Raiders

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

After a long delay at London City, the tower cleared their flight to Oxford and seconds later the Citation was screeching into the sky over the Isle of Dogs. Banking 290 degrees starboard, they were on their way. They were scheduled to spend just thirty minutes in the air before landing, and with Ezra on a flight back to New York, Mason suggested everyone take the time to decompress before talking to Lloyd.

Eva dropped down into one of the soft seats, rubbed her neck and sighed. “After we speak with Ambrose, will you still need me?”

“Odds are that we will,” Mason said.

“Oh.” Eva Starling paused a beat while she searched for the right words. “It’s just that I’m not exactly the type who goes around getting shot at and abseiling down buildings. I’m worried I might slow you down or get in the way.”

“Are you kidding?” Milo said. “We couldn’t have done any of this without you.”

Eva was clearly flattered by the compliment, but waved it away. “Being chased around the world by crazies like the Hidden Hand and kidnapped by thugs like Linus isn’t exactly my thing. Trust me when I say that this whole experience isn’t exactly going to be my most treasured memory.”

Caleb handed her a bottle of water. “What is?”

She gave him a surprised look. “I’m sorry?”

“What was your best and worst memory?” he said with a cautious smile.

She hesitated. “I guess my best would be the day I got married, and the worst when my husband died.”

“I’m sorry,” Caleb said. “I had no idea.”

“Why would you? I’ve only known you for a few hours.”

Caleb gave her another warm smile and turned to Ella. “What about you, El?”

“Best memory is easy — the day I graduated from Cambridge.”

“Not when you met Ben?” Zara said.

Ella considered but shook her head. “No, Cambridge. I love Ben with all my heart because he came along at just the right time… pretty much saved me from myself, but that was a confusing time. The best memory was graduation day.”

As Ella recalled the moment, her smile widened. “Mum and Dad were both there, and my brother James. It was sunny, and after the ceremony we all went for drinks and a meal at The Eagle on Benet Street. I was the first person in my family to go to university, and they were all so proud of me.”

“Sounds great,” Caleb said. “I graduated from the University of Brawling, Arizona.”

“What did you study?” Ella asked.

The others cracked up with laughter. “Think about it, El,” Milo said.

“Ah,” she said. “Sorry.”

“Hey, don’t knock Brawling,” Zara said. “I studied ass-kicking at Barfight College, Nevada.”

“Nice,” Milo said, nodding his head with approval. “That explains so much about you.”

“Zip it up, Louise,” Zara said, flicking his ear.

“Hey — that hurt!”

“That hurt?” she said. “Jeez, I only flicked your ear, you big cry-baby.”

“Sooner be a cry-baby than have a negative IQ.”

“Fifteen-Love,” Virgil said.

“Fifteen-Love my ass,” Zara said. “Tell us yours.”

Virgil bit his lip as he thought it through. “Best was when Amy was born, and worst was when I lost a half a million at the poker finals. Damn that thing.”

“What about you?” Ella asked Caleb. “What’s your best and worst memory?”

“Best was when my son was born, and second best was when my daughter was born. Worst was when I took a bullet in Afghanistan and got medically evacuated back to the States.”

“Zara?”

“Best, when we rescued Charlotte Nowak from that crap-hole in Budapest.”

A strange silence fell in the cabin. Charlotte Nowak was the daughter of a New York billionaire who had been snatched by kidnappers while on holiday in Italy. They had demanded fifty million dollars within forty-eight hours or they would kill the girl. She was only eleven. The Raiders not only got her back, but took out all of the kidnappers into the bargain. Then, Zara broke the silence. “You all know the worst.”

Another silence fell, this time a darker, sadder thing.

“And what about your worst, Ella?” Caleb said, breaking the silence. “You never said what it was.”

“If we’re going to talk about work then my worst was when we screwed up the Monaco job.”

“Ah,” Caleb said. “The Monaco job.”

“That wasn’t our fault,” said Milo.

“It was our job, our team, our planning,” Mason said. “Our fault.”

“But we were double-crossed,” Milo protested. “We couldn’t have seen that coming.”

“And that’s why it was our fault. It was our responsibility to see it coming,” Mason said. “My fault.”

Caleb changed the subject. “Milo?”

“My best memory was when I pranced naked through the wildflower meadows of Old England, hand in hand with a supermodel — I forget her name now.”

“You have to be serious, Toadstool,” Zara said.

“In that case, my best memory is when I hacked into NASA and played havoc with their security systems. I don’t give a metric fuck about fame, but that made international news, you realize.”

“We realize,” Caleb said with a smile.

“Worst was the day I left home to escape Dad.”

Another silence. They all knew that story, too.

“All right, Mr Mason,” Caleb said. “Your turn.”

“Jesus, I hate these stupid games. I have to plan the mission.”

“You’re not getting out of it that easy, hun,” Zara said. “Best and worst, right now.”

Mason sighed deeply and ruffled his hand through his hair. It was a delaying tactic but it only bought him a few more seconds. “I suppose the best memory I have is when my brother and I got to the top of Everest, if I’m pushed to talk about it.”

