Seven-Card Stud

by Ava Drake

  As if his threat conjured it, the sound of a motor became audible. It was quiet, and he felt the vibration as much as heard it. He looked all around and saw nothing approaching. Granted, he was only inches above the water, and the swells were a couple of feet high out here.

  All of a sudden, a shape loomed in front of him. It was low and black and sleek. And two men dressed in black wet suits with something black smeared all over their faces were leaning out of the boat.

  “Mr. Callahan, I presume?” one of them said in a British accent.

  “Uh-huh,” he managed to gasp.

  “Need a lift?” the second one said in the broad vowels of upcountry England.

  “Can’t move my arms,” he managed.

  The men reached down, snagged him by his armpits, and bodily hauled him over the edge of the boat. He landed in a heap on the cold metal floor of some kind of low-profile motorboat.

  Several pairs of hands jerked at him, and he realized with a start that they were efficiently cutting his clothes off his body with knives.

  “Don’t move, sir. We’ll have these wet things off you in a sec, and then we’ll wrap you up in nice warm blankets. You’ll be toasty in a few minutes.”

  He’d believe that when it actually happened.

  They rolled him in a scratchy wool blanket and then in another blanket that sounded like plastic. A motor revved quietly behind him somewhere, and the vessel felt like it leaped forward beneath him.

  One of the black-clad men explained to him, “Normally we’d take you to the Royal Navy base in Gibraltar, but your employer is concerned that someone might see you there and report your survival to the wrong people.”

  “Where are we going, then?”

  “Rendezvous with a private craft that will take you aboard. We’ll reach it in twenty minutes or so. Just sit back and relax, Mr. Callahan.”

  He spent most of the ride to the yacht shivering more violently than he believed possible, but ever so slowly, he began to regain feeling in his face and fingers. His quads, biceps, and back muscles started to unclench, and somewhere in there, he stopped being an actual icicle.

  He didn’t pay much attention as the rescue boat pulled alongside a nice but not obnoxiously ostentatious yacht. Conversation floated over his head about how he was still dangerously chilled and to leave the heating blanket on him for another hour at least. And then he was lifted by the men in the small vessel and passed into waiting hands above.

  “May I please stand up on my own two feet?” he complained.

  Chuckles sounded around him. “Irritability is a good sign. His mental functions are returning to normal.”

  He turned to thank the men in black for saving his life, but the vessel was already nothing more than a small hump among the waves.

  “Who were those guys?” he asked the crewmen standing around him.

  “British SAS,” someone answered.

  Whoa. Who’d managed to pull strings and get those guys to come fish him out of the ocean?

  “This way, sir.”

  He followed a crew member inside the yacht, down a hall, up a steep stairway, and into a salon decorated like a posh gentleman’s club. Two men sat in side-by-side armchairs smoking cigars.

  Collin started. “Peregrine? Martin? What are you two doing here?” Both owners of Wild Cards, Inc. were present? Had he screwed up that badly? He supposed he should be grateful to be alive and not disappointed that they were going to sack him.

  “How are you feeling, Collin?” Pere asked him.

  “Cold. And I could use some dry clothes.” He didn’t add that he was currently naked as the day he’d been born underneath the blankets he held wrapped around himself.

  Martin Wylde picked up a telephone from the coffee table beside his chair. “Emmitt, could you roust up some clothing for our guest and bring it up here right away?”

  It was under a minute before a tall, handsome man with cold, black eyes entered the room and handed him a small pile of clothes, complete with underwear and deck shoes. The guy pointed at a closed door. “Restroom’s in there.”

  Collin retired to dress in gray slacks, a white polo shirt, and navy blue wool sweater. He slipped on the deck shoes and availed himself of a comb he found in the medicine cabinet. At long last, he felt vaguely human again. Time to face the firing squad.

