by Pamela Clare
Angel felt like he’d taken other things too. Like her dignity. Oh, she hated him and wanted him. That old familiar feeling. “Just another pig,” she said, pulse still racing. “The good news is that he buys that I’m a hooker.”
Macy frowned. “The bad news is that it’s going to look suspicious if you never go back and get your gun.” Their plans involved penetrating from the inside and leaving off the roof. They weren’t planning on exiting through the front door. “We’ll have to double back and act like you forgot it,” Macy said.
“Are you serious?” White Jenny said. “Hamburgle the perv and come back in the front door?”
“It’ll look more suspicious if we never come and get it,” Angel said. “It’ll make us instant suspects for the job.”
“You’ll play the doped-up hooker,” Macy said. “It’ll be fine. They won’t know anything’s gone for a day or two. There’s not a choice. We have to do this job.”
They all knew it was true. The Flesh Boys wouldn’t release Aggie until they got Borgola’s prized diamonds, and no other diamonds would do—Macy had tried to negotiate that. The Flesh Boys weren’t killers, but they were bad guys, and they had some beef with Borgola. Angel doubted Borgola even knew who the Flesh Boys were, they were such small potatoes compared to Borgola’s multi-billion dollar crime operations.
Macy slid her eyes to Angel “The Flesh Boys are going to be sorry. So sorry.”
“So sorry,” Jenny echoed.
They all hated to imagine Aunt Aggie in the hands of those creeps. Worse, it was a little bit their fault she got nabbed—the Flesh Boys knew about some of the jobs the three of them had pulled through the years and figured they could get the Borgola diamonds. And it wasn’t like they could go to the police.
Angel wondered what kind of environment they were keeping Aggie in. The old lady would be so frightened, so desperate to be home. Apparently they’d let her bring along her blood thinners. Small morsel of comfort.
“You really want to escalate things with the Flesh Boys?” Angel asked.
“Once Aggie’s free, we’re escalating all over their asses,” White Jenny said. “And your guy’s watching you again.”
“He’s not my guy,” Angel said.
Chapter Two
He watched her walk off with her friends, watched her slipping through his fingers like minutes. It wasn’t just her devastating beauty, all smoldering dark eyes and cherub-cheeks and midnight hair full of glittery hair things. It was her secrets.
Cole was a secrets man.
He’d never met a secret he couldn’t crack, and the girl had a whole lot of them. That’s what had drawn him—eyes full of secrets. They weren’t a prostitute’s secrets, either. Prostitutes looked at you like you shared a secret together, and they used that to entice you, but their secrets weren’t really secrets in the end.
This girl, Angel, she was no prostitute. And she seemed so self-contained, as though she possessed hidden worlds. He found that he desperately wanted in.
He looked away. She’s not for you, he said to himself. He couldn’t lose his focus.
When Cole had first started on the security team, Borgola had called him in to his office and given him a lot of threats and rules. Borgola had gone on to inform Cole that the oriental rugs they stood on were priceless, but also treated with something that made them easy to clean. Borgola had made the seemingly offhand remark that his whole operation was like that: priceless and easy to clean. But it hadn’t been an offhand remark. Borgola liked his men to think he was untouchable.
Borgola had been untouchable. Until Cole.
Clues were for amateurs—he hadn’t been blowing smoke up Angel’s ass. Cole Hawkins was a genius at math and an expert in logistics. His superior at the Association called him a Sherlock of Chaos. He worked in equations—deductive logistical equations, to be precise. Because everything in Borgola’s twisted world could be boiled down to equations of commodity, movement, and protection—torqued with variables and coefficients to account for the way law enforcement presence warped supply routes, the way paranoia among thieves sometimes made straight lines into curves.
Yeah, Cole Hawkins was a nerd. With the arcane equations he’d developed, he could deduce entire shadow organizations from seemingly random details, like a deadly Sudoku. It was through equations that the unseen could be perceived.
