OLIVER jumped forward as Collin crumpled to the floor. He had to work fast now. He knelt and pressed his fingers against Collin’s neck, checking for a pulse.
He looked up at the cluster of men that included his father and announced grimly, “It’s done.”
The group seemed to exhale as one in satisfaction. Cock-swinging, motherfucking bastards.
Oliver shrugged out of his own tuxedo jacket and tossed it over Collin’s head and chest. Then he commenced rifling through Collin’s pockets, pulling out his lover’s wallet and taking off his watch. He threw over his shoulder, “I assume you removed all identifying labels from the tuxedos you provided us?”
“Of course,” someone answered.
“I need a rug or a tarp or something to wrap him up in. I used a hollow-point round to minimize the blood, but I need to get him out of here soon so he doesn’t bleed all over the floor and leave behind evidence.”
While they waited for a tarp to be fetched, Oliver looked over at his father. “Tell me something. Was this entire tournament a ruse to draw me out and suck me into your world?”
George shrugged. “Would anything less than a chance to prove you’re the greatest poker player in the world have gotten you off that damned beach?”
“Absolutely not.”
“There’s your answer, then.”
He supposed he should be complimented that his father and his cronies had gone to so much expense and trouble to lure him here and then manipulate him into committing murder so they could control him forever. But still, it galled him to have been maneuvered into this moment, standing over the body of his lover, neatly caged, forced to serve the consortium as his lord and master.
“What about the attempts on my life? Are you saying your people had nothing to do with those?”
George answered for the group, “The murders and attempted murders were not us. Gathering the best poker players on earth necessitated dipping into some violent barrels.”
“What about Stacy Kiern? She was behind the attacks, wasn’t she?”
“Very good,” George said approvingly. To his colleagues, the older Elliot said, “I told you he’s sharp. He figured out who the attacker was without our help at all.”
Oliver rolled his eyes.
George commented, “Ms. Kiern is interesting. She showed impressive initiative. We may choose to recruit her at a later date.”
Initiative? Apparently in George’s lexicon, that was a nice way of saying the woman was a homicidal psychopath.
A big man in a cheap suit stepped out of a door on the far side of the room and walked forward with a big blue plastic tarp folded sloppily in his arms. A second man followed close behind. Oliver had only seconds left to do the last thing he needed to. He palmed two small objects and unobtrusively slipped them into Collin’s front pants pocket as he bent over his body. Collin would need them where he was going.
One of the thugs laid out the tarp beside Collin, and Oliver grabbed him under the armpits while the second thug took Collin’s feet. They heaved him onto the edge of the tarp and then rolled his limp body in it. The thugs helped him wrap ropes around the whole package to hold it together, and then the first guy hoisted Collin’s body over a beefy shoulder.
“To the marina, I assume?” Oliver asked the thugs.
“Yup,” the second one answered gruffly.
“Let’s get rolling, then. I’ve got places to go and things to do.”
The two men led him outside and crossed the beach to the marina. Thankfully, the men veered away from his father’s massive yacht and opted instead for a smaller cabin cruiser. Collin’s body got dumped on the aft deck an in unceremonious heap, and all three men moved into the wheelhouse.
The first man moved to the vessel’s controls and started the engines while the other one cast off the lines. The first man guided the cruiser out of its berth. As they reached the sea, he pointed the prow to the west and opened up the throttles, announcing, “Best place to dump a body is in the Atlantic. Currents will carry it down the coast of Africa a ways before there’s any chance of it coming ashore. Locals won’t give a damn that some dead guy washed up and won’t report it.”
“Perfect,” Oliver replied coldly. How these thugs weren’t hearing his heart pounding its way out of his chest, he couldn’t fathom. He was so light-headed with adrenaline and icy terror he could hardly see straight. Time was the enemy now. He squinted down at his watch. It had been a scant fifteen minutes since he’d shot Collin. He needed to make sure this little jaunt took at least thirty more minutes. He’d had to hurry Collin’s body out of the casino so his father and George’s cronies wouldn’t examine it too closely. But now he needed to delay.