  He stepped out into the salon and took the neat whiskey that Pere held out to him before sinking into the club chair that had been pulled up beside the first two. At Pere’s urging, he spread the heating blanket over his legs to continue bringing his core temperature back toward normal.

  “Quite an evening you’ve had,” Martin commented. “I hate to interrogate you so soon after the shock of being shot, but what can you tell us about the Erebus Consortium? We looked into it, or tried to, and the security we ran into blew up our entire computer network. Our mainframe had to initiate an emergency shutdown to keep from being fatally corrupted.”

  “That sounds about right,” Collin replied. He filled in his bosses quickly on the few morsels of information he’d collected before his “death.” Erebus was some sort of shadow organization of incredibly powerful men who styled themselves the puppet masters of pretty much everything they touched.

  Pere and Martin exchanged loaded looks. Pere was the one who spoke, however. “What can you tell us about Oliver Elliot?”

  Collin had no idea where to start answering that one. Instead he asked, “What do you want to know specifically?”

  “Will he join the consortium now that he’s won the tournament and killed you?”

  “I have no idea how to answer that. Oliver despises his father and everything his father stands for.”

  “Did the son say anything to you once he found what prize you were playing for to indicate his intention to go to work for Erebus or not?”

  Oliver had said he loved Collin. The members of the consortium had forced him to kill the man he loved. Surely Oliver wouldn’t turn around and go to work for people like that. Collin blurted, “How is it that I’m not dead? Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

  “Oliver contacted us yesterday. Explained what was going on. We arranged for operatives to infiltrate the hotel last night, bring in tuxedos for both of you, and plant the blood squib and sedative injector in your suit coat. We then provided Oliver with a revolver loaded with blanks, a knife, and a locator beacon to slip into your clothing.”

  “What if I’d won the hand of poker instead of him?” Collin demanded.

  “Oliver was going to pass you the revolver and tell you to shoot him.”

  “But I wouldn’t have known about the pickup at sea by the British SAS.”

  “No. You would have had to labor under the impression that you’d killed Oliver until we could discreetly get in touch with you after you left the resort. But we weren’t worried about that.”

  Collin frowned. “Was everybody so certain I would lose the hand of cards? I’m not that horrible a poker player.”

  His employers laughed. “By no means. You made it to the last two players, after all. Well done, by the way.”

  “So you had it all planned. Why in hell didn’t anyone bother to share all of this information with me? I thought Oliver actually shot me.” He couldn’t stop a note of anger from creeping into his voice.

  Martin answered, “Oliver thought it best that your reactions be genuine and unscripted. He’s well-practiced at deceiving his father, but he worried that you would not be able to bluff George Elliot.”

  Reluctantly, he had to allow that Oliver might be correct.

  Pere added, “Oliver was very worried about you. He was unwilling to take even the slightest chance with your life.”

  “And yet he drugged me and threw me into the freezing cold ocean in the dead of night.”

  “You’re here, aren’t you? The SAS was monitoring you the whole time you were on the boat with Oliver and those men. They had a stopwatch on you from the moment you entered the water and knew how long the
y had to pull you out before hypothermia became life-threatening. You were never in any danger.”

  No. Just gut-clenching terror.

  “Where’s Oliver now?”

  “Our surveillance showed him returning to the El Rocca and disembarking just before you arrived aboard this vessel.”

  “You have surveillance on him? May I see it?”

  “We were hoping you would be up to taking a look. You know his body language better than any of our other analysts.”

  They had no idea.

  “Come with us.” His bosses rose to their feet and led him downstairs to a shockingly well-equipped electronics room crowded with computer monitors and manned by a pair of analysts he’d worked with in England. After a quick round of greetings and congratulations for not being a popsicle, one of the men stood up and held out a headset to him.

  Collin sat down at the station and donned the headset. Oliver Elliot’s voice filled his ears immediately. Something uncurled in his gut at the sound of his lover’s voice. Oliver was angry but hanging on to his temper tightly. The video feed wasn’t great, but he was amazed there was any video at all on the Erebus. Who on earth had managed to evade the ship’s security, board the vessel, and plant this camera?

