That line came from a bad action movie, which unbeknown to Alaric at that moment, was exactly what the situation was about to turn into. He smiled and nodded. The smile was tense, and deliberately so—Alaric’s alter ego hadn’t been keen to meet in the middle of the fucking ocean.
“Difficult trip?” he asked. “The sea’s a little rough today.”
“On the contrary—it’s always a pleasure to get out on the water, even in a boat like this. Do you have the money?”
“Do you have the painting?”
Dyson chuckled. “All in good time. Can I interest you in a drink?”
He waved a hand at a glass-fronted mini-fridge on the floor in one corner, and Alaric spotted a bottle of Dom Perignon as well as soft drinks and a six-pack of beer. Dyson was an enigma, a ghost with many faces, much like Alaric himself was to become after that day.
“Let’s save that for after we’ve completed the deal, shall we?”
“As you wish.” Dyson closed the laptop and tucked it into a drawer, then tapped his hand on the desk. “Let me see.”
Alaric hefted the briefcase onto the table. One million bucks in hundred-dollar bills weighed twenty-two pounds, not much for what amounted to a lifetime’s work for many people. The remainder of the pay-off, the diamonds, consisted of sixty-five stones of three to four carats each, all rated in the top two categories for clarity—IF or VVS1. Alaric had learned a lot about gems over the last few months, and not just because of this case. No, last month, he’d bitten the bullet and bought a ring for Emmy. Would he ever give it to her? He didn’t know. He wanted to. But there was one big obstacle standing in the way, and his name was Black.
Emmy’s husband.
The two of them had never been married in the traditional sense. There was no big white wedding with a kiss and a honeymoon at the end. From what Alaric could gather, it had started off as a green-card deal, a way to tie Emmy to Blackwood Security and her job for good, but the arrangement had lasted for seven years and counting. The pair lived together, and even though Emmy assured Alaric that there was no romance involved, he’d seen the way Black looked at her. The asshole wouldn’t let Emmy go easily.
Did Alaric feel guilty about dating another man’s wife? Not really. It wasn’t as if Black stayed celibate. Emmy said he had a fuck pad in Richmond, an apartment where he took women, but when Alaric did some digging, he found it was so much more than that. Black didn’t just have the occasional hook-up, he had a whole damn harem. The women lived in an apartment complex in Rybridge, usually half a dozen at any one time, and they even had a concierge to look after them. When Black needed to get his rocks off, he just picked out a piece of ass and had her sent over. Did Emmy know all that? Alaric was fairly sure she didn’t. The beck-and-call girls signed NDAs.
And tempting though it had been to let the information slip, he didn’t want to win Emmy’s affections by driving a wedge between her and Black. She obviously cared for the man despite his many faults. No, Alaric needed to tread carefully and bide his time.
The night before the handover, before they’d flown to Virginia Beach and picked up the yacht, Emmy had fallen asleep in his arms for a few minutes, something she never normally did. He’d whispered that he loved her. Did she hear? He wasn’t sure, but when her eyes flickered open, she’d kissed him sweetly, almost tenderly, and he’d sensed her hesitation before she headed back to her own bedroom. She’d wanted to stay.
Why hadn’t she? Because she was dangerous. A combination of nightmares, instinct, and lightning-fast reflexes meant she was capable of killing a man in her sleep, and she’d come damn close once. Ever since that night, she’d slept alone.
But maybe if she got away from Blackwood, away from the source of the strife…
Alaric pushed the thought out of his mind as he unlocked the briefcase. That was a problem for another day.
The first inkling that something was wrong came with Dyson’s sharp intake of breath. What was the issue? Alaric had watched the accountant at the Bureau pack the cash himself, and the amount was spot on—one million dollars exactly, taken from a slush fund that didn’t officially exist. Alaric’s boss hadn’t been thrilled about him borrowing it, or the conflict diamonds confiscated from a crooked lobbyist, but since they’d be coming right back, he’d grudgingly agreed.
An FBI team would be monitoring the scalloper’s movements by now, thanks to the tracker Alaric had installed. The agents were stationed on a coastguard patrol boat just outside the marina. They’d decided it was too risky to have more vessels in the area in case they spooked the target, and that was a good call judging by the marine radar unit mounted above the scalloper’s bridge. As long as Alaric got Emerald, Dyson and his friends would be arrested as soon as they set foot on the shore. And if the sale turned out to be a scam and Dyson attempted to steal the money? Same outcome—handcuffs and a nice vacation in prison. Sure, there was a chance they’d try to dump Alaric’s body overboard, but what was life without a little danger? He wasn’t worried. He’d been in worse situations, and he had Emmy as backup. Oh, and the other FBI agents, but Emmy was worth ten of them.
“This money is fake,” Dyson snapped. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
What? This was the scam? They’d lured Alaric into the middle of nowhere, only to accuse him of a double-cross? As if he’d do that. Not when Dyson was their best—and only—lead to a ring that had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of art. Rumour said the School of Shadows had been involved in the Emerald heist as well as the disappearance of a Van Gogh last year and numerous other high-profile thefts over the past four decades, but nobody knew who they were or where they came from. Alaric couldn’t afford to screw this up.
“It’s not fake.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday. These bills all have the same serial number.”
A chill started in Alaric’s toes and worked its way up his body. Duplicate serial numbers were amateur hour, and they hadn’t even been sequential let alone identical when he left FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. He grabbed one stack and thumbed through them, and the chill turned to a full-on glacier seeping through his veins. The notes were forgeries, and not even good ones. Instead of puffy clouds drifting over Independence Hall, there was a fucking tempest brewing.
“What the hell?” he muttered under his breath.
Meanwhile, Dyson had tipped a couple of the rocks out of their velvet pouch and begun examining them with a diamond tester, a small electronic device that measured the electrical and thermal conductivity of the stone. Diamonds wouldn’t conduct electricity, whereas some imitations would.
Such as the ones in Dyson’s hand, for example.
“This is cubic zirconia,” he said. “I negotiate in good faith, and you, my friend, are a fraud.”
No, no, no. Those damn stones were diamonds. According to Alaric’s boss, every single one had been authenticated by a jeweller when they were confiscated, and they’d been sitting in a safe at the Bureau ever since. Alaric knew it was possible to tamper with a diamond tester, to rewire the inside to skew the readings, and if that had been the only problem, he’d have suspected Dyson was trying to pull a fast one. But the hundred-dollar bills… Sometime between the originals being loaded into the briefcase at headquarters and that moment on the boat, they’d been swapped. What if the real diamonds had been taken too?