Showdown

by Cindy Dees

  The wait was agonizing this time as Sebastian was silent, listening. Zane mentally jolted as Sebastian said, “Yes, he’ll work with us. He’ll do whatever I tell him to.”

  What? Whatever Sebastian told him to do? Was Sebastian right? Had he really fallen so hard for the man already?

  Dang.

  Warning lights flashed and sirens wailed in his head. He knew better than to fall hard and fast for a guy, particularly after they’d just had great sex. He’d been so needy in his younger years he’d mistaken any attention from anyone as real caring. But he knew better now, dammit.

  He’d worked too hard over the years to love himself, to recover from the mistakes and wounds of his youth. He was not going to fold up and give in to the old insecurities. Did he like Sebastian? Yes. Did he want to get to know the man better? Hell yes. But he was far from caring about the guy so blindly, trusting him so completely, that he would do whatever Sebastian told him to without questions of any kind, thank you very much.

  A slow burn of anger started in his toes, rising inch by inch to consume his entire body. Jerkily, he pulled the bacon out of the pan and broke the eggs into it, wishing them slow, painful deaths. By the time Sebastian got off the phone, he was shaking with rage.

  He’d thought they had something. An emotional connection, in spite of his initial goal of merely distracting Sebastian. He was crazy about the guy, but Sebastian was taking him for granted. And that was the one thing he knew better than to accept from anyone, especially his lovers. His eyes narrowed in fury. Spatula in hand, he wielded it like a sword as he turned to face Sebastian.

  “What was that about?” he asked ominously.

  “Wild Cards were able to track a deposit to your bank account from a numbered anonymous account in Cyprus. It’s likely Erebus, since they have a major hub in Greece. The Wild Cards computer guys and the British government are unpacking the data now. If we’re lucky, it’ll lead to the consortium’s last remaining bank accounts.”

  “The deposit’s been made, then? The full million dollars?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Wow.” He was a millionaire, huh? Of course, if he didn’t cough up the plates, he would be a dead millionaire soon enough. “I wonder how much taxes Uncle Sam is going to charge me on the money.”

  “Your main problem is going to be explaining to the government where it came from.” Sebastian shrugged. “I mean, I suppose you can claim it as work income earned overseas. Unless you’re audited, Uncle Sam shouldn’t request receipts or contracts to prove where you earned the money. As long as you pay income tax on it, they probably won’t care where you got it.”

  Damn. He hadn’t thought of that when he’d told the counterfeiter to put the money in his regular, American, regulated bank account. As if he would have had any idea how to set up some illegal, anonymous offshore account.

  “I have a great accountant,” Sebastian continued blithely. “If you’d like me to set you up with him, he can help you figure out what to do with the money to protect it as much as possible from tax implications.”

  “How does that saying go? It takes money to make money, and it takes more money to hide your money?”

  Sebastian snorted. “That’s no lie.”

  He commented, “Well, I have to give this consortium of yours credit for keeping its word.”

  Sebastian made a sound of derision. “In the first place, not my consortium. And in the second place, yeah. Only after they tried and failed to kill you and then couldn’t successfully kidnap you.”

  Details, details. If the money was in the bank, then he should probably move heaven and earth to find a way to deliver the plates and walk away from this mess alive. Of course, that also meant Sebastian’s mission would be over and the man could walk away from him as well, and not look back.

  His head and heart felt as if they’d gone to war against each other. He was pissed as hell that Sebastian didn’t respect him as an adult in his own right and thought he could exert any kind of control over him.

  His heart argued that he’d been the one to dare Sebastian to take possession of him. He couldn’t throw the man under the bus for doing exactly what he’d asked him to do, could he?

  Did Sebastian respect him or not? Should he believe Sebastian when he said he only wanted to help Zane extricate himself safely from this mess? Now that the money transfer had given the Wild Cards the financial lead they’d wanted, he could walk away from this whole situation, right? His part was done… he hoped.

