Chasing the White Lion

by James R. Hannibal

  “We’re in Greece. And we’re in trouble.” Talia glanced around. “Where is everyone?” The lower deck, the living room complete with ethanol fireplace, and the kitchen and bar were all empty.

  “Eddie’s in his room, working on a project. I sent Darcy and the other boys off to run some errands. And I assume Val is off pouting somewhere because the bathrooms on this boat don’t meet her standard.”

  “Which is?”

  “Not being on a boat.”

  “Errands.” Talia sank into a deck lounger whose overstuffed cushion threatened to swallow her whole. “You’re pressing forward with the weapons heist?”

  “We don’t have to scrap the whole plan. We just have to explore new alternatives.”

  The cushion added an extra level of difficulty to the conversation. Talia wanted to sit sideways so she could frown at him if necessary, but she was struggling to keep her feet on the deck. “We’re not murdering one of Boyd’s field mice to move up the list.”

  “Why not?” Val came down the steps from the upper deck in a black one-piece and sarong. “They’re all criminals.”

  “Like you?”

  “Cute. This is all part of Boyd’s game.”

  “I don’t care about Boyd’s game.” Talia gave up searching for the deck with her toes and let her body fall back into the lounger, trying and failing to make the movement look natural. “We’re not playing by his rules.”

  “Speaking of . . .” Val pointed at Tyler as she reached the bottom step. “You know I don’t do accommodations that store waste in a tank.”

  “Why do you think I chose it?”

  She scrunched her eyes at him.

  Tyler smiled and sipped his drink.

  Talia rolled her eyes. “We were talking about the merits of murder?”

  “Relax.” Tyler set his drink down on the glass table between them and laid his head back. “I’m not planning to kill any of Boyd’s small woodland creatures.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “We’re hunting bigger game. Jafet himself.”

  “Tyler—”

  “He’s right.” Val sat on the edge of Tyler’s lounger. “Jafet is Boyd’s top earner. If we kill him, we’re guaranteed a seat at the Frenzy.”

  “We’re not killing anybody.”

  Tyler waved her off, gazing up at the sky as if the clouds held all the answers. “Table the murder part for later and carry the idea forward. What will it take to bring Jafet down?”

  Murder didn’t seem like the sort of thing they should table for later, but Talia humored him. “You’d need a small army. From what Eddie told me, his place is well stocked with security.”

  “Done.” Tyler rolled his head over, eyes perfectly serious. “We have a small army ready to go and close by. Think about it. We’ve used them before.”

  It took her only a moment to catch his drift. “That . . . might work. Okay, but we can’t storm Club Styx SWAT style. Word would get back to Boyd, tipping our hand.”

  “True. We need to subdue his people quietly.”

  “And you’ll need to draw him out,” Val said. “Jafet doesn’t leave the safety of his office for just anyone.” The confidence in her tone told Talia that Val knew more about Jafet than the rest of them. Val had started her grifter career in the Mediterranean region. Maybe she had crossed paths with the man before.

  Tyler agreed with her. “Not just anyone. I have a specific someone in mind. Don Marco.”

  An image of the mafia-don-esque gentleman who had helped her and Tyler locate Valkyrie on their first mission appeared in Talia’s mind. “What does Don Marco have to do with this?”

  The other two ignored her. Val walked away from Tyler. “Don Marco won’t leave Campione for the same reasons Jafet won’t leave his office.”

  “He’ll come,” Tyler said.

  “He’ll want to, because you’re the one who’s asking, but I’m afraid he’ll still say no.”

  “I won’t be asking. You will. Don Marco won’t leave Campione d’Italia for me. But he’ll do it for his only daughter.”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-

  THREE

  ADAMANTAS MARINA

  MILOS CALDERA

  MILOS, GREEK ISLES

  FINN, MAC, AND DARCY did not return until dusk, cutting across the caldera in a pair of rented powerboats. And they did not return empty-handed. Black canvas bags bulging with their purchases filled up a quarter of the houseboat’s living room. When Talia tried to unzip one, Darcy slapped her hand away. “What are you trying to do, blow up the boat?”

