“You do know you picked the most expensive things on the menu, right?” she asked as the server walked away.
“I figure if we have to eat in a fancy restaurant, we might as well see how the other half lives,” Caleb said with a grin. “Though I’ll probably have to go out to McDonald’s after this for something a little more filling. You’re welcome to join me if you want.”
“Already asking me out on a second date before the first one is even over, are you?” she teased with a soft laugh. “I never say no to fries, so you’re on.”
Male voices rumbled through their earpieces as Lestari and the other men at his table discussed the menu. Brielle glanced at them and immediately realized that their lips weren’t syncing up with the words she was hearing, and it took her a moment to remember what Misty had said about using a software program to translate from the Serbian language the men were speaking straight into English. According to Misty, the software could handle almost all of the languages and dialects common throughout Europe and Asia, which was very convenient, she had to admit.
She sipped her wine, listening to the men carefully, but after hearing nothing of interest, she turned down the volume on her earpiece. Across from her, Caleb did the same. Listening to the man babble on about food, wine, and traffic, it was hard to believe Lestari was one of the most cold-blooded and ruthless arms dealers in the world. According to the file STAT put together, Lestari had made his millions selling weapons and explosives throughout Indonesia and South Asia, particularly in India and Sri Lanka. While nuclear weapons seemed to be a big step up for Lestari, it was difficult to ignore the fact that one of his ships had slipped out of the port city near Incirlik barely an hour after the weapons had been stolen. The same port city her brother had used during his short-lived drug operation. That ship had sailed straight for the Adriatic Sea and the city of Rijeka, a little more than two hours from Zagreb. They’d moved fast, just in time for this dinner between Lestari and a group of men supposedly interested in staging a coup in Yemen.
Yes, it was a lot of circumstantial evidence, but taken together, Brielle could understand why STAT thought Lestari had the nukes. And once they had the weapons back, Jake promised to make sure Surinda Lestari told them everything he knew about her brother and where he was.
The fact that she hadn’t heard from Julian in nearly a week terrified her, but she had to believe he was alive and well. She wouldn’t be able to keep going if she let herself imagine anything else.
“So you and Julian grew up in Lyon?” Caleb asked, sipping his drink. “What was that like?”
She picked up her wineglass and took a sip. It was fruity and sweet and not dry at all, which was nice. “I wish I could say that it was charming, idyllic, and heartwarming, but that would be a lie. And something tells me that you’d prefer me to be honest.”
Caleb was silent a moment, as if considering that. “I’d prefer if you didn’t lie to me. The idea that you might bothers me for some reason.”
Brielle filed that away for later. She was surprised to discover that she didn’t want to have any secrets from Caleb. No matter how dangerous that might be.
“Our mother passed away when my brother and I were young,” she murmured. “I was barely twelve at the time, and Julian had just turned seven. It was hard on us but even worse for our father. Maman was the glue that kept our little family together, and to say our father didn’t handle it well would be an understatement.”
Brielle bit her tongue in a vain attempt to distract herself from the pain that memories of her mother’s death brought back. For some unexplainable reason, she found herself wanting to tell Caleb everything, even though she’d never confided to anyone about it before. She only hoped she didn’t start crying in the middle of the restaurant. That would be too much.
“We didn’t have any other family. Papa tried to take care of us as best he could. But without Maman, his heart wasn’t in it.”
She fell silent as the server placed their appetizers in front of them, then nibbled on the warm brioche topped with orange butter, losing herself in the bright citrus taste and using it as another excuse to distance herself from the emotions she’d never been able to process, even after all this time.
“My father started drinking—a lot,” she finally said, picking up her spoon to scoop up a small piece of wine-poached pear. “As you can imagine, things went downhill from there. He was able to stop a few times for Julian and me, but the periods of sobriety never lasted long. I was fourteen when he lost his job for good. By that point, I was already doing all the cooking and cleaning, and I was paying the bills with whatever money he brought home. It wasn’t much of a leap for me to get my first job. At that age, I couldn’t do much legally, but we had a family friend who took pity on us and let me stock shelves in his store at night after it closed. The pay wasn’t much, but between that and the expired canned goods he let me take home, it kept food on the table.”
“What about Julian?” Caleb asked.
Brielle looked up, surprised to see that he’d already finished his appetizer and his drink. She’d been so lost in her story that she’d barely noticed.
“Julian didn’t handle our mother’s death any better than our father did.” She nibbled on her brioche, then ate some more of the pear. The fruit was made even sweeter from the port and would have been a delectable dessert with a big dollop of whipped cream. “He disappeared into a shell for a long time, and when he finally came out, he wasn’t the same. I was the one who had to make sure he ate, went to bed on time, got to school, and did his homework.”
Caleb gave her a sympathetic look. “That must have been tough on you.”
She shrugged. “It was. I missed Maman, too, but I was so focused on taking care of Julian that I didn’t have time to process everything.”
They both fell silent as the server showed up with small bowls of risotto with carrot juice. The dish was topped with burrata, which both resembled and tasted a lot like mozzarella, Brielle discovered, but with a creamier consistency.
Across from her, Caleb started to say something as he dipped his spoon in his risotto again, but then he paused, taking a moment to listen in on the translated conversation going on between Lestari and the other men at his table. Brielle was starting to think STAT had been wrong about this guy because they’d been eavesdropping for at least thirty minutes and had yet to hear a single word related to the stolen nuclear weapons.
“Did things ever get any better for you and Julian?” Caleb finally asked, turning his attention back to her, gazing at her in a way that made her breath hitch a little. “After that, I mean.”
She shook her head. “Our father passed a few days after my eighteenth birthday, and I went from raising Julian to being legally responsible for him. I’d just taken my qualification exams and been hoping to go to university, but there was no way I could do that, not when I had to provide for Julian. So I got two more jobs and committed myself to taking care of my brother, paying the rent and bills, and putting food on the table.”