  Which meant Sebastian’s obligation to protect him was finished too. Right?

  What came next? Would Sebastian actually give him the respect he deserved and take their relationship to the next level? Or would the man walk away from him and never look back? Had last night been it? Did that phone call spell the end for them?

  The old fear was back, along with insecurity slimy and roiling in his gut. Would he lose Sebastian now that this mess was more or less resolved?

  One thing he did know. Sebastian respected strength. Intelligence. Self-control. Weakness did not impress Sebastian Gigoni.

  The show must go on, baby. As if he was stepping out onto the runway, he plated the eggs and bacon, smiled brightly, threw his shoulders back, and carried the food over to the coffee table. He felt like a performing monkey, but he would be damned if he would show Sebastian his fears and hurts.

  “So. What’s on your agenda for today, Seb?”

  “I need to check in with Etienne. See if he was able to get any identification on who was following us last night. Then I need to track down a top-notch engraver who can mark the plates in some subtle way that won’t be obvious on casual inspection but which makes them useless.”

  “Won’t the counterfeiters spot something like that?” he asked in alarm.

  “Not if the plates are altered subtly. I don’t know much about it, but Pere suggested that we could probably get them defaced and rendered unusable without a casual visual inspection being able to spot the flaw.”

  Zane was tempted to skip altering the plates and just hand them over, but that would make him an accessory to counterfeiting, and he highly suspected that was a serious felony, if not something worse, like treason.

  “How about you?” Sebastian asked. “Anything you need to do today?”

  “I was thinking about taking a nap.”

  Sebastian smiled knowingly, and Zane’s insides melted a little. They both knew why he hadn’t gotten much sleep last night. “All right, then,” Sebastian said. “Sit tight here, and I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  Thought he had him caged and cowed, did he? Hah. He was no domesticated house cat to sit around all day waiting for the master to come home and pet him at his convenience. No, sir. He was a goddamned tiger.

  Zane gave Sebastian ten minutes to clear out of the building, and then he hurried to the door. Thankfully, it was designed to keep people out and not keep people in. He slipped outside and went down the stairwell to an actual, recognized floor in the building, where he caught an elevator and took it all the way down to the ground level. He walked out of the lobby, hailed a cab, and headed for the bank.

  While he was in the car, he called his agent. “Janice, sweetheart, I need a favor.”

  “Anything, darling. I heard from Kato’s people, and they’re raving about your work last night. You’re back, baby. I won’t have any trouble booking you gigs after this. They said you were the only model who wasn’t a complete bitch about the shoot.”

  He laughed. “Not for lack of desire to bitch, I assure you. I’m bruised all over. I won’t be able to take any swimwear work for a couple of weeks.”

  “Duly noted. What favor do you need, sweetie?” she asked.

  “Do you know someone in the jewelry business who could take a cast of a metal piece and make a duplicate superfast? And they’d need to keep their mouth shut about it.”

  “You planning on pulling a jewelry heist?”

  He laughed, a little uncomfortable with how
close to the truth that was. “Do I strike you as the cloak-and-dagger type, darling?”

  That sent Janice into peals of laughter. “Actually, I know an artist who might be able to do what you need. She’s a sculptor by training but makes costume jewelry for Broadway productions. Does that sound like what you’re looking for?”

  “My God, yes. She sounds perfect!”

  “Lemme dig up her number. I haven’t called her since I broke up with her a few years back. But I see her work all the time in theaters. She’s freaking brilliant. High-strung artist type, though. Does way too many drugs. You be careful around her, okay?”

  “Never fear. I’m clean as a whistle and planning to stay that way.”

  “I’m proud of you, kid. Have you got something to write with? You know you can’t remember numbers for shit, sweet boy.”

  Maybe not when he was stoned out of his head, but sober, his memory was just fine, thank you very much. He memorized the number she rattled off and hung up quickly. On television, spies never wrote down phone numbers. No trail of evidence and all.

