Pimpernel

by Sheralyn Pratt

  Claire nodded, more out of reflex than anything as her mind tried to predict who was about to walk through the door.

  Kali stood, bringing her satchel with her. “I’m going to leave now. What happens next is up to you, but what I can promise you is that the second that door opens, you have to pick a side. There will be no straddling fences. Straddling fences gets you killed in the world you’ve tripped into, Claire. Never forget that. There is no such thing as multiple alliances. You pick your team, and you sink or swim with it.”

  The words felt true, even though Claire’s mind fought them. She didn’t want them to be true.

  “You ready?” Kali asked, walking over to the door.

  Claire stayed sitting where she was. “No.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, then opened the door.

  Kali didn’t make a big production of leaving. She just walked out, leaving the door open behind her. A mid-sized man stepped through it, shutting it behind him. His hair was light blond and cropped short. He looked to be in his mid-thirties.

  For a moment, Claire didn’t recognize him. She was used to smoother skin, more pronounced cheek bones, and a higher arch to the brow. Her mind mapped and remapped the features of the man in front of her, realizing he must have worn a wig to make his hairline lower and his hair longer and darker. Once blue eyes were now hazel or brown. She couldn’t tell from across the room, but she didn’t need to get any closer to see that Daniel’s immaculate wardrobe had been replaced with casual jeans and a black t-shirt with a little bit of scruff on his jaw that indicated that the man who typically filled Daniel’s shoes hadn’t had time for a proper shave that day.

  Without Kali’s introduction, Claire would have guessed this man to be Daniel’s much older brother. The two men had the same nose and the same lips, but without whatever device had been pulling this man’s face taut to make him look at least a decade younger, it seemed impossible that she could be looking at the same man.

  “Daniel?” she breathed.

  In a voice that was a half an octave lower than she was used to and distinctly missing a lisp, the man replied, “Hello, Claire.”

  Chapter 21

  Thank heaven for Kali Fischer! Jack thought as he let Claire process who he was and why he was there.

  Jack had made the right call when he stuck his neck out to save Kali’s life last year. She’d been a bit of an unknown quantity then—heck, she still was now. But the woman was a pinch hitter. When the pressure was on, she didn’t flinch a bit. She’d just proved that much. Now he just had to follow in her smooth footsteps, which was hard to do when Claire was looking at him with eyes that belonged in a Disney cartoon.

  “Let’s sit down and talk, shall we?” he said, gesturing to the couch.

  For a stunned moment, Claire simply looked at him. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt more violated in my life than I do right now.”

  Jack gave her a little nod. “That happens when you become a criminal. Rules and boundaries change.”

  “Wait,” she said, her voice pitching half way to shrill. “You’re not even going to apologize for lying to me? For pretending to be my friend? For…”

  The last accusation got caught in her throat somewhere when her voice pinched off and cracked, leaving Jack to fill in the blank himself.

  He took a seat on the couch, leaving room for her to do the same. Following Kali’s lead, he kept his tone and energy neutral. “For putting an end to a serious crime before defrauded billionaires start calling in hitmen?”

  He saw Claire’s mind working, probably analyzing every moment they’d spent together. “So my apartment really didn’t have anything wrong with it four weeks ago? That was a setup?”

  Jack nodded. “We created the situation so I could get to know you better and try to get a feel for your motives.”

  “I’ll bet,” she said in a tone all men recognized. He was a breath away from her hair trigger.

  Her mind was thinking. Jack could tell that much. It probably wouldn’t work out too well for him if he let too much of that happen right then, so he kept talking.

  “Kali was right when she said I’m here to take your investment scam down. And, believe it or not, I have no desire to throw you to the wolves when I do it. So if Kali was also right about you having a plan to pay back your investors, how about we both put our cards on the table now to see if we can work together?”

  Her answer wasn’t immediate, which wasn’t a good or a bad thing. She was still mad—the flat line of her lips told him that much—but Jack couldn’t allow himself to be distracted with what she may or may not be feeling. This was business.

  Her eyes met his, challenging him. “Would you really send me to jail?”

  “In a heartbeat,” he said without hesitation. “But if you have a way to undo what you’ve done, I can help you and keep you safe.”

  “What if I don’t need your help?”

  “You need it.” It terrified him that she might be so naive as to not know that already.

  She laughed. “You sound confident.”

  “You sound inexperienced,” he retorted. “But please feel free to make me eat my words.”

  “Fine.”

  Uh-oh. The f-word. She was mad.

  “But first, who are you really?” she asked.

  That was a question he could handle. “My name is Jack Cavanaugh, and my job is to basically keep the 1% from misbehaving, as much as possible.”

  She blinked in confusion, which was better than anger. “What?”

  “I know. There’s not really a job title for it,” he said, trying for a breeziness he didn’t feel. “But think of me as a person who makes it my business when the elite of the world misbehave in ways that directly impact those less powerful. Things like what will happen when over one hundred millionaire -and billionaire-investors learn that a group in Las Vegas ripped them off. What do you think people like that will do when they find out they’ve been had, Claire?”

  That rhetorical question seemed to hit her somber button, and he waited while she processed it.

