Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Are you sure you were speaking Romanian?” Zoran asked.
“Not totally,” Iacob said.
“Do we have a recording of that?” Maxim shifted to stand beside Zoran.
“No, we only had mics in the suite.”
“Nikki, explain,” Eric demanded.
She didn’t want to look at him, but when he grabbed her hand, she glanced over, not quite meeting his gaze.
“Gus made a joke about the flowers being poisoned because Iacob had tested them for poison at the door. But Iacob and I were speaking Romanian, not Hungarian, when we talked about what he was testing.”
“I said ‘they’re clean’ in English.” Iacob spoke slowly in the way of people trying to remember something. “Because he made a joke about the flowers getting ‘mucky’—I had to look the word up since I didn’t know it.”
“Isn’t it possible he guessed what Iacob was doing was checking for poison?” Maxim asked. “He’s a smart man.”
“We could just have easily been testing for radiation.”
“He knew someone was trying to hurt her,” Iacob said, countering Zoran’s point. “It’s not absurd to expect poison might be one of the things we were checking for.”
Nikolett stayed quiet, listening to Iacob, Zoran, and Maxim, hoping one would say something to ease away this sick feeling in her stomach.
So far, it seemed totally reasonable to assume that he’d just figured out it was a poison check from context clues. She tried to relax.
“Even if he did understand, why does it matter if he speaks some Romanian?” Eric asked. “Maybe he’s learning that language too and forgot to tell you. Or maybe he speaks enough Hungarian to understand Romanian.”
“That’s not how those languages work. They’re not even in the same language family,” Zoran said without looking up from his computer. “Hungarian is a Uralic language. Romanian is a Romance language.”
“Why lie about it?” Nikolett added. “Why not say he knew some Romanian?” Now that she let herself think about the possibility that he wasn’t who he said he was, almost everything about their time together felt suspicious, but there were a few actionable items. She whipped to face Zoran.
“Toward the end of dinner, he mispronounced charcuterie when talking about the cheese course. Find it, please.”
Eric gently gripped her shoulders, forcing her to face him. “Nikki, what is it you think is happening?”
“I think…” She squeezed her eyes shut, then forced herself to open them and look at him. “I think Gus might be the Spaniard.”
Eric blinked. “You think a man named Angus McAngus might secretly be an assassin, blackmailer, thief, and fixer who goes by ‘the Spaniard’?”
Nikolett exhaled. “When you put it like that it sounds ridiculous.”
“It is. Your people vetted Gus, you told me so yourself.”
“I checked everything,” Zoran added, sounding entirely confident. “Angus McAngus is clean.” Zoran was staring at his computer while holding a headphone to one ear.
Eric tugged on her hand. “You’re adding two and two and getting five,” he said soothingly.
That actually made her worry flare hot once more. “Eric, when have two plus two ever equaled four for us? It’s always, inexplicably, five.”
“...Fuck.”
“Got it,” Zoran said, pulling off the headphone.
A second later, sound came from the computer speakers.
“It’s just cheese.”
Nikolett hid a wince at the sound of her own voice.
“I think having it with bread and fruit is not a French thing, though I’m glad it’s not a full charcutería and there’s no meat. I’d be tempted to eat it and I’m almost too full for the cheese, let alone meat.”
Maxim held out his phone and tapped the screen. A second later, a voice repeated charcutería with the exact same pronunciation Gus had used.
“That’s charcuterie in Spanish,” Maxim said, voice flat.
Eric crossed his arms, feet braced. “Here’s what we have.
He knew you tested the flowers for poison, even though he shouldn’t.
He’s either good at deductions, or understands Romanian, but for some reason tried to hide that fact.
Also, he called the cheese course charcuterie, but used the Spanish word for charcuterie.
He did tell you he spoke Spanish, but why would he use one random word in that language? ”
“There’s probably more,” Nikolett said. “We need to go over the recordings.”
Now that she’d spoken this horrible, insane thought aloud, she couldn’t shake this feeling that she was right.
That the man she’d been flirting with, the man she’d planned to have sex with, the man she planned to marry, was the same person who’d spent the last year terrorizing her and the rest of the Masters’ Admiralty.
“We’ll go over them,” Zoran said. “I didn’t even open the recordings, but it’s running through a second more detailed transcription now.”
“How were you monitoring?” Nikolett asked.
