“Where did Holly get a lock picker? And why?”
“Holly’s an interesting person,” he said, closing the door behind them. “You’ll see.”
They climbed several flights and came to another door. As he worked on the lock he could almost feel Samira’s blood pressure rising. After several minutes it opened into a modernized low-ceiling one-bedroom flat. He lowered the rucksack next to a pair of sash windows in the living area.
“Bonnie and Clyde couldn’t be embalmed—did you know that?” said Samira, walking to the kitchen. “Too many bullet holes.”
“Police in Edinburgh don’t usually carry guns. Just batons.”
She searched a few cupboards and pulled out two glasses. “That makes me feel so much better.”
“You’re starting to sound like my sister.”
“I’m starting to feel like your sister.” She filled the glasses from the tap, drank from one and held the other out to him. Suddenly he was parched. “Has she always been that cynical?”
“You noticed?” he said, crossing the wooden floors and downing the water in one. He was hungry as well. “She’s had it tough lately. She’ll make a cracking good lawyer. She’ll not take shit from anybody.”
“I’ll bet,” Samira said, shedding her coat, planting her knuckles in the center of her spine and arching. “We might need a lawyer before the day is done.”
“Come here,” he said, rounding the kitchen island. He put the glass down. “Let’s sort out that back of yours.”
She opened her mouth to object, then closed it. The ache had evidently won out. As he coaxed out a drumroll of cracks, she looked resolutely downward. Adamant it wouldn’t turn into something more intimate, like last time? What if he ran a finger down her cheek...?
He stepped away and strode to the windows, taking in the view through the net curtains. “Come meet the neighbors.”
Across the broad street a champagne-colored neoclassical stone building straddled a whole city block. Or was it technically neo-Renaissance? A white security tent was erected outside, acting as a funnel from a turning bay to the building’s entrance.
Samira joined him, reading aloud the name etched across the facade. “‘The Balfour’... Jamie, what are we doing? We have no hope of getting through all that security.”
Two police officers flanked the tent opening, and two more stood on the turning bay, talking to a trio of security types in suits, lanyards and sunglasses. No visible weapons but they had to be carrying. A fifth officer stood outside a roller car—the hotel’s parking garage?
“Just recon, for now,” Jamie said. “I’m not suggesting we force our way in.”
“What, then? We dig a tunnel under the hotel and come up underneath his room?”
“His room won’t be on the ground floor.”
She swiped at him.
“Imagine if it worked,” he said.
“Imagine if it didn’t.”
“Look,” he said, turning to her, “I’m thinking we’ll find a more diplomatic solution. Just give us a chance to make a plan before you veto it. We have more advantages than you might think.”
“You’re saying I get right of veto?”
“Samira, there’s never going to be a perfect solution and it’s never going to be risk-free. We’ll all need to weigh it against the bigger risks—that Tess gets convicted, that you have to go back into hiding. And there’s your parents, Charlotte...”
She pressed her lips together.
“We need to turn the tables,” he continued. “Once Hyland’s back in the States he’ll be even harder to get to. He doesn’t know what we’re after. The last thing he’ll expect is for us to come to him, here. As far as he knows, we’re right now trying to run away from him.”
A woman with a little girl approached the tent. An officer spoke to her and she dug around in her bag and showed him a hotel keycard, and some other card—ID? Inside the tent a security screening scanner was visible, like at an airport.
“‘When the webs of the spider join they can trap a lion,’” Samira murmured.
“What’s that?”
