Three

His cell phone, set to vibrate, rattled on the plush carpeted floor of Pia’s bedroom. Michael reached down and found it without looking. It was a text.

Finished?

He looked at the woman sleeping next to him. She wasn’t just sleeping; she was totally zonked by the sedative slipped into her drink at the club. He’d taken her to bed and joined her—played along until the drugs took effect. He felt a twinge. He always did when the job involved women, but he buried it. Twinges caused hesitation. Hesitation wasn’t something he could afford.

Almost. Done in ten.

Michael sat up, pulled on his pants, and got to work. He cloned her cell phone and her computer, collected a DNA sample, and scanned her fingerprints and retinas. Jorge Cordova lived in a fortress with state-of-the-art security that only he and his daughter were coded for.

He didn’t bother to wipe down his prints when he left. They weren’t in any system or database he needed to worry about. He even tossed a business card on her nightstand before he left—tonight he was Gregor Ehrlichmann, an investment banker from Berlin.

Cordova was due back in Barcelona the next night. Michael would gain access to his home using the samples he’d collected and put a bullet in his brain. The clones he’d made of Pia’s computer and cell would be used to generate a trail of evidence that would prove she hired a hit man to take out Daddy because he froze her thirty-million-dollar trust fund.

Poor Pia was about to have a very bad day.

“So?” Ben said when Michael walked in a few hours later. The kid was sitting on the couch of their suite playing Call of Duty: Ghosts and eating nachos. Sometimes he wished he was the boss’s son … and then he remembered that the boss, Livingston Shaw, made Charles Manson look like a door-to-door Bible salesman.

He took off his suit jacket and tossed it in the general direction of the chair. “Samples are collected and handed over to tech. They’ll use them to do what they do. We’ll be ready to roll tomorrow night.”

Ben rolled his eyes at the television screen. “I wasn’t asking for an operational debrief, Major Stick-Up-the-Ass. How was she? Did the infamous Pia Cordova live up to the hype?”

“Pure magic. Best night of my life.” He sat down and stared at the television screen, watching the kid kill a couple dozen insurgents. “You wanna explain to me why I get stuck with all the shit jobs?”

“We flipped for it. Besides, shit job—really? That chick was bangin’ hot, and she wanted it—bad.” The kid cocked his head to the side and worked the controller double time.

“Yeah, well, next time feel free to be the one to give it to her.” He needed a shower.

Ben cut him a look. “You didn’t sleep with her.” He shook his head in disgust. “Do you even have testicles?”

“Ask your mom, she’d know.” He reached for the nachos. They were cold, but whatever.

Ben laughed. “The only way she’d notice your balls is if they were bright white and shaped like Vicodin.” He paused the game and tossed the controller onto the table. It landed in the nachos. “Seriously, how are you gonna get over that chick if you won’t let yourself get over her?”

“Careful, kid.” It’d been over a year since he’d seen Sabrina, if you didn’t count every time he closed his eyes. Forget about her? He’d have better luck forgetting how to breathe.

Ben just laughed. “First off, I’m not a kid. I’m only three years younger than you are. Second—”

The cell on the coffee table let out a beep. Ben picked it up and rolled his eyes before flipping it open. “It’s the asshole,” he said in a stage whisper before he spoke in the phone. “Hey, Dad, what’s up?”