He commented, “Make sure we’re far enough away from land that there’s no chance of him being found. I didn’t jump through all these hoops just to get sloppy now.”
“You got it, sir.”
Sir. Right. He was one of the bad guys now. The newest member of the Erebus Consortium. May they all rot in hell, his father in particular.
As the chilly night breeze sprayed a fine mist of saltwater against his face, shock began to set in. God almighty, pulling that trigger had been hard. Harder than he’d imagined it would be—and he had a damned fine imagination. The look of shock and hurt in Collin’s eyes—he would never forget that as long as he lived. Hell, he suspected it would haunt him to his grave.
The longer they sailed into the night, the farther from shore they went, the more tense he grew. And the combination of terror, shock, and tension proved toxic. Acid rose in his gut and burned the back of his throat.
The more he thought about it, the more violently his gut twisted in horror at what his father had made him do. What kind of monster did that to his own child? The revulsion threatened to spill over, and he mumbled to the other men, “Seasick. Crap.”
Staggering out of the cabin with his hand over his mouth, he ran to the back of the boat and emptied his stomach over the edge of the vessel. He leaned heavily on the rail, gasping in the aftermath.
Taking the opportunity while he was there, he nudged Collin’s body with a toe and murmured low, under the roar of the engines, “You awake?”
A faint groan rose from the tarp.
“Hush,” Oliver said quickly. “If you’re conscious enough to understand me, say my name.”
“Ol-liver” came the sigh.
“Listen up. Your life depends on it. I faked your shooting. I fired a blank at you and simultaneously exploded a fake blood pack one of your Wild Cards colleagues hid in your tuxedo with a remote control. There was also a hypodermic in your jacket. When I shot you, it injected a fast-acting sedative into you to knock you out. It’s wearing off now. I’ve put a knife and an emergency locator transponder in your right front pants pocket. When the goons dump you in the water, you’ll need to cut your way out of the tarp. The ELT will activate when it’s submerged. Friends of yours will come pick you up as soon as this boat has cleared out of the area. The water’s cold, so try to keep the tarp wrapped around you and don’t flail around too much. For God’s sake, don’t make any noise when you hit the water. The cold will be a shock, but don’t scream. Got all that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll try to keep them from dumping you for another fifteen minutes or so. The sedative should be totally out of your system by then. Don’t drown on me, Collin. I love you.”
COLLIN listened in disbelief as Oliver’s steps receded across the deck from him. He wasn’t dead? Well, that certainly was good news. And furthermore, Oliver loved him? That was almost as shocking as the moment when Oliver had pulled the trigger of that damned gun.
Did they have a chance after all? If he managed to make it off this boat and out of the ocean alive, was it possible? Hope ignited in his gut, and his heart beat a little more strongly.
He still felt groggy, and it was tempting to drift back into unconsciousness. Must fight it. For Oliver. For the love between them. He hadn’t gotten to tell Oliver properly that he loved the big jerk back.
He needed to get hold of the knife in his pocket before he got thrown overboard and risked losing it. His life would depend on being able to cut himself free of the cocoon encasing him. It was probably a good thing he was still somewhat sedated, because he was mildly claustrophobic. At full mental speed, he would be freaking out at being a human burrito like this.
Moving cautiously, he wriggled his right hand up his thigh and into his pocket. His fingers closed around the hard steel of a folded pocketknife. How in the hell was he supposed to get it open with one hand—?
Ah. His fingertip encountered a small button on the side of the knife. It was a switchblade. He debated opening it now or waiting until he hit the water. But the claustrophobia made the decision for him. He popped the knife open and winced at the tearing sound of his pocket and pant leg giving way. Sharp little sucker, this knife of Oliver’s. Thank God. He tested his wrappings and felt loops of rope around his shoulders, waist, and thighs. Easing the knife up his torso, he poked the tip of the knife through the tarp and started sawing at the ropes around his waist.
