Chapter Six
Aboard My Veloce
Port de Sóller
Mallorca, Spain
Verena Kaine tipped back the last of her broccoli and spinach smoothie, swallowing the thick, bitter concoction without so much as a grimace. The taste didn’t bother her, but the drink’s temperature annoyed her.
Damn it!
Hadn’t she asked the chef to make it ice cold?
If I had wanted it cold, I wouldn’t have specified it needed to be ice cold, would I?
First-world problem for sure, but still infuriating.
Setting the glass down, she tensed. There was a condensation ring on the polished wood where she had previously set the glass on the small desk.
She stood, her irritation spiking. The master cabin of Veloce was full beam, a blend of modern minimalism and high-end Italian craftsmanship, and like everything else in her life, Verena wanted it pristine.
Large windows on either side bathed the cabin in natural light, which accentuated every perfect detail—the clean lines, the sleek finishes, and the immaculate order. And now, a water ring was marring it.
Unacceptable.
She strode into the luxurious en suite bathroom, pulled a facecloth from the neatly folded stack, and returned to the cabin to wipe the surface clean.
She looked at her work, studying it from different angles.
Only once she was sure the desk was perfectly dry did she return to the en suite to place the cloth back exactly as it had been.
Satisfied, she sat in front of her laptop, entered her ten-digit password, and brought up the live feed of two of her men working over Paul Hobb in the engine room.
The feed came from the two cameras mounted in the engine room, one positioned high in the corner near the access hatch and the other set lower, angled toward the twin generators.
Between them, she had a clear, unbroken view of the beating.
The journalist, who was on his knees beside the generators, had his wrists and ankles bound together.
Verena heard Hobb groan, and she quickly lowered the volume.
While the cameras’ built-in miniature microphones weren’t the best, the confined space of the engine room helped to amplify the wet sounds of her men’s fists meeting Hobb’s flesh, something she found . . . repulsive.
She tilted her head, scrutinizing the reporter. She had to admit, he had more grit than she’d given him credit for. Few people would have thrown themselves from a speeding dinghy while bound. Hobb must have known that whatever awaited him aboard the yacht would be as merciless as the sea itself.
Still, he jumped. And that took balls.
She respected people who had real courage.
But even the bravest break. They all do eventually.
Hobb had so far refused to talk. But as she watched his head snap violently to the left from the force of the latest punch, she knew it would be soon. After all, the reporter was not a trained operator, just a nosy journalist who had stumbled too close to something that needed to remain buried.
The vibration of a phone against the lacquered wood of the bedside table drew her attention. She looked back at the three devices lined up next to each other. One of them—black and untraceable—was the one that mattered the most. There was only one person who had this number.
Her employer. Blackstone Security’s sole client.
She picked up the black device and placed it against her ear.
“I was just about to call with an update,” she said.
“Then don’t waste my time. You found him?”
“I did.”
“And? Any complications?”
“None,” she replied.
“So far,” the man said.
“Yes. So far.”
“Is he talking?”
“He will. I should know who his source is within the hour.”
“Once you do, take care of whoever is fucking with me, and toss the asshole reporter to the fishes.”
“Of course,” she replied, but the line was already dead.
Her employer didn’t do pleasantries, and that suited Verena just fine.
She set the phone down and was about to return her attention to the live feed, but something felt off.
Her fingers twitched as she glanced at the three phones.
The one she had just used wasn’t perfectly aligned with the others.
Half a centimeter too far to the left. It threw off the symmetry and the vibe of the entire cabin, didn’t it?
She reached out and nudged it back into place.
Then again, this time just a hair to the right.
Still not quite perfect. She adjusted all three, lining them up precisely along the edge of the table.
There. Finally.
No. The spacing’s all wrong.
She leaned in again, shifting the middle phone just a fraction of a centimeter.
Better.
Another nudge. Then another.
Enough!
She took a long, deep breath and forced herself to pull her hand back. She exhaled slowly.
There. Done.
Verena sighed, then swore out loud. She needed help, and she knew it. Her employer would kill her if he knew how much time she wasted on stupid things like that. He didn’t trust people who had weaknesses, especially the ones who he had admitted into his close circle.
Blackstone Security had been an unexpected turn in her life.
Five years ago, she’d been a rising-star detective in the LAPD’s Narcotics Division, only months away from being promoted to lieutenant.
Her career had derailed after a judge had deemed that emptying her entire magazine into the two men who had shot and killed her partner was excessive force.
