Happily Ever After (Runaway Princess: Flicka, Book 5)

by Blair Babylon

  Beside him, sitting at the end of the table, Julien was frowning, too. “This is a suicide mission.”

  “This is just the meeting for one of the offensive branches of the operation,” Raphael said, “And every aspect of this mission is on a need-to-know basis only, just in case someone has loose lips.”

  Because someone definitely did, and they were very likely on that plane.

  He tapped his pen on his yellow pad. “We are anticipating their countermeasures. We will eliminate their defenses before the Welfenlegion sink their first anchors into the cliff and begin to climb. It’s not a suicide mission. Suicide missions are for SEALs.”

  Julien dropped his pencil on a notepad, exasperated. “How is this only ‘one branch’ of the operation? The whole Welfenlegion is going, and you traded your Rogue Security teams for us. You don’t have anybody else.”

  Raphael smiled at him. “Julien, I might have taken the whole Welfenlegion, but there are many more of my operators out there, waiting for us. Rogue Security has grown quickly since I quit the Welfenlegion. We have far more work than I can accept, even though I’ve hired a lot of people. If I had more capital, I could hire and outfit a thousand more men, plus heavy equipment.”

  Across the table, Wulfram’s blond eyebrows dipped. “I would have fronted you the capital.”

  “I don’t want to take more of your money.”

  “Finding good investments is difficult. I would have been pleased to fund more.”

  “I also didn’t want it to grow too fast. Hiring new people is the main problem. I have strict criteria.”

  Wulf nodded. “Fine.”

  Matthias Williams sat in the last row of the plane, frowning. He wasn’t taking notes. He wasn’t from Raphael’s and Wulf’s days at ARD-10. They’d only known Matthias a few years, though he’d come highly recommended by mutual friends and had served five years on the American commando squad SEAL Team Six.

  He was frowning a lot, and his lack of taking notes was unusual. When Theo and Noah had tried their little ruse, Matthias had taken the swing at Julien and started the free-for-all fistfight that had broken up the session.

  Matthais might be at the very top of Raphael’s list of suspects.

  In that Mousetrap session, perhaps Matthias had realized someone on a webcam was hunting for a mole and had started the brawl to sabotage them. Starting a melee was a great way to get out of larger trouble.

  Sitting right beside Raphael, Friedhelm Vonlanthen wasn’t taking notes, either. His dark eyebrows were drawn down, and he had a tight grip on a ballpoint pen. A bead of sweat had formed on his tanned skin, near his dark hair. “This does seem like a suicide mission.”

  “It’s not,” Raphael said. “We’ll go in hot, but the plan is that everyone goes home. I’m not counting anyone as cannon fodder. Clausewitz said that ‘there are times when utmost daring is the height of wisdom,’ and this is one of those times.”

  But he watched Friedhelm. When they’d been in the Swiss army together, Friedhelm had been the bravest at charging during operations, to the point where Raphael had wondered if he might have a death wish. Friedhelm liked to quote Clausewitz, too, but his favorite quote was, Courage, above all things, is the first quality of a warrior. Friedhelm had always counted himself a warrior.

  This kind of reticence in the face of an assault was odd for Friedhelm.

  Raphael would have bet that Friedhelm would have been the first one to sink an anchor into the cliff and begin climbing toward the Prince’s Palace, just for the fun and chaos of it. Raphael didn’t like odd, and he certainly didn’t like that Friedhelm Vonlanthen, his old friend who had mustered out of ARD-10 at the same time as he had, was the one being odd.

  Police Colonel Basch Favre had been an old army buddy from ARD-10, and he had betrayed Raphael to the Ilyin Bratva. Shared history didn’t confer ultimate loyalty. Raphael had learned that the hard way.

  Indeed, as he watched Wulfram von Hannover’s dark blue eyes, Raphael and Wulf had a decades-old friendship, and Raphael had betrayed him so many times.

  Raphael needed to tell Wulfram that he had married Flicka.

  And his real name.

  More Strategy

  Raphael Mirabaud

  More plans,

  and more of Clausewitz’s wisdom.