  “—satisfied now, Father?” Oliver was pacing a gaudy salon decorated much like the Italianate office Collin had visited aboard the ship.

  “I have to say you performed much better than I expected, son. I didn’t think you’d do it. You clearly had a crush on that British chap.”

  “That British chap had a name.”

  “A name you would be wise never to utter again in the presence of my—our—colleagues.”

  “Tell me something. Did you feel a need to knock off the best players so I would end up standing here?”

  “I was confident you could do it on your own. In fact, Stacy Kiern hired some of the female escorts to thin the ranks. She personally tried to take out that British player friend of yours, though.”

  Collin was shocked. He would never have pegged her as capable of killing. She was an even better bluffer than he’d realized.

  Oliver was speaking again. “I heard she was tough. Did you know she or one of her girls tried to kill me?”

  “We had our suspicions.”

  “Twice.”

  “She always was a discerning woman. She knew who her biggest threat would be,” George commented. “We may recruit her yet.”

  Collin snorted. He could imagine the hopes these murderous bastards had for the player who’d been killing off the others. Too bad this surveillance video wouldn’t be admissible evidence in a court of law. He’d love to see Ms. Kiern face charges for her shenanigans. One day she’d get caught. He hoped to be there to see it.

  “So what’s next, Father? I’m now a murderer with blood on my hands. I assume a quick departure from Gibraltar is in order?”

  “The Erebus sails within the hour for a private island in Greece. It’s one of our bases of operations. You’ll receive your full introduction to my bosses in the consortium there.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then your special talents will be shaped and honed to serve the organization. We like to keep our enterprise all in the family, of course. Mark my words, boy. You’ll be the most successful of all of us. In a few years… the power you’ll have… you’ll thank me for forcing you to accept the Elliot legacy, son.”

  “A legacy I’ve spent most of my adult life avoiding.”

  George shrugged. “It was high time for you to quit fooling around and join the family business. I’m not getting any younger, and I’d like to retire in a few years. If you’re going to be trained to take my place, now is the time for you to start.”

  “By murdering someone I cared about a lot?”

  “The life of one insignificant poker player in return for the world at your feet…. It will have been well worth spilling a little blood.”

  Oliver was silent, but Collin spied a telltale tic in his jaw muscles. Collin murmured, “He’s furious. I don’t think he’s swayed by his old man’s promises of wealth and power beyond measure.”

  Oliver left the salon without saying any more. His gait was stilted, his shoulders stiff. Oh yeah. He was beyond pissed. He was livid.

  “That ship is a fortress. We’ll never get him off of it,” Collin declared.

  “We don’t want him off the Erebus. To the contrary, that’s exactly where we want him to be,” Pere replied.

  Collin swiveled in his chair to stare up at his bosses. “What’s going on that you’re not telling me?”

  “Come with us.” Pere and Martin led him back upstairs to the salon and made him endure the pouring and sipping of another round of whiskey before Pere finally spoke. “We’d like to develop Oliver Elliot as an asset.”

  “A spy? Inside the Erebus Consortium?” Collin asked, shocked.

  “Exactly.”

  His eyebrows slammed together. “He has no training whatsoever to pull off something like that. You’ll get him killed!”

  “That’s why he’ll need a handler,” Pere answered patiently.

  Collin snorted. “One does not handle Oliver Elliot. Not unless one wishes to make an enemy of him. He’s fiercely independent and hates being manipulated in any way.” A flash of the two of them tangled in bedsheets flashed into his mind. There was one way Oliver liked to be handled, at any rate.

  Pere and Martin exchanged another pair of loaded looks. What in the hell were they slow-walking him toward?

  “Just spit it out, you two. I’ve had a crappy day, and I’m too tired for these games.”

