Blood Money Page 3

  ‘You should know. You should be determined. There’s a lot of girls here who want the same thing.’

  ‘I’m not like them.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t care if I don’t get what I want.’

  ‘And he is what you want?’

  ‘Do you have a problem with that?’

  She smirked. ‘If I did, I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  Nadia blinked. ‘You ask good questions, my dear.’

  ‘Hopefully you give good answers.’

  ‘I’ve been here long enough,’ she said. ‘I floated in a couple of years ago, just like you did now. And I never left. Aaron keeps me around.’

  ‘He likes you?’

  ‘Yes. He takes care of me. He’s taken care of me for a long time.’

  ‘But you’re not together.’

  ‘Does it look like we are together?’

  Ruby looked over and saw Wayne and Zafir spread out across one of the booths. Zafir had an arm around two separate blondes, and had allowed a little warmth to creep into his cold eyes.

  Ruby knew the act was a guise.

  Wayne’s wasn’t. He had a tanned brunette, only a shade north of twenty, sitting on his lap. He was whispering something in her ear, and she was smiling, staring at him like he was all that existed in the world. It was a charm that couldn’t be falsified, an ability to capture the attention of the opposite sex and keep hold of it with practiced ease.

  Ruby had thought she’d possessed the same charm.

  But it hadn’t worked on Wayne.

  Because he had it, too.

  Nadia seemed to notice her dejection, but took it at face value instead of probing deeper.

  The woman said, ‘Don’t worry. Aaron likes you.’

  Ruby looked at her. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He never does what he just did. He’s usually paranoid. Thinks he has enemies everywhere.’

  Ruby’s heart thudded, but she masked it.

  She turned up the puppy-dog eyes and said, ‘Do I look like an enemy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nadia said with a wink. ‘To me you do.’

  Then she floated away.

  Leaving Ruby to wonder whether she’d meant it at face value too.

  7

  The night bled on.

  Ruby made small talk with ease, sinking into the blur of inebriation without actually experiencing it, gossiping with girl after girl about shoes and dresses and drinks and who Wayne was going to sleep with at the end of the night. When asked, she laughed and shrugged and played coy, murmuring that she hoped it was her. It disarmed them, as she knew it would — they didn’t see her as confident. They saw her as someone pretending to be something she wasn’t.

  If only they knew.

  More than an hour into her charade, Nadia approached with a pair of small white pills in her open palm. She passed them over and whispered in her ear, ‘Aaron wants you to have them.’

  ‘Molly?’ Ruby said.

  Nadia squinted. ‘What else would they be?’

  Ruby smiled. ‘Just checking. I love molly.’

  She moved in one fluid motion. Leaned onto her right hip so she could look past Nadia and make eye contact with Wayne. He saw her and Nadia in the same glance, and realised that she’d accepted his offer. He half-smiled, and she blew him a soft kiss. Tried to make her amber eyes glow as much as possible.

  It worked.

  He stared at her for longer than he wanted, and Nadia noticed. She turned, looking over her shoulder, inherently jealous of Ruby capturing the man’s attention.

  Which was her intention all along.

  As soon as neither of them were looking at her palm, she released the pills and caught them with her heel on the way down, sending them skittering under the booth behind her. Then, with practiced ease, she pressed her palm to her mouth and gulped down an imaginary mouthful. Wayne watched keenly. She smiled at him, turned to Nadia and cocked her head to the side.

  Satisfied?

  Nadia nodded.

  The Lynx program was unparalleled in its level of detail. Ruby knew exactly what to do. After twenty minutes of small talk with various members of Wayne’s entourage, she tensed her abdominal muscles and held her breath — discreetly, of course, but with enough intensity to raise her core temperature. She concentrated on warming her face, flushing her cheeks, directing the heat to where it was most visible. Then she flooded herself with nervous energy, conjuring a clear mental image of Zafir tying her down and dissecting her while she was still alive. Her pulse rose, and a cold shiver crept up her spine, but those fear responses weren’t visible to others. What was visible were her dilated pupils, evoked from a stress response, but also the defining characteristic of someone high on ecstasy.

  She got louder.

  She laughed harder.

  She smiled without restraint.

  Everyone bought it.

  Dead sober, her head clear, she blended flawlessly into the hedonism. The women around her swayed and moved and lost themselves in the rhythm of the music, and she matched their every movement. The bodyguards remained stoic, watching everything unfold from a distance, but Zafir was succumbing to the environment. It was simply impossible not to lose yourself in the opulence. There was exorbitantly priced alcohol at his fingertips, and any drug he could think of only a finger’s snap away, and a cohort of beautiful women practically throwing themselves at him because of his wealth.

  Ruby knew the warlord’s usual routine was as detached from this as you could get. There was no room for this sort of hedonism amidst suffocating the campaign of Houthi rebels in Yemen. His days were filled with blood and death and pain.

  Well, so are mine.

  The night crept onward, and she danced with two blondes in the centre of the space, carefree, white teeth bared in exaggerated smiles. They laughed and ran their hands over each other’s bodies and complimented each other’s attire.

