Fatal Forgeries

by Ritter Ames

  “Did you drink any of it?”

  “No. I’d drunk enough of the glass you poured, along with the beer at the bar, and decided to get food on my stomach. The sea bass and bread arrived before the fake waiter came. I snacked on the bread until you returned.”

  “Thank goodness.”

  Everything went back into my purse and we waited for the nail to dry. Minutes later, we had our proof. The tip of my fingernail changed colors. The wine was drugged.

  Jack’s face turned thunderous. “Don’t eat anything else. Let’s see if we can find him in the kitchen. And stay right beside me.”

  Like he had to tell me that.

  I scooped up my Prada with one hand and cradled the wineglass with the other. “For evidence,” I said.

  “Good thinking.”

  The young man had left minutes before. He’d probably been watching us and realized we knew. The restaurant manager gave us the waiter’s name but could provide nothing else. He also offered another meal, more wine, a better table, but he could not tell us how to find the absent waiter. He tried to get our contact information, but Jack said no. We would handle things from this point.

  I asked for a to-go cup to pour the tainted cava into something transportable with a lid. One of the kitchen help scurried away to find what was needed. I wandered over to the trash and saw a mostly full bottle of cava sitting at the top.

  “Jack, we probably should take this, too.” I pointed at the open bottle. He grabbed a towel and lifted it from the bin.

  Later, in the cab, I said, “And to think, I felt so calm when we arrived there. Someone obviously followed us from the bar.”

  “I think we need to forget calm for a few days.” He’d stuffed the end of the towel into the opened mouth of the bottle and was doing his best to not touch the wider end where I saw the waiter holding it. After a stop at the nearest police station to tell our story and give the waiter’s name, we headed back to our hotel. Neither of us had any real appetite anymore.

  In our hotel suite, we snacked on Cokes and Toblerone bars out of our mini-fridge and relished the fact that since Spain was still part of the EU the chocolate triangular lovelies carried the candy’s original shape, despite the change in the brand bars for U.K. customers.

  “I still need to write Toblerone officials a complaint letter,” I groused. “If I didn’t travel so much, I probably would.”

  Jack laughed.

  “What else did Miguel say?” I asked.

  He blew out a breath and grabbed my phone from the coffee table. “He said he’d email or text us further information, but there’s nothing here yet. I told him to stay vigilant. Might need to call back and tell him our further adventures.”

  “You’re getting off topic. Tell me what he said,” I repeated, taking back my phone too.

  “He gave me the yacht and the time. He’s going to try to get me onboard in some capacity—”

  “Us. I go wherever you go.”

  “No way.” Jack set his Coke a bit too heavily on the tabletop and liquid flew in droplets. “Your picture will be on the phones of any security guys there, or any of the stooges sent to close out whatever transactions the criminals are making.”

  “I’ll wear a disguise.” I uncurled from my spot on the sofa and walked into the bedroom to rummage through my bag. A few minutes later, I was back with Liza Minelli hair and brown contact lenses covering my blue irises. “See?” I posed. “And I don’t even have to have a stylist change the color back later.”

  “Interesting.” He pulled my arm and I landed in his lap. “Never thought of you with short hair. Brunette or otherwise.”

  “I have a lot of surprises in my bag of tricks, Mr. Hawkes.”

  “I’ll just bet you do.”

  He tried to kiss me, but I pulled back. “Let’s keep on-topic, buster. You know I’m not staying out of the play. I’ve been doing this job without you all this time, but we both know our strength is in teamwork. Keep treating me like a partner, Hawkes, and not some fragile masterpiece. Or else.”

  “You’re right. Even if I can get police support, I’m going to need someone beside me who knows the other players in this farce. I don’t like it, but I’m going to have to learn to accept this as status quo.”

  I held his gaze. “If you can’t work with me without mother-henning me, then we can’t be together like this. It’s that simple. I worry about you the same way you worry over me, but we’re both damned good at what we do. Protect each other? Sure. That’s what backup is for. You worrying too much about me risks putting yourself into greater danger and threatens any plan we have in place.”