  “So…your name isn’t Daniel?”

  Those hadn’t been the words he expected to hear next from her, but he rolled with it. “No. Daniel is a character I created to be someone you would agree to live with.”

  She shook her head. “Well…great job. You really nailed it.”

  The words hit him like a sucker punch. He wasn’t sure why, he just knew he could let it show.

  “Are you even gay?”

  He hesitated, then shook his head. “You wouldn’t have lived with a straight man.”

  “True,” she muttered under her breath.

  They were getting back into the feeling zone—a dangerous zone. He had to bring things back to business.

  “Tell me how your setup works, Claire. How do you get investors?”

  She hesitated before answering, five seconds…ten seconds…then she looked him in the eye. “You can get me out of all this?”

  Jack nodded.

  “And can you keep Ryan safe?”

  He had to be careful here. “I can try.”

  “Can you get him out of jail?”

  He arched a brow. “Should I?”

  Her eyes dropped. “He’s a good man. He just got greedy.”

  “That can be said of a lot of people. But I don’t make it my business to save people who got caught doing what they meant to do. I help people who got caught in something that swallowed them while they were minding their own business.”

  Again, her lips pressed together like she was forcing herself not to say something.

  “There are plenty of people who will help the guilty for a price,” he added. “Ryan is welcome to reach out to them to get the service he needs. But the way I see it, you land in the category I handle. You’re involved in something so big that you’ve seen an inch of it and think you’ve got the full picture. You’ve seen the tooth that can bite you, and don’t realize it’s attached to a massive beast that wi
ll eat you whole and not even take notice. That’s why I’m sitting here, Claire. This is your one-time chance to team up with me, or walk out that door and stay on the team you’re on and see if it protects you.”

  She wouldn’t look at him, which was odd. She’d been avoiding his eyes the entire time he’d been in the room when she usually watched faces quite closely. Jack wasn’t quite sure what to make of that.

  “Tell me, Claire, can you be flipped?”

  Slowly, eyes still on her lap, she nodded. “I can.”

  “What scares you most about flipping?”

  “Ryan getting killed in prison.”

  A valid fear. “And how have you been told that his life is in your hands? What do you have to do for him to die?”

  “Get caught,” she blurted. “Go to the police. Stop landing investors. Basically, if it looks like the people above me need to cut and run and it’s my fault, they’re going to kill Ryan and, I guess me, and run off with the money.”

  That was pretty standard stuff.

  “And how do they contact you?”

  “The mail.”

  That surprised him. He’d checked that every day. “The mail?”

  “Yes. Dots that come on a fake credit card offer,” she said. “The color of dots on the top of the offer show the day, and the number of dots is the time. The location was always the same.”

  Wow. Analog, but brilliant. Who thought to open junk mail?

  Claire blinked a couple times, pressing her hand to her chest. “I think the valium is wearing off.”

  He eyed the prescription bottle Kali had picked up back at the apartment. “I’m with Kali when it comes to starting your medication again.”

  She nodded without hesitation. “I have to. I can’t make it to March.”

  He leaned forward. “Why did you go off in the first place?”

  He’d seen Kali talk about this, holding up the notebook Ren had found as she did so, but Jack still wasn’t clear on the full picture there.

  “To remember the numbers,” she replied.

  “The account numbers?”

  She nodded. “The names, routing numbers, account numbers, and amounts.”

  It was Jack’s turn to be rocked by a new piece of information. “That has to be thousands of numbers.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “And I couldn’t do it on my medication. The side effects…well, they don’t let my brain work on a level that allows retention of information like that.”

  “But off of it, you can?”

  She nodded. “You’ve seen what it does to my social game when I’m off them, but when I thought Ryan would only be in jail for three weeks, I knew I had to take a shot. Once he got out, I didn’t know when I’d have my next chance at the computer, or if I’d be able to look at the notebook when I needed it. So I figured I’d memorize the numbers.”

  That’s how she’d worked her magic. It had all been in the mind. Amazing. It was also ironic that the very thing she was doing to make herself more formidable was the very thing that had made him underestimate her. “That’s…impressive.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s also insane,” he added. “Did you really think you could drain $326 million out of the investment account and catch a flight somewhere to get away from the backlash?”

  She frowned. “Well, when you put it that way, maybe not.”

  He shook his head, backing off. “Doesn’t matter. That’s my wheelhouse, and I can tell you that you’re not the first person to romanticize an escape plan.”

  She said nothing, eyes down.

  “Claire? Are you okay?”

  She cleared her throat and blinked a couple times. “Fine.”

  Was she…crying? His eyes jumped to her medication, wondering if she’d slap him if he brought it over.

  “Do we need to let you rest some more and do this later?” he asked.

  She stayed still. “Are we friends?”

  Great. Just great. Maybe this had been a really bad idea. In hindsight, he should have sent Margot in and made her the point of contact for the rest of this and just made Daniel disappear. If Jack could go back in time, he would. But there was nowhere to go but forward now.

  “Trust is more important than friendship at this point, Claire.”

  Her eyes snapped up to his. “And you just shattered mine, so where does that leave us?”

