“What about the chemical weapons that Kojot brought?” Layla asked. “Won’t explosives spread the chemical agent all over the place?”
“That’s not going to be a problem,” Clayne said. “Zolnerov looked like he was preparing for a really long war. Those buildings out there on the east side of the estate are all stuffed to the gills with high-explosive artillery shells, long-range rockets, hand grenades, and bulk explosives. The crates of chemical rockets Kojot was trying to sell him are sitting right in the middle of all that stuff. When those buildings go up, there won’t be anything left but a big, smoking crater. The chemicals will be incinerated in the fireball, along with most of this estate.”
“How much time do we have?” Jayson asked.
Clayne shifted Mikhail a little in his arms and looked at his watch again. “Five minutes. That’s plenty of time.”
Five minutes didn’t seem like a lot of time to Jayson. Layla and the Russian girl must have agreed because they picked up their pace as they moved through Zolnerov’s former mansion.
Clayne stopped when he saw Powell lying on the floor. “I thought you said Powell was dead already. What’s he doing here?”
Jayson really didn’t feel like talking about it now, but it was obvious Clayne wasn’t going anywhere until he heard the story, even with the clock ticking on a building full of explosives. “He survived and sold us out to Zolnerov for a chance to get another shot at killing me.”
“Huh,” Clayne said.
They found Danica and the kids waiting for them outside the demolished main gate, along with a handful of pickup trucks and Range Rovers parked out on the street with armed men standing all around. That explained where all the gunfire he’d heard earlier had come from. Some of the vehicles had been shot up pretty good and so had some of their occupants, but none of the guys looked like they were seriously wounded. Standing at the head of their group was Victor Garin.
At the sight of them, the old cop ran forward and pulled the dark-haired girl beside Layla into his arms. It wasn’t until Victor said her name that Jayson finally recognized her. She was Victor’s granddaughter, Larissa. When he pulled away, there were tears in his eyes.
“Thank you,” he said to Jayson.
Jayson gave him a nod. “We need to get out of here. Zolnerov’s ammo stores have been rigged to blow and we don’t have a lot of time to get outside the frag distance.”
Victor nodded and started shouting orders in Russian. The men he’d brought with him immediately began getting everyone loaded into the vehicles. Victor started to lead his granddaughter to the truck he was obviously leaving in, but Larissa refused to leave Mikhail’s side. Instead, she helped get the injured teen into the back of the pickup truck first, then climbed in with him.
When Victor gave him and Layla a questioning look, all Jayson could do was shrug. Larissa had obviously developed a strong bond with Mikhail. Having someone risk his life for you could do that.
He and Layla climbed in the back of the truck with the two teens. Moments later, they squealed away along with everyone else. They hadn’t gone more than half a mile when the entire estate went up in a huge fireball that sent a shock wave through the ground that shook the vehicle. Clayne hadn’t been lying when he’d said the explosion would incinerate anything and everything in the blast zone, chemical or otherwise.
Jayson leaned against the cab of the truck, easing the pressure on his aching back and pulling Layla close. She buried her face against his chest and hugged the hell out of him. He knew exactly how she felt. Rescuing those girls had almost killed both of them, but they’d done it. They still had to get Dylan, Olek, and Anya back across the border into Ukrainian-held territory, not to mention get Mikhail medical attention, but after everything else they’d been through, dealing with that didn’t seem all that difficult. It was only after they got back to the States that things would get complicated.
He wasn’t going to think about that. Right then, he was simply going to hold on to Layla and enjoy being with the woman he loved while doing the job he loved.
* * *
“You ready to do this?” Landon asked Ivy as he pulled the SUV up in front of Thorn’s mansion.
It was late at night—or early in the morning, depending on your definition of that kind of thing—but she had no doubt Thorn would still be awake since they’d called him about an hour ago and said they’d be dropping by with his stolen property.
Frasier opened the door before they could ring the bell. Thorn was waiting in the foyer, a frown on his face. He barely glanced at the diamond when she handed it over. Mostly because he was too busy glaring at them.
“Why the hell didn’t you call when you figured out who stole it?” he demanded. “I thought I was quite clear that I wanted Frasier to handle the actual recovery?”
“You were,” Landon said. “But to be truthful, we didn’t know for sure the guy we were going to see tonight was the thief.”
“We knew we were never going to find out who stole your diamond working with Hayes, and since the bodies of known thieves kept turning up, we did our own digging,” Ivy added, elaborating on the story that she, Landon, and John had come up with. “We looked for other people who had the requisite skills but who’d been excluded from the detective’s suspect pool for some reason.”
“We came up with a couple people and went to talk to one of them—Daniel Abbott—down at his warehousing business near the Navy Yard tonight,” Landon said. “Twenty years ago, Abbott was picked up and questioned in connection with nearly a dozen jewelry heists, but nothing ever stuck to him, even though the detective on the case back then was sure he was the guy.”
“Wait a minute,” Thorn said, holding up his hand. “Are you trying to tell me that it was some washed-up thief who broke into my home and stole my property? What, did he just decide to come out of retirement because his mutual funds had taken a beating in the market?”
When he put it that way, it did sound a little crazy. Ivy prayed that Kendra and Evan had done a flawless job on Abbott’s fake background because she had no doubt Thorn was going to dig into the poor guy’s former life with a microscope. In reality, Daniel Abbott was a marine salvage dealer who’d been unfortunate enough to pass away the previous night from a heart attack in his shop down near Washington Navy Yard. Other than the fact that the man had absolutely no family and very few friends, there was nothing remarkable about him. Which is why Kendra had selected him as their thief.
Ivy hated the idea of messing with a dead man’s life by giving him a police record, making it look like he’d been involved with a string of unsolved burglaries in DC nearly twenty years ago, and creating a fake history that was going to live on forever. But it was either destroy one man’s past or accept that Dreya Clark probably wouldn’t have a future. It simply had to be done.
“We knew it was a long shot, which is why we didn’t bother to call you or Frasier,” Ivy admitted. “It wasn’t until we got to the warehouse that we figured out Abbott was the guy. We caught him right in the middle of getting ready to leave the country with your diamond.”
“Where the hell is he?” Frasier growled. “You better not have turned him over to the cops before Mr. Thorn gets to speak to him.”
