In a Faraway Land

by Blair Babylon

  Dieter had trained those guys. He would have been disappointed if they’d been so damned obvious.

  In the front row, Eian Summerhays sat with a few of other guys. Eian was, of course, Dieter’s northern Irishman from Rogue Security, tasked with infiltrating the Welfenlegion and guarding pregnant mother Rae from any turncoats in Wulfram’s security detail. From the easy way Eian lounged with the four of them in their chairs, he must have slid right in.

  He always did, though. It was one of the reasons that Dieter had hired Eian for Rogue Security. He could infiltrate any organization and find out anything they needed.

  The plan, as Noah had told Dieter, was to accuse Eian of being the mole.

  Eian knew something was going to happen because Blaise had managed to get a message to him, but not exactly what. Eian would roll with it, Dieter was sure.

  Unlike the last time Dieter was supposed to sniff out the traitor in the Welfenlegion, the men standing against the walls were all wearing the black fatigues of Rogue Security. They ringed the perimeter with their arms crossed, scowling. Supposedly, they were the new guys from Noah’s fictional outfit, Sin Nombre Security.

  The Welfenlegion guys looked uncomfortable. Their glances up and over at the Rogues betrayed nerves in several of them. Dieter resolved to watch those guys more carefully, though a traitor might just as well damp down his reactions.

  Luca Wyss sat in one corner of the room, leaning his chair back against the wall with his arms crossed and scowling. Luca was often an observer in circumstances like this. Dieter had expected that. Luca watched crowds for ripples and saw things before most people, like Dieter himself.

  One of the Welfenlegion guys, Matthias Williams, looked at the black-clad commandoes. He sat with Julien Bodilsen and Friedhelm Vonlanthen, who were whispering to each other.

  Matthias said, “You guys are with Rogue Security. Where’s Dieter Schwarz?”

  Crap. It had taken all of thirty seconds for one of the Welfenlegion guys to recognize the Rogues. Dieter had pointed out this flaw in Theo’s plan, but Theo thought it was unlikely to cause problems.

  Aaron Savoie, the Israeli assassin and Rogue who stood closest to Matthias, turned his dark eyes toward him. “Shut up. We’ll ask the questions.”

  Dieter said through the microphone, “Theo, get them to stop this. Do not let Matthias antagonize Aaron.”

  On the screen, Matthias stood. “No, seriously. Where the hell is Dieter Schwarz? Why are you guys here without him?”

  Beside Matthias, Julien Bodilsen stood and gestured, but the webcam’s mic didn’t pick up whatever he said.

  Aaron didn’t so much as flinch. “Schwarz is in the field looking for Friederike von Hannover. You know, the principal target you lost?”

  “Theo!” Dieter yelled through the mic. “Noah! Get Wulf in there and get Matthias to back down! Hey Blaise! Can they hear me?”

  A ripple of testosterone and rage ran through the Welfenlegion guys.

  In the corner, Luca Wyss stood and watched.

  Blaise’s window popped back open. The square monitor reflected in his mirrored sunglasses as he typed on a keyboard. “I don’t think they can hear us, Schwarz. I’m on it. I’ll patch you through whether they want it or not.”

  On the computer monitor, Matthias puffed out his chest and swaggered right up to Aaron’s face. Dieter could hear him enunciate very clearly. “We were guarding Wulfram and Rae. They are safe and accounted for. You guys were tasked with making sure Flicka didn’t run off or get kidnapped yet again, like she had been just that afternoon on your watch. How did you guys screw it up again?”

  Matthias pulled back his arm like he might punch Aaron Savoie.

  Dieter stood in his empty, rented office space, yelling, “Theo!”

  On the computer screen, Dieter saw Aaron barely move his arm, but with that economic movement, he punched Matthias hard in the jaw.

  Matthias crumpled, unconscious.

  Julien grabbed Matthias as he fell and stumbled under his weight. Julien careened backward, trying to keep Matthias’s unconscious skull from bouncing off the crowded chairs.

