In A Faraway Land (Runaway Princess: Flicka, Book 3)

by Blair Babylon

  One errand down, two to go.

  Dieter walked into the county attorney’s office in the downtown office building. He said to the receptionist, “I have a one-thirty appointment with Mr. Theo Bonfils.”

  The admin typed something on the computer. “He’s on his way.”

  The security checkpoint had X-rayed Dieter’s duffel bag that still hung over his shoulder, and the police officer manning the scanner had looked up at Dieter with one of her sleek eyebrows raised, evidently seeing the plush bear inside.

  As he had only a pink, stuffed bear but no firearms or explosives, they let him through to see the county attorney.

  Theophile Bonfils had been one of Wulfram’s attorneys for his marriage to Rae Stone because, to marry in Paris, certain residency and legal obligations must be met, much like divorcing in Nevada. Wulfram had taken a squad of lawyers with him to ensure that the wedding came off without a hitch.

  Theo was auburn-haired and brown-eyed, and he stuck half his body around a corner to motion at Dieter. “Hey! Come on back.”

  That angle, with Theo’s torso flopped around the barrier that might have shielded him, left his heart and lungs vulnerable to a gunshot.

  Dieter shook his head at the lack of apparent common sense and situational awareness. No wonder Theo had taken a round to the stomach when the shooting had started in Paris over four months before. “Right behind you.”

  Theo waited, still swinging around the corner, exposed.

  The sooner Theo backed around that corner, the better. Even with the security checkpoint scanning for firearms, you couldn’t be too careful. “Go on. I’m coming.”

  Dieter followed Theo through the prairie-dog warrens of cubicle farms back to his office.

  Admins and junior attorneys chatted on phones and rattled keyboards, a chaotic bluster of sound that would cover running footsteps or the clack of a rifle chambering a round until it was too late.

  Theo’s gait was off, Dieter noticed. He was limping, and he held his left arm close to his ribs.

  Dieter had seen some of his best friends take a bullet when he was a commando in the Swiss Army’s elite special forces unit, ARD-10. With Theo’s slight limp and the way he was favoring his left side, Dieter could diagnose that he was healing well but not ready for active duty yet. If Dieter had been his commanding officer, he would have benched Theo rather than allow his reduced state to jeopardize an operation.

  Flying a desk as a prosecuting lawyer was probably less physically demanding than breaking and entering, Dieter supposed. “How are you feeling?”

  Theo looked back at him with one eyebrow up, but then he chuckled. “Ah yes, you were there. You jumped on Wulf von Hannover while someone shot me. Better, I’m doing better. The doctors say I can start boxing next month.”

  “Boxing can be tough during a recovery.”

  Theo shrugged and spread his right arm at a glass-enclosed office. “Let’s discuss this in private.”

  Dieter walked into the office in front of Theo, even though the back of his neck prickled as Theo’s footsteps rustled on the carpet and the door clicked closed.

  He sat in one of the chairs in front of the desk while Theo opened and retracted clattering vertical blinds that lined the transparent walls. Theo said, “I hate this office. Everyone can tell when I’m playing blackjack on the computer, but we’ll talk in here.”

  Dieter nodded. He dropped the light duffel bag on the floor beside his feet. The transparent walls behind his back made his spine crawl with spiders.

  “I’m surprised they let you in here with that.” Theo waved toward the bag, “They’ve been paranoid ever since the Santiago Rojas case.”

  Dieter shrugged. “It must have been my kindly, non-threatening face.”

  Theo laughed again.

  That’s right, Theo Bonfils was a laughing kind of guy. Dieter wasn’t sure how he felt about that. “Anyway, it turns out that I need some advice on the prenup agreement that you hammered out for Flicka von Hannover.”

  Theo tipped into his leather office chair. “I assisted in drawing up that prenup. The French lawyers did the bulk of it. I reviewed it.”

  “So noted,” Dieter said, absolving Theo if anything lawyerly went wrong due to his advice.