  “I just wanted to see,” she said, rubbing her smarting fingers.

  “So did the curious cat, yes? And look what happened to her.”

  Bunking with the chemist that night had charms of its own. Eddie stayed well past his welcome, and something in the way he and Darcy talked science made Talia want to put her earbuds in. There were passionate undertones hidden in all the technical jargon. “Time for you to go, Eddie. It’s late.”

  “Am I being too loud?”

  “No.” Talia caught his elbow and led him to the door, all of two steps from the edge of Darcy’s bunk. “You’re being too . . . here. I need to sleep.”

  “We’ll be quiet. We can talk with the lights off.”

  “Not a chance. Out.”

  They both glanced at Darcy, who had lost interest and started digging in her purse. Eddie lowered his voice. “But we were connecting.”

  “Connect tomorrow, when I’m not around. Good night, Eddie.” She pushed him out and closed the door.

  With Eddie gone, Talia began a nighttime ritual she had started many years before, after losing her father. Any first night in a new bed, she read a worn copy of The Cat in the Hat.

  She had barely passed the title page when Darcy set her purse down and propped herself up on her pillows, playing with what Talia took to be a ball of clay. “He is sweet, no?”

  Talia lowered the book to her lap. “Always has been.” To her, Eddie was like a little brother—not the annoying kind, but the kind who needed protecting. “Darcy . . .”

  “Yes, mon amie?”

  “Where do you see things going? With you and Eddie, I mean.”

  Darcy kept playing with her clay, molding it into a little man. “Nowhere. Anywhere.” She shrugged, and in the process, tore one of the clay man’s spindly little arms off. She frowned and tried to stick it back on. “We are having fun, and for me, that is enough, yes?”

  “Does he know that?”

  Darcy let go of the repaired arm, and it stayed in place, now shorter and grossly uneven with the other. “Does he know what, mon amie?”

  “That you—” In that instant, the clay’s yellow tone and glossy sheen registered in Talia’s mind. “Darcy, is that . . . ?”

  “X-dough. Swedish plastique.”

  “And you thought I would blow up the boat?”

  “Don’t be silly. X-dough has the stability of C4, with improved plasticity. Watch.” Darcy smacked her hands together, squishing her art. “See? Safe. You cannot set it off without detonators.” She held the little man, now as flat as a pancake, in her palm and placed two tiny black discs where his eyes would go.

  “What are those?” Talia asked.

  “Detonators.”

  “Darcy!”

  She showed Talia another one, holding it between her thumb and forefinger. “Look how small they are—the latest advance from Singapore.”

  The Cat in the Hat could wait until their next location. At the moment, she needed to keep Darcy from playing with bombs in bed. Talia slapped the light switch. “Go to sleep, Darcy. Let’s hope we both live to see the morning.”

  She rolled over against the bulkhead side of her bunk, and the moment she closed her eyes, trying not to picture Darcy playing with plastique, her phone rang. Talia nearly jumped out of her skin. “Yes?”

  “There you are.”

  The caller’s voice rose from the bottom of a well of static, but Tal
ia recognized it. “Jenni?”

  “Were you in the bathroom? You let it ring for like two full minutes.”

  “No. The call has to . . . Let’s just say it has to pass through a lot of junctions before it reaches me. What’s going on?”

  “Mom tried to call yesterday. She never got through.”

  “Wendy’s number is not on the list.”

  A long pause. “You can call her Mom too, you know. Even if you don’t sign the adoption papers.”

  “Jenni, it’s nighttime here. Are you calling to catch up or—”

  “Two things. The police came to the house. Except, I don’t think they were police. They said you didn’t show up at work. I told them they were mistaken. You’re on vacation. But Mom’s worried.”

  The police. Unlikely. Jordan hadn’t taken long to make her next move, escalating the game. “Did they ask where?”

  “I told them I didn’t know.”

  Smart. But Jenni had always been quick on the uptake. “Thanks. I’m okay. And I’m sorry it upset . . . Mom.”

