“What are you doing?!” I ask, shocked.
“Relax. It’s a burner from Marcel, purchased with cash.”
“But Epicurus – ”
“I won’t be on long enough for it to make any difference.”
First Grant sends a text message of what appears to be one letter. Then he dials a number. Someone answers.
“Hi. I need you to connect me to Agent Mailin… what’s his last name?” Grant asks me.
“Walker – what are you – ?!”
Grant holds up a finger as he speaks into the phone. “Agent Mailin Walker’s cell phone. And I need him right now. I know that. He’s in Paris – and yes, it’s important. My name is Grant Carlson; you guys are looking for me, and he’s expecting my call. So connect me. Now.”
“What the fuck are you doing?” I hiss.
He points at the telescope. “Look through it.”
I do. The scope is centered on a bench, where a man and a woman sit dressed in hoodies and sunglasses. The man is holding a cell phone up to his head.
“Who are they?” I ask, bewildered.
“Us.”
“What do you mean, ‘us’?”
Grant points again at the telescope as he says, “Mailin! Hey. Grant Carlson here.”
I look through the eyepiece again. The couple is still sitting there on the bench.
“I decided to come along with Eve, just to make sure you don’t try to strong-arm anybody,” Grant continues. “Yeah, whatever. Where are you? Eve and I are sitting on this bench over by the food stand. See us?”
As I watch through the telescope lens, the guy in the hoodie seems to see somebody. He waves.
I suddenly have a sinking feeling in my stomach.
“Cool, come on over,” Grant says, then hangs up and immediately sends another one-letter text. “Okay, tell me what happens.”
I continue watching through the telescope.
The man on the bench looks at his phone, then puts it in his pocket.
“The guy just got off his phone – ” I say.
Suddenly fifteen men swarm the bench, all in regular clothes, all with handguns drawn and pointed at the couple on the bench.
“Oh SHIT,” I gasp.
I’m expecting the young couple to get blown away in a hail of bullets, but instead they’re thrown to the ground and handcuffed.
A group of six men run over, all in suits and ties.
I recognize one of them.
Mailin.
He’s a lot different than I remember him, though. The Mailin I knew from high school was a lanky beanpole with greasy rocker hair and alt-rock t-shirts. This guy is muscular, with short hair and a decent suit. The only thing that’s the same is the glasses – though he’s traded in his old black hipster frames for a beautiful pair of steel-framed lenses.
He’s actually really good-looking. Like Chris Evans, the Captain America actor, but a shade nerdier.
One of the guys in street clothes rips the hoodie off the girl on the ground.
She bears a striking resemblance to me, I notice.
Mailin looks almost relieved, then shakes his head.
“What the fuck?!” I cry out.
“Don’t feel bad,” Grant says. “You’re a computer hacker.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?!”
“It means you’re great at all the digital stuff – but when it comes to cloak and dagger shit and real world stuff… mm, not so much.”
From his tone of voice, Grant seems to think he’s being sympathetic. But really, he just comes off as horrendously condescending.
I guess I deserve it, though.
“Who are those two people?” I ask, my voice trembling, as the man and woman are roughly yanked up from the ground and escorted away. Mailin looks grim but composed as the other men around him shout and gesticulate angrily.
“A couple of actors,” Grant says. “Don’t worry, they got paid a thousand bucks each. They don’t have any ties to Marcel – he hired them through a guy using another guy using another guy, so we should be safe.”
“What about the actors?!”
“Marcel’s guy told them they were part of a reality TV show. They didn’t break any laws, so they should just get off with a warning.”
“What if they’d gotten shot?” I demand angrily.
Grant looks at me coldly. “Then I’d say that one’s on your boyfriend and not on me, wouldn’t you?”
I feel sick.
Mailin lied to me.
What’s worse, Grant was totally right from the beginning.
“Here, I want to see this guy,” Grant says, and nudges me out of the way so he can put his eye to the telescope. “Okay, which nerd is he?”
“The one in the suit and glasses.”
Grant pauses. Then he looks at me, surprised. “That guy?”
“There’s only one in glasses.”
He looks back through the telescope, then at me. He looks vaguely pissed. “That guy’s a hacker?”
It takes a second to identify the emotion on his face, but I finally figure it out.
“Former hacker… are you jealous?” I ask, astounded.
“No,” he says petulantly.
“So why are you acting like – ”
“I’m not acting like anything,” Grant interrupts as he hits redial on his phone. Seconds later he says, “Yeah, I need Agent Walker again. Now.”
There’s a short pause, then –
“Mailin – buddy – that didn’t go so well, did it? You ready to cut the bullshit and meet face-to-face without lying to me anymore?”
I look through the eyepiece. Mailin is on his cell, holding back the others with a finger in the air.
“Good. Give me your number so I don’t have to keep calling the FBI back in D.C.” Grant looks at me and says, “Remember this – 202… 350…” and then he gives me the rest of the number before returning to Mailin. “Yeah, I got it. Be at the Arc de Triomphe in fifteen minutes without your French buddies, or I don’t fuckin’ call back next time.”
Grant hangs up and looks at me. “Okay, what’s going on now?”
