Rand bumped his arm. “It’s a large file. Maps I made with AutoCAD. It always takes forever to print, but I need it to work out the book locations and timeline.” He cast a glare at the printer. “The whole sequence is fucked now.”

A moment later, the printer whirred to life, and Rand held back his relieved sigh. There was no telling how tech savvy this guy was. No way could he give him the USB drive.

Rand plucked the drive from the printer and shoved it in his pocket. The map printed on six pages. “You got tape?” he asked. “I need to put this together before I jump on Zoom with my agent.”

The guy went through a range of expressions before sighing when he saw the pages were clearly a map file as described. He turned toward the door. “I have tape.”

He grabbed a dispenser from his office across the hall and pressed it into Rand’s hand, then pulled the door to the tech room shut and locked it with a key. “You need anything else printed, ask me.” He gave him his business card. “Call or text if I’m not here.”

Rand shrugged. “Fine.”

Back in the conference room, Rand closed the door and dropped the stacks of paper on the conference table with a heavy sigh of his own. There was a mirrored camera dome mounted to the ceiling above the table and he had no reason to think Grigory would give him privacy. “Damn editor,” he muttered.

Freya’s voice was crystal clear through the bone-conduction headphones. “Well done, Lieutenant Commander. We’re in the network.”

“This better be worth it. If my career is going to implode no matter what, I should be enjoying my vacation with Kira.” He lined up the printout in two rows of three sheets and started taping the pages together.

Freya chuckled but said nothing. She knew the comment wasn’t for her so much as to establish him muttering to himself. It would be the fastest way for him to communicate with her, so he would be a mutterer for the foreseeable future.

As he worked, Freya gave him a quick update, confirming his suspicion that Nadia was angry because Grigory intended for Aleksandr to marry Kira.

Map constructed, he sat down again in front of the laptop and opened the link to chat with his fake agent. Vicki was ready and waiting. She’d logged in under Rand’s agent’s name and used a very good face-changing filter so the twenty-nine-year-old Valkyrie could pass for Rand’s fifty-year-old agent.

“This is so not how I planned to spend the ass crack of dawn on Monday of my four-day weekend,” Vicki said.

“Shit. That’s right. Tomorrow’s the Fourth. Dick move for Jerry to send that edit letter on the Sunday night of a holiday weekend.”

“I swear he had it drafted on Thursday, but waited to send for maximum vacation and holiday fuckery.”

Rand was going to owe his very nice editor a fine bottle of wine after being maligned like this. “Sorry you got pulled in. Did you have plans today?”

“I had a hot date with a SEAL.” Vicki grinned. “But he’s twenty years too young for me. Good thing he’s fictional, or it would be indecent.”

Rand laughed. He’d met Vicki a few times. She was young and smart and, now he knew she was a book nerd in addition to being a computer nerd. He was impressed that she hadn’t outed him as Reece Foresman, especially considering she wasn’t bound to any code of silence and the dedication had been blatant.

He suspected she liked having her secrets and wondered if she’d been given the chance, would she have revealed what she knew to Rand, or just pretended ignorance?

“SEALs are overrated. Big egos. Always bragging about how special they are. That’s why I write about Green Berets. They’re humble. Less effective, but humble.”

Vicki let out a snort laugh. “Quit it. You know I love SEAL books and that’s what you should be writing. I’ve told you that from the start. Jerry would probably have accepted the book no problem if your hero was a SEAL. SEALs sell.”

“Well, I’m not changing my hero in book three to a different branch of the military. That’s the kind of continuity error that readers pick up on.”

“Yeah. So it’s just everything else we have to change.” Her brow furrowed. “Where the hell are you, anyway? I thought you were in Malta. Are you in some sort of office?”

“Yeah. Get this, I hooked up with that woman I told you about, the art historian who helped me with the research for this pile of shit.” He waved to the stack of papers on the table, just in view of the laptop camera. “That I now have to rewrite⁠—”

“Shit. Artifact smuggling was the first thing Jerry wanted you to cut.”

