A thousand questions raced through his brain. But one overcame all the others. “That was quite generous of them.”
“I assure you, what I provided to them was worth far more.”
That was saying a lot. Maybe even too much. “Are you sure this cache is real?”
Reinhardt sat back in his chair. “That’s the thing, Eli. I’m not. My friends in Berlin were clear. None of this has been verified.”
“You made a deal on something that might not even exist?”
Reinhardt smiled. “Your auction is real. I reasoned that, at a minimum, I could extract a payment from you not to interfere with that.”
He was cornered and did not like it.
“We need to find out if the Pantry is real,” Reinhardt said.
“What do you propose?”
“That we have a look.”
He hated that word we. This was his sale. His venture. But his choices seemed limited. Reinhardt could surely disrupt things. And why not? He had zero to lose. So he did what he did best and made a bargain. “I want a cut of whatever you receive on your portion of the deal.”
Reinhardt grinned. “How much?”
“Twenty percent.”
“That’s quite a cut.”
“I have expenses on the auction that you would need to contribute toward. A lot of money has been spent on privacy and security. Which raises a point. How did you find me?”
“Once the Germans showed me your invitation, I sent men out to track you down. I know your haunts, as you probably know mine. When Munoz disappeared, I assumed I’d found you.”
“And how did you know how to call me?”
Reinhardt smiled. “It wasn’t all that hard. Like you, I have friends with capabilities. You left a contact number with the agency that handles Sturney Castle. It’s the only fortress like it, available for rent, in Slovakia. Lots of privacy.”
He cursed himself for being so careless. If he’d made that big a mistake with Eli, what others had he made? Were some of the potential buyers closing in? Had the auction site been compromised? Thank goodness last night he’d taken those final precautions. Then a frightening thought occurred to him. “You followed me last night, didn’t you?”
Eli nodded again. “And when you drove north to Kraków, then to Wieliczka, my heart leaped.”
He waited.
“The Pantry is hidden away inside that salt mine.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Cotton kept his mouth shut and his temper in check until he and Bunch were in a car, alone, driving away from the monastery, Bunch behind the wheel.
“That should buy you some time,” Bunch finally said. “The president himself told Czajkowski that we were backing off, that there’d be no American presence at the auction. Him hearing that directly should do the trick.”
“So Fox flat-out lied to a head of state?”
Bunch waved off the accusation. “He merely misdirected him. I simply reinforced that misdirection.”
He shook his head. “Both of you are idiots.”
“That’s the president of the United States you’re talking about.”
“Yeah. That’s the scary part.”
They were on a two-laned highway, paralleling the River Wisła, headed back toward Kraków.
“You should have a clear path to the spear now,” Bunch said.
“Tom. Can I call you Tom?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “I make it a point not to say things I might regret later. Especially to people who work for the White House. But with you, I’ll make an exception. How about you go f—”
Bunch pointed at his cell phone.
Odd.
It rested in the center console between their seats.
He’d already noticed it, but had not paid much attention. He lifted the unit and saw that it was on a live call, the setting to SPEAKER.
“Mr. President,” Bunch said. “Malone knows you’re listening.”
He shook his head. This was beyond belief.
“It’s good to know what you really think of me,” Fox said.
“I didn’t know that was a secret, given our first encounter. You apparently didn’t learn a thing from almost being blown up?”
“I actually did. I learned that I want my own people handling things. No more of Danny Daniels’ leftovers.”
“Your people are incompetent.”
“As am I?”
He had zero intention of backing down. “You’re at the head of the line.”
Bunch’s face carried a smug grin, clearly pleased with the disrespect being shown.
“Ordinarily, Cotton—I can call you that, right?” Fox said through the phone. “I’d just tell Tom to fire you, hang up, and move on. We can hire other people. But you’re there, on the ground, ready to go, and time is really short. We only have until midnight to steal that spear.”
“The only reason I might is so I can shove it—”
“Cotton,” Fox said, interrupting. “Just steal the spear. Then I want you and Tom to go to the auction and buy whatever information Jonty Olivier is selling.”
These two were bold SOBs. He’d give them that.
“I was elected president,” Fox said, “because I had the balls to go out and ask people to vote for me. I think big. The problem with most people is they don’t think big. They’re afraid to think big. So they latch on to people, like me, who think big. I’m not scared to win. I like to win. I do what I have to do in order to win.”
“I don’t really give a crap,” Cotton said to the phone. “I don’t have a dog in this fight.”
“Except for the $150,000 Stephanie Nelle promised you.”
“I can live without it.”
Fox chuckled. “I’m sure you can. But I want those missiles in Poland and if you don’t help me out, I’m going to do what I told President Czajkowski I would do. I’ll fire Stephanie Nelle and the Magellan Billet will be disbanded. All of the American intelligence divisions will be told not to hire her. She will be persona non grata. If anyone in the private sector wants to hire her, she won’t receive any positive references from this administration. Quite the contrary, in fact. Her career choices will be limited to going to work for one of my enemies.”
He hated bullies. And that’s exactly what he was dealing with. And the best way to handle bullies was to get right in their face because, at their core, they were cowards. Right now, though, he had little to nothing to bargain with.
But if he had the spear?
They were beginning to enter Kraków’s outer suburbs, coming in from the west, and ahead across the river he spotted Wawel Castle. Its tawny defensive walls rose nearly a hundred feet above the water, at once massive and slender, topped by domes and towers. The seat of Polish kings for more than a millennium, though now only their tombs remained. It was both a museum storing precious objects and a work of art itself.
The symbol of Poland.
And where the Spear of St. Maurice waited.
His best bargaining chip.
“Did you hear me, Malone?” President Fox said.
“You really are a prick.”
“Like I care what you think. If I wanted a conscience, I’d buy one. What I want is those missiles in Poland. More important, I want Russia to know that the days of rolling over the United States are through.”