It was laborious work not because the rope was hard to cut through. Quite the contrary. He didn’t want to cut all the way through the ropes just yet. He needed them to hold long enough for his killers to pick him up and throw him off the boat.
When he was done nearly sawing through the waist ropes, he shifted by slow degrees, jackknifing his body a little until he could reach the ropes around his legs. He went to work on those, carefully sawing them mostly through.
He was just pondering how to reach the ropes around his shoulders when the vibrations of heavy footsteps underneath him announced the arrival of his killers. He froze, holding the knife tightly, resting the blade along his pant leg.
Had he been “dead” long enough for rigor mortis to be setting in, or should he play limp corpse? No telling how long he’d been unconscious. It must still be night, though, or they wouldn’t be out here to dump him in the middle of the busy sea lanes near the Strait of Gibraltar. If it was still night, then he’d been “dead” only a few hours at most. No rigor mortis, then. Limp it was. As rough hands grabbed him through the tarp, he forced every muscle in his body to relax and steeled his mind for the abrupt agony of submerging in ice water. He remembered all too well the shock of jumping into the Mediterranean after Oliver several weeks ago.
He was lifted and swung up and out. There was a sickening moment of free fall, and then a tremendous impact as he slammed into the water. The cold and dark closed around him like a grave, and panic smashed into him. He kicked violently, and the ropes around his legs broke free. Another violent jerk with his arms, and the waist ropes gave way. Rather than try to cut the ropes around his shoulders, he just shoved and tore at the tarp and rope, ripping his head free of the confining materials.
He opened his eyes, and nothing but painful blackness stung at them. Screwing them shut again, he realized the weight of his clothing was pulling at him. Crap. Which way was up?
He gave an experimental pull with both arms. It felt like the pressure on his ears diminished slightly. He pulled again, more strongly this time. Did he dare surface yet? Was the vessel Oliver and the thugs had dumped him off far enough away that they would see him surface?
His lungs didn’t give him much choice in the matter, however. He must have exhaled partially when he hit that icy water, because his oxygen supply felt almost depleted. He opened his eyes and thought he spied the faintest light overhead. He stroked strongly toward it.
Almost as relieved as when Oliver told him he wasn’t dead, Collin’s face popped out of the water. He dragged in a blessed lungful of air. Just to be safe, he submerged again, pushing upward with his arms to hold himself below the surface. He counted to a hundred and surfaced again.
This time he turned in a full circle, searching for the boat carrying Oliver and his helpers. Nothing. He was alone. Distant lights on the horizon told him where the nearest land was. Whether it was Spain, Morocco, or someplace else altogether, he had no idea. He was only seeing what looked like the tips of mountains, so he estimated he was a good three miles from shore. Not that it mattered. No way could he swim that far before he succumbed to hypothermia.
Speaking of which, he was starting to shiver. Violently. As in his teeth were chattering like castanets and his large muscles were starting to cramp up. Belatedly remembering what Oliver had said about the tarp, he grabbed the tattered plastic sheet where it floated beside him and awkwardly wrapped it around himself like a clumsy blanket.
If it helped, he couldn’t tell. He still felt like he was quickly turning into an ice cube.
To keep his mind off his suffering, he shifted the switchblade to his left hand and managed to reach into his right pocket while staying afloat. A small square of plastic rested there. Grabbing it, he pulled it out and brought it to his nose. A tiny green light blinked underneath a piece of tape that mostly obscured the light-emitting diode. Okay. Locator beacon working. Now he just had to pray someone found him before he froze to death.
He grabbed the edge of the tarp and pulled it more tightly around himself. Would he ever be warm again? If he got out of this mess alive, he was finding the hottest, sunniest beach he could and cooking himself on it until he was the color of boiled lobster. Well, maybe he would use sunblock. But he was still going to get as hot as he could stand.
