Loup glanced at Henry. “Sure.”
“What about me?” Pilar asked. “I’m not letting Loup do this alone.”
“It, ah, might be better if you did.”
She folded her arms. “You hired us as a team.”
“All right, all right!” Magnus put up his hands. “Clive insists you’re a decent marksman. You can be auxiliary backup. Do you really have experience tending a bar?”
“Yeah, for two years.”
“Fine.”
The client arrived ten minutes later, ushered into the conference room by Sabine. Hugh Danielson was a fleshy, middle-aged British man with stubborn lines etched around his mouth. “ ’Lo, Magnus. Which one’s the GMO?” he asked, glancing around the table.
Loup stood up. “I am, sir.”
The lines deepened. “You don’t look like much.”
Magnus snapped his fingers. “Henry?”
Henry rose, drawing his pistol. Loup crossed the room in a blurred flash, deflecting his weapon hand downward. She feinted a punch at his face, pulling it at the last second. When he flinched, she threw him neatly over her hip, plucking the pistol out of his hand as he soared. “Sorry!” She winced as he hit the conference room floor hard. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” he grunted.
Hugh Danielson stared.
Loup checked the pistol to confirm it was unloaded, then set it carefully on the table. “If that was for real, I would have just taken him out. I wouldn’t have pulled my punch. But I hope you get the idea, sir.”
He stared some more, then turned to Magnus. “I want her.”
“You understand it will cost?” Magnus turned smooth and obsequious. “Lupe Herrera is the only one of her kind.”
“I don’t care,” Danielson said bluntly. “I want her.”
Magnus smiled. “Then you shall have her.”
TWENTY-THREE
Loup stared at the scripted itinerary for the party. “You’re joking.”
“Wish I were,” Henry Kensington said laconically.
“A pirate attack?”
“Not just any old pirate attack, baby,” Pilar said, scanning the details. “Danielson’s hired Diarmuid McDermott to reprise his role as the dashing pirate captain Mick O’Malley.”
“Who?”
“His daughter Rose’s favorite actor,” Henry offered. “Young Irish bloke did a big swashbuckler film last year. Word is he’s got serious gambling debts, bad enough to make him willing to take on a gig like this. The rest of the outfit’s a production company specializing in major spectacles. But it’s a bloody security nightmare, and the sea battle’s the worst of it.”
“And the kid’s gotta be on the ship, huh?”
“Oh, yes.” He looked weary. “In order for the dashing Mick O’Malley to board her and lose his heart to the fair English Rose, declaring her his pirate queen.”
“Jesus,” Loup muttered. “They really oughta cancel.”
“Quite,” he agreed. “But they won’t. We’ll meet with the clients and the event coordinator tomorrow. Since the threat was issued, we’ve been negotiating to determine how many of the crew will be actors, and how many members of the security team. I want you on that ship, Loup.”
“And me, right?” Pilar added.
“Actually, yes.” Henry sighed. “I’d love to staff the entire enterprise with our people. But I can’t guarantee it. They insist on having a certain number of professional actors supplied by the company to provide authenticity of experience. We’re running background checks on all of them.”
Loup read more of the script. “Pyrotechnics, huh? Nothing like a few fake explosions to make things more complicated.”
He winced. “Don’t remind me.”
They met the client, his daughter, and the event coordinator the following day at the Danielsons’ elegant townhouse. The event coordinator was a thin, steely-eyed woman named Jeanne Blondet.
The daughter Rose was a pubescent nightmare.
She took one look at Loup and Pilar and declared, “I don’t want them, Papa! I don’t want them on my ship, and I don’t want them at my party!”
“Hush, pet,” Hugh Danielson soothed her. “I promised you the best of everything, didn’t I? Wait until you see what Ms. Herrera can do.” He shot Loup an urgent look. “Do something, won’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” Loup looked at the girl’s narrow, suspicious face and decided it would be best to be nonthreatening. She plucked a polished apple from a gleaming silver bowl and tossed it across the salon in a high arc, then flashed across the room to snatch it out of the air when it had scarce cleared its apex. She returned in a shot, bowed, and presented the apple. “Here you go, my lady.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Okay.” Loup placed the apple carefully back in the bowl. “But that’s what I can do, you see? If there are bad guys out to get you, I can protect you faster and better than anyone in the world.”
