Girl Scout at two o’clock, holding up a BMW, all long legs, slim hips, and a serious green-eyed gaze.
“Con.” The girl pushed off the Beemer she’d been leaning against and fell in beside him.
“Scout.”
“You get him?” Her whole life was wound up in those three words, but she didn’t let it show. The question was casual, tossed off.
“He didn’t come to the gallery.”
She nodded once, not letting her disappointment show either, and that was just like his girl.
“What about the Sphinx?” she asked, easily keeping up with him, matching him stride for stride in a pair of camouflage BDUs and a white T-shirt.
“Got it,” he said.
She smiled at his news, a bright, wide grin that always did his heart good. The girl didn’t have enough of those.
“So what do we do now?” she asked.
“Does Miller have anything for us yet?” Miller was a guy in Nevada, a wounded vet with spooky computer skills. He could not only hack, he could chop, slice, dice, and, when needed, puree databases, all kinds of databases. Four months ago, when word of the Sphinx had first started hitting the streets, Con had tagged him to find and follow Warner’s private jet, to get locations and flight plans.
Scout checked her watch. “Last time I talked to him, he said to give him another hour, and we’re close to that now.” She pulled a phone out of a cargo pocket on her pants and speed-dialed a number.
The girl was twenty-two, lanky, brilliant, and tough enough, with café-au-lait skin and a head full of wild dark curls that nothing could tame.
“Scout,” she said, after a few moments. “You know what I need… Yes… Yes… Good… Yes. I’ll get back to you on that.” She hung up and met his gaze. “Miller’s got a lock on Warner’s location.”
“Where?”
“Just about where you said he’d be, within a couple of hours’ range-São Paulo, Brazil.”
For a second, Con had to work to contain the sharp thrill that ran through him. The monster was close-but not close enough, and there was no victory until Warner was dead.
“Then he had somebody at Beranger’s,” he said, handing her his camera from out of his pocket. “Send the last group of photos to Miller along with these names-Levi Asher, the fat man in the blue suit; Suzanna Toussi is the woman; and I’ve got one unknown, one other guy in the photos. Tell Miller we’ll get him a name, and tell him we want dossiers, as much intel as he can find.”
“On it,” she said, taking the camera and fishing a small cord out of her back pocket.
“Call Jo-Jo, have him find out what he can about every gringo staying at the Posada Plaza-one of them will be our guy-and find out where Asher and Toussi are staying. Those two flew in from somewhere. I want to get to them before they fly back out.”
“De acuerdo.” Okay. She speed-dialed another number. “Jo-Jo, it’s Scout. I need you on the horn. Two norteamericanos looking to buy some stolen art arrived in the city sometime in the last couple of days, four days at the most, Levi Asher and Suzanna Toussi… Yeah, Toussi. I need to know where they’re staying and-”
“Tell Jo-Jo the woman arrived at Beranger’s with Jimmy Ruiz,” Con interrupted.
Scout nodded.
“The woman was with Jimmy Ruiz today, this afternoon… Yeah, that Ruiz, and…Yeah…You sure?” She shot him a worried look. “Jesus… Sure, sure. I’ll send you photos. Tell all your guys to be on the lookout-and Jo-Jo… yeah…I need the names and 411 on all the gringos staying at the Posada… Yeah.”
“What?” he asked, when she ended the call.
“Ruiz,” she said, using the cord to connect her phone to his camera. “He’s dead. Multiple gunshot wounds in a suite at the Gran Chaco. The room was registered to a Suzanna Royal.”
Shit.
“This is getting interesting, Con,” she said.
Oh, hell yeah.
“Where’s the woman now?”
“Not at the Gran Chaco, but the cops are there and asking the same question.” With half a dozen keystrokes, she started downloading the photos and sending them to Miller and Jo-Jo.
“Have Jo-Jo check the Posada for her. If she’s there, or shows up anywhere on his radar, tell him to put somebody on her and to call inmediatamente.”
“Roger that.” She watched the screen on her phone, and after a couple of seconds passed, she hit a few more keys. “Miller said the information cost him double the usual price, and he wants three times the agreed-upon amount.”
Two times the cost meant three times the price? Sure, that made sense.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think his girlfriend is pregnant again and-”
“And that makes what, four? Five kids?” he interrupted.
“Five, and Paul Detty that jerk, screwed him on his last deal, and I think we could buy a lot of Miller’s loyalty right now for just a few more dollars.”
Con thought it over for a second, but no longer. It was that kind of game, and Miller actually had quite a bit of loyalty that could be bought for not very damn much cash, and Scout wasn’t really asking. She knew the score on all their deals, sometimes better than he did, especially with the stringers, and she had a soft spot for Miller’s brood of sniveling brats.
Christ. Scout had a soft spot for every sniveling brat on the planet-and he had a soft spot for Scout. If he had a sniveling brat, she was it.
And if that wild-ass boy on Con’s payroll who was chasing her from one side of the globe to the other didn’t watch himself, Con was going to put his butt in a sling. Scout could do better than some red-haired, freckle-faced heathen with more balls than brains. Jack Traeger was running on pure testosterone, which was fine on the job, but not when it came to Scout.
“Your call,” he said to her, and saw a small smile of satisfaction curve her lips. Pretty soon, she’d be the one giving the orders. He could see the writing on the wall. He could see a lot of writing on the wall, and sometimes it unnerved him, especially when it concerned her and their mission.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. It wasn’t too late for her to walk away. Her part of the mission had only one target, Erich Warner. But the mission had gotten complicated, and in Con’s experience, each added layer of complication increased the possibility of failure, and failure was a dangerous commodity.
The look she gave him would have quelled a lesser man.
“Don’t go there, Con,” she said. “I’ve got as much right to this as you do…almost.”
Yeah, but the almost was a big one. He was locked in, every chemical in his body irrevocably changed by the drugs he’d been given-and the scars, hell, from the looks of them, he was damn lucky to even be alive. As bugged as he sometimes got with his memory situation, he was glad he couldn’t remember being tortured, but he’d been cut, that was for damn sure, deep and often. Given the array of “tools” available to the good doctors in Bangkok, it didn’t take much figuring to figure out who’d carved him up.
Scout had not been touched by the brutality or the drugs, but her father had been in that charnel house in Bangkok with him, and the Girl Scout’s father had not made it out alive.
“So how does it look?” she asked, slanting him a curious glance. “Cool? Like it’s magic or something?”
“Really cool,” he said and grinned. At heart, Scout was still a kid, and to the best of his ability, he tried to keep it that way. “But no magic.”
“It’s worth a fortune, though, right?”
“Millions, easy.” To everyone else. For Con, the statue had only one value, the same value it had to the spymaster-bait. Keep it or lose it-he didn’t care, not after Erich Warner was dead, and to that end, he wanted to get the statue to Costa del Rey, King’s Coast, the compound he’d taken over up-river. Given the tricky time frame on the transference of immortality-brief and nonnegotiable with the rise of the full moon at sunset, with all necessary astral conjunctions in place, the whole shebang destined to happen in just a little over twenty-four hours-Warner had to have his sights locked onto Ciudad del Este and be waiting for the call.