It was through equations that he would bring Borgola to his knees.
Though he didn’t need an equation to tell him how much danger he was in at the moment. If Dax and the Association knew how hot things had gotten at the mansion, they would’ve pulled him out days ago.
Just one more night. He could risk it one more night.
Because there was a ship out on the Pacific Ocean somewhere and it was full of high school-aged kids from the other side of the world who thought they’d won scholarships to schools in America.
They hadn’t.
Instead they were headed for the most grisly and demeaning deaths imaginable…unless he got the puzzle pieces he needed to figure out the ship’s location.
He’d search tonight, after the party. One more night. Though that’s what he’d been telling himself every night for a week.
Seeing the girl’s gun had hardly required an equation. He saw it in the way she stood, the fact that she held her drink in her left hand instead of her right when she was, in fact, right handed. A woman concealing a gun while optimizing access to it. Supply and transportation. A bullet in the brain. Logistics was everything.
Lord, he was tired.
He didn’t care about her gun. He didn’t care that she was pretending to be a hooker when she wasn’t one. Or that her mp3 player was something else. Recording equipment, maybe. It was her secrets that got him.
He loved women with secrets. He loved to break them open.
A foolish indulgence. It’s just that things had gotten so hot, so desperate, and he was so tired, and he’d needed…what? To touch her. To take something of hers. To rest a bit.
Yeah, rest. Like a cross-country driver thinking he’ll just rest his eyes. He hadn’t set out to kiss her, but it had been mind-blowing.
He struggled to keep his gaze off Angel, to at least look as though he were monitoring the guests. He shouldn’t have let her distract him. He didn’t need Borgola looking at him any harder than he already was.
Angel’s girlfriends didn’t seem like hookers, either, but he couldn’t be sure without talking to them. He smiled, thinking about the ABBA thing. Maybe she was a tourist of sorts, there to try out a bit of dangerous sex. Possibly a P.I. or a blackmail scammer. A little more time with her and he would’ve figured her out, but then he’d snapped out of it. Whatever she was up to, it didn’t concern him.
Mapes walked up. “Where’s Sturnvaal?”
“Perimeter,” Cole said.
Mapes grunted. “Quite a show out there. Fuckin’ whores.”
“Had enough of the pool?”
Mapes shrugged. He obviously wanted to trade posts, but he wouldn’t outright ask Cole to trade because then he’d owe Cole, and Mapes saw Cole as a rival.
This made Mapes dangerous.
Mapes was an ex-dirty cop, too, and not as stupid as the rest of the security crew, another reason he was dangerous.
It was ridiculous of Mapes to think Cole was a threat. The last thing Cole wanted was to climb the ladder in the Borgola security squad. He’d risen in rank over the past nine months simply by not getting transferred or murdered. His promotions were actually quite the inconvenience—the lower Cole was, the more invisible he was.
Some spies needed to rise into a position of access in order to break into computers or whatever. Cole only needed to be present to collect his mundane details to plug into his dark equations of criminal decay.
Cole had actually tried to make Mapes look good over the months, but it had only made Mapes more suspicious.
He pushed off the fountain. “I could use some fresh air, if you wouldn’t mind tradin
g.”
Mapes shrugged. “Sure.”
Cole strolled out onto the patio, even farther away from Angel and her beautiful dark hair and dark lashes and her tantalizing secrets he wanted to bury himself in.
The prostitutes played topless volleyball in the pool, one of Borgola’s favorite spectator sports. Ridiculous and relatively harmless.
Unlike other of the man’s tastes.
Cole thought about the kids on the ship. Evidence suggested they were from Southeast Asia or possibly former Soviet states; he didn’t have that piece of the puzzle yet. One thing he did know: they had five days until they landed, and then they’d be lost. Borgola’s snuff films—violent, disturbing sex films that always ended in death—seemed to be filmed in trucks and shipping containers, mobile studios that could be anywhere.