  Raphael sat in a small apartment in Nice, France and made phone calls from a variety of cell phones he’d retrieved from a drawer in the apartment’s bedroom.

  He called Blaise Lyon—the hacker whose name didn’t come up on any search engine searches and whose national identification number might be the only one in existence that was not for sale somewhere on the dark web—to tell him that Rogue Security was going to attack the Prince’s Palace in Monaco soon. Blaise and his few underling, gray-hat hackers had work to do. The Rogues were going to need a blackout for the city and total communications failure for the palace and police. He wanted the WiFi down and any weapon that needed computerized targeting to fail hard.

  And he needed it all in forty-eight hours.

  Blaise laughed. “Do you want unicorns to crap rainbows on the palace walls, too?”

  Raphael hung up, but he knew Blaise would come through.

  Next, he called Aiden Grier, the Scotsman. “I need to get inside the Prince’s Palace tonight.”

  “Och, ‘ave you lost your damn mind, ya wee bawbag? Ye cannot just walk inside!”

  “You did, so get me in,” Raphael said.

  “Away wi’ you, and chew me banger!”

  “And meet me in the usual place in Nice this afternoon.” He hung up.

  Now, for the trickier calls.

  He summoned other Rogue Security and Welfenlegion members who had arrived in France via different means, not on Wulfram’s airplane, to a hotel room a few miles from the apartment. He was glad to see Romain Belmont, his old drinking buddy from years past. Romain’s dark eyes looked pleased to be back at home in France, and they promised to go out for a beer soon.

  Once the dozen or so men had assembled in the room, Raphael withdrew a large piece of paper from a manila envelope. Inked arrows and scrawls overlaid a blue diagram of the Prince’s Palace and vicinity. Raphael told them, “We’re going in through the tunnels from the Monte Carlo Casino.”

  Romain frowned. “Those tunnels have to be well-defended, and the surveillance must be top-notch. That’s the first place they’d expect an infiltration.”

  “We have a skeleton team set to assault the walls,” Raphael told him. “They’ll draw all the attention, but the real operation will be through the tunnels. We’ll send eighty percent of our forces in that way. After all, ‘The best form of defense is to attack,’” Clausewitz again, “so our defense will be another attack. The frontal assault will disengage the moment they encounter any resistance. Their whole job is to not get shot.”

  Romain and the rest of the Welfenlegion nodded solemnly. Romain said, “I’m going to need to study that map.”

  “I happen to have a dozen copies.” Raphael passed them out. “We have two weeks before the operation, however. We’ll go during the first quarter of the moon. They’ll expect something at the new moon, if they’re expecting anything. If we wait, they’ll become fatigued and return to normal operations.”

  Romain nodded. “Good plan. Very good plan. I like it.”

  Raphael watched him for any signs of deception because Romain was relatively high on his list of possible suspects, but he saw nothing exceptional. Romain had been hyper-alert, drumming his fingers on the table, when Raphael had been watching the Welfenlegion over the webcam one time, and he was a newer guy, not Swiss army or ARD-10 with Raphael and Wulf.

  Not that it mattered.

  Raphael frowned, his heart heavy. He hated suspecting everyone of disloyalty. The concept felt foreign.

  Everyone was a damned suspect. Every, single one of them.

  Now, he had to wait.

  Elimination of Possibilities

  Raphael Mirabaud

&nb
sp; When the impossible is eliminated,

  Whatever remains is your answer.

  Oh, but I did not like the answer.

  Both of Raphael’s plans to rescue Flicka were stupid.

  Ludicrous, inopportune, and the propositions of a lunatic.

  Stupid.

  But even while Raphael had been explaining that bizarre plan to launch an all-out, complete war on Monaco while they’d flown over the Atlantic Ocean that sparkled far below the plane, Raphael had been channeling his mentor from across the centuries, Carl von Clausewitz.