Maybe he would build a sauna in his garage. Then he could cook himself every single day until he forgot what this bone-deep chill felt like. His brain was getting sluggish, and he couldn’t feel his face anymore. He was going to haunt Oliver from beyond the grave if the jerk saved him from death by shooting only to freeze him to death out here because no one came to rescue him.
As if his threat conjured it, the sound of a motor became audible. It was quiet, and he felt the vibration as much as heard it. He looked all around and saw nothing approaching. Granted, he was only inches above the water, and the swells were a couple of feet high out here.
All of a sudden, a shape loomed in front of him. It was low and black and sleek. And two men dressed in black wet suits with something black smeared all over their faces were leaning out of the boat.
“Mr. Callahan, I presume?” one of them said in a British accent.
“Uh-huh,” he managed to gasp.
“Need a lift?” the second one said in the broad vowels of upcountry England.
“Can’t move my arms,” he managed.
The men reached down, snagged him by his armpits, and bodily hauled him over the edge of the boat. He landed in a heap on the cold metal floor of some kind of low-profile motorboat.
Several pairs of hands jerked at him, and he realized with a start that they were efficiently cutting his clothes off his body with knives.
“Don’t move, sir. We’ll have these wet things off you in a sec, and then we’ll wrap you up in nice warm blankets. You’ll be toasty in a few minutes.”
He’d believe that when it actually happened.
They rolled him in a scratchy wool blanket and then in another blanket that sounded like plastic. A motor revved quietly behind him somewhere, and the vessel felt like it leaped forward beneath him.
One of the black-clad men explained to him, “Normally we’d take you to the Royal Navy base in Gibraltar, but your employer is concerned that someone might see you there and report your survival to the wrong people.”
“Where are we going, then?”
“Rendezvous with a private craft that will take you aboard. We’ll reach it in twenty minutes or so. Just sit back and relax, Mr. Callahan.”
He spent most of the ride to the yacht shivering more violently than he believed possible, but ever so slowly, he began to regain feeling in his face and fingers. His quads, biceps, and back muscles started to unclench, and somewhere in there, he stopped being an actual icicle.
He didn’t pay much attention as the rescue boat pulled alongside a nice but not obnoxiously ostentatious yacht. Conversation floated over his head about how he was still dangerously chilled and to leave the heating blanket on him for another hour at least. And then he was lifted by the men in the small vessel and passed into waiting hands above.
“May I please stand up on my own two feet?” he complained.
Chuckles sounded around him. “Irritability is a good sign. His mental functions are returning to normal.”
He turned to thank the men in black for saving his life, but the vessel was already nothing more than a small hump among the waves.
“Who were those guys?” he asked the crewmen standing around him.
“British SAS,” someone answered.
Whoa. Who’d managed to pull strings and get those guys to come fish him out of the ocean?
“This way, sir.”
He followed a crew member inside the yacht, down a hall, up a steep stairway, and into a salon decorated like a posh gentleman’s club. Two men sat in side-by-side armchairs smoking cigars.
Collin started. “Peregrine? Martin? What are you two doing here?” Both owners of Wild Cards, Inc. were present? Had he screwed up that badly? He supposed he should be grateful to be alive and not disappointed that they were going to sack him.
“How are you feeling, Collin?” Pere asked him.
“Cold. And I could use some dry clothes.” He didn’t add that he was currently naked as the day he’d been born underneath the blankets he held wrapped around himself.
Martin Wylde picked up a telephone from the coffee table beside his chair. “Emmitt, could you roust up some clothing for our guest and bring it up here right away?”
It was under a minute before a tall, handsome man with cold, black eyes entered the room and handed him a small pile of clothes, complete with underwear and deck shoes. The guy pointed at a closed door. “Restroom’s in there.”
Collin retired to dress in gray slacks, a white polo shirt, and navy blue wool sweater. He slipped on the deck shoes and availed himself of a comb he found in the medicine cabinet. At long last, he felt vaguely human again. Time to face the firing squad.