  “Have you seen Flicka von Hannover?” Theo asked, gazing at his office wall as if he were not asking Dieter a very important question.

  “Not lately,” he said, which was not quite perjury had their conversation been under oath, which it wasn’t. He hadn’t seen her in the last ten minutes or so. That was lately.

  “That’s not what Joachim Blanchard said.”

  Damn that weasel French lawyer. “He must have been wrong.”

  “He was wrong when he was kidnapped off the street in Paris and whisked away for a meeting in a moving van with Flicka von Hannover, who was seeking divorce advice and in the company of Wulf von Hannover’s foremost security man?”

  “Must have been.”

  “That’s surprising.”

  “Surprising things happen every day,” Dieter said. “And even if Flicka did consult with that lip-flapping jackass Blanchard, she still needs a second opinion about her prenup. The first opinion was unsatisfactory.”

  Theo looked over Dieter’s head, outside the glass-enclosed office.

  Dieter wrenched around in his seat to look through the windows at the hallway and the rest of the county attorney’s office.

  A very tall, blond man strode through the admins’ area, his chest and head towering over the blue-upholstered dividers. Even from this far, Dieter could see his ice-blue eyes were narrowed in anger.

  Dieter said, “Damn it, Theo.”

  Wulfram von Hannover slammed open Theo’s office door, rattling glass. The vertical blinds swung from the force. “Where the hell is she?”

  Dieter stood. “I don’t know, Durchlaucht. And if I did, I couldn’t tell you.”

  Wulf advanced on him, his hands at his sides until the last minute when he tried to grab Dieter by the collar.

  Dieter knocked Wulf’s hands away with his forearms. “Don’t. Don’t do it. I couldn’t tell you even if I knew.”

  “Is she in danger?” Wulf ground out.

  “No,” Dieter said. Not as long as she stayed in the damned hotel room and didn’t walk around Las Vegas.

  Wulfram sat heavily in the chair beside him. “Tell me.”

  “I can’t,” Dieter said.

  “I’m the client.”

  “You’re a target, and you’re not the only target. Pierre said the Monegasque Secret Service has someone inside your security.”

  Wulfram pondered this, his dark blue eyes going cold. “I will kill Pierre.”

  “His uncle would retaliate just for the hell of it.”

  “Who?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Elands.”

  “It’s better not to tell you a damn thing. It’s better that you act as if you haven’t heard from me, you don’t know anything, and you have no idea where she is.”

  “Pierre must be lying,” Wulf said. “Half of the Welfenlegion are from our Swiss Army days, and you hired them all. The Welfenlegion couldn’t be penetrated.”

  Dieter wished it were true. “People can be bought, and half of them weren’t with us in the army. Rainer or Pierre would have offered them a lot of money. Even you can’t pay an entire staff enough to stop that from happening.”

  “I had hoped that I inspired personal loyalty.”

  “Anyone can be bought if the price is right.” Dieter’s own price was Flicka’s smile, or her tears, or her kiss. Everything about her was his weakness.

  Wulfram averted his eyes and stared at the floor.

  Theo stood and started closing the blinds around the room.

  “Are you all right?” Wulfram asked. “Do you need anything? Money? Someone to stand over her while you take a piss so she won’t go running about?”

  “No, Durchlaucht. I just set up an account to draw from Rogue
Security. We’ll be all right.”

  Wulfram straightened and clapped his hands on his knees. “So now what?”

  “You never saw me,” Dieter said. “You don’t know anything new. Go back to Rae and don’t leave her alone with anyone. Carry a weapon at all times. Give her one, too.”

  Wulf shook his head. “I have not been paranoid enough. I would have bet against that.”

  Dieter laughed, but he didn’t mean it was funny. “I would have taken your money on that one.”

  Once the blinds were all closed, Theo returned to his desk.

  Wulfram said to Dieter, “I wish you could look at the Welfenlegion. You can look at anyone and know if they’re a threat. I’ve gotten too close to them. I couldn’t even offer a list of top three suspects.”

  “I can’t do that. They all know me,” Dieter said. “I worked with them for years.”