  Ruby looked over at Wayne.

  He was staring at her.

  Behind her warm cheeks and dilated pupils, a pang of real fear struck.

  Because she realised he was playing the same game.

  He wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t high. She’d watched him sip Ace of Spades all night, and even bend over one of the booth tables to do a line of cocaine, but meeting his gaze now she realised he might as well have just crawled out of bed. Either he had an incomprehensible tolerance to substances, or he’d been mirroring her actions, pretending to drink and pretending to ingest drugs and pretending to lose himself in the moment.

  It made sense.

  He looked like a surfer. He acted like a playboy. He entertained like a socialite.

  But he was none of those things.

  The intelligence briefing had told her as much.

  He was the real estate kingpin of the east coast of America, a ruthless businessman who cut every corner and took advantage of every legal loophole to crush the competition before they could even compete. There was more — much more — but it didn’t matter right now, so she refused to think about it.

  What mattered was getting him in private.

  Finding out exactly what he wanted with a psychopathic warlord.

  She couldn’t do that here.

  Then the façade began to wear on her. It was incredibly draining to act unhinged, under the apparent effect of drink and drugs, whilst simultaneously watching every word that came out of her mouth. She couldn’t slip up once, couldn’t let the guise dissipate, not with Wayne observing her every move. Her actions became laboured, her responses slower. She couldn’t maintain every detail of her performance forever. She thought about excusing herself to the restroom to regroup, but as soon as she took a step in that direction Wayne shot to his feet.

  She froze.

  The world stopped.

  Her heart stuttered.

  Wayne clapped his hands together and got the attention of everyone in his entourage and said, ‘Le
t’s take this back to the boat.’

  A resounding, booze-drenched cheer went up.

  Ruby battled down a sigh of relief.

  8

  The superyacht lived up to its name.

  She saw it from hundreds of feet away, a towering status symbol even amongst the fierce competitors of Port Hercules. Monaco was the premier destination for the wealthy, yet Aaron Wayne had managed to stand out here, too. Perhaps that had always been the goal. Win everything. Conquer all worlds.

  The richest go to Monaco? Go there, too, and one-up them all.

  It was working.

  Wayne seemed to understand the power of the compound effect. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. His real estate dominance gave him the aura of invincibility, and he’d used that to leverage even bigger deals. And now, it seemed, he was entering uncharted territory.

  The realm of blood money.

  Ruby tottered alongside Zafir, breathing the man’s stink. He didn’t speak — in fact, he’d barely opened his mouth since she’d first stepped foot in Sapphire. She’d caught him mumbling a couple of sentences to Wayne, leaning all the way in so no one else overheard, but apart from that he’d elected to hold his tongue and simply observe. He’d been drinking, and he might have taken something more illicit, but he didn’t let it show.

  Wayne was the opposite.

  He’d ingested almost nothing, but he was playing his role perfectly. The bombastic host. The loudmouth. The show-off.

  The confidence man.

  They strolled out onto the floating concrete pontoon, a shadow-drenched highway aimed straight at Wayne’s yacht. It rested at the end of the pier, too large to bob in the water. It sat there like a floating island, three of its four decks bathed in pleasant yellow light. A shining beacon of excess — Aaron Wayne personified.

  Look at what I’ve built.

  Look at what I am.

  Large and Small led the way. Wayne hung back, whispering sweet nothings in one woman’s ear, surrounded by another four hangers-on. Nadia lingered behind them, her focus absolute, her intentions clear. But there was a detachment in her posture. She’d clearly been privy to this sort of thing for long enough to understand Wayne’s priorities. Zafir hung further back, framed by Ruby and the other two girls and his three bodyguards. His men were, as to be expected, complete amateurs. They were frail and hollow-eyed and all three sported the look of deer in headlights. They couldn’t wrap their heads around their surroundings.

  They wouldn’t be a problem.

  Wayne’s men would.

  Large and Small stationed themselves like gargoyles on either side of the boarding ramp, which had been lowered to the pontoon by the yacht’s staff in advance. Wayne must have signalled he was en route before they left Sapphire.

  Then everything happened at once.

  Some of the new girls hovered in place, unsure how to proceed.

  Nadia wormed her way through them and went first.

  With familiarity she stepped up to the two bodyguards and held her arms out straight on either side of her. Large frisked her down, quick and polite, but still thorough. He knew what he was doing, and he covered every square inch of her arms and legs and waist with slicing movements. Then he moved aside and she stepped up onto the ramp.

  The girls in front got the message, and sauntered forward one by one.

  Ruby calculated distances, barely suppressing panic.

  They frisked the first girl, and confiscated her phone, which they promised was only in the interest of privacy during her time aboard.

  They did the same with the second.

  Then the third.

  Ruby forced herself not to move suspiciously. Back in Sapphire she’d made an estimation based on how the night unfolded, and figured there was a less than ten percent chance Wayne would take any precautions onboard the yacht. There was simply too much alcohol, too many drugs. She figured everyone would be too caught up in the moment.

  Wrong.

  Bad call.