She’d disagreed with the judge. Strongly. The two lowlifes had deserved every single bullet she’d fired at them. Still, facing termination and a possible civil lawsuit, she’d resigned. And, just as it had happened to many disgraced cops before her, the job market chewed her up and spit her out.
Unable to find a job that paid close to her detective III salary, she was about to default on her mortgage when her benefactor had called to offer her a job.
She knew the man and had met him three or four times when she’d been a teenager, but she hadn’t talked to him since her dad, who had served alongside him during the first Gulf War, had perished in the cockpit of an experimental aircraft fifteen years ago.
“I apologize for not keeping in touch with you, Verena, but I’ve kept an eye out for you,” her benefactor had said. “I admire your resolve, and I watched the video several times, you know?”
She didn’t need to ask which video he was talking about. She knew which one. Though the footage taken by her bodycam wasn’t in high definition, it had captured the entire firefight.
“There’s a poetic ruthlessness about you. One that can’t be taught. I’d like you to run a private security firm I’m invested in.”
That was the moment she’d realized she’d been given a second chance.
A sharp knock on her cabin door pulled her out of her thoughts.
Justin Burton, Veloce’s captain and a former lieutenant with the US Navy, stepped inside before she could tell him to come in.
“Ma’am, we have a problem,” he said.
“You’ll need to be a bit more specific than that, Justin.”
“Something’s going on at the beach. I think you should see for yourself.”
She nodded. She picked up two of the three phones, including the black one, then followed Burton to the main deck. He handed her a pair of binoculars.
“Check the rocky alcove at your one o’clock,” he said.
She raised the binoculars and scanned the alcove near the end of the small beach. Pam, one of the four operators she had sent to snatch Hobb, was moving in a combat crouch toward the alcove, her pistol drawn. Pam didn’t spook easy. Burton had spoken the truth.
Something’s wrong.
A moment later, Pam disappeared behind the rocks.
“Where’s Oscar?” Verena asked.
“Can’t say for sure, ma’am. I watched him untie the Jet Ski, then I went back inside to get the binocs ’cause I thought I saw someone else.”
“Someone else?” she asked, lowering the binocs so she could look at Veloce’s captain.
“Again, I can’t say for sure. That’s why I went inside to grab these,” Burton said, nodding at the binoculars. “Next thing I know, Pam has her gun out.”
She brought the binocs up again. Through a gap in the rocks, she caught glimpses of movement. A struggle between two people. A man.
And he’s fighting Pam. Shit!
A sudden realization settled over her. Oscar wasn’t missing. Oscar had been taken out. And if someone was good enough to neutralize the former pro boxer, then whoever that someone was, he was a problem.
A big problem.
Verena’s first instinct was to send backup.
She was about to order Burton and the two men interrogating Hobb to take the dinghy, but she hesitated.
It wasn’t tactically sound. She had no idea what—or who—she was dealing with.
Was it just one man? A team? Were they after her, or was Paul Hobb their target?
Even armed, her men would be sitting ducks on the open water, vulnerable to enemy fire as they crossed from the yacht to the beach.
And it would also leave her alone with the chef to protect the yacht.
Too many unknowns. And unknowns got people killed.
Besides, her employer’s orders couldn’t have been clearer.
Find out what Hobb knows. Find the leak, Verena. And plug it. Permanently.
Sending her crew to help Pam would be careless and distract her from her main objective. Her gut told her to play it safe. At least until she knew exactly what the threat was.
“Warn our friends in the engine room that we’re about to leave, Justin.”
“Now? But . . . what about Pam and Oscar?”
She looked at him, daggers in her eyes.
“Don’t make me repeat myself,” she hissed.
“Where to?” Burton asked, lowering his eyes. “Back to the marina?”
Verena considered the question. If someone was here for Hobb, it meant they had resources. That meant they might already have people waiting at the marina. The right call was to move out, regroup, and formulate a plan.
“For now, let’s head south,” she said in a friendlier tone. “We’ll be back for Pam and Oscar, I promise.”
Burton gave her a sharp nod, then headed toward the helm. A few seconds later, the Azimut’s three Volvo Penta IPS 1350s, each delivering one thousand horsepower, rumbled to life beneath her feet.
Verena walked out to the cockpit and gripped the railing, her eyes fixed on the shore.
Whoever this was, they’d just made a powerful enemy.
Verena smiled. Her most dangerous asset was in Palma, awaiting orders. She hadn’t activated him for the Hobb job. Instead, she had kept him in reserve, in case there were complications.
It was time for him to earn his keep.