  “Touché,” he muttered. Was it too late to call Kali back in?

  “I want to believe you,” she said. “But the only thing I really know about you is that you’re an amazing actor. I mean, I absolutely thought you were gay. You totally nailed that.”

  ‘Thank you’ seemed like the wrong thing to say, so he didn’t.

  “So how do I know any of this is real?” she asked, eyes earnest. “Kali is impossible to read, and you…”

  Yeah. She didn’t need to finish that sentence. Crap. How did he fix this?

  “Here’s what I can promise you, Claire,” he said, leaning forward. “I can promise that I will help you refund the investors. If you do that, I can promise the backlash will be aimed exactly where it should be. That’s the reason I’ve been here since the beginning, so you can trust that.”

  She didn’t look reassured. She looked defeated.

  Jack wished they were closer so he could touch her hand or something as he spoke. Then again, it was probably for the best that he couldn’t. “We’re going to be acting quickly, Claire. The people you’re defrauding get twitchy very easily. And when they get twitchy, people die. They’re holding back now because I have a reputation for delivering, and that’s what I’m going to do. That’s why I need to ask you right here and right now if you want to work with me. There’s no thinking about this or giving it a day. It’s now or never. Your call.”

  Claire looked up at him, small hands hugging her undersized frame as those brown eyes of hers did a number on the logic center of his brain. “I can’t do it anymore,” she said softly. “I also don’t want to go to jail, so I’m choosing you.”

  Jack nodded. “Glad to hear it.”

  She bit her lip and looked away. “And I’m just hoping that the Daniel I’ve come to know and trust is in there somewhere.”

  The comment sailed in and struck below his defensive radar, but he didn’t let it show. “Let’s start by talking about what needs to happen tomorrow.”

  Chapter 22

  At last, Jack was down to the part where he did what he did best: the takedown.

  It should have happened three weeks ago. Jack knew that. Spending a month on a case like this was unprecedented for him, but people like Claire Ramsey didn’t belong in prison. Prisons were for people who had lost their moral compass and compulsively victimized their fellow man.

  Claire’s moral compass was fully intact, albeit a wee bit naïve, and her intentions were to understand and to help. How in the world she retained so much good will after being raised by the parents fate had dealt her, Jack had no idea. Claire should be a sociopathic pit bull, like her brothers. Yet from the first day Jack met her back when she was interviewing to move in, he’d known she wasn’t his usual pawn. Claire was one of the pieces he’d been trained to leave off the playing board entirely.

  Innocent, yet formidable. Unbreachable, yet fragile. Claire was so many opposites wrapped into one. Finding her was like finding a little abandoned wolf puppy—adorable and helpless, but with the makings of becoming something much more dangerous down the line. But, like a puppy, once you looked her in the eyes and saw all that bravery and fear and hope and loneliness gazing back, the instinct to protect took over.

  That’s why Jack’s team hadn’t moved three weeks ago. Because Claire’s soulful brown eyes had silently begged for help and Jack hadn’t been able to resist.

  But now it was time to get down to business.

  Pulling out a fresh pack of playing cards with blank faces, Jack gave the deck a habitual shuffle as he reviewed all the notes and pictures he’d pinned to the wall of his workr
oom. Margot was all about smart screens and digital approaches, but Jack’s work process was more old school. His family line had been playing this game since before America was a country. In that time, Jack’s progenitors had mastered the art of planning and executing a job while leaving no trace in their wake.

  Claire had just fooled him over the past four weeks by keeping everything in her head, and Jack’s own process wasn’t so different. He wrote out his moves on playing cards and once he was content he had everything right, he memorized the cards and burned them.

  Eyes still on the pin board, Jack fanned the deck of cards out in front of him, blank side up.

  Where to start? What would his finale be? And what tricks did he need to pull off between the beginning and the end?

  Most people saw magic as entertaining parlor tricks that had nothing to do with everyday life. Ask anyone and they’d tell you that magic wasn’t real; it was just trickery. That dismissive attitude was the very reason Jack’s family had been able to do what they’d been doing for centuries.

  There was trickery involved in magic, sure, and it was important that people saw that so there was always something for them to focus on. Drawing focus was key to astonishing people with what you’d planned all along. Magic, done well, was like a chess game where you chose all your opponent’s moves in advance and then tricked them into making all the moves you wanted them to make until you blindsided them with a checkmate.

  The true mystery of magic was figuring how the magician got you to do exactly what they wanted.

  In this art, Jack’s parents had trained him well. They’d both been magicians, his father a famous escape artist and his mother the queen of making things disappear, both on and off a stage. Both had passed on their secrets to him, along with all the legacy tricks of his family line. But it had been mentalism that called out to Jack from an early age.

  Just like Jack’s dad got a high from being dropped off a bridge in a locked trunk and his mom got a high from stealing jewels from snobs at a party, Jack got a high from deciding what final result he wanted and then building a row of dominoes that got people to create a chain reaction resulting in the final result he’d imagined from the start. It was like a symphony where everyone got to play their part and even have solos, while Jack played the role of the maestro, cueing everyone and making sure they kept tempo with each other.