Cole had originally been planted undercover in the team to develop intelligence on a different operation of Borgola’s, sex slavery out of Myanmar. He’d worked out the details pretty quickly. And then he’d uncovered the snuff film operations. He hadn’t found direct evidence of the films; rather, he’d discerned the operation’s presence via his equations, like a ghost limb. He’d asked spymaster Dax to let him stay on and bring it down. Dax was all for it.
Associates sometimes got planted in deep cover for years doing unthinkable little things and sometimes unthinkable big things to keep their credibility. They helped with the small plots and sabotaged the big plots and leaked information and executed people when they had to. Officially, no governments knew about them; unofficially, they were central to the international fight against crime.
Cole knew that it was foolish to think you could solve life or solve evil the way you solved a math equation, but deep down, he very badly wanted to. He liked to even things up. He always took eggs out of egg cartons two by two, and always from the middle. He balanced his checkbook to the penny. Injustice offended him on a human level, but also on a mathematical level—like a ledger with uneven sides. It meant somebody needed to pay.
Borgola really needed to pay.
Cole watched him laugh it up with one of his pet assassins. The men here were monsters, no question.
He’d heard of law enforcement professionals taking psychology courses as a way of getting into the heads of criminals. It made him want to laugh. He’d gotten his psychology courses from day one, courtesy of his drug-addled parents—there was no better school in the world for reading people. In a family like his, if you couldn’t instantly read the moods and intentions of your parents and the predatory adults floating in and out of your home, you were done. He’d been at the mercy of some real perverts before he’d learned how to be invisible, and later, to make them pay.
And you couldn’t be a nerd in a dangerous neighborhood and not know how to fight. A bookish boy had to be tougher than the bullies and gangbangers because kids were constantly testing him. They saw the glasses and books and good grades as an invitation to beat him up. Cole set them straight on that.
As he grew older, the creeps that came around to visit his parents would confide in him, and he heard every kind of story from every kind of low-life. He came to know pretty quickly what made them tick, what pissed them off, what cranked their engines.
When Cole was 15, his folks won a settlement off a bogus lawsuit—six figures. They promised things would be different. They’d move, live the good life. Like an idiot, Cole had allowed himself to feel hopeful. But after he went to bed that night, his parents had shoved a good five figures right up their noses, or at least they tried. In the morning, when he came down ready for school, they were dead.
He’d never forget finding them slumped on each other. Or the terror of touching his mother’s hand and finding it cold.
Both Cole and the settlement money were taken on by distant relatives, who used most of it for home repairs and vacations and the rest to send him to St. Luke’s Military Academy, a decrepit and savage boarding school full of juvenile delinquents from across North and South America. Cole made enough of a name for himself there in terms of aptitude in math and ability to defend himself that he got the attention of Dax, the leader of the Associates.
He’d never actually met Dax—nobody met Dax—but the man pulled him out of St. Luke’s and supplied him with accelerated training in violence and math, and then he funded Cole’s Ph.D. in logistics. After that, Cole joined the Association, Dax’s shadowy organization dedicated to fighting crime worldwide. The Association struck Cole as an island of badass misfits; each Associate had a nerdy specialty and a whole lot of demons deep inside.
Cole felt like he was finally home.
There were exactly 1,329 container shipping companies that might be working with Borgola, operating thousands of ships in the Pacific. With time running out, Cole needed to narrow the search for the kids the old fashioned way—by getting at Borgola’s shell corporation documents, and Cole had a good idea of where they were.
According to rumors, Borgola had two safes. A bedroom safe for precious stones and cash, but somewhere in the mansion was a secret safe, and apparently Borgola was the only person alive who knew where it was. All the workers who’d installed it had been killed.
Cole suspected the secret safe was in the tunnels below the mansion, and he’d been searching nightly, inch by inch, using X-Ray equipment he’d gotten from the Association. He’d been caught down there once already. He managed to hide the equipment and make up a good story, but he was surprised he’d lived the night, especially with Mapes trying to make him look untrustworthy to the paranoid old man. Really, he should’ve left after that.
