I tapped my watch’s voice button and then wrapped Lexi in one arm behind my back. “We’re going outside. Walk quickly but don’t run.”
Ueli and his operators would hear what I’d said over our channel. They were my safest option at that moment.
I positioned Lexi between my body and the wall and moved toward the exit, my arm around her shoulders, ready to force her to the floor and gather her underneath me, if necessary.
As we approached the darkened glass exit glowing with sunlight, my security entourage assumed the square formation, more and more pairs of operators accreting around us with each step.
Ueli yanked the door from the outside as we approached, startling the concierge who’d been holding the door, anticipating the mob of us walking toward him.
We broke out into the glaring sunlight, a desert blast akin to a Dubai afternoon, and I hurried Lexi a little faster with my hand on her upper arm. She picked up her pace at the instant I pressed her.
At the black vehicle, she glanced up at me as I took her hand and lifted, helping her inside. She clambered in, and I stepped in right after her with one last glance at the sidewalk.
Every person standing there, from tourists to uniformed hotel and restaurant workers, seemed an instant away from producing a concealed weapon and opening fire.
As my leg cleared the car’s frame, one of my staff shoved the door closed. Ueli was half a step behind my pace, vaulting into the front passenger seat, and the engine roared as Ueli slammed his door.
Lexi plastered herself against my side, and I wrapped both arms around her, savoring her soft body in my arms, because this moment almost never happened. “He was in the bar,” I said to Ueil in the front seat. “As we were leaving, the man who’d been in my suite was sitting in the bar.”
The agent’s description poured out of me, as I’d been trained to notice height, weight, coloring, and mannerisms since childhood. “I’m certain he was Russian intelligence. No one else would threaten so casually. We can get the video from the bar and identify him.”
Ueli asked, “Have you downloaded any new phone apps lately?”
I tugged my belt from my pocket and leaned forward to thread it around my waist. The Russian-made handgun in my waistband felt floppy without a belt securing it to my back. Assoon as the leather pressed it down, the metal safety on its side poked into my spine. “No. Nothing.”
“But Lexi is with you.” He cranked himself around in his seat and glared at her. “Your phone has not been cleaned of the advertising spyware,ja?”
Ueli had a standard tirade about commercial spyware in phone applications being purchased and used by foreign and domestic intelligence services. Despite military personnel dying from exercise apps on their phones giving away the locations of navy ships and temporary military installations, the right of corporations to advertise still outweighed national security and any remnants of a personal right to privacy.
Ueli could go on for hours about the intersection of privacy and security if no one intervened. Commercial spyware abuse verged on being a special interest with him.
“No, you haven’t done anything to my phone to protect us,” Lexi said to him, snark in her voice. “You can clean the spyware off my phone any time you want to.”
“Ueli, enough. You can scour her phone when we’re somewhere secure, perhaps while we’re at Clemmy’s Hermès store or the couture consultation.”
His sharp glance was an argument. “I insist we abort the previous schedule and move security to Level Two. We should proceed to the plane and travel to a secure location.”
Dear God, Ueli’s security levels and codes and protocols were exhausting. “Absolutely not. I’ll tell Clemmy we’ll meet her at the Hermès store for the Birkin purses, and we’ll proceed from there.”
Lexi’s hand slid into mine. “We can cancel going to that thing tonight. It’s fine.”
“Good,” Ueli said, starting to turn back to the front. “Cancel everything.”
“We’re not canceling,” I told Ueli. “If we canceled every engagement every time there was a threat, I’d never get anything done.”
“Your wife wants to cancel,” Ueli said, holding onto the back of the driver’s seat, bracing himself as he twisted to stare at me. His pale eyes were the color of ice storms. “You should listen to your wife.”
Lexi squeezed my hand. “We don’t have to go to that party tonight if it’s dangerous.”
Ueli sniped, “Bravado in front of the women is stupid.”
“It’s no more dangerous than my normal day-to-day routine,” I explained to her and meant it. “There arealwaysthreats. Knowing one of the current players gives us an advantage, but we mustn’t allow that to make us lax toward other, unknown threats.”
“Jeez, Nicolai. What’d you do to make people so mad at you?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t nonchalance on my part. I’d been numb to it forever, it seemed. “Whether it’s political radicals who take offense at my ancestors or the private militia of the wealthy elites of the world because I refuse to play their depraved game of mutual assured destruction by blackmail, someone isalwaysgunning for me.”
She was blinking her dark eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