  The men jumped toward the melee. Some leaped in, fists swinging. Others, including Luca Wyss and Friedhelm Vonlanthen, were grabbing collars and belt loops and hauling people backward.

  Dieter yelled, “Dammit, Theo! Get Wulf in there!”

  A man’s shout bellowed from off the screen. “What is the meaning of this?”

  The men who were fighting lowered their hands and backed up, wiping their mouths and rubbing their ribs.

  Wulfram strode into the middle of the chaos, a tall, blond commander in a business suit. This time, his voice was low and simmering with power. “What is the meaning of this?”

  The window with Theo finally popped open on Dieter’s computer screen. Theo’s eyes were bugging out, and it looked like he was silently yelling at someone to his side.

  Dieter listened to Wulfram solemnly tear into the Welfenlegion and the Rogues for acting like children when a woman was missing and perhaps in bodily danger. “Quit assigning blame and take some damned responsibility for the solution.”

  Dieter sat back in his chair and scrutinized the men around the room.

  All seemed chastised, or at least backing off.

  No one seemed to glare at Wulfram or have a wrong, odd reaction.

  Everyone except Matthias, who had perhaps seen what was coming and had thrown the first punch with a very thin excuse for a fistfight. He just hadn’t realized that Aaron Savoie was not the man to mess with. He was weaving in his chair and rubbing his jaw. Eian Summerhays had hauled him off the floor and was talking fast at him. Julien stood beside him, glaring at the Rogue Security men.

  Dieter told Theo his thoughts, such as they were, about Matthias and some of the other guys. As before, his thoughts were mostly conjecture with a few speculations thrown in for good measure, and he felt stupid even saying them.

  He emailed Wulf, telling him to reassign Matthias for the time being to something outside the house or to put him on administrative leave. Dieter didn’t want Matthias anywhere near Wulfram or Rae von Hannover.

  Something was amiss, there, but Dieter couldn’t be sure if Pierre Grimaldi had bribed Matthias to be a traitor or whether Matthias had just had a rough day.

  Surely, the traitor was not Matthias. It made no sense.

  But they could take no chances either with Matthias being a turncoat, and if he was, they couldn’t risk that he was the only traitor.

  Dieter also told Blaise to stay the hell out of his phone.

  He deleted the Tor browsers and VPNs off the hard drive and had Blaise do something remotely to make sure the memory was properly wiped clean.

  Dieter stood.

  Now to see if his toddler daughter had cornered his girlfriend in a closet.

  Dieter’s hand stopped in midair as he reached for the doorknob. He paused to think about that.

  His girlfriend.

  Dieter shook his head. He was a grown man. He didn’t have girlfriends. That sounded like a high school kid.

  Yet he wanted her to be something.

  Kitty Ha-Boo

  Dieter Schwarz

  That,

  I did not expect.

  The car sped away down the residential street as the late afternoon sun shone down. Heat percolated from the sidewalk under Dieter’s shoes, radiating up his pants legs.

  He had no idea what he was going to find inside the townhouse.

  Two crying females?

  A battleground of goldfish crackers and applesauce smears with Sesame Street screaming the background?

  Blood and spilled wine, both probably Flicka’s?

  He unlocked the door and headed inside.

  Alina was standing in the middle of the darkened room. She was wearing her headband sporting cat ears and had her little hand over her mouth.

  Her attention was riveted on the couch.

  Dieter walked toward her. “Alina, baby? Where’
s Flicka?”

  “Ha-boo!” Flicka’s voice, pitched high, echoed in the townhouse. Dieter just caught a glimpse of blond movement out of the corner of his eye.

  Beside him, Alina jumped, startled, but she dissolved into giggles and bobbled on her little legs to one end of the couch. Her baby-blond hair swung around her shoulders as she leaned to peer around the corner.

  “Ha-boo!”

  Alina jumped back, giggled like a maniac, and sprinted as fast as her chubby legs would carry her to the other end of the couch. She carefully peeked around that end.

  “Ha-boo!”

