We met a few hours later in a gentlemen’s club in Mayfair. James was a member and called ahead so they’d permit my entrance. It was the best place to meet because it was the one place in a city known as the City of Spies where the walls didn’t have eyes or ears.
“It’s been an age, my friend.”
At the familiar, clipped Etonian accent, I stood from the table where I awaited him. James grabbed my hand to shake it with both of his. “It’s good to see you, McRae, but you’re taking a bloody chance showing your face here.”
“It’s good to see you too,” I replied sincerely. And then grimly, “It’s worth the risk.”
“I’m intrigued.”
A few minutes later, coffees ordered, James unbuttoned his suit jacket to sit comfortably. “So, why am I at the club at this ungodly hour?”
I swallowed my pride. For her. “I need your help.”
Thirty-six hours later
The good news, our sources were sure there was no imminent threat against Silver while she was in hospital. That didn’t stop me from calling in a few favors. Now she had twenty-four-hour protection with bodyguards at her hospital room door. James’s authority meant the hospital had to comply with the security measures.
Knowing Silver would be all right in my absence was the only reason I got on the private flight to New York using an old alias. When you were lucky enough to have the option to retire, like I had, you weren’t supposed to have access to powerful resources. Yet “supposed to” was a phrase that often hadn’t sat well with me. Lucky for the higher-ups, I’d been fucking good at my job, and I was allowed a certain leeway others weren’t.
And they owed me.
They knew it.
James knew it.
So when I called, he came through.
We’d spent the last day piecing together the puzzle. Jay had sent me the photographs the tourist had taken of Silver’s attacker fleeing the scene. The registration number on the boat was visible. It was registered to a rental company in Oban. We hacked the rental company’s computer system, but the boat had clearly been rented under a false name. James pulled the CCTV footage from traffic cameras and any businesses who had a view of Oban Harbor.
We found the fucker with a traffic camera.
James started running facial recognition.
As we waited for it to ID our suspect, we uncovered everything we could about Halston Cole’s schedule. From there we looked at the best place to corner him alone and the security measures I’d have to breach to do it without being caught.
Which was why, thirty-six hours after meeting James in London, I found myself in the men’s restroom of a members-only club in Manhattan.
I’d flown via private jet. James had arranged the delivery of the club’s staff uniform to my hotel room upon my arrival. We’d planted one of my aliases in the club’s staff database because each staff member had to sign in and out digitally with a key card.
From there I’d entered the “highly secure” club with embarrassing ease. Despite my unfamiliar face, they believed so much in their own security no one even questioned my presence.
Before I’d arrived, James contacted me with pivotal information. Silver’s attacker was a criminal from Glasgow. A bit of a local gun-for-hire called Shawn Prescott. He’d been paid by local thugs and crime families to “deal” with undesirables. Scotland’s Specialist Crime Division had been working on nailing the slippery bastard for years, but it turned out his previous clients were smarter than Halston Cole. They’d always dealt in cash. Cole couldn’t.
Not only did James’s team find a digital money trail from his bank account to Halston Cole’s personal fucking bank account, but they also found email communications between them that revealed he was the one behind all the threats to Silver. Most importantly there was a recent communication that detailed a new job: tosilenceTierney Silver. He thought making it look like a robbery would avert suspicion. The absolute moron. Cole’s defense might argue he didn’t mean for Prescott to kill her, but with all the other evidence the news article would reveal next week, Cole’s lawyers would have a hard time defending him. Shawn was arrested, and the police found the weapon with blood on it. A simple DNA test would prove it was Silver’s.
We had them.
All because the fucking bastard thought Silver was a young woman on her own whom he could easily target. He probably also assumed a small country like Scotland wouldn’t have the resources to put the pieces together. We did. The police would have gotten there. It just would have taken them longer than it took my sources.
Halston’s ignorance and arrogance was his undoing.
He didn’t see me standing at Silver’s back.
Now he was about to endure a lesson on exactly what that meant.
When I spotted Halston in the dining room, I wanted to break his neck. Instead, I made sure I was the one delivering his coffee and I dosed it with a liquid laxative. My palms were unusually sweaty at the familiar situation but I pushed away bad memories. I focused on what needed to be done. Large reading glasses obscured most of my face and I changed the way I walked and held myself to diminish my size.
Thankfully, the bastard was the kind who didn’t acknowledge servers. He didn’t so much as glance at me when I brought the coffees to the table he shared with another Silver Group board member, Darren Polson. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were there to discuss the upcoming article in theChronicle.