Rose sniffed. “I’m not a child. Don’t talk to me like one!”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Father and daughter engaged in a silent contest of wills. “Oh, all right!” Rose relented. “She can be on the ship, and she can come with me to the pirate ship. But she can’t be a girl. She has to be a boy.”
“How about your faithful cabin boy?” Jeanne Blondet, recovering from her astonishment at Loup’s demonstration, opened a portfolio and whipped out a sketch of a slight figure in a striped shirt, ragged breeches, and a stocking cap. “That’s a character I’m willing to recast.” She sent an uncertain smile in Loup’s direction. “I think she would be quite charming as the faithful cabin boy following his little mistress into adventure.”
“I don’t want her to be charming!”
“She means it would make the picture you make all the more charming,” Danielson said smoothly. “Isn’t that right?”
“Don’t patronize me, Papa!”
“I don’t know,” Loup said in a dubious tone, examining the sketch. “I’m not crazy about that hat.”
“It’s gonna look pretty silly on you, baby,” Pilar agreed.
“You will wear the hat!” Rose said in a flash of temper. “All day and all night. If you’re going to attend me, I want you to be my faithful cabin boy for the whole party and never leave my side!”
Loup hesitated, feigning reluctance.
“Our client has made a request, Ms. Herrera,” Henry Kensington said in a stern voice.
“All right, all right! I’ll be your faithful cabin boy.”
“Good.” Rose was mollified. “But I don’t want her there.” She pointed at Pilar. “She’s not anything special, is she, Papa?”
“She’s a trained bodyguard, pet. They work as a team. I’ve already agreed.”
“Did you agree she could be on the ship?”
“No,” he said. “I agreed that she could tend bar. Sweetheart, it’s not a bad idea to have security people no one would ever suspect. Ms. Mendez certainly fits that description.”
The girl narrowed her eyes. “So as long as nothing happens, she’d just be another servant?”
“Ah…” He paused. “That’s exactly right.”
“Fine.”
They hashed out a few further details of the arrangements, and Jeanne Blondet gave Loup an address to report to later in the day to have the cabin boy’s costume altered to fit her.
“Yikes!” In the back of their sedan, Pilar shuddered. “That child’s a piece of work.”
“She’s a handful and a half,” Henry agreed from the front. “Don’t suppose it’s all her fault, but still.” He glanced back at them. “Nice work, by the way. That bit about the hat. It brought her right around. A little of the old reverse psychology, eh?”
“Yep,” Loup agreed. “If that means what I think it means.”
“It does.”
“I don’t like not being on the ship,” Pilar fretted. “That’s the most dangerous part, right?”
“We’re taking every prec
aution and then some,” Henry assured her.
“Still.” She eyed Loup. “If anything happens to you on that stupid fucking ship, I’ll never forgive you.”
“It won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” Loup glanced out the window. “Hey, Henry. I thought we were going back to the hotel?”
He shook his head. “Headquarters, first. We’re going to visit the armory and get the both of you outfitted and legal. HQ’s been working on the permits; they ought to have come through. Clive trained the two of you on the Glock 26, yeah? The Baby Glock?”
Pilar brightened. “We get to carry on this job?”
He gave her a look. “I told you. We’re taking every precaution. Pray you don’t need to use it.”
“I will.”
The production company was nothing but efficient. Within twenty-four hours of Loup’s fitting, the costume arrived. She tried it on in the hotel room at Pilar’s insistence and stood before her barefoot in ragged black pants, a black-and-white striped shirt, a cropped vest that concealed a tailored shoulder holster, and a red stocking cap.
“Well?” Loup asked.
Pilar giggled. “You look somewhere between ridiculous and adorable. Which pretty much adds up to charming, baby.”
“Mmm.” Loup caught her around the waist, dropping her voice an octave. “Think we can rewrite the script so the faithful cabin boy ends up with the hot bartender?”