Mailin and the other men in suits dash across the area under the Eiffel Tower.
“I think the plainclothes cops are staying behind, but the guys in suits are going with Mailin,” I say, depressed.
“Some people never learn,” Grant says as he places the telescope back in the trunk of the car.
“So, what was that weird reaction you had a second ago?” I ask.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You’re jealous!”
“Of what, the guy who just tried to sell you down the river?” Grant sees my face fall, and he softens the tiniest bit. “Look, he’s FBI, I’m a cat burglar on the Most Wanted List… he had to try. Don’t take it too hard. Come on, let’s go – we have to play Round Two of ‘Pointless Charades.’”
I get dejectedly into the car’s back seat.
The last thing Grant does is remove the battery from the cell phone and drop them both on the ground. Then he gets in the back seat beside me, and Marcel’s guy spirits us away.
We drive for a couple of minutes in silence, until I can’t stand it anymore.
“Go on, say it,” I mutter.
“What?” Grant asks innocently.
“‘I told you so.’ I know you’re dying to say it, so just get it over with.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Grant says kindly. “You trusted him; he lied to you. It’s not your fault.”
I look at him in surprise.
Wow.
I’m actually touched –
Until he breaks out into a grin. “I’m just glad I’m not wearing one of your GPS things, seeing how you trust them as much as you do your friend.”
He snickers while I seethe in silence, devising ways to kill him if Epicurus doesn’t get to us first.
55
So starts an epic round of ‘catch me if you can.’ Two more times we driv
e to a location and watch through the telescope as Mailin makes a fool of himself; two more times Grant discards a burner cell phone and we drive to a new vantage point.
“Dude, are you going to wise up at some point?” Grant asks on the final try. “‘Cause I can do this all day.”
By this point I’ve started listening to Mailin’s voice over the phone. My insides roil with rage every time I hear him speak.
“Look, I could lie to you again, but you know what’s going to happen,” Mailin says. “They’re never going to let me meet you alone, no matter how much I want to.”
Grant ponders for a moment. “Alright… since the FBI doesn’t have jurisdiction in France and can’t do shit without the local authorities, you can bring one FBI guy other than yourself. Understand?”
“Understood. And thank you. Where do you want to meet?”
Twenty minutes later, Grant and I are in the Tuileries, a giant public garden near the Louvre. The gardens used to adjoin a palace that French royalty used for centuries until it was torched by radicals in the late 1800’s.
The major advantage of meeting here is that the gardens are right next to the Seine River. If Mailin tries anything funny – or if Epicurus’s men show up again – we can run to the river and jump into the smuggler’s boat, which is waiting at a predetermined spot. The smuggler is basically our getaway driver in case of emergency.
As we stroll amongst immaculately sculpted greenery, Grant keeps his suit jacket draped over his forearm. Beneath it is the pistol, hidden from view.
“You planned this all out from the very beginning,” I say, shocked. “You knew what would happen at the Eiffel Tower, and you planned this all down to the last detail.”
“Yup,” Grant agrees.
“How did you know?”
“I don’t know serial killers, which is why I can’t figure out what Epicurus is going to do next… but I know cops. And they all think alike.”
“He’s FBI.”
“Same thing.”
We walk along in silence for a few seconds when Grant clears his throat. “So… exactly how close were you with this guy in high school?”
I stare at him, then laugh. “You are jealous!”
“NO, I’m NOT,” Grant says, so unconvincingly.
“Yes you are!”
“You just didn’t mention anything about him being so…”
“So what?”
Grant grimaces. “He’s a lot better looking than you led me to believe, is all.”
“Well, he wasn’t that good-looking in high school.”
“Oh?” Grant asks, a neutral look on his face.
“No. He was pretty scrawny back then.”
“Huh,” Grant says noncommittally.
This whole thing is freaking hilarious. Mailin is super cute now, sure, but he’s nowhere near Grant’s league. And Grant is acting like he’s got a serious rival for his affections.
I’m enjoying it. After all, I’ve had to put up with snotty Miss French Movie Star for the last couple of days. The least Grant can do is sweat a little over my former platonic friend.
As we walk up to the arranged meeting place – a pathway between giant rows of shrubbery – I spot Mailin.
He’s even more attractive up close than he is far away.
That doesn’t make me want to smack him any less, though.
He sees me, and a huge smile breaks out on his face.
I scowl back, and his smile fades.
There’s another guy with him, a shorter, older man I saw through the telescope. He’s wearing a suit and a Bluetooth earpiece, and he regards Grant and me with the cold, hungry look of a predator.
Grant points his camouflaged gun at the shorter man. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“We won’t,” the shorter man says.
“Good – because you’ve been doing stupid things all afternoon.”
The short guy just scowls.
“Grant Carlson, I presume,” Mailin says.
“That would be correct.”
“I’m Agent Walker, and this is Agent Duplass.”
“Mm. I’d say ‘nice to meet you,’ but we’d both know I’d be lying.”
Mailin turns to me. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he seems sincere. “I had no choice. You have to believe me.”
“I don’t know what to believe about you anymore,” I say.
“Oh, you had a choice,” Grant says to Mailin. “You could have not lied to her.”