  “I get it.”

  My phone vibrated from a text, and I held the screen so we could read it together. It was from Miguel.

  “He’s got you a server’s uniform for tomorrow,” Jack said.

  I smiled. Miguel knew better than to think I’d agree to be benched. I read the rest of the text. “And you’re on the guest list under a strange name. John Leeds. Short and sweet, but can you get by using it?”

  “Yes. I have a passport with that name and gave it to Miguel when we spoke in the bar.”

  Wonder what other secrets he hadn’t told me yet, I thought. Aloud, I said, “Alrighty then. Guess I need to start searching out ways to get the yacht’s blueprints.”

  “You can do that?”

  I patted his cheek. “Baby, I can do anything.”

  SEVENTEEN

  We spent most of the night working our individual sources to see what information we could get and what additional reinforcements we might be able to count on. Jack woke his friend in Italy’s military police and carried on a long conversation in Italian, while I searched under every internet rock for blueprints of the Faux Foe. I worked backward from its registration for info on who owned it and found a shell company that had me naturally thinking of Ermo Colle. Eventually, I found the factory specs of the yacht from delivery to its original home in the Bahamas.

  “Be back in a second,” I whispered while Jack continued a call, this time with someone in the U.K. “I’m going downstairs to see if I can make some copies.”

  “Just a minute—”

  “I’ll be fine,” I interrupted. “This time of night I should be the only person there besides the desk clerk.”

  He nodded, and I was glad the argument ended so quickly. I didn’t want this to start becoming a problem, no matter how much I understood his reaction.

  The wireless printer at the desk quickly made friends with my smartphone, and I was back upstairs with the copies in less than ten minutes. Jack was at the elevator when I hit our floor.

  “I finished my call. Thought I’d take a walk.”

  I grinned. “Come on and memorize the major points on five decks instead.”

  “Five?”

  “Yep. It’s a mega.”

  “I guess I’m not surprised.”

  I wasn’t either, but it would mean a lot of studying to make sure we didn’t get turned around if we needed to escape quickly. Plus, the yacht was three years old. Plenty of time for the owner to think about changing up the factory setups, no matter how custom-built it had been on delivery.

  “There’s been some chatter about a big gun delivery,” Jack said once we were back in the room. “No names associated with it, but my Italian friend thinks this auction could be the means of transferring ownership. My Home Office contacts share his opinion.”

  “Using art as payment?”

  “And the fact it will be off land. Nothing like the high seas to conduct illegal business. Did you get anything from the yacht’s ownership?”

  I shook my head. “Shell company. I’d need Nico or someone like him and a lot of time to dig any deeper.”

  “So it could be Colle.”

  “Or Moran. Or any number of Asian conglomerates or Arabs with l
ots of money and yachts of their own. It’s registered in the Bahamas, but that doesn’t mean the owner actually lives there.”

  “Which means we wait and see who we recognize.”

  I nodded.

  We took over separate areas of the room. Jack requisitioned the desk and made notes, working up ways he could get on and off the boat without relying on measures afforded to other auction participants. I took over the loveseat and coffee table, studying printouts of the blueprints until lines started crossing with my eyes. I remembered the contacts and removed that phase of my disguise.

  A phone rang as I reentered the sitting room from the bedroom, and Jack answered. It seemed like every time a call came he spoke in a different language. The words became a kind of white noise while I worked. As I looked at him then, however, taking control of the operation side of things, I wondered again about his relationship with the government and his own father as an MP. There hadn’t really been time to talk about this and how it impacted our jobs and…us. It seemed the deeper we moved into this project, the greater each of our histories became involved in everything we were doing.

  He finished up the call and noticed me looking at him. “Something wrong?”

  “Just watching you in action,” I said, smiling. “I…” I caught my lower lip with my teeth. “I like that confidence.”

