Chapter 16 #5
“Oh, that’s us,” Josh said. “Did you miss that meeting? We gave all our info to Nick so after the thing in Colombia he could really put on the pressure.”
“Oh,” Marco had replied, setting the boxes down and allowing the group to attack and scavenge, which was something that apparently gave him great pleasure when he’d been baking. “Well, he also blames us for a ship leaving the Middle East full of opium that apparently blew up—”
“My bad,” Leon said. “Do you have a marzipan croissant?” he asked rather wistfully.
“Your bad?” Marco said, offering him that very thing. “How is it that’s your bad?”
Leon had taken the croissant from him and shrugged.
“Well, Chuck and Hunter were planning something, but they were spread quite thin. I, as you know, have left the more brutal parts of the import/export business behind me. However, a certain… acquaintance, who also wanted to go straight, asked me how I might trust him, and I said to not do any dealings with Kadjic.” Leon shrugged and took a bite of the pastry, his savagely handsome features melting like a child’s with pure bliss.
“I had no idea he’d blow Kadjic’s ship out of the water. ”
“Oh dear God,” Julia said, as they’d all stared at Leon, appalled. “I hope he didn’t get… or do I hope he did get…? I am both aghast and strangely heartened by this news, Leon. I have no idea what to hope for.”
Leon grinned at her, flakes of butter croissant still in his beard. “Hope my colleague can stay straight and doesn’t get caught,” he said. “I certainly hadn’t anticipated the move, and the colleague had been trying to make a name for himself, so I don’t even owe him a favor.”
Julia blew out a breath and moved forward to help brush the crumbs from her lover’s beard, and Marco continued on with the list of things that had happened to Kadjic since the Salingers had begun their campaign, starting with the painting in Chicago.
While the Salingers were really only culpable for about three-quarters of the list, what had come from the bit of gossip was the knowledge that Kadjic was definitely feeling the pressure.
It was why he would negotiate the painting and then follow the shipment of girls out in what would ordinarily be a routine operation he’d have nothing at all to do with.
“Excellent,” Danny muttered. “If Marco’s right, this will do it. His empire is dissolving, his passion will have just betrayed him, and he won’t be able to pin the fallout on a single person. This is when he’ll go to his den to pout.”
“How do you know for sure?” Molly asked, and for a moment Liam held his breath, thinking that this was the height of cheek, interfering with someone as cyclonic as Danny Lightfingers and the man who’d almost broken him.
But Danny proved, once again, why he had a room full of talented geniuses following him around the world to get rid of a monster—one Danny refused to take personally anymore.
“Because his empire is his ego,” Danny said.
Tienne and Stirling were in a quiet corner, each working on a different project, but within touching distance so their knees and shoulders bumped.
“The thing that drove him to order Tienne killed was embarrassment. Tienne’s father had made a fool of him when all the poor man had wanted to do was keep his son away from Kadjic’s nasty fingers.
Think about it. We have embarrassed him on a global stage many, many times.
And while he still has more money than God, we have seriously disabled his ability to make more.
When I met him he was just coming into his own, just becoming the boogeyman he is today.
I remember asking him when it was going to be enough, and do you know what he said? ”
Molly shook her head.
“He said when his footsteps make the world burn. Well, now they’re making his world laugh. He’s going to need to lick his wounds from that. And when he does, Liam’s crew will have him.”
“We could have him,” Grace said, seemingly out of nowhere.
The truth was, Liam had realized, Grace did his share of the planning, but in surprising places.
While Josh was always solidly planted with his laptop, Grace was often dancing around other people’s conversations.
Liam had just finished hearing him do physics problems in his head to help Chuck and Michael figure out how much power the pumps would need to clear out the water for a pathway for their fleeing victims. While the water was cold, their risk of being discovered or of something going wrong with the equipment doubled for every yard of pathway they carved below the river’s surface.
It was imperative that they balance how much water they had to pump with the well-being of victims that they had to assume were underfed and weakened by captivity, so Grace’s quick—and deadly accurate—calculations probably saved lives.
Now here he was, smiling waifishly at Danny and offering to… what?
“What would we do with him if we had him, precious?” Danny asked carefully.
The smile went from waifish to wolfish. “We’re not angels, Uncle Danny. And Kadjic is a very bad man.”
