“You’ll get there, my boy,” Danny told him, and Grace brightened a little.
It hit Hunter then how badly Grace seemed to need not just attention, but validation. All of the preening, all of the look-at-me—he never expected anybody to see when he’d done something wonderful.
“It’s important,” Josh muttered. “If he’s building toward something, we need to know what. And Broadstone, your tech may be really crucial to that end. Do you have a list of projects you know for sure have been stolen?”
Broadstone nodded. “Of course. Why?”
“Because if we can look at who’s been producing what, maybe we can see a pattern,” Josh replied, gnawing on his lower lip. “But first….” He gave Artur a meaningful look.
Artur quailed. “Do you really need to see it?” he asked, sounding wretched. “You don’t understand—I need to drop it off in less than two hours!”
“See what?” Lucius asked.
“The thing that carries your data. The thing Mikey Jenkins was sent here to steal,” Josh told him, his forehead still puckered into a frown. “Which actually introduces a third party here.”
“Oh God.” Molly was sitting on one of the beds, and she flopped backward with a tremendous sigh. “My head hurts. Explain.”
“Well, we’ve got the people being exploited,” Josh said slowly. “Artur, Lucius, anybody else Sergei is blackmailing into helping him or stealing from, and the people doing the stealing and profiting from it—so, Sergei. And then Mikey—and I don’t know what he was doing here, but given that Lucius was unaware of the gun and wasn’t the one who let him go, he’s either working for Sergei—which makes no sense at all—or….”
“Or he had his own reasons,” Felix finished for him on screen.
“Okay, then,” Julia said. She’d crossed her legs elegantly and was leaning forward, tapping her lower lip with her finger. “We still need to see exactly how the information is being transported. Wait.” She cut a sharp look to Lucius. “How did you know about Artur? How did you know he’d be transporting information or a thumb drive or whatever?”
Broadstone grimaced. “Jenkins told me.”
“Of course,” she murmured.
“But….” Artur’s voice cracked. “It’s a trust, you see,” he finished, not looking at anybody. “I’m trusted with a job. It’s… it wasn’t a comfortable relationship. I didn’t ask for it. But for thirty years I… I was trusted.”
“But the person who trusted you is gone, Dance Master,” Grace said, his voice dropping compassionately. “The first guy may have treated you like a business partner—unwilling or not, he may have shown you respect. That’s not who’s left. The man who’s there now is going to drive you into the ground. Everybody at the Conservatory has seen it. You’ve been traveling more often than you’re home, and we need you at home.” Grace blinked soberly at him. “We need you, Dance Master. Yanking you away from us makes you betray your most important trust, doesn’t it?”
Artur nodded, defeated. “Da,” he murmured throatily.
Hunter tried not to get whiplash from the many facets of Grace, but it was hard. He wondered if affection was part of Grace’s emotional repertoire, because if so, it would have a hard time breaking free from the other six hundred directions his personality tried to travel simultaneously.
But Hunter liked this particular side. Seeing him be kind, gentling the proud Artur into changing a pattern established after thirty years of work—that showed that there was more to Grace than the brilliant thief who was also an obnoxious pain in the ass.
“So,” Julia said, dimpling, “could you please fetch the present? Don’t worry. We’ll have Grace open it. He knows how to make it look as though nobody has touched it. Sergei will never suspect—”
“But what if it’s my tech!” Broadstone protested, and suddenly, through the computer screen, Felix “Fox” Salinger made his presence well and truly known.
“What if your tech is being used for nefarious purposes?” Felix demanded. “Have you thought of that? The people this tech is being delivered to are mobsters on an international scale. What if you’re funding a coup? Don’t you want to know who has been stealing from you and what their organization looks like? Come on, man. You’re poised to be a Fortune 500 company here. Think bigger than your backyard!”
“You have no idea how big I’m thinking,” he snapped. “Don’t judge me. I have irons in the fire that don’t show up on Forbes—”
“We can subsidize Caraway House,” Felix said, and while nobody else in the room knew what that meant, the effect it had on Lucius Broadstone was immediate.
His broad shoulders relaxed, his hard jaw softened, and the lines on his forehead went from “etched deeply” to “showing character” in less than a breath.
“How did you know—”
“Please,” Stirling murmured, his fingers clicking relentlessly on his laptop. “We’re not amateurs.”
“Who are you people?” Lucius muttered. Then he seemed to remember. “I mean, I know you’re Felix Salinger and Benjamin Morgan—everybody from Chicago knows that.” He frowned. “But what are you doing involved in this?”
Danny gave him an engaging smile, and even through the computer screen, Hunter could feel the tug of the man’s charisma. “Isn’t it wonderful what awesome and powerful paths the tides of life can sweep us toward? So do we have your permission to continue to make the drop and see this little adventure through?”
Lucius blinked slowly, probably trying to decipher whether or not Danny had answered the question, which everybody else in the room recognized he had not.
“Sure,” he breathed after a moment. “Fine. Whatever. Caraway House is safe. What’s a forty-year-old tech legacy anyway?”
“Have a little faith,” Felix said genially. “Your old man sounds like a bastard. Imagine what starting over could do for the old self-esteem.”
Lucius glared at the screen through hooded eyes, and Hunter smirked. He didn’t see Felix and Danny letting Lucius’s firm go under if they could at all help it, but they were right. Interrupting the delivery of whatever it was Artur was transporting wasn’t going to solve their problem—in fact, it would only make it worse.
“I assume you’re being ironic,” he said after a deep breath.
“You are so very generous!” Danny clapped his hands, delighted. “Artur, why don’t you fetch that package now. You’re going to have to deliver it soon, and we want everything to go smoothly.”
Artur nodded and exited the room with heavy steps, leaving the rest of them to talk about him while he was gone.
On Delicate Toebeans
“GRACE,” JULIA asked, “is he up to this?”
Grace blew out a breath. “I think he’s tired,” he admitted. His feet ached, and he wished mightily for some—
“Here,” Hunter murmured, thrusting some ibuprofen into his hand with a bottle of water. “Should have made sure you had this earlier.”