Chapter 13 Schloss #3
“Not Liam,” Carl said, making Josh blink.
“I know you’re trying to make him legitimate here, and it’s a nice thing to do, but it’s too suspicious.
Liam shows up and the box shows up? Whether his job backs him or not, suddenly Liam’s got a mark.
He’s been pretty pristine in all of our adventures so far—let’s keep him that way. ”
“So what do you recommend?” Liam asked. “Because I saw that coming and I was on board.”
“It’s easy.” Carl shrugged. “I saw five or six pieces my company ensures while we were there. Two of them were in the bedroom. I call the guards over, point out the weaknesses in the alarm system—and there were several—and while I’m doing that, Michael freezes the wires from the alarm to the wall, which gives you the five seconds to break the contacts and replace the box. ” He dusted his hands. “Easy peasy.”
“Well, what do I do?” Liam asked, sounding miffed.
“Cover me on my way out,” Josh said. “Also, you’re in charge of the signature.”
“What is the signature?” Michael asked, and Josh, feeling thick, stood up and went to search his luggage again.
“Actually, when we go out tomorrow—”
“When you go out tomorrow?” Liam said, catching his eyes.
Josh was going to shake him off; he was good at it. But he’d promised. He’d promised. “Six,” he said.
“Not good enough,” Liam said firmly, and when Josh felt the argument tripping on his tongue, Liam softened his voice. “You promised.”
Josh sighed. “Can we at least go out to eat? Do some errands? Sightsee a little?” He tried his most winning smile, and Liam shrugged.
“Nap in the afternoon, early bedtime,” he maintained, and Josh conceded.
Or, well, he yawned. Concession was sort of implied.
“Fine,” he said, digging in the pocket of his luggage.
It was more than a zipper—everything about the luggage was specially made, including the hidden pockets in the regular pockets.
After a moment he produced a stack of fifty holographic stickers wrapped in plastic and pulled out another that he showed to everybody and then stuffed back in the bag.
“Once we pulled the job in France, we figured Kadjic’d be on the alert for things.
He won’t need the big gesture anymore—the small shit will catch his attention.
So put these out tomorrow. Backs of traffic signs, park benches, that sort of thing.
A couple in an area. Be subtle, don’t get caught.
We picked Stuttgart because he’s got enterprises nearby—nothing big enough for him to be visiting, not after all the shit that went down two days ago—but big enough for his people to start talking about the logo popping up. And, I shouldn’t have to remind you….”
He paused with the stack of stickers extended to Carl.
“Don’t get caught on camera,” Carl said blandly. “Trust us, Josh, we’re not stupid.”
Josh handed the stickers over. “I know you’re not,” he admitted. “I’m just frustrated at not being able to go out and do it myself.”
“Well, here.” Carl pulled out a handful. “Trust me, I’ve helped Michael’s kids with stickers. That will feel like buzzenteentwelve.”
Josh grinned at him, because that number was sort of a family favorite, and Liam grunted.
“So,” he said, “how much is a buzzenteen? Is it more or less than a googolplex? Is it smaller than infinity and bigger than a baker’s dozen? I feel like I need buzzenteen maths now that I’m road-tripping to perdition.”
“I figure,” Michael said complacently, reaching for another slice of schnitzel, “that a buzzenteen is the amount of minutes left in the workday when you woke up really wishing you could stay home and watch TV in your pajamas.”
“Times the percentage of your day you spent imagining you could squish your boss’s head,” Carl said, nodding sagely.
“Oh! I get it,” Liam said. “So buzzenteen is the number of meetings I have to have before I dodge out of the next one and go solve the case myself.”
“Or the number of heartbeats you have between when Grace goes early and you’re actually supposed to be sprinting through the Louvre,” Josh said with an exaggerated wipe of his brow.
“I get it now,” Liam said, tugging on Josh’s hand so he’d sit down. “Buzzenteen maths. I now have a new skill.”
There was some laughter, and then they went back to fine-tuning the plan. Tomorrow might be a rest day, but in four days, they were going to have to pull off the job and take the train to Prague.
Four days later, in a warehouse in Colombia
MOLLY GOT really angry when people didn’t know history.
“Did you know,” she whispered, setting the explosive charge in the corner of the warehouse, “that when the farmers in this country were offered a chance to grow food instead of cocaine, they jumped on it? Did more to cut down drug trafficking than any amount of policing or violence?”