  “I’ll remember that.” He rose and started moving my way, but another call stopped him. I received a shrug and a grin as he answered in French.

  Moving back to my own abbreviated office space on the loveseat, I resumed my own specialized work. I spent the next hour scrutinizing the plans and making notes on the prints where I feared changes might have been made, so we’d remember to check before we needed to use any of the fixtures or architectural features.

  Then I rescanned everything again from stem to stern, comparing floors and composing mnemonics in my head to remember what was on each floor. I finished the tick list I wanted Jack to memorize of the public spaces where the auction likely would take place and any staterooms or storage areas that appeared irregular.

  I closed my eyes for a minute, just to rest them and get the gritty feeling on my eyeballs to go away, but woke up hours later in the bedroom. Alone in the bed. My clothes laid neatly across a chair.

  Voices in the sitting room led me to crack the door before I slipped on a robe and stepped into view. It was Jack’s friend from the Italian military police.

  “Hello, Giuseppe,” I greeted the stocky man with the trim mustache. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “Happy to see you as well, Laurel.” He shook my hand.

  I turned to Jack. “Are you going to get any sleep?”

  “I crashed here on the sofa for a couple of hours,” he said, waving a hand to encompass the about five-foot couch measuring a foot shorter than he was.

  “That couldn’t have been comfortable.” I fisted my hands on my hips.

  “I’m used to it.” He handed me the room service menu in English. “Why don’t you order all of us some breakfast. I promise to try to nap afterward.”

  I was starting to feel like “the little woman” again, but I didn’t want to argue while we weren’t alone. Figuring if I ordered the food and kept quiet, I might better learn intel than if I asked either man anything directly. Pick my battles.

  Speaking of battle, one thing I did notice was the gun on the table. Jack hadn’t tried to bring a weapon into Spain because of their strict laws forbidding foreign parties transporting firearms. Even if the person was law enforcement. I assumed Giuseppe managed this one somehow. Frankly, I didn’t care. I was just glad Jack would be armed.

  By the time the full breakfast I ordered arrived, they still hadn’t switched from Italian long enough for me to know what was planned. I finally asked.

  “You’re going on the servers’ launch with Miguel’s contact,” Jack explained. Something I already knew. “I’ll follow on a hired craft I arranged a short time ago. Giuseppe is going to be coordinating with the Cuerpo Nacional de Policia, the state police here in Barcelona. He has a contact in the CNP who works with the division for international crime. We can’t get full police support because we have no proof a crime is being committed. But they’ve heard their own chatter and are going to work together to see what they can do.”

  Which meant we may have reinforcements, or we might be on a yacht with lots of guns and pretty much on our own.

  “The big thing is,” Jack continued, “if you see Colle or Rollie, try to get off the boat or hide somewhere. Be sure and wear your charm bracelet in case I have to find you later.”

  Nico fixed me up weeks ago with a special charm that looked like a camera but could track me wherever I went. He and Jack had an app on their phones keyed into the GPS of the charm.

  “It’s in my purse. I’ll make sure to have it on. But if Nico has his phone, he has the app too.”

  “We’ll have to take that risk,” Jack said. “Tracking you via a GPS hack on your mobile is the greater risk.”

  We finished eating, and I went to shower and dress. I still needed to go by Miguel’s apartment and pick up my uniform for the day. As I pulled out a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved white blouse, I called and made sure he’d be ready for me.

  “Yes, I’ll be here all morning,” he told me.

  When I came out of the bedroom, I grabbed my sweater and the Prada and said, “Giuseppe, would you mind going with me to Miguel’s so Jack can get some sleep?”

  Jack started to rise from the chair. “I’m going—”

  “No, you’re not, my friend.” Giuseppe put a hand on his shoulder to keep him in the chair by his plate. “Laurel is correct. Get some sleep. I will escort her and keep her safe.”

