At Midnight

by Blair Babylon

  Raphael shoved into her harder, pounding her body with his, as her core tightened. She flailed, grasping at his shoulders and hair, running her nails over his skin.

  His surging body and male scent and rough skin overwhelmed her.

  Flicka came apart in a burst of ecstasy and white light that filled her as Raphael moved in her body.

  His rhythm quickened, and he thrust up into her with those last few strokes of instinct seeking oblivion. His hoarse shout echoed in her ears as his body trembled in her arms.

  After a moment, his arms and legs curled inward closing around her like a shield.

  He whispered, “Remember what I said. If you find an opening, take Alina and run.”

  Flicka nodded and held him tightly in her arms.

  Working Days

  Raphael Mirabaud

  A Vice-President

  and a prisoner.

  For a few days, Raphael left with his father in the morning, striding with him through the ten-car garage to the chauffeured town car that drove them into Geneva.

  The car carried them through the Mirabaud estate to the highway Quai de Cologny. Large lawns edged with flowerbeds and manicured hedges sprawled to the shore of Lake Geneva.

  Once they left the property, the ride to the bank in downtown Geneva took seven minutes.

  Seven long minutes, where Raphael sat in the passenger seat and conversed in pleasantries with the driver, who had no idea that the two men in the car were related unless she had noticed the striking similarities in their appearance, though his father was around four decades older, of course.

  Valerian sat in the back, reviewing documents. He and Raphael didn’t speak.

  When they arrived in Geneva, several of the guards met Raphael and Valerian at the door and escorted them to Valerian’s office, where the two men met with some of Geneva Trust’s non-criminal clients and went over the financial underpinnings of the bank.

  These clients didn’t really matter. They were no one important. No one would listen to them, if they even thought to say anything to anyone.

  Raphael watched for his Uncle Bastien or his sisters.

  At the bank, he saw no one from his family, save his father.

  He spoke to no one who would be a problem.

  No one knew Raphael existed.

  If he fought back, it would be easier to dispose of his body if no one in the family or bank knew he had returned.

  A sinking feeling filled him that Bastien wouldn’t utter a word if Raphael disappeared.

  He sat in the meetings quietly, waiting for them to relax their guard.

  Raphael caught on to Geneva Trust’s financial structure quickly. He had received an MBA from the London Business School, one of the best B-schools in the world, but he didn’t mention his degree to his father.

  He didn’t mention several other subjects to his father, either: his military career, his degrees, or Rogue Security. His whole life as Operator Dieter Schwarz dissolved and blew away in a puff of white smoke.

  He was and had always been Raphael Mirabaud with only a brief sojourn as a bodyguard, a hulking brute with no banking connections. Raphael had not quite finished high school when he disappeared.

  After a few days of this routine, at the end of business on a Wednesday, Valerian looked up at Raphael, pleased. “You have an innate talent for finance, I think.”

  Raphael said, “It must be genetic.”

  Valerian said, “Tomorrow, you’ll begin work in your own office, meeting with clients. I expect total loyalty.”

  “Of course,” Raphael said. “I understand the ramifications.”

  Valerian eased back in his large chair. “I should hope so, but I hope that you also understand that the expectation is that you will become involved in the bank, become a part of our operation, and then we’ll have no need of any assurances such as Flicka and Alina now provide.”

  “I’m sure we’ll grow to trust each other.” A half-truth.

  “I have missed you, Raphael. I’m not young, and I expect you to take my place someday.”

  Raphael smoothed his gray, silk tie on his crisp, white shirt. “I’m counting on it.”

  He was planning it much sooner than Valerian had meant.

  Piano

  Flicka von Hannover

  I couldn’t believe it.

  The next day after lunch, a ruckus occurred outside the double doors of the guest suite.

  Flicka scooped Alina off of the floor, shoved her into her bedroom, and told her to hide under the bed and not make a sound, no matter what she heard.

  Flicka’s heart hammered in her chest. Alina hadn’t been trained to hide in the face of danger, to secret herself in a niche and be entirely silent or, if the situation called for it, to sprint to safety.

  They needed to do better. By the age of two, Flicka had known how to hide. Her mother had seen to that. The nannies had drilled her until she could practically crawl into a crack in the sidewalk and cover her mouth so no one could hear her breathe.

  Flicka swore they would do better, and she grabbed a vase that would do absolutely no good against armed attackers, but there was nothing else in the suite to throw.

  The doors flung inward.

  Flicka stretched herself across the door to Alina’s bedroom and hoisted the vase in her hand, readying herself to heave it. The first guy was going to get beaned hard before Flicka went down.

  Moving men walked in, carrying an electronic piano between them.

  Flicka lowered the vase. “What’s this?”

  One of the housekeepers, the stout blonde named Kyllikki, held the doors back for the men. With a furtive glance out the doors, she whispered, “Mr. Mirabaud said that you were to have a piano immediately.”

  “Which Mr. Mirabaud?”

  “Mr. Raphael Mirabaud.”

  Interesting. He could give orders now, at least orders for a piano. “Thank you.”