Danny nodded, taking Grace seriously as so many of the crew had learned to do.
“It’s a legitimate proposal,” he said, and Liam was aware that the room had gone still around him.
“And, in the heat of the moment, a number of us have dirtied our hands in such a matter.” Liam had a memory of Gunrunner’s Island and a small but significant body count, including a man who had assaulted Tienne.
“But….” Danny swallowed and cupped Grace’s cheek in a gesture that was pure affection.
“No, my darling boy,” he said softly. “I would never, in a million years, want you to put a thing like that on your soul.”
Grace swallowed in turn, and the whole room could see his eyes grow shiny. In a move like a darting fish, he gave Danny a short, fierce hug before coming to sit next to Josh.
Josh stopped his relentless tapping to wrap an arm around Grace’s shoulder and whisper in his hair, and Hunter left his stand as sentinel of the room to Carl and came to sit down on the floor by Grace’s feet.
And Liam felt a contentment, an easiness, because these people he’d come to love weren’t going to change in this endeavor—Grace could be a first-rate, terrifying assassin.
But he wasn’t going to be, because the people who loved him wanted him to remain Grace.
And Josh—his Josh—had always been focused, always been super competent, always been their mastermind. And he’d always done his best for those he loved.
Liam thought that maybe they would be okay.
“So, Josh,” Danny said, and Josh glanced up from the one-handed work he’d been doing on his computer. “How’s the gala job going?”
“Well,” Josh said, “lucky for us, Kadjic has a hard-on for somebody really well-known this time. That last artist was a little obscure, so we had to go into her house and break into her loft to search for lost canvases. This is Gustav fucking Klimt, and it’s one of his most famous paintings, so it’s in the middle of the Trade Fair Palace. And the reason this is good, Carl?”
Liam grinned because he’d originally been in on the gala job and had gotten to scope out the entire National Gallery of Prague.
“Because the Trade Fair Palace is in the dead center of town,” Carl said. “And the gala is for another Klimt masterpiece, Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona—”
“No,” Molly said, turning her attention from the yacht schematics that Stirling had brought up for her. “Is that really the name of the painting?”
“It’s a very handsome painting of Prince William, who was a prince of Ghana in the 1890s,” Carl said. “It was stolen by Nazis and disappeared—many feared it was destroyed. The painting was marvelous, but the subject was Black, and we know the Nazis were fuckheads about that.”
“Still are,” Stirling muttered. “Only now they’re paid by the US government.”
“One crisis at a time,” Danny said. “Kadjic today, the mobsters in the White House tomorrow.”
“Deal,” everybody breathed, and Carl continued.
“So the gala is for the Prince William painting, which Kadjic doesn’t want—”
“Because in spite of his fascination with Dizzy Gillespie,” Danny added, “he is very much a Nazi fuckhead.”
“Exactly,” Carl said. “And this gives us some drawbacks and some bennies. One of the drawbacks, of course, is that the Klimt part of the museum is going to be rather full.”
“And the bennies?” Danny prodded.
“The attention is going to be on the Prince William painting,” Carl said.
“Also,” Josh said, “that The Maiden is going to be in a slightly darkened corner of the museum because the Prince William is everybody’s darling—as it should be.
Now I’ve been directed to stay in the van, but Grace, Carl, and Tienne have been in and out of the museum, pretty much scouring the Klimt exhibit in its entirety, while I’ve been looking at schematics.
Part of our problem is that The Maiden isn’t a small painting—it’s slightly larger than six by six feet, and hefting it out of there is going to be a challenge.
But I think we’ve got an in—unfortunately it’s tomorrow night and not the night after. ”
“What’s our in?” Felix asked.
“A special cleaning crew,” Julia said. While Carl had been asking questions as himself, she and Tor had simply been wandering around the museum like tourists, albeit Julia wore a disguise.
Between them they’d managed a thorough casing of the place without exposing Grace, Tienne, Josh, and Molly, who had been getting a lot of exposure as of late.
“They will be escorted by a docent with key privileges to get the nooks and crannies. It’s my understanding that some of the, uhm, finer points of the alarm systems will be shut off so they can clean the frames of the paintings in that section of the museum. ”
“What’s our gambit?” Danny asked.