  This time, Alina fled behind Dieter’s legs and clutched his trousers, hiding.

  Dieter watched, absolutely baffled.

  Flicka popped up over the back of the couch, laughing. “Ha-boo!”

  Behind him, Alina jumped and burst into giggles again.

  Orange, spotted cat ears poked out of Flicka’s riot of blond curls.

  She was grinning as widely as Alina.

  Black lines on her cheeks radiated from her mouth toward her ears.

  Dieter asked, “Flicka?”

  “Oh, hi Dieter.” She ducked behind the couch. Thumping sounds bonked back there.

  Alina jetted from behind his legs back to the closest end of the couch and peeked around the back corner again.

  “Ha-boo!”

  Alina shrieked and ran the other way around the couch.

  He asked, “What on Earth are you doing?”

  Flicka stuck her head up over the back of the couch. Yes, something was indeed drawn on her face. “Kitty ha-boo.”

  Alina said to him, “Kitty!”

  “What’s that on your face?” he asked.

  “Whiskers,” she explained like he was obviously an idiot. “Because we’re kitties.”

  “Flicka-mama kitty!” Alina told him.

  “How long have you been doing this?” he asked her.

  Flicka shrugged. “I don’t know. Since fifteen minutes after you left?”

  Almost three hours. “Have you been drinking?”

  “I wouldn’t drink around a baby!”

  Okay. “I brought supper home.”

  “Oh, great. I’ll go wash this eyeliner off my face.”

  Alina ran over to Flicka and hugged her leg. “Flicka-mama, up!”

  “Oh, okay.” She carried Alina on her hip as she walked upstairs, singing a song about going up the stairs to her.

  Dieter watched them, stunned, and tried to think, but his brain was not working.

  Flicka was good with kids.

  She was good with his kid.

  Huh.

  The Stratosphere

  Flicka von Hannover

  I hate roller coasters.

  I have always hated roller coasters.

  Dieter knew that,

  the jackass.

  “Where are we going?” Flicka laughed, skipping beside Dieter as they wove through the crowds along the Strip.

  Her hair was knotted on top of her head and tucked up under a baseball cap. Dieter wore a matching hat, thus camouflaging their two blond heads that stuck out of the crowd.

  Her glittery-gold little purse, the one she’d been holding when she’d escaped from Pierre, bounced on her wrist.

  It’s easy to get lost in a crowd, especially at a time when they shouldn’t be there and walking to a place they never went.

  But since she had nearly been kidnapped off the street, Dieter had increased their operational security measures.

  When Flicka got off work, Dieter drew a card out of a deck to randomize which of many different paths and corners they would use before they were picked up by a car service at many differing locations. They’d discussed buying a car, but they didn’t plan to live in Nevada more than a few more weeks at the most. Maybe a few months, depending on whether Pierre contested the divorce. Being driven around in different cars every day was better operational security, anyway.

  The suit of the card determined which cardinal direction they would walk. Spades meant north. Hearts were east.

  The rank of the card determined their route.

  A queen meant they went through casinos and out the other side to a northeastern corner.

  If he drew a three, they went back around the block to other streets and picked up a car on the southwest corner.

  An ace meant they had to find a wholly new route they had never used before.

  Flicka dreaded kings. Kings were a long walk through stairwells and upper floors of casinos to a far-off corner. They’d only drawn one of those so far, thank goodness.

  This Tuesday, however, was one of her days off. They had left Alina with Tinashe for just a few hours to eat a quick lunch together. No cocktails to deliver. No playing card draw. Just a never-before-used route to a place they never went at a time when they were never outside.

  Unpredictability increased operational security.

  But before they went to lunch, for some bizarre reason, Dieter had wanted to come down to this end of the Strip.

  He stopped in front of the Stratosphere hotel and casino.

  “Here?” she asked, peering up at the tall hotel with amusement park rides at the very tip. “What’s in here?”

  “Just something I thought you might like,” he said. “We’re in Las Vegas, so we might as well enjoy ourselves.”