  Kyllikki said, “This electronic one is for practice in the suite. The accessories will be brought up in a moment. A baby grand will be installed in one of the sitting rooms downstairs tomorrow morning for your amusement.”

  Flicka placed the vase, which was probably a priceless work of art, on its pedestal. “We’ll be here that long?”

  “I haven’t been informed, ma’am,” she said.

  Flicka stilled her shaking hands and went into the bedroom to tell Alina that all was clear now.

  A piano.

  Her heart lifted a little.

  Nannies

  Flicka von Hannover

  I remember my nannies,

  all of them.

  Every.

  Single.

  One.

  Flicka calmed herself for the next few hours by playing two-octave scales silently on the electronic piano until Raphael got home from work. She had one earbud in to listen, and the other dangled over her fingers as they walked up and down the keys in time to the metronome, crossing carefully at the right spots.

  The repetition, music, and very prescribed movements soothed her.

  While she was, in fact, a prisoner and a hostage, she was staying in a gorgeous Swiss mansion on the shores of Lake Geneva. Outside, the deep, blue water of the wide lake sparkled in the sunlight, as she saw from the front windows that faced the water. Several small sailboats were tied to an anchor, radiating like daisy petals from where they were moored, beside a long, wooden pier that jutted out into the water.

  From other windows, she had seen a tennis court, a pool with an expansive pool house and outdoor dining for sixteen, and a vegetable garden teeming with late fall pumpkins and hardy greens.

  She kept a tight grip on her fears and tried not to flinch every time someone walked by the guest suite’s door.

  Alina had asked her, “Flicka-mama okay? Flicka-mama okay?” about a dozen times.

  The little extrovert was perceptive.

  After an hour of practice, Flicka read books to Alina and tried to play ha-boo with her, but she ended up sitting b
ehind the couch with her hands over her face.

  Alina crawled in her lap. “I’m kitty.”

  “Did you have a kitty?” Flicka asked her, tucking the child into a huggable bundle.

  “Suze-mama has kitties,” Alina said. “Three fur: black, white, turtle.”

  “Tortoiseshell,” Flicka said absently.

  “I miss Suze-mama,” Alina said. “Suze-mama play with us?”

  Every nanny-swap that had punctuated Flicka’s childhood ran through her head. With her odd memory trick, she remembered all her nannies, from Wiebke who left because she had fallen pregnant when Flicka had been fourteen months old, to Melitta, Roswitha, and Nadine when Flicka had been shipped to Le Rosey for kindergarten.

  Flicka leaned her cheek against Alina’s forehead. “I miss Suze-mama, too. I liked her.”

  “She eats green,” Alina said.

  “Yes, she does.”

  “Meti, and Tabitha, and T’she-she-uncle.”

  Her Las Vegas playgroup and sitter. “I miss them, too.”

  Alina pointed at the window, where snowflakes drifted in the air. “Cold out.”

  “A little, but there is no bad weather, only bad clothes,” Flicka said, echoing what the dorm mothers told her when they were insisting that Flicka learn to ski.

  “Go out and play?” Alina asked.

  “We haven’t been outside for days, have we?” Flicka said, musing about places where she could pick up Alina and disappear into a crowd. “I’ll talk to Grand-maman about getting us some good coats and shoes, and we will find a park to play.”

  Recruiting Bastien

  Raphael Mirabaud

  Some conversations require whiskey

  at ten in the morning.

  The next day, on the first day Valerian allowed Raphael free run of Geneva Trust without Russian guards breathing down his back, Raphael leaned on the doorway of his uncle Bastien’s office. “Tell me what happened.”

  Bastien leaned back in his chair and tossed his pen onto the paperwork scattered on his wide desk as if he were throwing a dart at something slimy that had crawled in. “What are you here to destroy now, Raphael?”

  “Just tell me what happened.” They both knew what he meant. He didn’t need to elaborate.

  Sunlight shining through the window picked out metallic silver strands in Bastien’s gold and gray hair. “Piotr Ilyin was furious. It cost him millions of dollars when you ran. We paid him back from personal funds, but it wasn’t just the money, of course. We had to appease him, or he would have had his Russian goons go after someone else in the family. We had to assure the police and the government that we weren’t involved with the Ilyin Bratva, but we were involved up to our necks, thanks to you. Even with that, there were some minor convictions for banking improprieties that we had to accept and then explain to our other customers, the ones who weren’t using us as a money laundering service. Some left, which has made us more dependent on the Ilyins and their dirty money.”

  Raphael asked, “Who took the fall?”

  “We all did! We all took the fall for you, after you got us so deeply involved with the Ilyins and then ran away.”

  That wasn’t quite accurate.

  Raphael had been twelve when the Ilyins had begun using Geneva Trust as their principal financial institution in Europe, which meant Geneva Trust had become their primary money laundering institution. Raphael had been doing nothing more nefarious than playing soccer when he was twelve.

  Geneva Trust’s connections with organized crime reached farther back in time than that, of course. Swiss banks were synonymous with money laundering and cash stashed away from interested governments and spouses.