  Clausewitz wasn’t a strategist like Sun Tzu, who would have told Raphael to treat his soldiers like he would his dear sons to inspire their loyalty. He already did better than that. He treated his soldiers like they were his friends and trusted comrades in arms, which they were. He listened to their opinions and respected them.

  And he didn’t lead them into suicide missions.

  The plan to sneak through the tunnels that laced the headland of Le Rocher was also a lie.

  The truth was that Raphael still had no strategy for rescuing Flicka, and that was his best strategy of all.

  Clausewitz said, Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.

  Raphael had loaded the ether with intelligence reports for Pierre. Now he just needed to wait until Pierre acted on one or more of them, and then Raphael could narrow down who his Welfenlegion spy was.

  This was much more accurate than trying to indirectly interrogate a group of men in a room. Those plans had been doomed from the start.

  Clausewitz had also said, Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

  Raphael would embrace the uncertainty of war with both arms and his whole heart.

  His plan was to gather what information he could from his sources on the ground and devise a plan to utilize any advantage he could find or muster.

  Two days after von Hannover’s plane had landed at the Nice-Côte d’Azur Airport, where the runways were strips rising just above the blue chop of the Mediterranean Sea, Raphael drove a sedan through the crowded, winding streets of the city. When he paused at a street corner with a cafe on the bottom floor of the modern office building on that sunny, winter afternoon, a man opened the car’s passenger door and ducked inside.

  He tossed a small satchel in the back seat as he settled himself.

  Aiden Grier, the ginger Scot from Rogue Security, buckled his seatbelt and checked the mirror on the passenger side for other cars following them as Raphael pulled into traffic.

  Raphael had sent Aiden to observe Monaco’s palace security right after he had helped Flicka escape to Paris. In the meantime, Aiden had cut his hair military-short to blend in with the other Secret Service men and walked in. Raphael thought it odd that no one in Monaco’s Secret Service had noticed a new guy, but Aiden had amazing espionage skills of all varieties, especially infiltration. He had probably convinced every one of the Monegasque Secret Service agents that they remembered him from grammar school. They’d been best friends, surely. Later, when they would try to find the redhead in their school pictures, they would be shocked that he wasn’t there, so shocked that they would concoct a memory rather than think that Aiden—genial and affable Aiden!—could have betrayed them.

  Knowing Aiden’s other espionage skills, his alias was probably on the Secret Service’s official duty roster. He might even be drawing a paycheck.

  After a minute, Aiden leaned back in his seat and grunted, “All clear,” with his guttural Scottish burr.

  Raphael had been watching his mirrors and agreed no one was following them. “Well?”

  “They’re all wallopers and bawheeds, thinking they’re celebrating a successful operation,” Aiden said, his Scottish accent so thick that Raphael could barely understand him. Aiden laid his native accent on heavily when he could because he was so often speaking another language. He’d told Raphael once that feeling the Scottish inflections roll on his tongue reminded him of who he was. “The numpties managed not to shoot themselves in the feet while they walked one woman and a baby out of a warehouse. We could have done the same with a tenth of the men. I’ve not seen such a sad knapdarloch in years.”

  “What are they doing now?” Raphael asked as they drove past museums and white-columned buildings.

  “Fortifying their meager defenses with poor choices and cheap weapons,” Aiden scoffed. “They believe that Her Serene Highness wanted to come back to Monaco and is content. They’re expecting nothing from within or below. Those train and pedestrian tunnels under the palace from the casino and museum are impossible to secure properly, you know, and they’re doing nothing to better them.”

  “That’s interesting.” Raphael’s second plan—a sneak attack through the underground passages—hadn’t reached palace ears. That reduced the chances that their traitor had been in the second group that had met in the hotel room, including Romain Belmont. Raphael smiled. “Any other changes to palace security?”

  “The bawbags added machine gun nests and spotlights to the top o’ the palace as if they think helicopters will swoop in and attack them in the dead o’ the night. No one would be daft enough to engage in a full-frontal attack against a bloody fortress. It’ll be a cold day in Hell before the Rogues’d do something so spectacularly doaty.”

  Oh.