  She could almost hear Jenni smiling at her use of the word. “That’s okay. I’ll handle it.”

  “You said there were two things. What was the other one?”

  “I got a call from Ewan Ferguson.”

  Talia sat up in bed. “The guy from Compassion International—the one on the ground in Thailand.”

  “He has a lead on the missing kids.”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-

  FOUR

  MILOS NATIONAL AIRPORT

  MILOS, GREEK ISLES

  MOONLIGHT POOLED on the hangar floor beside Tyler’s AS2. He kept the overhead halogens off, in case Jafet had eyes watching the airfield. While the others slept, he and Val had driven out there to await Don Marco’s arrival.

  Val walked the threshold between the polished concrete and the airfield’s cracked asphalt—agitated, unwilling to sit down at the folding table Tyler had pulled out for them. She still wore the black one-piece, but she had added a thin white shirt and a matching skirt that fell to her ankles. Both billowed in the breeze coming off the water. He watched her for a time, then disappeared into his jet to raid the coffee bar.

  “You want any?” Tyler asked, coming down the hatch stairs a few minutes later with a full pot and stack of paper cups.

  Val shook her head, still placing one foot at a time on the threshold like a tightrope walker.

  “Suit yourself.” He sat down and poured himself a cup. He dumped a packet of sugar into the coffee, swirled the liquid with the empty packet, and rolled it up into a little ball. Three of the four other cups he lined up one by one, upside down.

  The runway outside remained quiet. Depending on winds, Marco might be anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour away. He hadn’t exactly filed a flight plan.

  Val made a hundred-eighty-degree turn at the end of the threshold. “You never did tell your little protégé how you plan to deal with those containers full of weaponized drones.”

  “I thought you didn’t care what happened to the drones, as long as we get the money.”

  “I don’t. But she does.” The grifter took two quick steps, holding her arms out for balance. “You shouldn’t keep her in the dark all the time.”

  “I like to surprise her. Builds trust.”

  “Not always.” She abandoned her tightrope walk, taking interest in Tyler’s upturned cups. “Shell game?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” He slipped the paper ball under the first and began weaving all three in figure eights.

  “Keep the ball cup back. Otherwise the mark will see the transfer.” Val waited for him to stop and tapped the center cup. As predicted, the paper ball was there.

  Tyler sighed and started over. “I always loved this game, but I never mastered it.”

  She pulled over a chair and sat down. “Move the cups a little faster, not enough to make it hard, but enough to make them wonder.”

  He stopped. She tapped a cup. The ball was there.

  He started again, slower this time, instead of faster as she suggested. After a few seconds, he paused, squinted at the cups as if he had lost track of the ball himself, then kept going.

  “The weapons, Tyler. What’s the plan?”

  All that maneuvering and weaving in and out had left the cups in relative disarray. Tyler lined them all up at the edge of the table and lifted his hands, giving Val a nod.

  She rolled her eyes and lifted the center cup.

  The ball wasn’t there.

  She lifted the left, then the right. No paper ball. She frowned. “Okay. Good transfer. You’re wearing a T-shirt, so it’s not up your sleeves. Show me your hands.”

  He did, rippling his fingers. Both hands were empty. Tyler lifted a fourth cup at the far corner of the table—the extra cup he had offered to fill with coffee for her when he first emerged from the AS2. The paper ball rocked back and forth in the breeze.

  Val sat back, perplexed. “How did you—?”

  “I like to surprise you too.”

  The sound of a light jet on final approach drew both of their gazes to the runway. Tyler left her sitting at the table and walked out into the moonlight. “Here comes Don Marco.”

  AN OBSERVER MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT Tyler and Val looked like a miniature welcoming party, waiting on the tarmac as the jet pulled in before the next hangar over. But Tyler couldn’t banish the feeling they were two teens—a boy and his date, out past curfew and now waiting to face her angry father.