  A quick phone call later, and he was scheduled to meet with the artist, a woman named Maya, in an hour. She sounded like she was coming down off some kind of hard-core hallucinogen and only partially checked in with reality. But she focused fast enough when he mentioned that he could pay well for her services. Must be broke and almost out of drugs.

  He was jumpy the entire time he was in the bank gaining access to the plates. As he waited to be shown down to the vault, every new person who came into the bank made him nervous. He assessed everyone, wondering if each one was a shadow agent of the Erebus Consortium. Of course, he had no idea what an international criminal looked like.

  Thank God he’d had the presence of mind to insist on putting the plates in his grandfather’s safe deposit box so he could access them today. The safe deposit box arrived in the private viewing room, and he stuffed the metal pieces into his coat pocket, then left the bank quickly. Time was the enemy now. He had to get these things copied and back into the bank before Sebastian realized they’d been removed at all.

  He could only pray Sebastian had no plans to take the plates to a jeweler for a couple of days. His impression had been that Sebastian’s other business today would take a while, which meant he might not even get around to looking for an engraver until tomorrow.

  Zane hailed a cab and gave the driver Maya’s address, not far off Broadway. He jogged up five flights of stairs to a walk-up over a nightclub that was deserted and quiet right then. He didn’t like involving anyone else in this mess, but he didn’t know who else to turn to. And surely Erebus wouldn’t go looking for an obscure jewelry artist tucked away in an obscure loft in an obscure corner of Greenwich Village.

  Maya scowled darkly when he mentioned that Janice had given him her phone number. She burst out, “That rotten piece of shit. I oughta throw you out of here with a message for her to jump off the tallest building she can find.”

  “Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?” he replied dryly.

  Maya burst out laughing. “I like you. So why are you here? Please tell me Janice didn’t send you to try to get me back.”

  Aloud, he said, “She did not send me here to beg you to take her back. I’m actually here because she said you’re the finest sculptor and jewelry designer she knows.”

  “Bitch,” Maya muttered with considerably less heat. “You need me to make you a piece of jewelry? What’s it for?”

  “Actually, I need you to make me an exact replica of something. As exact as you can possibly manage.” He pulled out the pair of plates and set them down on the worktable in the middle of the cluttered industrial loft. “And I need them as fast as you can possibly do them.”

  Maya picked up the plates and stared at them in shock. “Do you know what these are?”

  “Yes,” he answered grimly. “That’s why I came to you to destroy them. After you make the replicas, I need you to alter both the copies and the originals in some subtle way that will make them unusable. Do you have any idea how to do that?”

  “That’s easy. I’ll just chisel an existing line a little deeper. Too much ink will fill it during the printing process and it’ll make a fat, dark stripe on the bill. The plate will look fine until someone uses it.”

  “How fast can you make me replicas?” he asked.

  “That depends. If you want me to make a cast and then fill it with stainless steel identical to this and temper it and cool it, that could take several weeks.”

  He swore. “I don’t have several weeks. I have to deliver what looks like real plates to someone, possibly as soon as tomorrow, and then make sure they can never be used.”

  “Tomorrow? I’m not a magician!”

  “Huh. Janice said you are.”

  Maya grinned. “Do you really want to mess with that person who’s getting these’s head?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can cast replicas of these suckers out of a nickel-titanium alloy called nitinol. It’s the stuff magicians make bending spoons out of. At roughly human body temperature, nitinol bends and is easily breakable. You could warm the replica plates up next to your body, like in your shirt pocket, and then you could snap them in half with your bare hands. Stuff’s not too expensive either, and because of its special properties is very easy to cast.”

  “Perfect. Do that,” he declared. “Can you make the impression thingy now that you’ll cast the replica plates from while I wait?”

  “I suppose so. As long as you don’t hover over me. Makes me crazy to have people watch me work.”

  Huh. He couldn’t imagine working without people watching him.

