Page 85 of Born for Starlight

Deke and I got into our car. Beto nodded as Deke got into the front seat, me the back.

We rolled out through the pretty gates, and I let out a slow breath through my nose and did not say one word, because I'd swept our vehicles this morning, but the morning was a long time ago.

Three blocks on, I saw the watcher.

A man at a café table across from the farmácia, angled to the street, coffee he wasn't drinking. My gut went cold and started working the problem, network, cop, somebody Ferraz whistled up to see us off the property. Then the man tipped his chin a half inch. The light hit him, and the cold turned into something a lot more meaningful.

Simon Clark.

Which meant the second man would be close. And there he was. Forty meters up on the far corner, covering the intersection with his hands in his pockets, bored to death and seeing everything. Billy Anderson. Good guy. Quiet. The kind you forgot was in the room until you needed him.

Onyx was in São Luís.

Jasper Creek was in São Luís.

Which meant the family knew, and if the family knew, the family was not all standing on this street corner.

Fuck!

"Beto. The fuel station past the market. Pull in."

They came to us clean, separate, thirty seconds apart, and folded into the back seat on either side of me like two men catching a ride they'd arranged last week. Nobody hurried. Beto pulled back into traffic before the doors were fully shut, because Beto had done this before too.

"Matthew," Simon said.

"Simon. Tell me how."

"Angelica’s grandmother called Bruno last night. Bruno called me. We were wheels up by midnight."

I was confused. “Little Grandma?”

“No, Angelica’s maternal grandmother, Maureen.” He said it flat, no apology in it. "Jase and Bruno took the hotel. Billy and I took the threat site."

The grandmother. She'd gotten one phone call from Brazil and mobilized armed men across an ocean before dawn. Angelica came by everything honestly.

"How long on the building?"

"Since twelve-thirty." Billy answered from my left, then went straight to the question that mattered. "Gray container on the service apron went in at one-ten, just after you went in front. Tractor dropped it and left. Doors to the building, no markings, and they graded fresh gravel back there recently, so it isn't the first one." A beat. "There are vent holes along the top rail."

Deke caught my eye in the rearview mirror. I nodded, then looked back over at Billy.

Confirmation, independent, from a man who'd been on a plane all night and still paid attention to the things that counted. Whatever else this family invasion cost me, Billy Anderson had just paid his way in.

"Here's how this goes," I said. "As of right now you're mine. My op, my rules, my comms. Officially, you're the additional security I told Costa about this morning, the men he can't see. Congratulations, you've been here since we landed."

Simon nodded, serious. "Copy."

"The visit is at three. That box moves today or tonight, I'd stake my pension on it, and we are not touching it, looking at it, or breathing near it until I say. And I'd bet everything else I own that there's a seven-year-old girl and two others somewhere in that building, and the only thing that gets them killed faster than the network is a rescue that starts early."

"Copy that too," Simon said, and this time his voice held emotion.

My phone buzzed.

Vargas, from the hotel overwatch. I put it to my ear.

"Boss. We have a situation in the lobby. Two men just came in asking for Miss Drakos by name. Front desk is stalling them." A pause I didn't care for. "One of them says he's her brother."

"Describe them."