  Don Marco seemed to share Tyler’s thoughts. “You two,” he said, coming down the steps after four young handlers took defensive positions at the nose, tail, and wingtips. “Did I not say once the Gryphon job was done, you were to sit down with me in Campione? Together?” He gave Val a kiss on each cheek, earning a dutiful but cold kiss on each of his, then stepped in front of Tyler. The old Italian’s bushy white eyebrows pressed together in a scowl. “We made a deal, Adam. Yet here we all are, six months later. What have the two of you been doing all this time.”

  “Working.” Tyler cleared his throat, which had suddenly gone dry. “Val’s been working for me. That’s all.”

  “With him,” Val said. “I’ve been working with him, not for him.”

  “Right. With me.” Tyler couldn’t stop himself from giving Marco a subtle head bobble that said With me means for me.

  Val smacked his arm. “I saw that.”

  “Your pilot can stow the jet in there.” Tyler gestured at the empty hangar. “And I made arrangements for you and your men at a house near the marina. We can still have that sit-down you wanted, tonight or tomorrow morning. By noon, things will get busy.”

  “No.” Marco turned away from him to scan the airfield.

  When he didn’t elaborate, Tyler cocked his head. “No sit-down? No, your pilot isn’t staying?”

  “Both. You two need to leave.”

  Something in his tone—something Tyler hadn’t picked up—seemed to affect Val. She touched her father’s arm. “Why would we leave? You don’t have a vehicle.”

  He stopped scanning the airfield long enough to look her in the eye. “There was a time when you called me Papa.”

  “That time is long past, but it doesn’t mean I don’t care what happens to you. Why do you want us to leave?”

  “Jafet’s people are coming. They can’t see us together.”

  The hair on the back of Tyler’s neck stood up. Marco wasn’t scanning the airfield out of routine paranoia. He was expecting Jafet’s men—dangerous men. How much time did they have? “You spoke to Jafet without me.”

  The Italian nodded. “I’m staying with him at Club Styx. It was the only way he’d agree to the meeting. An escort is coming for me now. My men and my pilot will return to Campione.”

  Concern choked Val’s voice. “If you go into that mountain alone, you’ll never come out again.”

  “You don’t know him as I do. Jafet will want to gloat—to lord his hospitality over me for a night and a day.” Don Marco shif
ted his gaze from Val to Tyler. “After that, my survival depends entirely on you.”

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-

  FIVE

  ADAMANTAS MARINA

  MILOS CALDERA

  MILOS, GREEK ISLES

  SLEEP ELUDED TALIA. How could she close her eyes when every minute counted?

  With the help of one of the refugee parents, Jenni’s contact in Thailand had discovered a pen of barbed wire strung between trees in the jungle. There were medical scraps, cigarette butts, and a ball made of rubber bands that one of the little boys always carried. Ewan Ferguson had given Jenni the GPS coordinates for the first stop in a trail that might lead directly to those kids.

  Tyler had nothing more than a teetering stack of assumptions. If his thieves could navigate three complicated cons, and if those cons led to the capture of Livingston Boyd, Talia might be able to pull the location of the kids straight from the kingpin’s mouth. But that hope was built on the assumption the kidnappers were truly part of Boyd’s global organization.

  She and Tyler had different goals. Talia was in this job for the little girl, Hla Meh, and the others. Tyler was in this for Boyd and Archangel.

  She lit a fire in the boat’s fireplace, curled up on the couch, and when Tyler and Val stepped in off the dock and turned on the light, Talia was there waiting for them. She had her speech all ready, but the worry in their faces stopped her. “What happened with Don Marco? Did you take him to the house?”

  Tyler pushed the door closed behind him, locked it, and closed the blinds on its window. “Jafet has him. Part of the deal. Nothing’s changed.”

  But something had changed. She could hear it in his denial. And with Don Marco in Jafet’s clutches, Talia’s decision would hurt Tyler all the more. “I . . . I have to leave.”

  Val tossed the van keys on the bar and threw up her hands. “Oh, here we go.”

  “I’m sorry, but the child advocacy group that told us about the missing kids has a lead. We could walk this long meandering trail of cons to Boyd, or we could cut a path directly to the kidnappers.”