He stepped out into the salon and took the neat whiskey that Pere held out to him before sinking into the club chair that had been pulled up beside the first two. At Pere’s urging, he spread the heating blanket over his legs to continue bringing his core temperature back toward normal.
“Quite an evening you’ve had,” Martin commented. “I hate to interrogate you so soon after the shock of being shot, but what can you tell us about the Erebus Consortium? We looked into it, or tried to, and the security we ran into blew up our entire computer network. Our mainframe had to initiate an emergency shutdown to keep from being fatally corrupted.”
“That sounds about right,” Collin replied. He filled in his bosses quickly on the few morsels of information he’d collected before his “death.” Erebus was some sort of shadow organization of incredibly powerful men who styled themselves the puppet masters of pretty much everything they touched.
Pere and Martin exchanged loaded looks. Pere was the one who spoke, however. “What can you tell us about Oliver Elliot?”
Collin had no idea where to start answering that one. Instead he asked, “What do you want to know specifically?”
“Will he join the consortium now that he’s won the tournament and killed you?”
“I have no idea how to answer that. Oliver despises his father and everything his father stands for.”
“Did the son say anything to you once he found what prize you were playing for to indicate his intention to go to work for Erebus or not?”
Oliver had said he loved Collin. The members of the consortium had forced him to kill the man he loved. Surely Oliver wouldn’t turn around and go to work for people like that. Collin blurted, “How is it that I’m not dead? Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”
“Oliver contacted us yesterday. Explained what was going on. We arranged for operatives to infiltrate the hotel last night, bring in tuxedos for both of you, and plant the blood squib and sedative injector in your suit coat. We then provided Oliver with a revolver loaded with blanks, a knife, and a locator beacon to slip into your clothing.”
“What if I’d won the hand of poker instead of him?” Collin demanded.
“Oliver was going to pass you the revolver and tell you to shoot him.”
“But I wouldn’t have known about the pickup at sea by the British SAS.”
“No. You would have had to labor under the impression that you’d killed Oliver until we could discreetly get in touch with you after you left the resort. But we weren’t worried about that.”
Collin frowned. “Was everybody so certain I would lose the hand of cards? I’m not that horrible a poker player.”
His employers laughed. “By no means. You made it to the last two players, after all. Well done, by the way.”
“So you had it all planned. Why in hell didn’t anyone bother to share all of this information with me? I thought Oliver actually shot me.” He couldn’t stop a note of anger from creeping into his voice.
Martin answered, “Oliver thought it best that your reactions be genuine and unscripted. He’s well-practiced at deceiving his father, but he worried that you would not be able to bluff George Elliot.”
Reluctantly, he had to allow that Oliver might be correct.
Pere added, “Oliver was very worried about you. He was unwilling to take even the slightest chance with your life.”
“And yet he drugged me and threw me into the freezing cold ocean in the dead of night.”
“You’re here, aren’t you? The SAS was monitoring you the whole time you were on the boat with Oliver and those men. They had a stopwatch on you from the moment you entered the water and knew how long they had to pull you out before hypothermia became life-threatening. You were never in any danger.”
No. Just gut-clenching terror.
“Where’s Oliver now?”
“Our surveillance showed him returning to the El Rocca and disembarking just before you arrived aboard this vessel.”
“You have surveillance on him? May I see it?”
“We were hoping you would be up to taking a look. You know his body language better than any of our other analysts.”
They had no idea.
“Come with us.” His bosses rose to their feet and led him downstairs to a shockingly well-equipped electronics room crowded with computer monitors and manned by a pair of analysts he’d worked with in England. After a quick round of greetings and congratulations for not being a popsicle, one of the men stood up and held out a headset to him.
Collin sat down at the station and donned the headset. Oliver Elliot’s voice filled his ears immediately. Something uncurled in his gut at the sound of his lover’s voice. Oliver was angry but hanging on to his temper tightly. The video feed wasn’t great, but he was amazed there was any video at all on the Erebus. Who on earth had managed to evade the ship’s security, board the vessel, and plant this camera?