“Is the door locked?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“God, yes.”
Afterward they lounged in bed, both studying their dossiers and memorizing the details of the elaborate itinerary and guest list.
“I kinda feel sorry for the kid,” Pilar said. “You notice there aren’t a lot of other kids on the list? I mean, she’s a spoiled brat and all, but thirteen’s a tough age. I bet she doesn’t have a lot of friends.”
“No wonder.”
“I’m just saying it’s tough. And losing her mom, too.”
“Yeah.” Loup glanced up. “We were thirteen when we met. We’d both lost our parents.”
“True.” Pilar toyed with the tassel on the end of Loup’s cap, which was the only item of clothing Loup was wearing. “But we didn’t have anyone to spoil us. And if there was one good thing about growing up in the orphanage, it’s that we learned that people have to take care of one another—the way Father Ramon and Sister Martha took care of everyone, and the Santitos took care of each other.” She smiled. “You know, I thought you were younger at first.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Mm-hmm. You were just this cute, wiry kid with intense eyes. I didn’t believe C.C. when he told me about you and swore me to secrecy. I thought he was just spouting some wild bullshit.”
Loup smiled. “Sometimes it was hard to tell with C.C.”
“No kidding. Then I saw you and T.Y. messing around in the courtyard one day. He was trying to hit you with a tennis ball, and you were zipping around like crazy, laughing your head off. But I still thought of you as a kid.”
“A kid with a hot older brother,” Loup reminded her. “You had a crush on Tommy, remember?”
“Everyone did.” Pilar tickled Loup’s nose with the tassel. “And it’s not my fault I was an early bloomer. When you did a year or so later… God, I can’t believe I didn’t notice now. Not until the day of my aunt’s funeral, when my uncle tried to drag me back home with him. You stopped him, remember?”
“Vividly.”
“I hugged you.” She abandoned the tassel to run her hand along the sleek curve of Loup’s back. “I was just so glad you’d made him let me go, you know?” She shook her head. “Except I didn’t want to stop, and nothing’s ever been the same since.”
Loup laughed. “Pilar, does this conversation still have anything to do with our bratty client? Because you’re so getting your smolder on.”
“Umm… no?” Pilar raised her eyebrows. “You okay with that?”
“Yep!”
TWENTY-FOUR
The party took place at a château on the shore of Lake Geneva.
The sea battle took place on Lake Geneva. A mixed crew of actors and security team members boarded a scaled-down model of an eighteenth-century brig at the jetty. The sailors looked jaunty and the officers looked impressive in their velvet doublets trimmed with gold braid and tricorn hats, an effect only slightly marred by the radio earpieces several of them wore.
Waiting to board, Rose Danielson shivered with anticipation. She wore an elaborate period gown and her cheeks were flushed with pleasure.
“It will be such an exciting voyage, don’t you think, Tip?” she said to Loup, standing beside her in her cabin boy’s costume.
“Huh?” Loup blinked.
The girl’s nostrils flared. “You’re to say ‘yes, mistress,’ or ‘yes, mum’!”
“Yes, mum,” Loup said obligingly. “Sorry. I didn’t know I was Tip.”
“Tip is a perfectly good name for a cabin boy, don’t you think?”
“Yes, mum.”
The captain, who was an actor, escorted Rose aboard the ship personally, giving her his arm and behaving unctuously. Her flush deepened. Loup padded obediently behind her diminutive mistress, alert and attentive. Henry Kensington, the first mate, gave her a subtle nod.
Once they were aboard, the captain gave the order to hoist sails. Up went the sails, while a discreet motor purred into life.
“Forward go we to seek our fortunes in the new world!” the captain shouted.
On the shore, a crowd of partygoers in period attire shouted, “Huzzah!”
Rose leaned over the railing, waving a kerchief. “Goodbye, Papa! Goodbye! Don’t weep for me, Papa!”
He blew her a dozen kisses, looking profoundly worried.
“Idiot,” Loup murmured under her breath.
