“I hate this moment,” Josh muttered, sagging. Hunter recalled that instant downstairs when Josh had looked exhausted. Now he looked almost green. His mother put a comforting arm around his shoulders.
“I do too. And I’d wager Grace isn’t excited about it either. But he needs to see he’s outgrown it.” She shook her head. “He’s matured so much since then. I know you can’t see it. But the way he’s become a leader in his dance troupe, and the discipline he’s shown over the last couple of months…. He’s got this.”
Josh nodded disconsolately. “Yeah.”
“Now we have to go finish the briefing, honey. Your father and Danny have discovered some truly alarming things about those ripples they were talking about. Our little mission to protect Tabitha’s grandfather has become more high stakes than we first imagined. We can catch Grace up later, but we need to have this meeting now.”
“Of course,” Josh said, magically transforming into the tough young leader Hunter had grown to appreciate. “Hunter?” He offered his hand.
Hunter took it. “I’m, uh, sorry,” he said.
Josh shrugged, like he hadn’t been fighting hard enough to nearly best Hunter when violence was what Hunter did.
“Completely my fault,” Josh said, his usual air of pleasant courtesy descending like a mask.
“It wasn’t,” Hunter told him, because Josh was too young not to let his vulnerability leak through. “I… I hope I did the right thing too.”
Josh gave him a weak smile. “If he’s not okay dealing with this, he’s not okay being in a relationship with you,” he said. “And there’s not enough emerald earrings in the world to fix that.”
They started down the stairs, and Hunter asked casually, “So what were in the other black boxes?”
“Hm….” Josh thought about it. “My father’s onyx cufflinks, my class ring, the watch my Uncle Danny gave me when I graduated from middle school, and one just like it that Danny was wearing when he and Felix first met.”
Hunter’s heart constricted. “Anything else?”
“Tabby’s promise ring from Sanjay. The first one. She thinks she lost it.”
Hunter fought the urge to rub his chest. Of course, because Tabitha was a friend and a promise ring meant a little less of that friend to go around.
Great.
“Anything else?” He tried to keep the fear out of his voice.
Josh looked at him and grimaced. “A pack of gum you had the day you guys first met—when we were eating pizza—and your tactical pen.”
Hunter’s eyebrows went up. “I have that on—”
“Your spare one. It was pink.”
Hunter blinked slowly. “That was in my gun safe,” he said. He’d had to ask Danny and Felix for permission to have it brought in and concealed in his closet. He, of course, had a larger gun safe in his apartment in the city, but this way he didn’t have to visit it for small missions.
“Well, yes, Hunter. If stealing was easy, everybody would do it and Grace wouldn’t be a prodigy, now would he?”
Hunter eyed him sourly. “You know, I hate to point this out to you, but you are not, legally, old enough to drink.”
Josh shrugged. “Tell that to my many fake IDs.”
“You know he has fake IDs?” Hunter accused Julia, and her shrug was the mirror of her son’s.
“Of course. Who do you think introduced him to the forger?”
Hunter shook his head and finally gave in to the temptation for that chest rub. It didn’t make him feel any better.
“Hunter?” Julia said softly.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Grace will come back. You were right to let him go.”
Hunter nodded, feeling wretched, and then pulled his big boy Kevlar on. They needed to see the rest of Danny’s presentation, at the very least.
“Where’s Dylan?” Tabby asked as they returned.
“Taking a breath,” Josh said gruffly.
She grimaced. “I don’t see why. Gabriel Hu is slimier than moldy cat shit. The only way to blow that guy off properly is to fart small.”
The shocked silence was broken by Molly, who erupted into peals of laughter. “You and Grace are perfect for each other,” she proclaimed. “He should have introduced you to us way sooner.”
“Well, I’m glad to know you now,” Tabitha told her, and then Danny shushed them all back into silence, and Hunter managed—with difficulty—to pull his attention back to the facts.
And the facts were disturbing.
Laslo Hu, Gabriel’s father, had been a highly successful jewelry designer in Chicago. When Gabriel had been sent to rehab—courtesy of Felix and Julia, Hunter suspected, although he didn’t know why—Laslo had relocated to New York but had moved the family home to Springfield, ostensibly to escape all of Gabriel’s old connections.
About two years ago—funny how all things happened two years earlier, including Sergei’s takeover of the business in Chicago—Laslo had left his shop in New York to highly competent and spectacular designers and merchants, and had retired to the family home in Springfield, contributing long distance. His business continued to flourish; Gabriel had taught his journeymen his cutting techniques for gemstones, and he apparently had an eye for talent. But none of the journeymen, according to Danny’s source, could laser cut as much information onto one single rock as they’d seen on the amber flower they’d intercepted in Vancouver.
But there was more.
Felix had contacted their friend Torrance Grayson, with the dates from Artur’s previous deliveries, and asked him to research any particular events that seemed to ripple out from the bullseye of when Artur dropped off the package.
There were always at least five.
Sometimes a struggling campaign—usually of a corrupt public official—would get an influx of much-needed cash about a week after the delivery. Maybe a tech company would suddenly announce a breakthrough, often in a field that wasn’t anywhere near its wheelhouse. A fairly wealthy or influential person in the community would suddenly go broke with no explanation, while at the same time, a nobody would win the lottery. A power company, perhaps, would go immediately bankrupt—rolling blackouts and rate increases happened almost like clockwork after the delivery. Someone who’d been in the papers for a very public, usually heinous, crime would be exonerated by anything from a corruption of the jury pool to the dropping of charges. And sometimes—particularly in places with lots of tech companies, like the Bay Area or Chicago itself—there would be one of those huge, terrible hacks in which a company hemorrhaged people’s addresses.
All within a week or two of a delivery.
“Oh my God,” Lucius murmured. “That’s…. My company alone didn’t provide all those dates.”
“No,” Felix agreed. “The pattern we’re looking at here shows several sources. He’s got a hacker on staff who is giving someone the go codes to get into the tech or credit-card companies, for example. He has more than one tech company with a weasel inside to funnel R and D information. Many of the political allies look like incumbents—these are contacts his predecessor cultivated and he’s keeping on staff. The criminals getting the get-out-of-jail card are often….” He caught his breath and looked at Danny. “They’re younger sons of rich men,” Felix said, as though surprised at the connection.