My conversation with Fekkete had taken longer than ten minutes, so the biker chick and I had renegotiated. With my cut lip and sore jaw, kissing and other activities proved a little challenging, but we made do.
When I woke up in the master bedroom of her surprisingly suburban house in Bothell, the rising sun had already brightened the triangular windows at the peak of the bedroom’s vaulted ceiling. The woman lay on her side next to me, brunette hair touching my shoulder. Sky. That was the name she had said. I didn’t know if that was her real name or a road name. Everybody I met lately was hiding an extra identity in their back pocket.
This would be a tough day. I knew these hours, the countdown before a mission. When we would plan and review and check our gear a dozen times. Some of the tasks were essential. Some of them just served to keep us calm. A lot of the time, we couldn’t tell the difference.
I’d been present at a few hostage exchanges in the Rangers. Negotiating swaps between tribal leaders, mostly. They weren’t the sort of assignments that earned anybody a medal. We were lucky if we went home thinking we got the slightly better part of a bad deal. The key was keeping everyone focused on what they had to lose if things went sour.
Once or twice, though, we got to bring our own people home. Captured soldiers, or men cut off from their unit and stuck hip-deep in hostile country. Those days made sense. Those days were on the side of righteousness. O’Hasson needed a day like that.
I rose and left Sky a gentlemanly note before leaving silently. Less bruised than I would have expected after my fight with Rénald. Maybe sex had beneficial properties beyond the obvious ones.
I called Hollis and Corcoran on my way into the city and arranged to meet them at Corcoran’s apartment in the evening. We would all crash there tonight, to get an early start. Then I went shopping. I visited a luggage store, a costume store, a hardware store, and bought half a dozen handheld multichannel radios, spending most of the cash I’d earned the night before.
Many hours later, when I was certain I had done all that I could for now, I called Tamas Fekkete and said I would be in touch tomorrow morning at ten to tell him where to go. I told him that he could bring two men, no more. That the place I’d chosen would be very public, near downtown, and he’d have half an hour to get there before the deal was off. I hung up just as he started to ask questions.
I could count on Fekkete. He’d keep himself far removed from any danger until he thought he had the upper hand. Then he’d try to screw us over. Reliable in his unreliability.
My next conversation, with Ingrid Ekby’s man Boule, was more combative. Maybe he was still pissed about my shoving a dart gun into his neck.
“You get nothing until I know Fekkete is there,” Boule said.
“No bait, no trap. Fekkete won’t show until he sees the gold. It’s one hundred kilos of metal; no one’s going to grab it and run.”
“What about O’Hasson?”
“He has to be right out in front,” I said. “Remember, Fekkete believes I’m forcing O’Hasson to give up the gold. He’s already twitchy. Spook him, and he’ll probably be gone and out of the country again before you even spit in his direction.”
Boule grunted. “He’ll bring soldiers.”
“So maybe a frontal assault shouldn’t be your first choice, for once.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I don’t trust your boys not to rush in with your asses on fire, shooting trank darts or worse at anybody who crosses your path. I’ll keep Fekkete under wraps until I’m sure you’re behaving.”
“Go to hell,” Boule said. “If you want guarantees, then tell me where the exchange will be now. Let me get my men into position ahead of time.”
I ignored that. “Have O’Hasson tell you what he called his daughter when she was a baby.”
“What?”
“Proof of life, Boule. Text it to this number. Do that, and I’ll call you in the morning. Be ready to move.”
If Boule could have sent a fist over the cellular connection, he would have done it.
“Shaw.”
“I’m listening.”
“You fuck with us on this, and you’re done. She’ll never quit coming after you.”
“A woman after my own heart. Guess you feel the same, huh?”
He hung up. Sensitive lad.
If our situations were reversed, I would be just as furious as Boule. Walking into an unknown environment was tantamount to putting your head in the tiger’s jaws and hoping you didn’t taste good. It was a sign of his—or Ingrid’s—desperation to get their hands on Fekkete that he was even willing to consider it.
But choosing the site of our exchange was my single tactical advantage. My only way to win.
Hollis met me as I hauled my shopping bags down the block to Corcoran’s building. The neighborhood was mostly Cambodian. Along with a backpack, Hollis carried a paper grocery sack that smelled of vinegar sauce and ground pork and mint. Heat was already curling and darkening the brown paper in oily patches.
“Jimmy’s family out?” I said.
“He’s carting them off to visit an aunt. I thought I’d bring provisions. So that we don’t leave them with an empty larder.”
We rode up in the pink elevator—buttons labeled in English and Khmer—and Hollis unlocked the door with a key from a jangling ring the size and weight of a medieval weapon. Hollis was the sort that everyone would trust with a spare key. He set the food on the kitchen counter and motioned for me to join him at the table.
“Before Jimmy arrives,” he said, unzipping the backpack. “You haven’t broached the subject, but I thought I’d ask.” He removed five lumps wrapped in individual chamois cloths and laid them out on the table. A mixed bag of small-caliber pistols, including an expensive-looking Walther.
“These are all clean,” he said.
I considered it. Not for the first time that day.
Hollis tapped a Colt with a fingernail. “I know what Jimmy would say. He always likes a little comfort.”
“No,” I said finally. “If the exchange goes even halfway wrong, and the cops get involved, we might bluff our way out. That only has a chance if we’re traveling light.”
“I prefer the gentler path myself.”
He swept the guns back into his pack just as my phone buzzed. Boule. He had sent one word: Ounce.
O’Hasson’s nickname for Cyndra as a baby. Because she had been born premature and underweight, three pounds one ounce. She’d spent a month in the incubator, Cyndra had told me yesterday.
Her dad was still alive. Fighters, both of them.
Corcoran opened the front door and sniffed the air, his nose leading him to the kitchen.
“The fuck?” he said. “You couldn’t bring something I don’t eat every day?”
From the eighth floor, Corcoran’s view was good enough to make out a fraction of the ghostly shape of Mount Rainier to the south. We sat on the balcony and ate while I caught them up on my conversations with Fekkete and Boule, and what I’d learned of Ingrid Ekby.
“Speaking of good-lookin’ people,” Corcoran said, “I don’t like the idea of these assholes seeing my face. Or Hollis’s,” he amended. “But mine, mostly.”
“We’ll have masks,” I said. “In fact, nearly everybody around us will have masks.”
I told Hollis and Corcoran what I had in mind, and where I had gone that day to reconnoiter, and showed them what I had in the shopping bags. Their expressions were worth a tall stack of gold bars.