Page 89 of Tamed Enemy
She huffs. “You’re not even in the mob. Why doyoucare who runs Baltimore?”
“Kate cares.”
She pauses for a long time at that. Finally, she asks, “I can bring Patrick?” Patrick Moran is her husband. Her enforcer. The man who can get her out of all this if everything goes sideways.
“Don’t tell him until day of. Don’t tell anyone.”
I hear her take a deep breath. Hold it. Exhale slowly. “I do this, and you and I are even?”
“Completely.”
“All right,” she says. “I’ll be there.”
I cross her name off my list and move on to my next impossible task.
35
KATE
Three weeks of chaos.
Three weeks of construction dust, delivery failures, fights with building management, and despairing that the con will ever get off the ground.
Three weeks of pushing my new recruits in Ariadne’s Daughters, discovering how they work together, watching them build a distribution network with a type of cooperation and creativity my Red Cap Raiders could never have imagined.
Through it all, Cole is an absolute rock, staying late and arriving early, capturing most of his meager four hours of sleep in the back of a car driven by Jacobson.
Every time Megan enters our fifth-floor office suite, the air seems lighter. She has an eye for detail I can only dream of matching. Her Marriott suite fills with clothing racks from the city’s various thrift shops. She works tirelessly to decorate cubicles, adding stickers to computer casings, hanging extrasweaters on coat hooks, shoving worn-out shoes beneath desks… all the little things that make the space come alive. She tracks down a wig for herself and hideous false teeth, dark contact lenses, and a wardrobe that makes her look like a color-blind mouse with a fetish for stretch polyester. She’s ready to play our receptionist.
With Ariadne’s Daughters, I begin dry runs for distributing footage of Tarasov’s eventual collapse. They have no idea what we’ll be sending out, but we build live feeds, tapping into dozens of social media sites. We create memes and track their spread over the internet. Using Cole’s money, we buy attention from the most prominent influencers in the world, reserving time on podcasts, on videos, even on audio, focusing on English- and Russian-language sites. We hack into bot networks, harnessing dumb machines to broadcast our message.
Finally, it’s Saturday night. We launch the con tomorrow, taking Tarasov into custody.
I arrive home after dinner. Mrs. Watson and Granny are sitting in the upstairs parlor, watching something on TV. Taking one look at my face, Mrs. Watson says to my grandmother, “I need to wash my hair. I’ll be back in half an hour to help you get to bed.”
I wait until she’s left the room before I sit on the floor at Granny’s feet. “Does anyone still do that anymore?” I ask. “Set aside specific time to wash their hair?”
“She’s good at her job,a chroí. She probably knows a dozen ways to give her patients some privacy.”
I glance at the table beside Granny’s chair. In addition to her knitting, I see both her rescue inhalers. “Bad day today?” I ask.
“I’ve had worse.”
Granny reaches out to pull my hair back from my shoulders. The August night is humid, and my curls billows around my head like a halo. I lean against her knees and let her finger-combthe tangles. “What do you think Breagha is doing right now?” I ask.
“I don’t have any idea what time it is in Indonesia. But I suspect she’s having a grand time with her young fella.”
I fiddle with the rug I’m sitting on, brushing the nap all in one direction, then in another. “I wish we could have been there when she married.”
“We’ll throw a big party for her when all of this is over.”
All of this.As always, Granny sees so much more than she mentions. I start to trace the patterns in the rug, flowers and leaves and paisleys. “Breagha’s always loved a party.”
Granny divides my hair into three equal parts. “It’s you and Cole who deserve a party. The pair of you have been working like fiends.”
My finger skips over the silk rug. “A lot of client work came in at one time,” I lie.
“It’s odd client work you can’t do sitting at your computer. Here. At the house.”