“I know. The prick. But honestly, I might have something better. See, it turns out, Kira—the art historian—is the long-lost daughter of some Russian oligarch with a roomful of art stolen by Nazis during World War II. This would make a fantastic fucking twist if I take out the smuggling like Jerry wants.”

Vicki leaned toward her computer camera. A fisheye distortion made her forehead huge. “Holy shit. Really?”

“Yeah. I’m going to try to convince her to go back to her dad’s house. Think of the research potential.”

“That’s cold. Even for you.”

“It’s not like I planned this. It just came my way. But there’s more. I’ve got another oligarch who wants to buy me off to clear a path for him to woo Kira.” He stuck to sharing only the details he was supposed to know. “That’s where I am now—the conference room in his villa. Kira’s off with the oligarch, who’s probably showing her his art collection.”

“Shouldn’t you be with them? Especially if he plans to make moves on her. You do like her, right?”

“Sure, but if we don’t fix my book, I’m going to have to seriously consider the old guy’s offer for Kira. I need this advance. I quit my day job a month ago. And shit, I put a yacht rental on my card yesterday to impress her. I expected the rest of my advance to be in the bank by the time the bill comes due.”

“Cancel the yacht, dumbass.”

“I can’t.” He closed his eyes and leaned on his hand. “The charter is two grand a night, and the deposit was my left testicle. I’m fucked.”

Vicki let out a low whistle that ended in an exploding sound. “Shit. I’m sorry. I really thought Jerry would love the book as much as I did. It’s possible the publisher wants out of the contract, but if they back out now we can fight them. You turned in a solid product.”

Rand jumped to his feet, getting into the role. “I don’t understand how this could happen. I thought the numbers for book two were good.”

“They are good. Just not as good as book one. That’s normal, though. You’ll earn out, but it will take a few months.”

“But I’ll never earn out book three. The advance was twice what they paid for one and two.”

With the groundwork for his desperation laid, Rand sat down again. “We have to fix this. We’ll spend the next two hours brainstorming fixes, then I’m back on vacation. I’ll begin my rewrite when I get home in a week and turn it in by the end of July.”

“When I turn in your new outline, I’ll insist they release partial payment, since you did turn in the book on time. But to do that, we need a solid outline. We’ll go over the letter point by point. I like your oligarch’s daughter idea, but how can we fit that in? Calvin’s love interest in the first two books can’t have a secret father. Her background is established.”

Rand was not looking forward to returning to DC and facing Freya’s husband, former Green Beret Cassius Callahan, who everyone called Cal, and admitting that yes, his character Michael Calvin—called Cal—might have been sort of named for him. But it was just a name, and a nickname at that. The character was an amalgamation of a half dozen men in various special forces units that he’d known over the years, but better, stronger, and faster, as fictional military action heroes needed to be.

His saving grace was that the love interest was based on no one. Freya was smart and beautiful and tough as nails—all traits the love interest shared, but he’d known from the start eventually she would either turn traitor or be killed off, and he couldn’t do that to a friend, not even in fiction.

“Well, I was planning to wait for book five, but I think to shake things up, she’s got to die at the first turning point.”

From there, Rand and Vicki went to work on the technical aspects of the game they were playing—her team sent him links and code to upload—while they verbally plotted a book he would never write. Not only would he never exploit Kira’s pain in that way, he’d also never put her on the page as a character. He would never share his Kira with readers. 

He might have a better understanding of how to describe love now than he did before, but the person who inspired the feeling would always be private and not fodder for fiction.

While they fake-plotted, Freya gave him updates on their progress through Laskin’s computer network. Rand did his part, following links and opening more doors, inserting code where needed. They identified devices and combed through emails and contacts, looking to match someone on the network to Ben Kinder or Cousin Andre.

Laskin had to be connected to one or both, and they needed that connection if they were going to identify others Kinder had conspired with to launch some sort of attack on Little Creek.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Kira stared at the painting on the wall of Grigory’s private, one-room art gallery, heart pounding with shock. Her hand went to her throat as she followed the chain down to the pendant with the Black Forest design—careful not to turn off the camera or microphone—that was reproduced in exquisite detail in the painting before her.