Jada chuckled. “Well, at least Dawson’s job doesn’t?”
“Truck looks good in his uniform,” I cut Jada off with a frown. She rolled her eyes, turning around and scrolling through her phone.
We both let the conversation drop, but I could hear Vi’s questions in my head. Thankfully, Jada distracted her by showing Violet pictures from the Leo DiCaprio version ofThe Great Gatsbyand returning the talk to their outfits and Yuriko’s custom designs.
My stomach twisted again, andstupidrushed through my brain once more. I couldn’t believe I’d allowed myself to be talked into Violet coming with us. She was a distraction I couldn’t afford right now.
Too many people and too many lives depended on this entire thing going flawlessly from start to finish. And if, somehow, Violet got tangled up in it, I wasn’t sure I’d ever forgive myself.
“Are you planning Dax’s costume as well?” I asked.
“No. I don’t ever have to worry about his style. Besides, Yuriko already has all his measurements,” she said, flipping her phone over and over. “I invited him to dinner at the penthouse tonight.”
Jada’s voice was neutral, but Dax was the one person who could truly get under her skin. The fact she was arranging dinner at her grandmother’s was her way of keeping him to herself for the night. Otherwise, Dax would have been surrounded by people wanting his attention…or just wanting him period.
It was late afternoon by the time I made it through the city traffic to Jada’s grandmother’s building off 5th Avenue.Ito-sanpulled in behind us in the SUV she usually chauffeured Jada around in. I let the ladies out, made sure the bags were taken up, and then told them I had to meet a friend at The Carlyle.
What I really did was valet the car, double back through the lobby, take ten different turns on the New York City streets, including passing through a restaurant into an alley, before I ended up at the Central Park bench where Malone was waiting for me.
This time, he was in a suit with a tablet in front of him. I leaned on the back of the bench, staring in the opposite direction and taking in the fall colors lighting up the place. The trees knew it was autumn even if the weather didn’t. The sunshine was holding in a way we needed for our ocean voyage, but it was also causing New Yorkers to fill the park in droves, enjoying the warmth before the rain set in.
“Don’t know when they removed the package from your trunk. We didn’t get any of it on film,” Malone said under his breath, frustration evident. The fact that theKyodaina‘smen seemed to continue to slip by, even when we knew where to look, wasn’t exactly a testament to the Bureau.
“They're delivering the cash on Sunday, but we’re a long way away from tying it to Tsuyoshi Mori. At most, it’ll look like one of his subsidiaries was involved, and he’ll be able to write it off with an apology and a grimace. I doubt we’d even be able to get it to stick to Ken’Ichi.”
“We’ll follow the folks making the drop. Hopefully, it’ll lead us to a bigger fish we can put pressure on.”
“They gave Jada a date for the wedding,” I said. “She’ll have more access to Ken’Ichi as it gets closer, but I’d rather us be done with the whole thing well before then so she can walk away.”
“She’s unstable. I listened to the tape from that last party in Spain. We’re lucky she didn’t blow everything,” Malone grunted in disapproval.
It was the truth. The further we got into this, and the closer we got to the arranged marriage, the more Jada used alcohol and tranquilizers to forget it all. She was crumbling apart, and it was my fault. If I hadn’t recruited her, she’d just be another heiress partying around the world without a care about how Daddy made his money. They may not have even forced the marriage on her. This was as much a way to ensure she couldn’t go on the stand against her husband as it was to force her to tame her wild ways.
“Do we have people ready to track the cash and the delivery at the dock in Spain?” I asked.
“We’re working through the details using the FBI’s legal attaché at the embassy in Madrid and the Spanish National Intelligence Centre.”
“Can we trust Spanish Intelligence?” I asked as doubts filled me.TheKyodainahad spies everywhere, and I doubted Spain’s CNI was immune any more than our own FBI. Ken’Ichi andMori-samapaid handsomely, and they always found the weak link. Then, they rewarded those leaks with more money than they would otherwise see in their lifetime.
“We have to trust someone,” Malone said.
“I trust you,” I responded, and that was pretty much where my trust ended.
I knew the stakes if the truth got back to any ofMori-sama’smen about me. The bloody gauze from that last night at the villa in Tarifa bounced through my head as well as the severed finger that had shown up in a box at FBI headquarters. It had belonged to an undercover agent who’d been working for theKyodainain Japan. A man whose body we’d never recovered.
I didn’t want Jada or me to be the ones losing body parts—or worse…our lives. I doubtedMori-samawould kill his own daughter. His only child. But he’d pretty much hold her hostage. Jada may not have been dispensable, but I was, and they wouldn’t hesitate to drop me off a boat in the middle of the ocean.
“It won’t be tied to you,” Malone said, reading my mind and bringing me back to the sunshine and the park. “Your name isn’t in any of the information we’ve shared with Spain.”
It was a small reassurance, but we both knew the truth. Because it was my yacht?mine and Dax’s?being used. If it got raided or chatter hit the streets about the shipment, I was the only one Ken’Ichi would suspect of having spilled the beans. I was already under suspicion after the bug in the study had been found.
There was nothing more I could do at the moment except to try and bring the whole house down before I was a card that got tossed out.
I pushed away from the bench and slipped into the crowds. I wound my way through the busy streets, changing direction several times until I ended up back at the hotel where I’d parked my car. I had a drink at the bar and then made my way out to the valet stand.
When I got back to Jada’s place, Dax had arrived. They were in the parlor, an expensively decorated room with real art costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was a house and a life so different from how I’d grown up with the cheaply framed Flower Fairy prints on the walls that it was hard to keep up sometimes.
Being in any of Dax’s and Jada’s houses was like living in a museum. A place you would never quite feel comfortable kicking off your shoes and resting your feet on the coffee table. The fact that I could afford some of it myself—if I ever bought a house and settled down—was even more of a foreign idea.