  She used one finger to reach through the slit in her dress and adjusted something.

  Zafir’s bodyguards moved forward in a cluster, and Wayne’s men let them through without frisking them. It would be bad taste to subject such esteemed guests to paranoid practices. The girls made more sense. They came and went. There were new and old faces. Better to clear them all.

  Ruby realised there was no one between herself and Large.

  She stepped forward.

  And her underwear came down her thighs.

  She waited until the material reached her knees and then stumbled on it, teetering forward. One of her heels skewered sideways and she fell, tumbling to the edge of the concrete pontoon, legs sealed firmly together.

  For two seconds total, no one was looking at her.

  They were staring at the racy lingerie draped across the pontoon, several feet away. Just in case there were any eyes on her she hunched over as she went down, shielding most of her body from view. Masking the fact that when she came down on her side she reached into her dress and unhooked the strap holding the combat knife to the inside of her upper thigh. The whole contraption came free and skidded across the concrete underneath her stomach.

  It took the slightest nudge to send it tumbling into the dark water.

  The splash was silent.

  It sunk into the black.

  She rolled over, gave a ditzy laugh, and — to ensure her own safety — parted her legs for the briefest of moments, allowing anyone with a trained eye the most momentary of glimpses of what lay between, now exposed.

  That would take anyone’s mind off what they thought they’d seen.

  She wasn’t above sacrificing her own humility for the mission.

  She clambered back up, but Zafir was there in her face, and for a moment she thought she was dead. But he was half-smiling.

  A strange thing to see.

  He gripped her arm and helped her to her feet.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered in his ear.

  His beady eyes, normally cold and dark, were intensely vulnerable.

  Was that all it took? she thought.

  A bit of untimely testosterone to disarm one of the cruelest men on the planet.

  She tottered past him, and let Large frisk her. No one seemed suspicious. She handed her phone over without concern, and promptly forgot about it. Its internals had been modified so all the contents could be wiped remotely from anywhere in the world. Even if Wayne kept it and took the time to get inside, he’d find nothing there.

  When they allowed her through and she stepped onto the boarding ramp, she glanced backward, acting coy and shy about the whole ordeal.

  She hesitated.

  Aaron Wayne was staring daggers into her soul.

  Like he knew.

  Too late, she told herself.

  She was already past the security.

  She couldn’t go back.

  With her heart in her throat, she strode aboard the superyacht.

  9

  Within five minutes of stepping aboard, she broke crucial protocol.

  She found the bar on the top deck, got the attention of the bartender, ordered a double vodka and soda and downed the whole thing.

  If her handlers had eyes on her, they might have neutralised her for so brazenly disobeying the rules.

  She didn’t give a shit.

  She had to steady herself.

  No amount of training can accurately emulate the field. Sure, there are simulations, and they are beyond intense, but they’re never real. She had no doubt she could break every bone in Aaron Wayne’s body if he tried to lay a hand on her, but she couldn’t say the same for Large and Small. They might not be in active service any longer, but they were still spec-ops washouts. Big and strong, their minds calloused, ready to do anything for their employer.

  And she was unarmed.

  As soon as the alcohol dulled the sharp edges of her emotions, she refocused. She dissected her fear and let it wash out. There was
no place for it here.

  Not with stakes like these.

  A few moments later, Nadia and an assortment of the girls found the bar, too, and then the party started up again. Ruby allowed herself to be washed downstream, falling back into unabashed socialising. It was a little easier now. The vodka was like velvet, draped over her senses, and she found herself thinking, Why don’t operatives do this all the time?

  She could just as easily kill with a slight buzz. She figured it was so ingrained in her subconscious that she could defend herself totally wasted, if that’s what it came to.

  But that was a dark, dark path to go down.

  If you end up relying on it…

  The top deck was long and exposed on both sides to the night sky, covered in the middle by an enormous hardtop bimini, which linked the whole thing together. The deck extended all the way to the open bow, tapering to a point that offered stunning views of Monaco’s twinkling skyline ringing the harbour. The bar rested under the bimini, and the whole section could be sealed in by sliding glass doors at either end. They were open now — the night was warm and the atmosphere was idyllic. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  The bar itself had a polished stone countertop. The newcomers congregated around it. Ruby hung back, pretending again to sip from a full champagne glass, knowing the vodka in her stomach was more than enough to steady her nerves.

  She hovered there, observing, waiting for her moment to—

  Hot breath on her neck.

  She pivoted, forcing herself not to jolt, playing it smooth.

  Zafir was there.

  Without his bodyguards.

  He had a half-finished beer in his hand, and his eyes were fully glazed over now. The warlord had succumbed to the toxic lure of inebriation. No one was safe from it, no matter how disciplined. Hell, she’d almost drunk herself into a stupor on an impulse, thinking it might help.

  Alcohol is undefeated.

  Except, maybe, with Aaron Wayne.

  Wayne knew how to use it as a tool, how to coax it into the hands and then the bellies of potential clients. He’d done the same here.

  Zafir gestured to the bow end of the superyacht. ‘Outside?’