  “Chocolate cheesecake?” Flicka ventured. “Really good champagne?”

  “Nope, higher.”

  She had no idea what he meant, so she followed him first through the jangling casino and to an elevator marked that it went to “The Tower.”

  The fake, mini-Eiffel Tower was over at the Paris Las Vegas, not the Stratosphere, so that wasn’t it.

  Okay, fine. She followed. Whatever.

  In the elevator, Dieter did not wipe that smug grin off of his face.

  “What are you up to?” she asked him.

  “Nothing.”

  “I know better than to believe that.”

  But the man could keep a secret.

  Fine.

  The elevator doors opened.

  Flicka recoiled and bumped her butt against the back of the glass elevator. “Oh, hell, no.”

  The elevator doors had opened to a platform high up on the Stratosphere Casino. The sky soared all around and dived below them.

  A roller coaster whizzed around the top of the roof and over the edge on a flimsy track, and it goddamn hung over the edge of the roof like it was going to fall all the way down to the Strip so many, many, many floors below.

  Flicka planted her feet and leaned back. “No goddamn way, Dieter. No way on Earth. No way in Hell. I am not going on that thing.”

  “Come on,” Dieter said, tugging her arm. “It’ll be fun.”

  Beside the roller coaster, a crane swung people from bungee cords in some other sort of torture device.

  She grabbed the rail around the elevator walls. “Nope. One of us has to stay alive to raise Alina.”

  He said, “If I die, Wulfram and Rae get her.”

  “But we don’t want that to goddamn happen, now do we?”

  “Nothing will go wrong.” He led her out of the elevator.

  Flicka was clutching his muscular arm so tightly that her fingernails hurt. “No way. No bloody way.”

  “Come on. I already bought the tickets.”

  “Well, that was dumb of you. You wasted money.”

  “You’ll love it.” He walked, pulling her after him.

  “I seriously doubt that I am going to love anything about this,” she grumbled.

  Adrenaline Is An Aphrodisiac

  Flicka von Hannover

  I hate it even more

  when that jackass is right.

  Fifteen minutes later, Flicka was clinging to Dieter’s side, her legs shaking and laughing her head off.

  Dieter tapped an elevator button at the bottom of the control panel to take them down to the casino lobby and the street-level exit.

  “That was insane!” she
said.

  He wrapped his strong arm around her back and kissed her temple as they stood in the elevator. “You bet it was.”

  Flicka snaked her arms around his lean and ripped body that had always protected her. “I thought we were going to fall over the edge!”

  “They designed it to look that way,” he agreed.

  The elevator doors slid closed, blocking out the sunlight.

  The elevator descended, making her head float. “It was hanging, teetering, right on the edge and I swear that it clicked one too many times and we were going to fall right down the side of the building!”

  “It sure did,” he said, smiling. He stroked her back as they rode down the elevator.

  Flicka pillowed her head on his shoulder. The faint scent of his cologne drifted out of his collar, warm cinnamon and a fresh scent like green herbs. She stretched to catch a better whiff of it, and her cheek grazed his neck. His satiny skin rubbed against hers, and she brushed her cheek against him again just to feel his warmth. She curled her arms more tightly around his strong arm and muscular waist.

  His clean, masculine scent intoxicated her, and she found herself standing straighter, even drifting up on her toes, to brush her mouth across the skin on his neck.

  She whispered, “I don’t want to go to lunch.”

  Dieter leaned and tapped the button marked 12 on the elevator’s control panel.

  Flicka whispered, “Why did you do that?”

  “Just a little something else I planned.”

  “Not another roller coaster!”

  “Nope. I promise.”

  “Will I scream?” she asked.

  Devilish glee sparked in his gray eyes. “I hope so.”

  Flicka stayed wrapped around him like a jasmine vine around a tree, inhaling the warm spices of his scent and feeling his strong arms around her waist.

  The elevator doors slid open to a hallway lined with doors, a typical hotel corridor.

  “What did you—”

  Dieter swept her up in his arms, lifting her off her feet and holding her against his chest.