  The palace had gotten wind of Raphael’s first stupid plan, the one he’d discussed aboard von Hannover’s plane.

  Dammit.

  First, this essentially confirmed that Monaco had bought or blackmailed one of the Welfenlegion, and now a spy resided in the ranks that would relay any plans to Pierre or Quentin Sault. Previously, this turncoat possibly might have threatened Wulf von Hannover or his family if Flicka tried to escape or was liberated, but they had been with Raphael on the plane.

  Raphael’s only solace was that he had narrowed down who the spy was, and thus Rae and the baby Victoria Augusta were now safe.

  As soon as Raphael dumped Wulfram von Hannover’s ass back on the plane and shuttled him back to the Southwestern US, he’d be safe, too.

  Raphael could fish out the spy and take care of them. He was damned confident of that.

  A list of suspects on that plane wove through Raphael’s head, each one more trusted than the last. Luca Wyss, Friedhelm Vonlanthen, and Julien Bodilsen had flown with them. Raphael would have bet every last cent he had that those guys were trustworthy.

  He didn’t like Friedhelm’s nervous sweat, maybe indicative of divided loyalties.

  Luca Wyss had been as devil-may-care as always, but maybe he’d been too damned pessimistic about the outcome of the operation, maybe because he was a little too familiar with the palace’s fortifications.

  Julien Bodilsen had seemed too interested in other divisions of Rogue Security that would be part of the operation, like he might have been gathering information.

  And there had been fifteen or so other guys on that plane, all of whom were now suspects.

  So, what had turned one of them, bribery or blackmail?

  Judas had been bribed to betray Jesus with thirty pieces of silver.

  During the Revolutionary War, the American general Benedict Arnold had been promised twenty thousand American dollars by the British, which is somewhere around three million bucks in modern cash, to betray his country.

  Anyone could be bought with enough money, it was said.

  How much money would it take to betray your friends, your country, and every ideal you’d ever been taught?

  Three million?

  Three billion?

  Could a prince pay you enough money to do that?

  How about if a Russian bratva threatened your child? What would you do, then?

  A small part of Raphael’s mind snarled that Dieter Schwarz couldn’t have been bought at any price. Dieter Schwarz was as pure as alpine ice, a crystal-clear, shining paragon of men, but Raphael Mirabaud had k
illed him.

  It didn’t matter, really, who had paid the traitor in the Welfenlegion or how much money it had been.

  The only thing that mattered was figuring out who the traitor was and how to keep them from handing over any more information to the enemy.

  The reckoning could wait.

  Raphael’s primary problem was that there had been too many suspects on that plane. He couldn’t leave them all out of the operation to rescue Flicka, whatever that would be. There just hadn’t been time to think up twenty asinine and yet mutually exclusive plans.

  Raphael asked Aiden, “Any other new defenses going up?”

  “Nope, not that I saw from my wanderings about the castle or the gossiping of the laddies. Parts of the Prince’s Palace remind me of Edinburgh Castle, eh?”

  “They’re both medieval, but I’ve never attacked Edinburgh Castle,” Raphael grumbled.

  Aiden mused, “I did, once. It started with a night of drinking with the lads and ended with the Honours of Scotland displayed in a pub. The crown jewels were all a-twinkling in the beer and scotch. The crown, sword, and scepter were first used as regalia for the coronation of the infant Mary, Queen of Scots in 1543.”

  Raphael vaguely remembered that Flicka was related to Mary, Queen of Scots, like Mary was one of Flicka’s however-many-greats grandmother. Mary had had her husband killed when he didn’t suit her anymore and then remarried the assassin, yet another one of Wulfram’s stories about his bloodthirsty ancestors that had given Raphael pause that first night when Flicka had settled herself on his thighs and kissed him.

  He said, “All your stories start with ‘a night of drinking with the lads.’ I really should hire these ‘lads’ of yours.”

  Aiden smirked. “A wee bonnie waitress wore the Crown of Scotland while she served us rounds of scotch that night. King James would have approved.”

  “Pics or it didn’t happen,” Raphael laughed.