The girl gave her a sharp glance. “What’s that you say, Tip?”
She returned a look of wide-eyed innocence. “Nothing, mum.”
They chugged toward the center of the lake. The actors fawned over Rose, making a show of being attentive toward her. She blushed and giggled, reveling in the attention. Loup stuck close to her side, scanning the crew intently.
Right on schedule, the scaled-down pirate galleon glided into view, bearing swiftly down upon them.
“It’s Mick O’Malley!” the captain cried. “Man the starboard guns!”
There was a booming sound and a puff of smoke. The pirate galleon tacked, then essayed a smoky boom of its own.
Rose squealed.
Pyrotechnic effects on the brig’s rigging sizzled and guttered, failing to ignite. Members of the crew glanced at one another.
“We’re hit!” the captain called, ignoring evidence to the contrary. “It’s every man for himself!”
Actors began diving overboard.
“I pray you, kind Tip, don’t leave me.” Rose clutched Loup’s arm. “I fear the pirate captain’s cruel intentions.”
“No, mum.”
The girl eyed her. “You feel… odd. I don’t care for it.”
“Good.”
Amid a bit of staged swordplay, Diarmuid McDermott vaulted aboard the ship in character as Mick O’Malley. He was a handsome young man with a thick shock of fair hair and vivid green eyes. He tilted his head back and issued a full-throated laugh, breaking it off at the sight of Rose. “But what is this?” he asked, wondering. “Is it a woman or a child? So young, and yet so valiant! I profess myself quite overcome.”
Rose blushed violently. “Good sir…”
“No, no!” He sank to his knees, pressing her hand between his. “You are exquisite. You are beyond compare. This life does not suffice to sustain you. You must come with me and be my pirate queen. And I shall issue my personal amnesty for all your crew!”
“All—all right,” she stammered. “Come, Tip!”
“Yes, mum.”
Loup watched the costumed movie star help her client navigate the tricky crossing to the pirate ship, t
hen vaulted over effortlessly, landing on her bare feet.
The dashing pirate captain eyed her. “Oh, my. You’re something else, aren’t you?”
“Nope.” She adjusted her red stocking cap. “Security, that’s all.”
“Rightio.”
After a bit of byplay in which the pirates hailed Rose as their pirate queen, the pirate ship sailed to the jetty. The brig ostensibly limped behind it, having retrieved several drenched actors. The crowd greeted their arrival with cheers. Hugh Danielson swept his daughter into his arms as she disembarked, then shook Diarmuid McDermott’s hand and thanked him for bringing her back safely.
“They made a botch of it, Papa,” Rose said in a more subdued tone than she might have used if her movie idol hadn’t been present. “The fire and smoke didn’t go. It was terribly disappointing. You’ll have someone dismissed for this, won’t you?”
“Absolutely, pet.”
Henry Kensington’s voice crackled in Loup’s ear. “Land team, are we secure for arrival?”
“Affirmative,” came the reply.
“Sea team, four square and perimeter,” Henry said. “Loup, stay close to the target.”
She touched the transmit button. “Affirmative.”
Rose pouted. “Whoever are you talking to, Tip?”
“Ah… First Mate Kensington, mum.”
“Well, I don’t care for it!”
Loup gave her a look, warning her not to push it.
Inside the château, they adjourned to the great hall on the second floor. It was a splendid space with vast windows and a high, vaulted rococo ceiling. Even in daylight, the spectacular crystal chandelier blazed. Henry Kensington relaxed visibly, feeling better about his team’s security now that they weren’t on open water and exposed. Waitstaff in contemporary black-and-white garb struggled to circulate through the throng.
“They’re too slow!” Rose complained. “Tip, fetch champagne for Captain O’Malley and myself.”
“You sure, mum?”
“Papa said I might have two glasses. I would like the first one now.”
Loup threaded her way through the crowd to Pilar’s station at the far end of the hall, cutting to the head of the line. “Sorry,” she apologized. “It’s for the birthday girl. I need two glasses of champagne, Pilar.”
[Santa Olivia 02] - Saints Astray Page 18
