She knew what to do. She trusted Yardley.
The car pulled up out of a copse of trees. The circular drive was lined with lights and guards with AKs. KC counted them, cursing guns, noting the sight lines because one thing it was hard to get clear intelligence about in advance was how a location looked from the ground.
She spotted, with not a little surprise, an armored personnel carrier parked in the grassy expanse ringed by the drive. A U.S. Stryker. It had a cannon mounted on the top. “Do you see this ride?”
“Whoa,” Yardley said. “Settles my bet with Atlas about what Mirabel’s been keeping in the horse stable. I told you he didn’t have horses. Also, are there used military vehicle lots everywhere now? With those waving inflatables and prices written in shoe polish on the windshields?”
“Maybe he’s going to use it as a flower planter,” KC said as the car pulled to a stop. The covered entrance to the home had crystal chandeliers lighting the path, three liveried valets who KC recognized as part of Mirabel’s second-ring security detail, and a young Russian oligarch smoking with a discarded Italian cabinet member who had been lately dabbling in opium import-export.
“Hey, losers.” KC hopped out of the car the moment her driver opened the door. “Where’s the party?”
She strode up to the two strangers while they pretended not to be interested in her. KC was beginning to understand that there was a lot of showmanship in spy craft. Also rules, cliques, gossip, and grudges. Yardley had told her that going to Vienna, the spy capital of the world, was like showing up at an endless debutantes’ coming out ball. KC had only attended a year of high school, and she definitely had never so much as received an invite to a coming-out ball, but she’d been a short, scrappy, queer redhead from birth. Theater came pre-installed.
“I didn’t believe it when I heard Daniel had a kid.” The woman took a very long drag of a bright pink cigarette. “But it makes sense now.” She raised an eyebrow at the man beside her, who laughed.
“Daddy issues,” he said, with a knowing nod.
KC’s cover was that she was the reprobate daughter of a well-known California-based arms dealer who was actually a CIA operative. They’d kept the background simple. Invitations to tonight’s auction hadn’t been difficult to come by.
“You don’t know the half of it,” KC said. “I don’t even answer the phone unless he’s already told me I’m a good girl.” She finger-gunned them. “Later.” One of the uniformed henchmen gestured her inside. “Cool friends,” KC murmured. “Definitely going to add them on Snapchat when I get home.”
“Isabella can be fun,” Yardley replied. “She actually got me out of a jam in Ulaanbaatar once, but then she stopped answering my texts.”
“That is tragic.”
She passed into the entryway, where a bored-looking manstood with his arms crossed, supervising a second bored-looking man who waved a wand over the guest who’d arrived in the car in front of KC’s. He wore a paisley smoking jacket and T-posed for the guards, exposing a shoulder holster that held a large-caliber pistol. When the wand passed over the pistol, a monitor beeped. Both guards ignored it and waved him through.
“Don’t talk to me on the comm,” Yardley reminded her as KC held her arms out for her own scan. “Oh! To your left, just past Paisley Jacket? That’s the guy from the wedding in Toronto! I did not make him for one of us. Or one of them.”
“Canadian intelligence,” Gramercy supplied after a brief pause. “Jack Tremblay. Just got the courtesy notification a moment ago.”
“Oh ho!” Yardley said. “So the prime minister did not trust us to pull this off. I should have known that guy was a Sister. They all think they’re 007 with their fancy haircuts and abs.” Yardley sounded peeved but amused, like she did when KC took them on a route that would add mileage to their run after promising to keep it short.
“I have abs and a fancy haircut,” she replied under her breath, but barely attending because the entry hallway opened out into a vast space, and she needed a moment to integrate what she knew with what she could see.
Which was a long wall of windows overlooking the patio and lawn to the water, shiny inlaid flooring, rows of enormous chandeliers that appeared to have birthed the baby chandeliers she’d seen outside, and a glittering array of people whose cocktail attire and bling put the lights to shame.
In the middle of the room, she noted neat rows of wooden folding chairs, a few already occupied by guests. The last chair ineach row had a number on its side. At the far end, there was a dais with a podium. A projection screen mounted behind it displayed an enormous image of a round blue velvet pillow encircled with gold braid.
“I called it,” Yardley said. “That’s where they’ll put the drive, reclining like a painted lady on that sexy pillow. None of these men are creative. I would’ve gone with something more like when you unbox a new iPhone. Lots of custom packaging and concealed magnetized clasps.”
Someone touched KC’s elbow, and she turned to see one of Mirabel’s security detail—Harry Davies, her memory from the briefing supplied,thirty-one, hails from the dodgy part of Leeds, bit of a thing for off-track betting—holding something out to her.
A paddle. Her paddle, for the auction. They’d assigned her number sixty-nine.
“Niiice.” KC took the paddle and pulled a lascivious face for Harry, who immediately started huffing with laughter, one hand on his waist. His laughter surprised her into her own, and then, in the middle of an island mansion in a ritzy island neighborhood near Stockholm, at a party for every henchman around the globe poised to purchase the most destructive nonincendiary weapon currently known to the international community, KC was sharing what was undeniably amomentwith a petty criminal whose background, after all, was no better than her own.
He put his hand on her shoulder to support his belly laugh. “Oi, that’s what I said, wasn’t it? But these boys can’t take a joke.” He snorted a final time, giving her shoulder a pat, and then leaning back. “Phew, I needed that.” He scanned the room. “Bit uptight here for such a do, don’t you think?”
“Maybe we should spike the punch.” She gestured to a champagne fountain by a French door open to the vast patio.
“Oh, it’s spiked. I’d stick to the bottled beer at the bar.” He nudged her with his elbow. “Good luck, then.”
He melted back into the crowd as KC started across the room, marking every face she recognized, all the exits and obstacles, expected and unexpected.
“You made a friend,” Yardley purred in her ear. “Good job, you.”
“Useful friend,” Gramercy said. “There’s an Interpol Black Notice on him. Seems he was the last to speak with a woman who went missing in the Lake District. Former mistress of Mirabel’s, but no doubt that’s a coincidence.”