  “God, I feel exposed. I could take Rae for an extended holiday in Germany and lock her in Schloss Marienburg.”

  “If I thought it would do any good, I would tell you to be on the first plane out of here.”

  “But the Welfenlegion would still be there.”

  “Yeah,” Dieter said. “That’s the problem.”

  “If you could look at them—”

  “Pierre and the Monegasque Secret Service know that Flicka was seen with me. If I’m found, they’ll have a point to start looking for Flicka.”

  “They have a location on her, anyway,” Theo pointed out. “Blanchard must have told them what he told her. They’ll know to look for her in Nevada.”

  Wulfram stroked his face. “The divorce laws here are nearly as liberal as in Nevada. The prenuptial contract may specify that Nevada is the preferred location, but it doesn’t rule out other venues. If you were seen here, it might throw them off her scent.”

  Dieter shook his head. “If they thought she was here, they would assume you were helping her. You and Rae wouldn’t be safe.”

  “If only you could look at the Welfenlegion without them seeing you.”

  Dieter shrugged. “Like monitoring them over security cameras? I don’t think just observing them would work. None of them would be so stupid as to look into a camera and confess, unprovoked, to being a mole in your operation, even if we told them it was a reality show about how royal families really live.”

  Wulfram chuckled at their old joke.

  Theo leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.

  Dieter glanced where Theo was looking.

  Hundreds of gray dots pock-marked the white acoustic ceiling tiles.

  Theo said, his voice wandering as if he were musing aloud, “Not a reality show, but maybe a teleconference. What if you were disguised as an additional security consultant, hired to look for Flicka? We have technical guys here who could electronically distort your voice.”

  Wulfram looked at Dieter.

  Dieter interpreted Wulf’s glance and complete lack of emotion as thrilled excitement. They had been friends for a long time.

  Wulfram said, “Rae took theater classes. She might know someone who could apply theatrical makeup to disguise you.”

  “I worked with these guys for years,” Dieter said. “They know me. They know everything about me.” Seriously, Luca Wyss and Friedhelm Vonlanthen would recognize Dieter’s fart.

  Wulf said, “I want that mole out of my security detail. Whoever they are, they’re around my wife, my pregnant wife.”

  “They might catch on, and then they’ll move on you.”

  “Then you’ll have to be very good at this, won’t you?”

  Dieter wasn’t confident about that in the slightest, despite the fact that he’d been playing the part of “Dieter Schwarz” for over a decade.

  “How about having someone else do it?” Dieter said. “Someone else can play the additional security consultant, and I’ll watch through closed-circuit television to see if I can spot anything.” He gestured across the desk. “Theo, here, could do it.”

  “They’ve seen me on the plane to Paris and around his house.” Theo was still staring at the ceiling. “If we’re going to use someone else, then it should be someone that none of them have ever seen before. My cousin Noah could play the consultant, and you could watch them on another monitor. He didn’t go to Paris. Visa problems.”

  Dieter said, “Now that’s a plan.”

  “I’ll call him,” Theo said. “We can set it up for a few hours from now.”

  “Splendid,” Wulf said, standing and straightening his shirt cuffs under his suit jacket. “I’ll alert the Welfenlegion that I’ve hired an additional consulting firm to search.”

  With a nod to Dieter, Wulf strode out of Theo’s office and into the corridors. The door thumped closed behind him, a strong, soundproof door even though it was glass. Dieter suspected that the Welfenlegion would pick Wulf up on the other side of the security checkpoint, as they probably were armed to the teeth and wouldn’t want to stow their weapons to enter the building.

  But Wulfram wasn’t his problem anymore.

  Dieter stood to go, though he would linger a few minutes in the hallways to let Wulf and his detail get a head start. He couldn’t let them see him.

  He turned back to say goodbye to Theo, repressing the urge to chew him a new one for narcing to Wulf that he was in town and had found Flicka.

  Theo said, “One more thing before you go.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no record of a Dieter Schwarz entering this country.”

