“Comforting,” Carl muttered. He glanced at Liam in time to see him smirking. “Does that mean Liam and Hunter are bunking together?”
“No thanks. I’ll take the couch!” Liam said, holding his hands up in mock fear.
“Smart man,” Hunter growled, coming down from his security check of the rooms.
When Chuck returned from his own check, he held a little device in his palm that wasn’t doing anything exciting—but that, apparently, was the purpose. “Well, the bug tracker says there’s nothing fun up here,” he said. “So that’s good to know.”
“Security’s pretty tight internally.” Hunter scowled. “I’m not a fan of the giant windows, but at least they’re tinted from the outside.”
“It would be really obvious to stage a hit through the windows,” Carl said. “The street’s so narrow, a sniper couldn’t come in at any sort of angle. Besides, who would know we’re here? And why would they want to kill us? For once, we’re not really doing anything wrong.”
“You’re never doing anything wrong,” Chuck said.
“I don’t know about that,” Carl protested. “The truth seems to get awfully bendy when we’re around each other.”
Young Liam Craig grinned. “’E’s right, Chuck. You bend the truth like a pretzel, pretty soon yer goin’ when ye ought’er be comin’!”
Carl blinked at him. “I could swear that was English,” he said blankly, and Liam smacked his own forehead with the flat of his hand.
“Forgive me,” he said, pulling his accent under control. “I’m tired and a little punchy, and I’ve taken two days leave for this and I’m worried it might get back to my commander.”
“All you need to do is stage the introduction,” Carl said, trying to put him at ease.
Liam shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s a little trickier than that.”
Chuck and Hunter drew closer, and Liam gestured to the long rectangular family-style table in the kitchenette part of the suite. It was covered with plates of meat, cheese, crackers, olives, and fruit, in addition to a bucket of chilled bottles of beer, juice, and water.
“Give us a minute to eat,” Chuck said, eyeballing the feast with relish. “And I’m sure we’ll think tricky is a walk in the park.”
NOT QUITE.
Carl hadn’t been wrong—the mission was still to talk to a man about a voluntary medical procedure. But there were a couple of wrinkles.
The first was that the man was rather famous for a number of enterprises that were less than legal. As with any such gentleman of means and reputation in these areas, his home came complete with deadly security measures and a couple of high-profile mercenaries.
The second was that his estate sat surrounded by a vast acreage of gardens and horse pasture, with very few trees and almost no covert means of approach.
And the third wrinkle was that this estate, with all the unwanted visibility, was still the easiest way to approach him. His city apartments were like bank vaults. It would take a year to plan for the job that would crack those, and they didn’t have a year.
They had, at most, a couple of months. Josh Salinger’s health wasn’t getting any better. If his body kept resisting chemo, very soon he’d be too frail to bounce back.
It had to be done the next day while people were coming and going to move their target to his winter home in Corfu.
“Has he hired any moving vans?” Hunter asked, all tactical.
“Yes,” Liam said. “I’d thought of that. I’ve even got a line on some onesies for us if it comes down to it. But he’s not moving the whole bloody place—just his kids’ clothes and such for himself.”
“He’s married?” Carl asked, hating the idea of breaking in on a family.
“Divorced,” Liam said, nodding like he understood the question. “The kids come and visit him when he’s in Corfu, and he brings some of their favorite items by request. One small moving van—that’s all they need. Four of us would be overkill, and most assuredly we all wouldn’t be able to sneak past his guards.” Four had been the agreed-upon number: Carl to present their target with the proposition and the other three to make sure nobody shot Carl while he was just trying to ask a hard-to-reach man a simple question.
They didn’t want to hurt anybody, they didn’t want to get hurt, and they didn’t want to involve the authorities when neither party wanted scrutiny.
And suddenly something exceedingly simple was irritatingly difficult.
Carl grunted and laced his fingers behind his head, relieved to see that Hunter and Chuck were also looking grim. Short of just driving up and asking to speak to the man—which, given who he was, might not generate the results they were hoping for—this job was proving more difficult than they’d planned.
“Give us good news,” Carl begged simply. “Liam, we’re not even trying to do anything illegal here.”
“I do have one thing to offer,” Liam said, “short of going to my commander and getting a court order to burst in and talk to this man, which would not incline him to listen, I must tell you that.”
“I’d shoot you on sight,” Hunter grumbled. “No, we need to be better than that. What’s your one thing.”
Liam gave a slight grin. “I’ve got the plans of the house. Here.”
With that, he unrolled a fairly impressive map of the estate, and Carl had to grimace. Liam had color coded the places that would be accessible during the move and the places where the master of the house would likely be located, isolated from all of the moving activity.
It really was like trying to break into a wardrobe from a freeway, wasn’t it?
But Carl’s expertise—and all the years he’d spent in his chosen, if hated, profession—was starting to percolate through his tired brain.
“Liam?” he asked, his voice coming from under layers of exhaustion and hope. “Do we know who insures his valuables or takes care of his estate while he’s gone?”
Liam cocked his head, eyes widening. “We do not,” he said. “But give me an hour after the crotch of dawn and I could tell you.”
Carl nodded, hiding a yawn behind his hand. “Give us some rack time,” he all but begged. “You’re welcome to take the couch. I’ve got an idea, but I need sleep to brain words. Can we wake up early and try this again?”
Chuck hid a yawn against his shoulder. “Carl, buddy, I knew there was a reason we brought you along.”
FIVE HOURS later, they were all dressed nattily in Italian-cut suits—even Hunter, whose suit jacket was his trademark Kevlar-lined leather. Packed into the Renault, a plan solidly under their belts, Carl and Chuck sat in the back making last minute contacts with their crew back in Chicago.
“I’m going in as a real estate agent who mistakenly thinks the place is for sale,” Carl told Julia. He and Chuck had squeezed their bodies back-to-back and were wearing earbuds so Chuck could hold court with Molly, their young drama student who was going to be Chuck’s tacky millionaire bride over the phone. Liam was the banker with the false papers of sale, which Carl had printed up that morning, and Hunter was their driver who was going to need a glass of water after Carl, Chuck, and Liam brazened their way through the front door.