“Which was when he invited you across the pond to share a beer with him,” Ace said.
“How’d youknow that?” Christian narrowly eyed Ace.
“Because that’s how he invited me.”
After a beat, Christian nodded. “Yeah. He invited me. But I didn’t go straightaway.”
Emily couldn’t help herself. Crumbling walls or not, she was hooked. She had to know the rest of the story. “Why not?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Christian shook his head.
Au contraire,she thought. From the look on his face,whatever had stopped him from going right away mattered quite a bit.
“What matters,” he continued, “is that Ieventuallymade my way to Chicago. The rest, as they say, is history.”
“But now what?” she asked. “Can the press track you back to BKI? Will they—”
“Indeed not.”
“How do you know? How can you be sure?”
“Because I’ve fallen off the grid.” His was the Olympic gold ofsmiles. His straight white teeth upped his sexy ante by about a hundred bucks. Not to mention his mouth… Sweet heavens! He had a full lower lip that spoke of carnal appetites and a harshly defined upper lip that spoke of rigid self-control.
Not for the first time, she wondered what it would be like to kiss those diametrically opposed lips. Despite her self-imposed edict, estrogen respondedto testosterone. There was nothing she could do to stop that.
“It’s six years on from that flight I took across the Atlantic,” he said, “and since then I’ve had no known address. No work history, bank accounts, assets, or debts. Boss pays me in cash. I carry fake passports and have a fake motorist’s license. As far as anyone knows, I have ceased to exist. The only thing that remains of theold me is my name. And I only use that with you lot.”
He spread his big hands wide. “So you see, if we can make that plane and hop back to the colonies, no one will find me. BKI will be safe. All will be well.”
Would it? Emily wasn’t so sure. “Exceptsomeonefound out you were here.Someonefound out you were part of that Kirkuk thingy, andsomeoneratted you out to the press.”
Acesaid the one word they were all thinking. “Spider?”
The name seemed to reverberate around the room like a tuning fork recently struck. Emily couldn’t help it; she shivered.
Spider was evil incarnate. If it was awful and currently happening in the world—say, piracy, for instance, or human trafficking or illegal weapons sales—it seemed to have Spider’s fingerprints all over it. Which youwould think would make the man easy to find. But you would be dead wrong.
The Black Knights had been hunting Spider for months. That hunt was why the four of them were in England. Unfortunately, the closest they’d come to figuring out who Spider really was had been to find the man who laundered his money, a billionaire media mogul named Roper Morrison. Too bad finding Spider’s money laundererhadn’t gotten them Spider. Morrison had died before they’d had a chance to interrogate him, and the media coverage surrounding Morrison’s untimely demise was one of the reasons they’d had to lie low and hole up in Christian’s uncle’s empty summer cottage, awaiting secret transport out of England.
“Could Spider have seen you on some CCTV footage?” Ace posited. The UK was lousy with surveillancecameras. And even though they had done their best to avoid the suckers during their time on the island, it was always possible they’d inadvertently been spied by one.
“And then what?” Christian asked. “He would have had to use facial-recognition software to identify me. Then he would have had to have someone working for him inside the bloody SAS who could get into myclassified”—he emphasizedthe word—“military records. Even if all of that were possible, how could he have sorted out I was here? My uncle and I haven’t spoken in years.”
“Maybe it’s simpler than that,” Rusty said. He was perched on the arm of a delicate wingback chair. Since he was a red-haired, freckle-faced Hulk, it was like watching a rhino balance on a telephone wire.
“How do you mean?” Emily asked.
“Thatguy who was working security for Spider’s money launderer… What was his name?”
“Steven Surry,” Emily and Christian answered in unison. Hearing Christian’s deep voice merge with hers made something strange happen to her stomach.
“Right.” Rusty nodded. “Wasn’theformer SAS? Could he have seen Christian at some point and recognized him? Could he have passed that information on to Spider?”
“And then what?” Emily frowned. “Spider gave Christian’s identity to the press? Why would he do that? And it doesn’t explain how he would know about Kirkuk.”
Rusty shrugged his massive shoulders. “Maybe Spiderdidn’tknow about Kirkuk. Maybe he knew from Surry that Christian was former SAS. If this Spider guy is as well-connected as you all say he is, it wouldn’t take him long to figureout that Christian had fallen off the map. And who better to dig up information on a dude who has fallen off the map than the press? Maybe Spider tipped off the newshounds hopingtheywould do his dirty work for him. Namely, find Christian. Total can of corn.”
Rusty had been born and raised in Pittsburgh, and Emily knew from their acquaintance thatcan of cornwas the way people from the SteelCity saideasy as you pleasy.
She exchanged a look with Ace and Christian. All three of them said “shit” at the same time.
Well, technically Christian said, “buggering shit.”But to coin an overused American phrase, Emily thought, silently donning Christian’s hoity-toity English accent,same difference.
“We need to get the hell out of Dodge,” she muttered.
Christian snorted, themuscle beneath his eye going to town. “That’s stating the obvi—”
BOOM!
He was cut off mid-sentence by the explosion outside.
