Dead Six

She whispered in my ear. “I know.”

Wide awake, I stared at the dark ceiling, listening to the night sounds of Zubara coming from the open window and Jill’s rhythmic breathing next to me. Her head was resting on my shoulder, and she had fallen asleep with one hand caressing the mottled scars on my chest.

Man, I needed that.

I moved the hair from her face, and she shifted slightly tighter against me in response.

What the hell was I doing? Men like me weren’t allowed to have relationships. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted to her. . . . Are you kidding? She was beautiful and had an unbelievable body. No problem there. I’m only human. There was nothing I’d rather do, but I actually . . . hell. I don’t know. It wasn’t like I was used to feelings.

Jill was different than the others.

But I couldn’t afford affection. Affection was weakness. I’d only ever had one serious relationship, and that had ended really badly. In the terrible world I inhabited, sex was business and love was for suckers. Loyalty was just something that could be used against you by anybody more ambitious than you were, my current predicament being a perfect example.

On the one hand, I felt like the biggest jerk in the world, like I was somehow taking advantage of this poor scared girl who had looked to me for protection, though it wasn’t exactly like I had initiated this. On the other hand, I was thinking about how stupid I was. The cold, calculating part of my brain was warning me that Jill was probably just doing this to cement her chances of me not selling her out, that somehow she was better at emotional manipulation than I was. Maybe the con was getting conned.

Then again, I was at least a decade older than her, probably more. Since I spent my days murdering scumbags, it seemed odd that I would have some sort of moral hang up about that, but I did feel like a dirty old man. On a strictly practical note, it made me really glad that at forty I had the physical conditioning of an Olympic athlete. Holy crap, the girl is energetic. Or maybe I’m just getting old.

So I lay there, beating myself up, yet somehow feeling strangely happy. It was kind of weird.

Jill stirred. “You awake?” she asked softly.

“Just thinking is all.”

I could see the whiteness of her smile in the dark. “Don’t worry. We will find them.” That hadn’t been what I was thinking about at all. In fact, this was the first time in weeks that every one of my thoughts hadn’t been driven by revenge. And for some reason, I liked how she said we would find them.

“You know, Jill, you’re really pretty when you’re homicidal.”

She giggled. “You think too much. Wanna go again?”

Maybe life doesn’t have to totally suck.

Chapter 15:

Pancakes

LORENZO

May 4

For some reason, despite massive setbacks, Dead Six boning me at every turn, being half a million dollars poorer, getting shot the day before, and still unable to get Adar’s box, I felt better today than I had in quite a while. I had gone out onto the balcony and was staring at the sun just beginning to light the morning fog. Carl joined me a few minutes later, leaned on the balcony, and regarded me suspiciously. As usual, we were the first up. “You kids get that out of the way finally? Been sniffing around each other like horny teenagers since she got here.”

The call to prayer began to resonate across the city. “Why, Carl, my good man. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He grunted. “Sure. So, what now, genius?”

I had been thinking about that. “You’ve seen the e-mails to Al Falah. The big meeting is on for June eighteenth. So we’ve got just over a month to get ready for the Phase Three.”

“So we go in, but without Adar’s box, we just die? Good plan.”

“I might be able to pick it.”

Carl nodded. “It’s like a thousand years old and has something like two hundred tumblers, and if Reaper’s numbers are right, you’ve got ten minutes maybe to get through before a couple hundred pissed off Saudis start shooting at you.”

We had been through all this before, but it never hurt to go over the options again. “Explosives.”

Carl knew his bombs better than I did. “That much reinforced material.” He held up a stubby finger. “First, too loud. Pissed Saudis, remember?” Then another. “Second, you won’t be able to smuggle enough in to make a shaped charge that can punch through.”

“What if I were to find explosives inside the palace?”

“Ten minutes,” Carl said. “Good luck. It’s true what they say.” He took a swig of his beer, breakfast of champions. “Getting laid makes you dumb.”

“There are four other keys in existence. Adar only had one. We’ve got a month. We could steal one of the others,” I suggested. Carl started to count on his fingers again. “I know, I know. One’s been missing since the Third Crusade. The others are well guarded, and any attempt to take them would cause the vault’s security to triple and probably get the meeting canceled.” Adar, the exiled heir, had been our only hope.

“Maybe we try something different,” Carl said.

“Find Big Eddie and kill him before he kills us? I’d love to. Since nobody knows who he really is, if he’s really even one man at all, and he works through layer after of layer of anonymous intermediaries, how do you suggest we do that?” I had been Big Eddie’s single most effective thief for years, and I had never met the man. The intermediaries I had worked for had never met the man, either, and the second I started looking, he’d somehow know. “It’d be like catching the devil.”

“I was just sayin’. I suppose I could just lay around in my underwear, get drunk, and watch TV until we run out of time.”

“That’s always an option. I’ll keep working the streets. Dead Six will screw up. They’re only human,” I said. My phone buzzed. “Unknown number,” I said suspiciously as I opened it. “Yeah?”

“Hello, Mr. Lorenzo.” It was the Fat Man, sounding as ominously vacant as usual. “Our employer was wondering if you had made any progress in retrieving his box.”

Oh, now it was his box. “Not yet. Dead Six is slippery.”

“I understand. Disappointing, but I do understand. Big Eddie believes in fully supporting his employees with all of our organization’s resources. His eyes are everywhere. Be ready on the eleventh. I will be in contact at exactly seven-fifteen in the morning, Zubaran time. I will give you the exact location of Dead Six. You will need to act