“—satisfied now, Father?” Oliver was pacing a gaudy salon decorated much like the Italianate office Collin had visited aboard the ship.
“I have to say you performed much better than I expected, son. I didn’t think you’d do it. You clearly had a crush on that British chap.”
“That British chap had a name.”
“A name you would be wise never to utter again in the presence of my—our—colleagues.”
“Tell me something. Did you feel a need to knock off the best players so I would end up standing here?”
“I was confident you could do it on your own. In fact, Stacy Kiern hired some of the female escorts to thin the ranks. She personally tried to take out that British player friend of yours, though.”
Collin was shocked. He would never have pegged her as capable of killing. She was an even better bluffer than he’d realized.
Oliver was speaking again. “I heard she was tough. Did you know she or one of her girls tried to kill me?”
“We had our suspicions.”
“Twice.”
“She always was a discerning woman. She knew who her biggest threat would be,” George commented. “We may recruit her yet.”
Collin snorted. He could imagine the hopes these murderous bastards had for the player who’d been killing off the others. Too bad this surveillance video wouldn’t be admissible evidence in a court of law. He’d love to see Ms. Kiern face charges for her shenanigans. One day she’d get caught. He hoped to be there to see it.
“So what’s next, Father? I’m now a murderer with blood on my hands. I assume a quick departure from Gibraltar is in order?”
“The Erebus sails within the hour for a private island in Greece. It’s one of our bases of operations. You’ll receive your full introduction to my bosses in the consortium there.”
“And then what?”
“Then your special talents will be shaped and honed to serve the organization. We like to keep our enterprise all in the family, of course. Mark my words, boy. You’ll be the most successful of all of us. In a few years… the power you’ll have… you’ll thank me for forcing you to accept the Elliot legacy, son.”
“A legacy I’ve spent most of my adult life avoiding.”
George shrugged. “It was high time for you to quit fooling around and join the family business. I’m not getting any younger, and I’d like to retire in a few years. If you’re going to be trained to take my place, now is the time for you to start.”
“By murdering someone I cared about a lot?”
“The life of one insignificant poker player in return for the world at your feet…. It will have been well worth spilling a little blood.”
Oliver was silent, but Collin spied a telltale tic in his jaw muscles. Collin murmured, “He’s furious. I don’t think he’s swayed by his old man’s promises of wealth and power beyond measure.”
Oliver left the salon without saying any more. His gait was stilted, his shoulders stiff. Oh yeah. He was beyond pissed. He was livid.
“That ship is a fortress. We’ll never get him off of it,” Collin declared.
“We don’t want him off the Erebus. To the contrary, that’s exactly where we want him to be,” Pere replied.
Collin swiveled in his chair to stare up at his bosses. “What’s going on that you’re not telling me?”
“Come with us.” Pere and Martin led him back upstairs to the salon and made him endure the pouring and sipping of another round of whiskey before Pere finally spoke. “We’d like to develop Oliver Elliot as an asset.”
“A spy? Inside the Erebus Consortium?” Collin asked, shocked.
“Exactly.”
His eyebrows slammed together. “He has no training whatsoever to pull off something like that. You’ll get him killed!”
“That’s why he’ll need a handler,” Pere answered patiently.
Collin snorted. “One does not handle Oliver Elliot. Not unless one wishes to make an enemy of him. He’s fiercely independent and hates being manipulated in any way.” A flash of the two of them tangled in bedsheets flashed into his mind. There was one way Oliver liked to be handled, at any rate.
Pere and Martin exchanged another pair of loaded looks. What in the hell were they slow-walking him toward?
“Just spit it out, you two. I’ve had a crappy day, and I’m too tired for these games.”
Pere smiled gently at him. “We’d like you to be his handler, Collin. You know him better than anyone else in the firm.”
“Small problem with that. My face is known to the Erebus Consortium.”
Martin answered patiently, “That is, indeed, a problem. But there is a solution, if you’re willing….”