  To reassure him, I pulled the charm bracelet from my purse and put it on while he watched. “There. You’ll be able to track my movements until you conk out from exhaustion.”

  “Take the battery out of your mobile.”

  “Already have.” I held up the two pieces, one in each hand. “Satisfied?”

  “Okay. But I’m really not tired.”

  Except the yawn that nearly split his jaw belied his words. I kissed him goodbye and followed Giuseppe out of the room.

  The morning was cool but comfortable with my sweater, and the walk to the nearby Gothic Quarter would have been pleasant if my companion hadn’t been in recon mode. I couldn’t blame him. With all the talking he and Jack had been doing I assumed he expected a bad guy around every corner. For me, going in disguised as other people at the auction kind of set my teeth on edge anyway. I would have much rather snuck in. Easier to sneak out. Besides, I was used to being served, not having to handle trays and be the server. My grace under pressure skills weren’t always available when needed.

  We entered the Barri Gòtic. It was easy to see the historic Moorish influence in Barcelona, but particularly so in this section of the city. The area was a system of narrow lanes and courtyards that kind of created mazes in the Gothic Quarter. Giuseppe jumped when we turned a blind corner and surprised two lovers either saying good morning or kissing goodbye. I noticed he quickly re-hid his gun under his jacket.

  “Is the whole place like this?” Giuseppe asked after we left the pair still necking.

  “I know it can feel like a rabbit warren, but honestly, this is one of my favorite places to wander on foot. There’s so much history and character all around us,” I said.

  “The twisting lanes are confusing,” he said. “And it makes for easy places to hide people.”

  “Another part of its uniqueness.”

  He gave a kind of snort, and I assumed he didn’t agree with my compliment.

  This neighborhood of connecting buildings, with courtyards that almost formed a labyrinth, usually charmed me. Yet, as we entered gates and walked past painted wrought-iron fences which blocked and delineated the pub
lic space, I caught some of Giuseppe’s anxiety.

  My goal was an apartment in a back hall on the second level about halfway down the next block. The way inside remained clear, and I told myself to relax. We climbed stairs and walked along an open hallway—actually, a breezeway—to get to the door marked with Miguel’s apartment number. Giuseppe followed close behind and kind of whistled under his breath. I shook the tension building in my neck and shoulders and quickened my steps as I drew near the door. I knocked, but no one answered.

  “He said he’d be here,” I said. Then I noticed the door wasn’t latched. I pushed it open.

  Miguel sat on a beat-up brown couch, staring our way but not seeing anything. The bullet hole in the middle of his forehead took care of that.

  “Get down, get down,” Giuseppe yelled.

  I hit the floor and bullets sprayed through the window. Glass peppered my head. Giuseppe motioned for me to crawl with him to the door. Obviously getting pinned down in the apartment was a bad idea, but with only a half-wall for the breezeway outside, I didn’t see how leaving would help either. Beside my hand was a cell phone, and I grabbed it. I didn’t know if it was Miguel’s or not, but it seemed prudent not to leave the device behind.

  Giuseppe duckwalked into the open hallway and quickly sighted in on a shooter on the next roof. He shot and we heard a cry, then he waved for me to run. I followed orders, and he was a pace behind me. I headed for the stairway down, but another gunman stood in the shadows, starting up toward us when he realized I’d seen him.

  EIGHTEEN

  “We have to go up.” I grabbed Giuseppe’s arm and pushed him back toward the other set of stairs. There was no way to block access once we’d made it to the rooftop—no lock on the door and nothing nearby to wedge under the knob. What we did find were huge concrete bunker-looking blocks we might be able to use for protection, probably hiding HVAC and other utility needs. As the gunman opened the roof door, he shot wide. We ducked behind a bunker and Giuseppe fired back, driving the gunman behind the door to reevaluate his options. We didn’t stop to wait and see. We ran to the next large object, making our way to the edge of the building, opposite from the side where the other shooter stood.