  When Raphael had turned sixteen, he’d gone through the bank’s computerized records back to the 1930s. Geneva Trust had millions in deposits from people who had not contacted the bank after 1939. Their descendants or family members had not been able to supply the necessary information to claim the funds, even though it was obvious who they were and that they desperately needed the money to escape Germany or start over somewhere outside of Europe after the Holocaust. The bank had kept those untold millions in unclaimed deposits and loaned them out at interest, which amounted to a tidy profit every year.

  Calling Geneva Trust innocent was disingenuous, to say the very least.

  Raphael asked Bastien, “Did you know what the delivery was?”

  Bastien shrugged his thin shoulders. “I’m sure it was something dastardly. Heroin?”

  It didn’t matter now, over a decade later. “It wasn’t drugs. So, you guys were out some money.”

  Bastien ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “It caused a lot of problems.”

  “You never wanted the bank to get involved with the Ilyins.”

  “Close the door.”

  Raphael stepped into Bastien’s office and closed the door behind himself. “Did you?”

  Bastien gestured to the conversation group in the corner, over by the wet bar, and walked around his desk. “If you want to talk, let’s sit down and have a drink.”

  Raphael didn’t mention that it was ten in the morning. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

  Bastien stood at the bar. Ice clinked in glasses, and Bastien splashed amber liquid over the cubes. He handed one to Raphael and sat on the couch opposite him. “My liver is in its best form of my life after drinking all day, every day, in Las Vegas. I could drink anyone under the table right now.”

  “That must come in handy for a banker.”

  “Indeed.”

  “You spied on us for months in Vegas and didn’t tell Flicka who you were.”

  Bastien sipped his drink. “Valerian and I walked into the Monaco Casino on the second day we were there, looking for you. He glanced over the crowd and declared that he didn’t see anyone who looked like you.”

  “But you did.”

  “But I did,” Bastien agreed, “so he went back to Geneva after a few days, and I stayed, trying to figure out what you were up to. Partly, it was curiosity, I suppose, but I wanted to see you. I wanted to know that you were all right. I only meant to see you for a while, maybe not even talk to you, but just make sure you were okay.”

  “But you turned us over to him. You could have just left Las Vegas and never mentioned that you had seen us. He was right there, outside the courthouse, waiting for us.”

  Bastien set his glass on the table and glared at it. “I didn’t tell him. He had Russian goons watching me, too. I didn’t realize it, and they followed me there. In the Monaco, they tried to take you, to drag you outside to the Las Vegas street, shoot you, and be done with it. I saw them running at you. Flicka saw them and warned you, and you two ran.”

  Raphael glanced into his drink, stifling his reaction. The goons at the Monaco Casino had been Russian bratva men gunning for him, not Monegasque Secret Service agents trying to kidnap Flicka.

  When he’d heard the crash of her drinks’ tray and glanced over his shoulder, their pursuers had been looking at him, not Flicka.

  His world flipped upside down.

  “So, Piotr Ilyin already knows I’m here.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Does Ilyin know about Flicka?”

  “Interpol found Gretchen Mirabaud’s passport, too. They told Valerian you were married to her. In Las Vegas, it looked like you were just card sharking until I noticed the Swiss woman named Gretchen. She was never there without you, and you were never there without her. I’d never met Flicka and didn’t recognize her as Friederike von Hannover. I should have. Anaïs would have known her in a heartbeat.”

  “How is your daughter?” Raphael asked. When he’d gone into hiding, Anaïs had been in pre-school.

  “She’s fine. She’s interning for an entire year at the UN instead of joining the bank. That’s Friederike von Hannover’s bad influence.” Bastien was smiling. “At least Anaïs won’t be caught up in this.”

  “I saw her at the Shooting Star Cotillion events. S
he’s beautiful.”

  “Of course, she is. All my daughters are beautiful. It’s too bad all of them insist on wearing those chunky glasses. They’re all as near-sighted as bats.”

  “Not the worst affliction.”

  “No, it’s not. They read incessantly. You can’t have a conversation with them about anything because they will cite facts and destroy your argument in minutes.” His smile grew fond as he stared into his drink. “They’re formidable.”

  “I still don’t know how you found out we were in Las Vegas at all,” Raphael said.

  Bastien grinned around his drink. “You caused quite a stir when you proposed to her on that airplane. People uploaded the video of it. Interpol is still looking for you, and their facial recognition software matched your face to their files. The software picked up the alert but not the cause. They almost got you at the gate. They couldn’t see what the charge was, so they didn’t act.”

  Raphael frowned. The horror, anger, and pain in Flicka’s emerald eyes had devastated him. He’d been losing her. He’d felt her revulsion and that she was slipping farther away from him with every passing second. It had been the most impulsive of proposals, perhaps the most impulsive thing he’d ever done, perhaps the only impulsive thing he’d ever done.

  She had thought he didn’t love her enough to propose marriage.

  But he had always loved her more than his heart could hold.

  So he’d proposed.

  And the cameras had come out, and the videos had flown into the ether, and Interpol had notified his father.

  Raphael asked, “And then what happened?”

  “We got word of it. After that, it was easy to find out where your ticket went. You even used your real name, for God’s sake.”