Mailin looks at him coolly. “Just like you could have chosen not to steal any of those paintings… but you did.”
Grant gives him a tight smile. “Allegedly. Who’s in charge here? Because I want to talk to whoever’s calling the shots.”
Mailin clenches his jaw at the snub.
“I am,” Duplass says.
“Good,” Grant replies. “I know why you guys are here: to get me. What you might not know is why I’m here.”
“Enlighten us,” Duplass says dourly.
“Number one: I need you to give Eve safe passage back to the U.S. I hired her to help me with a life-threatening matter, and it went seriously sideways. She’s done nothing illegal, and I want to get her to safety no matter what.”
My throat tightens when I hear him talk. I’m torn between what I know is his real and obvious concern for me, and my belief that he’s doing this to get rid of me.
Duplass sneers. “Looks an awful lot to me like she’s aiding and abetting.”
“Nope. No aiding, no abetting,” Grant says cheerily.
“Are you holding her against her will?”
“No,” I say forcefully. Grant gives me a half-smile.
“Then why didn’t you just walk away from him and turn yourself into the authorities?” Duplass asks.
Uh…
Grant saves me: “Which brings us to the second thing I want from you guys. Or you could look at it as what I’m going to give you.”
“And what’s that?”
“A much bigger fish.”
Grant launches into his entire story about Epicurus, including the two women he saved. Now I realize that his ‘who’s in charge’ comment had a double purpose: not merely as a way of dominating a rival, but keeping Mailin from implicating himself, too. Grant explains everything to Duplass, so there’s no way Mailan can accidentally spill the beans on something he learned from me but isn’t supposed to know. Everything’s out in the open from the beginning.
Speaking of which, Grant is surprisingly honest about every single detail – including the fact that he breaks into wealthy people’s homes he designed. The only lie he tells is when he denies he steals anything. He sells his break-ins as more of an unhealthy compulsion – which is actually kind of the truth.
“Bullshit,” Duplass says after Grant finishes.
“Excuse me?”
“You want me to believe that you just happened to have ten incredibly valuable paintings – all of them stolen – but that you yourself didn’t steal them?”
“That’s right, I did not.”
“But they just somehow magically appeared in your safe room.”
“Epicurus’s men must have planted them there after Eve and I escaped.”
Duplass laughs. “You’re saying this Epicurus guy wanted to frame you?”
“Yes.”
“He could have framed you for a hell of a lot less than $500 million dollars.”
“Agreed. But he is insane.”
“Says who?”
“He’s a serial killer who tortures women,” Mailin interjects. “I’d say that makes him categorically insane.”
I don’t know if he’s saying it to get on my good side… but it does score a couple of points for him. Especially since it pisses off Duplass, who shoots a look at Mailin before turning back to Grant. “Still doesn’t explain why he’d drop $500 million to make you look bad.”
Grant shrugs. “Maybe he’s a billionaire. Maybe $500 million is chump change for him.”
“Yeah,
right. I don’t care who you are, that’s not chump change for anybody.”
“Well, I wouldn’t call it ‘chump change,’ but it’s less than half of what I make in a year. Might be worth it if I wanted to destroy someone’s reputation badly enough,” Grant says mildly.
Duplass stares at Grant with unfettered hatred.
Probably not the best idea in the world to taunt a government employee with a humble-brag about how you could drop half a billion dollars just to screw somebody else. Especially not when that government employee has a hard-on to see you in jail.
I decide to jump in the fight – even though it’s with an outright lie. “Plus, they’re stolen paintings. The killer might have gotten them for a couple of million.”
Mailin gives me a little smirk, like Look at you, calling ME a liar.
“Now we’ve graduated to horseshit,” Duplass says.
“Whether you think that or not, Eve’s life is in serious danger,” Grant says. “If you take her back with you, she can corroborate my story and help you catch this guy.”
“We don’t need her help to catch anybody.”
“You had no idea he even existed before I told you about him,” Grant says. “Trust me, you’re going to need outside help on this one.”
“If this boogeyman of yours is so dangerous, where the hell is he now?” Duplass asks, and looks around the gardens. “Why isn’t his band of mercenaries here to take you down?”
“Because we covered our tracks,” I say.
“Of course,” Grant adds, “if we wait around long enough, I’m sure his thugs will show up – which is why we need an answer now: are you going to get Eve back safe to the U.S., or not?”
“Not unless you go back in handcuffs, too,” Duplass says to Grant.
Grant looks at me. “Well, I tried.”
My insides sink.
The French boat smuggler it is, I guess.
“Duplass,” Mailin says, “Eve is an incredible internet security expert. I can vouch for her. She really could help us catch this Epicurus – ”
“Don’t you get it?” Duplass sneers. “There is no serial killer. This is just a bunch of bullshit he invented as an alibi.”
“If there is no Epicurus,” I ask, “then who raided the penthouse in Manhattan?”
Duplass points at Grant. “Probably somebody he ripped off who wasn’t going to just lay down and roll over.”
The Billionaire's Redemption (The Billionaire's Kiss, Book Five): (A Billionaire Alpha Romance) Page 16