“And worst?”

“That’s easy,” he said bluntly. “Yesterday, when my girlfriend betrayed me and left me for dead.”

That was the end of the game.

The Spiders had received their pay checks for snatching the American archaeologist and their business with the Hidden Hand was done. This was good. What was not good was that their plans to sell Eva Starling to Albanian people smugglers had been ended abruptly when their Frankfurt safehouse was raided by unknown specialists. They had taken her from right under their noses and their quarter of a million had gone up in smoke right there and then.

So when the English woman walked into the abandoned farm they were hiding in and told them she knew who had taken the American, Linus Finn saw a chance to right a few wrongs and get his money back.

“Sounds like this Mason is your hero,” Finn said. “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other,” he said slowly. “Matthew 6:24. Ye cannot serve God and mammon, Miss Addington, or in your case you cannot serve Jedediah Mason and SPIDER.”

Led by Bjorn Brick, a low chuckle rumbled around the group of men and women sitting close to Linus. The only one who didn’t laugh, or smile, was Kyle Cage. He was too busy sharpening his hunting knife to care what anyone was talking about.

“I understand that,” Kat said icily. “And he is not my hero.”

“I see.”

“And it’s Lady Addington to you, Colonel Finn.”

A neutral grin spread across Linus’s lean, unshaven face. He liked Kat Addington already, and something told him they were going to get along like a house on fire. “Lady Addington?”

“At least until we get to know each other a little better, anyway.”

“And will we?”

“Will we what?”

The grin grew broader, and greasier. “Get to know each other better?”

“Many men have tried to get close to me, Colonel, but most of them end up very disappointed.”

“I see you’re a confident woman,” he noted. “I like that, and you’re beautiful, too.”

“I’m not here to ask you out on a date, Colonel.”

“Hear that, Linus,” Brick called over. “She says keep your dick in your pocket.”

The others laughed, but Kat Addington never flinched.

“So why did you reach out to me? Why are you here, exactly?”

“I’m giving you an opportunity to get the American back so you can fulfil your contract with the traffickers,” she said.

“Not worth our time,” Linus said in a flat, cold tone. “I’ve lost interest in it.”

The aristocrat licked her lips and he could see she was thinking something over in her mind.

Linus drummed his fingertips on the arm of his chair. “Come on, Your Ladyship — out with it.”

“They have something in their possession.”

“What?”

“Something of enormous value and importance. Something I thought was mine, but Mason double-crossed me and now he has it. If we take it back from them we will each retire as multi-millionaires.”

Linus sat up in his chair and paid closer attention to the woman. Her astonishing beauty had been obvious as soon as she entered the room, but now he saw something else — the same kind of cold, calculating cunning he saw when he looked in the mirror. It was there, behind her cornflower blue eyes, sparkling like a wicked kind of black magic. “Don’t stop.”

“We were hired by a very public institution to retrieve a stolen asset. They always approach the Raiders first because of their reputation. In this case, the asset had been stolen in a robbery of military precision and they were in trouble. Big trouble. If the theft ever went public there would be hell to pay with insurers and a million other problems. Mason’s brief was simple: retrieve the asset and return it to its rightful owner.”

“Only you cooked up another sort of plan?” he said, a smile creeping over his thin lips.

Kat looked almost offended. “I decided it was time Mason and I went our separate ways, and I knew I would need money to fund the lifestyle I wanted to live.”

“So you made the decision to rip off your friends and steal the asset?”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Don’t be so concerned, Lady Addington — I like what I’m hearing. You sound like my sort of woman.” A murmur of approval rippled over the small group. “You see here in SPIDER we all like to think of ourselves as a little like pirates. It sounds corny, I realize, but we’re really all out for ourselves. There’s not a lot of your ‘all for one and one for all’ bullshit here.”

“But we have each other’s backs,” Iveta said. “Don’t confuse the two things. We are a team, a solid unit, but we all know when we’re done we fly away into different sunsets and never see each other again.”

“I understand,” Kat said.

“A different arrangement from what you’re used to, no doubt,” Kyle said, finally looking up from his knife. He slid it in the sheath hanging from his belt and walked over to her. “There’s no marshmallows over the fire in this crew. We’re business. In and out. No respect for the law of any land.”

Linus smiled. He was enjoying this recruitment more than when he hooked Molly Cruise. “But you knew that already, right?”

“I guess so.”

“And if you’re here to betray us to these Raiders,” Bjorn growled. “I’ll kill you with my own hands, but not before you’ve seen me kill everyone you ever loved.”

“There is that, yes,” Linus said. “If you’re here to infiltrate us and try and compromise any of our missions, you will die, certainly.”

Linus could see Kat was confused; she was clearly struggling with many emotions. Switching crews was not an easy thing to do. Everyone had their own working culture and rules, their own dreams and nightmares. “So maybe we have a deal?” he said at last. “We work together to track down Mason and his crew, we get this mysterious asset and split it evenly, and we get to kill the Raiders for screwing up our Albanian contract.”

The English woman nodded. “We have a deal, Colonel Finn.”

“Call me Linus, please.”