by Tim Tigner
Troy raised his flute in a toast to her wisdom as Emmy dialed the first number.
“Hello.”
“Good morning. Mrs. Jane Michaels, please,” Emmy said, affecting a British accent.
“Speaking.”
“Born January ninth, nineteen-sixty-six?”
Hesitation. “Yes, who’s asking please?”
“Mrs. Michaels, I’m calling from the All Saints Bank in Geneva, Switzerland to inform you that an anonymous benefactor has opened an account in your interest.”
“Come again? Geneva? Anonymous benefactor? I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“Yes, I understand your confusion,” Emmy continued. “It’s to be expected. Do you have a pen and paper handy?”
“Is this some kind of trick?”
“No ma’am. I’m not going to ask you for a thing. I’m just giving. Do you have that pen?”
“All right,” Jane Michaels said after a pause, her voice markedly suspicious.
Emmy read off a twelve-digit number, and then added, “The password is WALTER64. With that information you can access your account in person or over the phone, so don’t share it with anyone you do not trust completely. In fact, I would strongly suggest that you keep everything I’ve told you strictly to yourself. There are a lot of vultures out there, with beaks tuned to sniff out money. Best to be discrete.”
“What account is this again?”
“Your new account. The gift of an anonymous benefactor. The balance is one million dollars, American.”
Emmy’s revelation was greeted at first with silence, and then, “Come again?”
“That’s right, a one followed by six zeroes. A gift, all yours, tax free, to do with as you wish. Enjoy yourself Jane. You won’t be hearing from me or anyone else about the money ever again.”
“Thank you, I think …”
“You are very welcome. Please, enjoy yourself. You deserve it,” Emmy said, and severed the connection.
“That seemed to go well,” Troy said. “And only forty-four to go—plus Kostas Kanasis.”
“You going to call him tomorrow?”
“He’s scheduled to arrive home from Greece at noon. I’ll call him shortly thereafter.” Troy took another swallow, happy to have lived up to the promise he’d made the old man. Then he looked back at Emmy to find that her face was rife with a different kind of emotion. She looked nervous.
“Is something wrong?”
Emmy stood and ran her polished toes through the sand. “When are we going to sit down and figure out what we’ll do with our share?”
Troy was about to say “No time like the present” and suggest ordering another bottle of Taittinger when his instincts kicked in. He wasn’t as quick as Emmy yet, but he was learning. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Combined, we’ve got two-million dollars. That gives us a lot of options.”
Emmy’s use of “combined” and “we” was worth far more to Troy than the money. For the past four weeks, while they used Luther’s titanium ledger to backtrack to all his victims, they had managed to avoid any talk of the future. He had hoped all along that they would want to remain together after their last duty was done, but all the same he had worried that the bonds forged under fire would slacken once the heat was off. Hearing her confirm his unstated desire, he couldn’t believe that he had ever harbored doubt.
“I’ve already got it all figured out,” he said, standing and taking her chin in his hand.
“Oh you do, do you?”
Troy nodded sheepishly.
“Out with it,” she said, poking at his belly with both index fingers.
He stepped back and shook his head.
She held up a fist and looked at him sideways. “How about a hint?”
He dropped to one knee. “We are a pretty good team, you and I …”
Author’s Note
Dear Reader,
THANK YOU for reading Flash. I hope you enjoyed it. If you would be so kind as to take a moment to leave a review on Amazon or elsewhere, I would be very grateful. Reviews and referrals are as vital to an author’s success as a good GPA is to a student’s.
I know this can be a bit of a pain, so if you do write a review, please email me at [email protected] and I will forward you my unpublished thoughts on what happens to Flash’s characters next. I thought that would be a fun way to say thank you.
All my best,
Please click here to leave a review on Amazon.