  “That’s surprising,” Dieter said, not letting his face move at all, even though he wanted to deck Theo for even looking into that detail.

  Theo said, “There’s no record of a Dieter Schwarz existing at all.”

  “You should check Swiss military records. You’ll find all sorts of paperwork, passports, commendations, and sniper qualifications in that name.”

  Yeah, it was a little bit of a threat.

  Theo continued, “But there is a record of a Raphael Valerian Mirabaud entering the United States. He looks a lot like you, and his criminal record makes him a target for blackmail or coercion by bad actors.”

  Dieter turned to go. “Thanks for the warning.”

  “There’s more than one way to turn someone,” Theo said. “Bribery is the nice way.”

  “What are you implying, Theo?”

  He said, “You should stay away from Wulf von Hannover.”

  “Don’t threaten me, asshole.”

  “In my jurisdiction, in this county, I can have someone arrested and prosecuted for just about anything I want, and I would take you down if I felt like Wulf or Rae were in danger.”

  “Thought you two didn’t like each other much.”

  “We came to an understanding over drinks on the flight back from Europe.”

  After Dieter had already quit, but Theo hadn’t been around Wulf’s Southwestern house in the meantime. “Well, good. I’m glad to know that someone else has his back, too. But no one’s turned me.”

  “That’s surprising, considering Raphael Mirabaud’s history.”

  “I’m not Raphael Mirabaud,” Dieter said, his teeth grinding in his mouth.

  “I hope not. Raphael Mirabaud looks like a small-time thug who would sell his own family for a couple thousand dollars and not give a shit. It looks like he has no loyalty to anything or anybody.”

  “That’s not me,” Dieter lied, his stomach sick.

  “It looks like Raphael Mirabaud has some connections to some really despicable people.”

  Dieter turned and braced his arms on Theo’s desk, leaning in and staring Theo straight in his pale brown eyes. “I don’t think you’re in any position to judge family connections, are you, Theo Valencia?”

  Dieter had ordered a background check on Theo when Wulf had hired him to work on Flicka’s prenup, even before Theo had become engaged to one of Rae’s best friends. The check was more extensive than most and had utilized unconventional reporting sources. Dieter hadn’t liked what
it had found because people with criminal pasts can be blackmailed.

  Theo’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t try me, Raphael.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Dieter said, pushing off and walking away. “My name is not Raphael Valerian Mirabaud.”

  A Job Suitable For A Princess

  Flicka von Hannover

  It was like a sign,

  a really big, neon-lit sign.

  It was literally a sign.

  Flicka strolled down the sidewalk, gripping a manila folder that Indrani had given her to keep her three resumes crisp. Summer sunlight blasted out of the white-hot sun and seared her exposed skin, and the baking sidewalk radiated heat up her legs.

  She had pinned Dieter’s alpine mountaineering pin, the military honor he had received and had remade into golden jewelry for her, into a seam on her skirt for luck. She always carried it for luck.

  Above her, high-rise casinos soared into the air. The hotel floors towered above the Strip while the open doors shot rock music and the jingling of slot machines out into the street.

  She’d taken a few minutes and a few miles’ detour to visit a free clinic that Indrani had also told her about, just to make sure things were fine down there. They’d done an examination and a few tests when she’d told them about her past few days, and the nurse practitioner had been exceedingly kind when Flicka’s eyes had leaked a little. She’d been reassuring, though, and had promised to call her with the test results.

  Indrani had told Flicka that the casino where she worked as a dealer wasn’t hiring and to try some of the smaller ones. The larger ones would want waitressing experience, Indrani had said.

  That made sense, so Flicka walked farther down the sidewalk past the last few humongous casinos, down to the establishments that were simply enormous.

  One casino’s sign blazed even more brightly than the desert sun: The Monaco Casino.

  It was a sign, a literal sign, she decided.

  Well, people equated Monaco with too much money and the flashy, slightly debauched decadence of the Monte Carlo casino. It made perfect sense that Las Vegas would covet Monaco’s aura.