“I don’t give a damn about you, Rick.” I caught Maggie flinch out of the corner of my eye. Even Denise seemed a bit taken aback by the remark. “These people are kidnapping girls and selling them into slavery. They’re smuggling nuclear material into my country and doing God knows what else. Not to mention they tried to have us all killed. They deserve to be put in jail, not just blackmailed.”
“And eventually they will. MI5 and the other agencies will reassemble their task force and they will catch these people, I believe that.”
I didn’t. Not really. It’s generally accepted that money may not buy you happiness, but it can buy pretty much any other fucking thing you want. Including immunity from the consequences of breaking laws the rest of us must abide by. If my new career had taught me nothing else, it was that people with money always come out on top, even when it looks like they won’t.
“When they haul Trish and her people into court,” I said, “I will gladly turn over the uranium. But at least until that happens, I’ll know that they’re only trying to kill me and no one else. The whole reason I came back was to protect all of you. This is the only way.”
“Dad,” Maggie said, “there has to be another—”
“Do it.”
Ethan stood in the doorway to his bedroom. Before he said those two words, the last time I’d heard him speak was when he still called memories “rememberies.” His voice had deepened since then, but not all the way. It still had some cracking and creaking to go before puberty was done with it. More importantly, the sweet, exuberant innocence that I remembered was gone. It might be there under normal circumstances, but not now. Not while I was within earshot.
“Tell him what he wants to know, Robert,” my son said, “so he’ll go away and leave us alone.”
“Ethan,” I said. My own voice cracking, but for entirely different reasons. I never got to finish the sentence, though. The instant my eyes met his, he turned and went back into his room, slamming the door shut behind him.
If Robert took any joy in Ethan’s simple, brutal dismissal of me, I didn’t know it. I never looked his way. I couldn’t take my eyes off Ethan’s door.
“Finish your calls,” Robert said, mercifully ignoring Ethan’s comments. “See if you can get the rest of the companies to go along. If that part of the plan works, we’ll revisit the uranium discussion.”
I nodded, still focused on the simple brown door and the boy behind it I barely knew, who wanted nothing more than to forget about me.
“You really think you can pull all that off from here?” Denise asked.
I turned, wiping my eyes with the heel of my hand, and held up my cell. “All any good recruiter needs is a phone.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I dialed and texted and emailed the rest of the day and into the night. By the time I took a break for dinner—chicken and carrots, the latter drizzled with melted butter and dusted with brown sugar, another Denise staple—my phone once more radiated heat, and I worried all the charging would burn out the battery.
The rest of the calls went about the same as the one with Marianne. Some, like the CEO of a Silicon Valley startup that was desperate for a good hacker to wage cyberwar on a competitor, were more hesitant. Fear of Trish and her Board of Directors was strong, but when I gave them a little taste of the information I’d gleaned from the hacked files, most were willing to take the risk in exchange for my silence.
Erica took my shift standing watch that night so I could get some sleep. It had been quiet anyway. The Persian hadn’t yet sniffed us out, but I knew that was just a matter of time. The following day was long and anxiety-ridden as I gave the companies time to get in touch with Trish and give her the news. After a dinner of instant rice and beans, I stepped onto the porch and called her.
“You must be getting desperate,” Trish said in lieu of a traditional hello. At least a few of the people I’d contacted must have called her.
“I am,” I said, “but that doesn’t make what I’m doing any less effective.”
“Effective?” she scoffed. “You blackmail a handful of our clients into backing out of their deals with us and you think that moves the needle? Oh darling, it’s cute when you try hard.”
“I didn’t try hard though, Trish, that’s the thing. Took me less than twenty-four hours to get those ten to back out of their deals with you. How many more do you think I can get in a week? Or a month?”
“A month?” This time she actually laughed. “Every sunrise you see at this point is a miracle. No, you won’t be around long enough to become more than a nuisance.”
“Yeah, but that uranium will be.”
“Once Detective Baglioni is gone, that won’t be a problem anymore either. Its whereabouts—and the problems it may cause us—will die with him.”
“That would be true, if he was the only one who knew where it was.”
There was a pause. “What do you mean?”
“Robert told me where the uranium’s hidden. It’s yours if you want it.”
Another pause, but more hopeful than the last. “Name your price.”
“Call off the hits on me and Robert. Leave my family alone. And forget any notion of framing me for your human trafficking operation. Let Leon take the fall for that one by himself.”
“Is that all?”
“I’m a fair negotiator. Do this and we both walk away happy. I’ll even stop pissing in your pool as far as blackmailing your clients goes.”
“How very generous of you. I’ll need proof you actually have the box, of course.”
“Naturally.”
A final pause, one spent making sure she hadn’t missed anything, some con I was trying to pull. “Okay. Send me visual proof you have the box then name your place to do the exchange.”
“I’ll be in touch,” I said, then I hung up. Nothing had changed. Trish was not going to call off anything just because I claimed to know where the uranium was. We were all still in as much danger as we had been a few minutes ago.
But now she was intrigued. If there was even a chance she could get her hands on that damned box she owed it to her Board of Directors to at least explore the opportunity. Because the guy who supplied her arms dealer wasn’t the typical drunk Russian ex-general, but an employee of a US-backed Saudi energy company. If the uranium was tied to them—and it would be—then there would be more attention on her and the Board than there had been at any point yet in their existence. More attention than even she would be able to deflect.
I hadn’t landed her yet, though. Trouble was there was no bait on the hook right now, and she wouldn’t stay interested if it remained that way for very long. I didn’t have a lot of time.
“You look like shit,” Robert said. He had joined me on the front porch.
