Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 68369 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 342(@200wpm)___ 273(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68369 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 342(@200wpm)___ 273(@250wpm)___ 228(@300wpm)
That was good. There was always that moment of unease between the time I left a location in shambles and the next group arrived, whether they were Hillcroft people ready to clean or a government agency ready to gather evidence for a bogus case and claim credit.
I’d never cared about credit—Hillcroft rarely received it. I just wanted to make sure they did a good job of covering up the truth, and I generally didn’t trust anyone on the government payroll.
At least we never left behind what was important. Tech and whatnot. We sent that straight to our own guys, and they were currently working on two laptops and four phones from the first safehouse. We’d had junior operators going back and forth all day.
The one silver lining about running an op so close to home.
It was a first for me. I hadn’t handled a domestic case since my early years, when I’d been part of a security detail in Texas. Now I was literally an hour away from home, which would hopefully be safe again after tonight.
“Any movement in Qatar?” I asked. They were nine hours ahead of us and should be asleep by now.
That was where Karl Hahn was living his best life with his business partner Omar Said and their closest confidants. Of course, with vacation homes across Germany, in Dubai, the Caribbean, somewhere in the Golden Triangle, Tokyo, Malta, and Belize. Coincidentally, they also had corporations in those areas.
“Nothin’ outta the ordinary,” Hudson answered. “Hahn’s wife bought a horse for twenty mil, as one does, and the big boss spent the day with a mistress.”
I snorted and used my own spoon to stir the food.
“More importantly, no phone or online activity outside the normal,” he confirmed. “Squeezy’s monitoring their right-hand men and the step below too. All this shit flies under their radar. It’s pocket change.”
We already knew that. I nodded absently and glanced over at Leighton.
I’d learned just yesterday from Ryan that Squeezy’s real name was Willow Quinn, and she was his and Darius’s baby sister.
Reese had made it sound like she merely knew the Quinns in some capacity. She’d worked with them, he’d said. Then again, nobody said more than necessary in our line of work.
Emerson hadn’t even mentioned anything to Ryan and Darius. He’d recruited Squeezy from right under their noses.
“Your recruit’s handling things well,” Hudson noted.
I scowled at him. “He’s a soldier.”
If fighting bad guys in trenches was all we did, we wouldn’t need to put our recruits through one year’s training before hiring them. Christ. Two months was evidently long enough for a grunt to sharpen his Army knowledge and become infantry once more. It didn’t fucking mean anything.
One conversation with the kid, and it was glaringly obvious that he was naïve beyond words. He didn’t know how the world worked. He couldn’t predict things the way an operator needed to. He had so much history to memorize, so many mind-sets to adopt, and so much strategy to learn.
“You’re riding his ass pretty hard, pal,” Hudson told me pointedly. “I didn’t say he was a fine operator. But for a twentysomething-year-old with two months of training, he’s doing fucking great.”
I dropped my scowl to my food and started shoveling cold chicken stew with rice into my mouth.
Glorious.
Coach had given me a similar speech already.
I was riding Leighton hard, because he was fucking different. He had the potential to become one of our best, all while… There was something so innocently sweet about him that I feared he’d overestimate his capabilities in a moment he had no backup to rely on.
“He thinks Karl Hahn is gonna come looking for us.”
Hudson chuckled into his mug. “So he’s young and inexperienced. That’s what training’s for. Don’t tell me you knew how the underworld operated at his age.”
Fair.
I remembered thinking we’d go hunting down cartels and mafia organizations, only to realize that the worst of the worst dressed in bespoke suits and dined with world leaders. The cartels were still there. The mafia was alive and well too, albeit in a new sheep’s clothing. They operated differently nowadays. But the men who caused the most destruction ran global networks of legit corporations, and they were surprisingly easy to track, because they had lines upon lines of men who not only did the dirty work but planned most of it as well. Karl Hahn and Omar Said were untouchable.
Between the two, they also had six sons ready to take their places when they died.
Whatever. I’d prefer to think about how fucked the world was when I had a bottle of bourbon nearby.
I shoveled more food into my mouth and looked over at Leighton again.
Since Coach somehow knew about us, my days of mentoring Leighton were over. But even if Coach hadn’t known, maybe it was for the best. I couldn’t be impartial to save my life, and I wasn’t ready to acknowledge just how much that kid meant to me. Not yet. It was way too soon.