the four of them started arguing about who was going to drive. They all wanted to get in on the action from the ground floor, and I couldn’t blame them. Every one of us had a reason to hate Maksim, and every one of us wanted to make him pay for what he’d done to me.
“We overlooked one simple thing, though,” Ryker said after a bit of fighting. “How are we going to know where he’s staying or what car service he’s using?”
“Good point,” I said. “Damn, how can we figure this out?”
That led to us spending some more time discussing the best way to track him down if we were going to head him off before he made it to the track.
“I have an idea!” I exclaimed at last. “I’m going to call around and ask. I’ll pretend to be Avery. I’m sure he’s got her on all his accounts.”
We started by looking up Ilya’s jet and checking what flights were registered to it. There was one from Vienna to Prague for the morning, which meant it had to be Maksim.
After that, I looked through his old social media posts to pinpoint his favorite hotel in the area. He was a creature of habit, which weighed in our favor.
“He loves the Regency Grande,” I said, showing posts from the past four years in the same place on the same day. I somehow lucked out, and there was even one photo from last year where he was tagged as a celebrity client for a car service.
I found the phone number of the service and decided to make a call. As soon as they picked up, I panicked, though, as soon as I said I was Avery. After a couple of seconds, the hesitation left my voice, and my confidence kicked in.
“Yes, Avery Byrd for Maksim Kostin. We used your service the last time we were in Prague, last year,” I said.
The woman on the other end of the line immediately changed her demeanor from disaffected irritation to bootlicking.
I smiled as she babbled about her pleasure to serve our family yet again. I rolled my eyes and suppressed a noise of disgust. If only she knew what animals the Kostin clan really was.
“How may I help you?” she asked at last.
“What time is our pick-up in the morning?” I replied. “I need to know.”
“You’re scheduled for eleven,” the woman replied. “In front of the Regency Grande. Our driver is Nico, and you will get the black Rolls-Royce Cullinan you requested, with the custom large back seat and blacked-out screen divider. Everything is in place, and please let Mr. Kostin know how much we value him and his father as clients.”
I rolled my eyes but kept my fake pleasant voice going.
“Thank you,” I replied. “You’ve been extremely helpful.”
I hung up, and we made our own plan. I decided we’d have to intercept the driver or intercept Ilya, whichever one took less effort.
“If we take the driver, then we have a passed-out dude to handle,” Ryker said.
“But if we take our own car, we don’t have a Rolls-Royce Cullinan,” Kingston replied. “This is the problem. To get the car we need, we’ll have to grab it right from the driver.”
“Money talks,” I said. “Offer him a stack of bills, and he might voluntarily walk away?”
“Not these guys,” Kingston replied. “If he takes our money, he’s missing out on a lifetime career. Besides, it will be obvious to every crime boss around exactly what happened. He knows he’d never be safe.”
“This is a real conundrum,” I said. “But I think it’s obvious that we have to take the driver, too.”
“Take but not kill,” Ryker said.
“That’s what I mean,” I replied. “I don’t want to hurt anybody other than the ones who deserve it.”
The ones who deserved to be hurt were the ones who hurt my family or me. I never liked hurting people for the sheer pleasure and power of it, not like Ilya and Maksim and those I’d seen in The Organization. I wanted to protect innocents from people like that, not turn into them.
And that’s how we decided. Once we had our plan worked out, we were excited to play it out in real life.
Until then, we had free time to do exactly what we wanted.