“We were running a real-time word recognition software. We had a list of flag words, and if the mics caught any of them, or a sound over a certain decibel, the system would alert us and we’d start listening.”
Nikolett’s thoughts were whipping so fast, there wasn’t even an internal monologue, just whipping, whirling thoughts.
“What’s going on?” Grigoris asked as he rushed inside, phone still in hand.
Everyone looked at her, but Nikolett had gone stiff, retreating to a formal, in-control posture that made her feel less vulnerable. She couldn’t look at one of her best friends, her security minister, and admit that she might be the most naive, pathetic fool in the world.
Iacob stepped into the silence, giving a quick rundown of the inconsistencies in Gus’ story, and Nikolett’s theory.
Grigoris didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he took a moment to curse viciously before visibly gathering himself. “If it’s true, it means either we all missed something, or he’s so good at erasing his digital footprints that we never stood a chance.”
Nikolett looked at each man in turn, realizing that it wasn’t just her. If she was right, he’d made fools of all of them.
Zoran’s jaw clenched. “I checked everything. Everything.”
If not, even Zoran could find a digital trail hinting that Angus wasn’t what he seemed then either it wasn’t true, or Gus/the Spaniard was shockingly, terrifyingly good at evading detection.
“Sometimes there’s nothing to find because there’s nothing there. Sometimes there’s nothing there because it was eradicated from existence,” Grigoris said.
Zoran was shaking his head, but Grigoris held up a hand. “It doesn’t matter.”
Nikolett stared at him, almost angry with his dismissal. “What do you mean it doesn’t matter?”
Grigoris held up the phone. “The Spaniard accepted the job.”
The mood shifted, and Nikolett let herself relax a little. Something had worked. They might, finally, be coming to the end of this.
“We anticipate he’ll move either tonight or tomorrow night. Once we catch him, we’ll know who he is.” Grigoris looked at her. “If the Spaniard is also Gus, we’ll add some questions to the long list of things we’re already planning to discuss with him.”
Now it was a waiting game.
It was early evening, and since Grigoris announced that the Spaniard took the job, it had been a flurry of quiet, controlled activity.
Though they had a detailed, multilayered trap planned, nothing was scheduled or fully in place.
It had taken the combined power of France, the members of Hungary who were here, and the bonus people-power of the Spartan Guard to get everything and everyone in place.
Since the Spartan Guard hadn’t been part of the original planning, they didn’t have roles to play.
Their presence did mean that rather than staying to guard Nikolett, Maxim had been able to join one of the teams in a backup position.
Two of the four members of the Spartan Guard that had come to Paris—Tobais and Emel—also took backup and lookout posts.
Regina and Keanu stayed behind to protect both her and Eric.
It took ten minutes, but he finally convinced Regina to give them privacy.
She wanted them all in one suite, but it didn’t take much to persuade her to stay in the larger suite while he and Nikolett retreated to her room.
All the equipment that would allow Regina to listen in to the live comms was in Grigoris’ suite.
Eric closed the connecting door and turned to Nikolett.
They hadn’t been alone since she jumped up and ran out of the room, then announced she thought the man she’d only minutes before been proposing as their spouse might actually be the enemy they were hunting.
He had no idea what she was feeling, but the fact that she hadn’t argued with anyone about either going with them, or demanded to be linked in so she could listen live as Regina was now doing, was a bad sign.
Nikolett sat on the couch, hands gripping her knees, feet together on the floor. To someone else, she might look poised and in control. But he knew her. She was barely holding it together. Stiff and fragile.
Eric sat beside her, projecting calm. He wasn’t actually calm. Internally, he was raging with the need to kill anyone and anything that made her feel bad.
“What if I’m not smart?” she said in a small voice.
This wasn’t where he expected their next conversation to start. “You are.”
“You keep saying that, but what if I’m not?” She was staring down at her own hands gripping her knees. “If Gus is the Spaniard, how stupid am I to have not seen it before now?”
“No one saw it. Nikki, your people are good. If they vetted Gus and didn’t find anything suspicious, it means there was nothing to find.”
“Or it means that he covered his digital tracks and the only way to catch him was in-person conversations. I’m the only one who talked to Gus, so it’s me who should have figured it out.”
“…and you did.”
“Too late!”
“We’ll get him tonight or tomorrow…”
She shook her head, almost violently, and he trailed off. He had a feeling they were having two different conversations.
“I don’t remember,” she finally whispered. “I don’t remember the end of the night.”