A few days later, Cole noticed his room in the security wing of the mansion had been very carefully searched. He definitely should have left after that.
But he wasn’t the type to leave a problem unsolved, and he was so close to locating the safe—like hell he’d leave and squander all the progress he’d made. His entire being buzzed with the need to see those documents, free those kids. He couldn’t stop thinking about them, stepping onto that ship so full of hope, only to find agony and darkness. It killed him to think it.
The secret safe would be a Fenton Furst. Virtually uncrackable, so he’d been told, but he figured he’d try and blow it and get out somehow. He’d gotten out of worse.
“Why do I have the sense things are getting a little hot there?” Dax had said when they’d spoken a week earlier.
“I won’t run away from a little danger,” Cole said.
“You running from danger has never been the problem, has it, Cole?” Dax was some kind of multi-billionaire, and highly intuitive—he always seemed to know everything. “Has it?”
Cole had remained silent. It never really worked out to answer Dax’s rhetorical questions.
“Nobody understands the logistics of criminal operations like you do,” Dax said. “But you and I both know where your real passion lies. It’s in the implosion. The endgame. You think you’ll find your answers in the fire. The ultimate leveler.”
The statement had stunned him. He sometimes didn’t know what Dax was. “No,” he said. “I don’t think it.” Did he?
“You can’t understand everything.”
“I know.”
“I’m trusting you to get out if it’s hot,” Dax said.
It was hot. He should get out. But he wasn’t going to.
He scanned around for Angel, wanting to rest his eyes on her. All he needed was to see some beauty, just for a little while.
Chapter Three
Angel, Macy, and White Jenny headed to the trophy room, which was also the billiards and darts room. They lingered at the opening to the home theater, currently playing an X-rated flick. A whole passel of people was fucking in the seats. Loudly and groaningly.
White Jenny caught Angel’s eye and made a confused face, as if she didn’t understand what was going on. Angel bit her lip to keep from laughing.
According to Jenny’s computer model, the door to one of three mechanical rooms was located at th
e back of the theater; this mechanical room provided access to the mansion’s heat, light, sound, and some of the security.
“Ready?” Macy asked.
Angel strolled in like she was drunk and wandered to the back and sat. When she was relatively sure nobody was paying attention, she snuck around and unlocked the door, then headed up to the front.
That was Macy’s cue to meet her for six minutes of diversion—a drunken girl fight in front of the movie screen to cover the light and sound from White Jenny slipping into the mechanical room and using a drill to open panels.
Macy and Angel made it look good, shoving each other and calling each other whores, among other things.
The plan was that Jenny would use an interrupter to bypass the alarm, reset the cameras to stop filming the areas they’d be sneaking through, and crawl into the vent system to where Jocko had stashed their equipment. She would then position herself above the second floor bathroom and wait.
Once the six minutes were up, Angel and Macy left to head for the bathroom rendezvous point.
Somebody was in there. They waited their turn, then they went in and locked the door. They knocked on the ceiling and White Jenny dropped down with the packs of equipment. The three of them changed into black cat suits, black facemasks, boots, and belts with a shit ton of hardware.
“Go, go, go,” Angel said as White Jenny and Macy clambered back up into the vents. Once they were up, she cracked the door to see if anyone was out there. Luckily nobody was waiting. She left the door cracked, turned out the light and hoisted herself up into the vent, happy she’d kept up her gym workouts; thievery took some serious bursts of strength.
Mansion jobs had been a specialty of theirs. Condos, too. They particularly liked vacation condos, though Angel didn’t miss the nasty spiders and snakes you ran into when you were crawling around where you shouldn’t be in destination locations.
Borgola’s vents were spider-free, though it was a lot of tight, dusty hell to get up to the sixth level.