Links to Tim Tigner’s other thrillers:
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About the Author
Tim began his career in Soviet Counterintelligence with the US Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. That was back in the Cold War days when, “We learned Russian so you didn't have to,” something he did at the Presidio of Monterey alongside Recon Marines and Navy SEALs.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tim switched from espionage to arbitrage. Armed with a Wharton MBA rather than a Colt M16, he moved to Moscow in the midst of Perestroika. There, he lead prominent multinational medical companies, worked with cosmonauts on the MIR Space Station (from Earth, alas), chaired the Association of International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, and helped write Russia’s first law on healthcare.
Moving to Brussels during the formation of the EU, Tim ran Europe, Middle East, and Africa for a Johnson & Johnson company and traveled like a character in a Robert Ludlum novel. He eventually landed in Silicon Valley, where he launched new medical technologies as a startup CEO.
In his free time, Tim has climbed the peaks of Mount Olympus, went hang gliding from the cliffs of Rio de Janeiro, and ballooned over Belgium. He earned scuba certification in Turkey, learned to ski in Slovenia, and ran the Serengeti with a Maasai warrior. He acted on stage in Portugal, taught negotiations in Germany, and chaired a healthcare conference in Holland. Tim studied psychology in France, radiology in England, and philosophy in Greece. He has enjoyed ballet at the Bolshoi, the opera on Lake Como, and the symphony in Vienna. He’s been a marathoner, paratrooper, triathlete, and yogi.
Intent on combining his creativity with his experience, Tim began writing thrillers in 1996 from an apartment overlooking Moscow’s Gorky Park. Twenty years later, his passion for creative writing continues to grow every day. His home office now overlooks a vineyard in Northern California, where he lives with his wife Elena and their two daughters.
Tim grew up in the Midwest, and graduated from Hanover College with a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics. After military service and work as a financial analyst and foreign-exchange trader, he earned an MBA in Finance and an MA in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.
Thank you for taking the time to read about the author. Tim is most grateful for his loyal fans, and loves to correspond with readers like you. You are welcome to reach him directly at [email protected].
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Links
Chapter 1 
Chapter 2 
Chapter 3 
Chapter 4 
Chapter 5 
Chapter 6 
Chapter 7 
Chapter 8 
Chapter 9 
Chapter 10 
Chapter 11 
Chapter 12 
Chapter 13 
Chapter 14 
Chapter 15 
Chapter 16 
Chapter 17 
Chapter 18 
Chapter 19 
Chapter 20 
Chapter 21 
Chapter 22 
Chapter 23 
Chapter 24 
Chapter 25 
Chapter 26 
Chapter 27 
Chapter 28 
Chapter 29 
<
br /> Chapter 30 
Chapter 31 
Chapter 32 
Chapter 33 
Chapter 34 
Chapter 35 
Chapter 36 
Chapter 37 
Chapter 38 
Chapter 39 
Chapter 40 
Chapter 41 
Chapter 42 
Chapter 43 
Chapter 44 
Chapter 45 
Chapter 46 
Chapter 47 
Chapter 48 
Chapter 49 
Chapter 50 
Chapter 51 
Chapter 52 
Chapter 53 
Chapter 54 
Chapter 55 
Chapter 56 
Chapter 57 
Chapter 58 
Chapter 59 
Chapter 60 
Chapter 61 
Chapter 62 
Chapter 63 
Chapter 64 
Chapter 65 
Chapter 66 
Chapter 67 
Chapter 68 
Chapter 69 
Chapter 70 
Chapter 71 
Chapter 72 
Chapter 73 
Chapter 74 
Chapter 75 
Chapter 76 
Chapter 77 
Chapter 78 
Chapter 79 
Chapter 80 
Chapter 81 
Chapter 82 
Chapter 83 
Chapter 84 
Chapter 85 
Chapter 86 
Chapter 87 
Chapter 88 
Chapter 89 
Chapter 90 
Chapter 91 
Chapter 92 
Chapter 93 
Chapter 94 
Chapter 95 
Chapter 96 
Chapter 97 
Chapter 98 
Chapter 99 
Author's Note
Free Book Link
About the Author