“Sorry to call you again so soon, Dieter,” Blaze said.
A pen clicked in the background. “Same bratva goons as your house in Chicago or new ones?”
Dieter’s smooth voice was an amalgam of European accents: more fluid than a staccato German accent, steadier than lyrical French notes, and an upper-crust calmness more like a commander than a soldier.
Basically, he was Swiss.
“Same bratva goons, different location,” Blaze told him.
“Are you still in the US?”
“Yes. Iowa.”
Shwarz’s voice dropped lower. “That’s a problem.”
The Rogues couldn’t help them this time. Shwarz’s entire staff was providing security for a royal crowning in an unspecified European country, even though a glance at the internet headlines made it obvious which country was getting a new king that weekend. None of the Rogues could reach Kalona in less than five days.
So Dieter Schwarz, mercenary extraordinaire, passed the phone to his wife, who had connections of an entirely different sort.
Flicka von Hannover had been a few years behind Blaze at Le Rosey, the billionaire boarding school Blaze had attended with those other three guys who now made his teeth grind in his head.
Plus, Blaze had climbed a harbor wall in Monaco during Flicka’s rescue the year before.
She didn’toweBlaze, exactly. The rescue operation had been massive. The Princess of Hannover was not personally indebted to dozens of mercenaries.
But it was a connection.
Thus, Flicka listened and passed Blaze’s conundrum on to her older brother.
Through the dining room window, Blaze watched the corn rustle and the road from the country highway do absolutely nothing. The cornstalks’ shadows stretched eastward in the late afternoon sunshine.
His phone rang in his hand five minutes later, and the caller’s phone number was nothing but a line of zeroes.
Neat trick.
Wulfram von Hannover’s British accent was the most upper-class of all the upper classes. His quiet cadence and clenched jaw sounded like Prince William on a particularly refined day when he was not pandering to the British tabloids’ readership. “Blaze Robinson, I presume.”
“Yes, and thank you for calling.”
“You were part of the Rogue Security operation that saved my sister.”
Not that Blaze was calling in aquid pro quo,but, “Yes.”
Thus, Wulfram von Hannover wired a substantial amount of money without further discussion.
An hour and a half had passed already.
Blaze’s next text was to the Bully Boys, his dried-beef eaters from the Navy, to explain the situation and call for anyone who wanted to participate in a tour of duty sniping mafiosos from an Iowa cornfield, and that’s when his phone started pinging like crazy.
No one had been near New York City after midnight when Blaze had needed help two nights before, but several of them were Midwestern Angus bulls at heart and thus within driving distance of Kalona.
While most of his fellow former combatants bore a wounded heart, many longed to return to battle where the only goals were murder and survival.
Civilian life was as tedious as lining up toothpicks for a living.
Calvin Jones called first, asking, “You got a problem?”
“A big one,” Blaze said.