  They negotiated a quick price, which he was pleased came to less than the two thousand dollars of the paycheck he’d just cashed. He didn’t know much about banking rules, but he did know that large deposits like the one Erebus had allegedly dropped into his checking account last night took a couple of weeks to clear and become available. The federal government examined all large deposits to make sure they weren’t drug money. He had no earthly idea how Erebus had explained away his deposit, and he hadn’t had time to ask at the bank this morning.

  Maya took the plates over to a table under a window and pulled out a wooden box about three times the dimensions of one of the plates. She took down jugs of clear goop and stirred them together in a bucket, then poured some of the goop in the boxes. She sprinkled the plates with a fine powder of some kind, blew off most of it, and then carefully laid them side-by-side in the goop. More goop went on top.

  And then she strolled over to the refrigerator across the room, an ancient beast that had to have survived World War II, and opened the door. “Beer?” she asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Weed?”

  “Definitely no, thanks.”

  “Good for you. Getting wasted will be the death of me.”

  He flopped down on a decrepit sofa and held his breath as best he could while Maya lit up a joint. Thankfully, she sat over by the resin casts and didn’t smoke for long. He was extremely proud of himself for surviving the temptation to move closer to her and inhale the blue cloud around her head.

  “Is there anything we can do to speed this up?” he asked as she pulled out a flat tin container, opened it, and started rolling another joint.

  “Nah. Resin’s gotta harden. Won’t take long. Relax. Take a load off. Tell me how you got no-shit currency printing plates?”

  “It’s a long story. I can tell you I am not a criminal, and I’m not going to let them fall into the hands of criminals. In a few weeks, when this is all over, I’ll tell you the whole tale. You’re gonna love it, especially the part where you’re the heroine of the story. Please promise me you won’t tell anyone about this.”

  “Who am I gonna tell? I mean, who’d believe me anyway?” she drawled.

  “I mean it, Maya. Bad people want these things, and they would kill you if they found out you were involved.”

>   “Dark, man.”

  Dammit. Was she too stoned on the weed to comprehend the seriousness of the situation? He should’ve made the danger clear before she’d lit up.

  They sat in silence, Maya sucking down two more joints and Zane watching the big clock on the wall tick away maddeningly slowly.

  “Okay,” she announced abruptly. “We’re done cooking.”

  Thank God. He felt ready to explode.

  He followed her to the table this time, watching as she unscrewed the sides of the box to reveal a cream-colored gelatinous cube. Carefully, using a length of thread, she cut into it. The cube split open to reveal the currency plates inside, like a toy surprise. She lifted the plates out gently, and perfect impressions of each of their faces were left in the gel. She turned over the top piece of gel, revealing the opposite sides of each plate, complete with the engraved inscriptions for the employees of the year. After inspecting both impressions in the bright light streaming in the window, she declared them bubble-free and perfect.

  “Great. You’ll call me when you have the replicas?” he said, reaching for the plates.

  “Not so fast. Lemme ruin those originals for you.”

  He watched in trepidation as she pulled out a set of metal tools that looked like dentist’s picks and donned a headpiece that pulled magnifying glasses down over her eyes. “Are you sure you’re steady enough to do this now? You’ve had a fair bit of weed, Maya.”

  She snorted. “That was just my wake-up weed. I don’t get fucked-up until I switch to the hard stuff. Back off, okay?”

  Riigghht. Note to self: stay the hell away from this woman in the future.

  “Seriously, Zane, stand back and don’t jostle me or the table. This shit’s delicate work if you don’t want it noticed right away.”

  He stood with his back against the door, holding his breath. It was a huge risk to deface the plates, but he would feel guilty for the rest of his life if he didn’t.

  The artist hunched over the engraving plates and placed the tip of a tool against the surface of one. She tapped the end of it lightly with a small wooden mallet, moved the tool, and tapped it again. She repeated the process a half-dozen times.