“Yeah, darlin’,” Chuck said over comms from another warehouse, where he was doing, presumably, the same thing. “Do you know why they started growing coca in the first place?”
“Because the US paid them to in order to fund an unjust war in Nicaragua,” she grunted.
“I know all this,” Grace muttered from his own structure—there were three giant warehouses in Kadjic’s compound, which Leon had needed to bribe, hack, and in his words, slither, in order to pinpoint.
Lucius was in the pontoon plane, hidden in a cove of the nearby lake, which was almost dead from the pollution of processing Kadjic’s cocaine, and he was, presumably, keeping an eye out for any more planes or transpo coming into the compound.
Hunter was… eliminating guards. Many of them were tied up and gagged—but not all. It was a bloody business.
“I’m just saying,” Molly continued, leaping lightly to the ground on the other side of a massive stack of packed drugs, “that our country has a lot to answer for, and that was before the mad orange king.”
“Darlin’,” Chuck muttered, “can we not talk politics when we’re trying to do some good along with the personal revenge?”
“Sure,” she said, trying not to tug at her breathing mask.
None of the guards wore them, but then, a lot of the guards had that twitchy appearance of addicts.
The drugs themselves were triple-wrapped and packed—they’d already eliminated the guards around the processing buildings and set the unwilling workers free.
Molly, Chuck, and Hunter all spoke Spanish—and Chuck and Hunter spoke Colombian Spanish, because like most dialects, a regional difference was like a whole other language.
They’d shooed the workers far, far away from the processing plant and gotten promises that they wouldn’t return to their families or their villages until dawn.
Most of them had been dazed and tearful, many of them older women who weren’t suited for sex work but were still trafficked in their own country.
It made Molly happy to think they’d be going home, but at the same time, she hoped they were far away from these warehouses before dawn.
If their crew did their job, they’d take out an entire branch of Kadjic’s drug business.
His cocaine operation would be completely defunct, and since he employed almost all local help, unless Kadjic was willing to move to Colombia, endure the heat and the humidity, and rebuild the machinery—from trafficked workers to hired muscle to actual infrastructure—he was going to have to kiss a third of his profits goodbye.
And thanks to Leon’s shipping business, Hunter, Carl, and Chuck had plans for the shipment of opium from Afghanistan that was another third of Kadjic’s drug empire.
And once those were up in flames, they had a list of suppliers to send Nick, Josh’s friend in the police department, who could take advantage of Kadjic’s distraction and take out his meth distribution system entirely.
And when Molly and Grace had been on their way to Colombia, they’d gotten word from Julia that Kadjic’s last known location had been Paris.
It was going according to plan—they were sending doppelg?ngers of each other across the globe until Kadjic was sure Lightfingers had accomplices everywhere, but he couldn’t find them anywhere.
Stirling, still in Europe and doing the research with Danny while the rest of them did the jobs, was currently ferreting out Kadjic’s human trafficking operation in Czechia, while Danny put the finishing touches on the Lightfingers caper that would bring Kadjic to them in Prague just in time to see the destruction of the third branch of his empire.
It was a dangerous operation, but the ultimate goal was to lure Kadjic into the open in such a state of mind that he finally led them to his own den, where his most prized stolen art pieces resided.
And once he was there, nail him to the legal wall.
Daring? Yes.
Risky? Oh, definitely.
But Molly loved daring and risky—and she was having the time of her life.
Except for this whole cocaine everywhere thing.
While not as foolhardy as Grace, Molly had experimented with illicit drugs as a teenager.
She’d been lucky. Her foster mother had called her on it almost immediately and had said all the right things: Molly was smart and beautiful and most importantly, loved, and adolescence may have hurt (because it always hurt), and Molly—abandoned as a toddler and in the foster system until she was eleven and Stirling was ten, had baggage that even her lovely foster parents couldn’t lift—shouldn’t risk throwing away the good things no matter how painful the bad.
Molly may still have gone Grace’s way, which had almost killed him, except for Stirling, who had overheard Stella’s conversation and stalked into her room after Stella had left.
Then he’d called her a selfish fuckheaded asswipe.
And then he’d cried.
And boom, Molly didn’t have a drug problem anymore.
But she still remembered cocaine, because that had been the most fun. It had let her dance all night and get good grades and keep up with Josh and Grace and Stirling, who all seemed to have metabolisms of pure rocket fuel.