  Pere smiled gently at him. “We’d like you to be his handler, Collin. You know him better than anyone else in the firm.”

  “Small problem with that. My face is known to the Erebus Consortium.”

  Martin answered patiently, “That is, indeed, a problem. But there is a solution, if you’re willing….”

  Chapter Sixteen

  OLIVER stretched his arms over his head and cracked his neck as he pushed back from the computer monitor. The sums of money that Erebus controlled around the world were staggering. He was building a complex investment algorithm for shifting the consortium’s holdings in and out of various currencies rapidly to take advantage of currency fluctuations. Arbitrage traders did the same thing, but with the inside information Erebus obtained from various governments around the world, they could move in advance of the open markets. It was as illegal as hell, but still an interesting project to the mathematician within him.

  He glanced out the glass wall to his right, down the mountain to the brilliant turquoise Aegean Sea below. The surf was up. A few surfers rode the waves, shooting along in front of the whitecaps like seagulls skimming the water. God. It had been forever since he’d surfed.

  Giving in to impulse, he strode out of his office. “I’m going surfing, Callista. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  His secretary replied, “There’s a surf shack about five hundred meters south of where the stairs emerge onto the beach, sir. You can rent a board there.”

  Ever the soul of efficiency, she was. He’d planned on bumming a board off one of the locals, but renting one would work too. He changed quickly into surf shorts and jogged down to the beach. The sun was brutal on his bare shoulders. Fuck. He’d lost most of his tan in the past few months, slaving at a computer day and night. But his algorithm was almost finished. Then maybe his taskmasters would cut him loose for a small vacation. And money was no object for him now. The numbers of zeroes on the end of the bank account his father had presented him with upon his arrival in Greece still appalled him. He thought he might try Australia. He’d like to surf the big waves there.

  Assuming the bastards let him risk his ever so valuable neck.

  Which wasn’t bloody likely. They’d failed to inform him that he was basically their slave until he proved himself loyal and valuable to the consortium. Even this small break to surf for an hour was likely to land him in hot wa
ter with the senior members of the consortium.

  He rented a scuffed-up surfboard and carried it down to the water. The warm Aegean Sea lapped around his legs, and he flopped onto his board and paddled out toward the breakers. It was the first time since he’d thrown Collin overboard and known that his lover was free of Erebus that he could remember feeling even a little happy. Please God, let Collin be alive and safe.

  He’d waited for weeks for Collin to contact him, but there’d been nothing. Total silence. Not that he blamed Collin for not forgiving him after Oliver had shot him. In the absence of contact, he could only assume nothing had gone wrong and nothing bad had happened to Collin.

  Oliver had frequent nightmares that involved Collin drowning, alone and terrified. But he dared not look for any evidence that Collin was alive. In the first place, Oliver expected that Erebus’s security team monitored his computer usage. And in the second place, the last thing he needed to do was lead his employers right to his supposedly dead lover.

  A blond, tanned surfer caught a wave a little farther out to sea, and Oliver paddled hard to get out of the guy’s way. He shot past Oliver, executing a nifty reversal only a few yards ahead of him. Something about the guy’s physique, his way of moving, reminded him of Collin. Of course, Collin didn’t know the first thing about surfing, and this guy wasn’t half bad.

  His path crossed the blond’s several more times in the next hour of surfing, and each time, something about the guy vaguely reminded him of Collin. And every single time, a pang of loss and longing twisted in his gut.

  Eventually, the blond guy went ashore and flopped in the sand. Whether he was taking a nap or just working on his prodigious tan, Oliver couldn’t tell.

  Oliver caught a few more waves, but the breeze was abating and the waves were subsiding as well. Tired, but less stressed than he’d been in weeks, Oliver waded ashore. As he reached the beach, he noticed the blond guy peering sidelong at him from behind his sunglasses.

  Frowning a little, he slogged through the sand to the guy and sat down beside him. The blond guy stayed stretched out on his back.